Electric vehicles (EVs) have become a symbol of the fight against climate change. However, in many countries, the market development of EVs is sluggish, and adoption rates greatly vary worldwide. This study examines the impact of Hofstede’s six dimensions of national culture on the development of the electric car market using sales data from 2019 and 2020 in 21 OECD countries. Results of (OLS) linear regression analyses show that uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity, and indulgence have a significantly negative impact on the sales of battery electric cars, while long-term orientation positively influences their market share. The results indicate that national culture is an important cross-country factor that influences the rate and direction of the adoption electric cars. The research also explains how cultural values are translated into the purchase of EVs and provides marketers and policymakers with an insight into how they can increase the spread of alternative-fuel veh... [more]

Electricity demand continues to rise on a daily basis. The most difficult task is ensuring that customers have access to reliable, high-quality electricity regardless of the weather. Automatic generation control (AGC) accomplishes this by keeping the target output power and frequency constant despite load fluctuations. This paper presents a hybrid PID-fuzzy controller for optimal automatic generation control in a two-area interconnected power system. A comparative analysis of the proposed controller was performed with the PID controller. The parameters of the both controllers were developed by simulated annealing (SA) techniques in order to obtain the best dynamic performance. MATLAB Simulink software was used to simulate the models. The results of the simulation for the two-area power system based on simulated annealing using the hybrid PID−fuzzy controller showed superior performance in comparison to a conventional PID controller.

As a major technical route to utilize biomass energy, biomass combustion power generation (BCPG) has been shown to be of environmental and economic significance. According to the operating experience, the installed capacity has a decisive impact on the operation and economic return of BCPG projects. In China, an installed capacity of either 30 MW or 12 MW is often chosen for constructing a BCPG project. To explore which one is more suitable for China, this paper uses actual operating data to compare the operation performance and techno-economics of two representative BCPG projects with an installed capacity of 30 MW and 12 MW. The results show that the operation situation and electricity production of the 30 MW project are better than those of the 12 MW project. The 30 MW project has a lower biomass consumption than the 12 MW project to produce per unit of electricity. The Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of the 30 MW project is greater than the industry benchmark in China and is almost t... [more]

Food waste (FW), a major part of the US waste stream, causes greenhouse gases within landfills, but there is an opportunity to divert FW to anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities that produce biogas and digestate fertilizer. The composition of FW inputs to AD determines the value of these products. This study provides insight into the effect of waste composition on the quality of AD products by first characterizing the biogas and digestate quality of anaerobically digested FW from four diets (paleolithic, ketogenic, vegetarian, and omnivorous), and then estimating the difference in biogas produced from codigested FW and brewery waste (BW). Waste feedstock mixtures were incubated in lab-scale bioreactors for 21 days with live inoculum. Biogas quality was monitored for 21−30 days in four trials. Samples were analyzed using a gas chromatograph for detection of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The composition of the waste inputs had a significant impact on the quality of biogas but not... [more]

Accurate estimation of the state of charge (SOC) of zinc−nickel single-flow batteries (ZNBs) is an important problem in battery management systems (BMSs). A nonideal electromagnetic environment will usually cause the measured signal to contain nonnegligible noise and bias. At the same time, due to the influence of battery ageing, environmental temperature changes, and a complex reaction mechanism, it is difficult to establish a very accurate system model that can be applied to various complex working conditions. The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is a widely used SOC estimation algorithm, but the UKF will reduce the estimation accuracy and divergence under the influence of inaccurate model and sensor errors. To improve the performance of the UKF, a robust desensitized unscented Kalman filter (RDUKF) is proposed to realize an accurate SOC estimation of batteries in the context of different disturbances. Then, the proposed method is applied to cases of error interference, such as Gaussian... [more]

Low voltage devices connected to public electricity supply networks can be subjected to a wide range of voltage quality, including sustained overvoltage. Assessing the impact of sustained overvoltage on devices connected to the distribution network is important in determining the appropriate variance of standard voltage levels without unduly impacting the utility and customers from a technical and economic perspective. Therefore, a clear understanding of the impact that sustained overvoltage has on the lifetime of the connected equipment is a necessary task. This paper investigates the impact of sustained overvoltage through a series of accelerated-life testing experiments on a custom designed test device representative of a common interface between the power supply and distribution network, a switch mode power supply. The switch mode power supply with combined rectifier and filtering capacitor represents one of the most common front ends of LV equipment in modern appliances, and the w... [more]

This century is experiencing a generation of nanotechnologies that makes use of the remarkable properties of nanofluids in applications such as electrical systems, industrialization, and others. In this paper, mineral oil (MO) and palm oil (PO), with multi-walled carbon nanotube (CNT), have been synthesized for use in oil-filled transformer applications. This research aims to use Raman characterization to assess the feasibility of CNT nanofluids samples at 0.02 g/L and 0.03 g/L concentrations. The chemical structure bonding that exists in the Raman band between 700 cm−1 and 3100 cm−1 regions is identified and analyzed, accordingly. After baseline removal and normalization, the precision band location and intensity of oil samples are fitted with a Gaussian profile. It was discovered that the peak at ~1440 cm−1 has the highest intensity for six oil samples, which is attributed to the (C−H) methylene scissors vibration of the CH2 group. Based on the FWHM profile and integrated area under... [more]

The pore and throat structure of tight oil reservoir cores is complex, and the resistance of oil drop to discharge from the core is very high during dynamic imbibition. Surfactant has good ability in interfacial tension reduction and wettability reversal. It can reduce oil drop discharge resistance and enhance oil recovery effectively during dynamic imbibition in tight reservoirs. Here, we first analyzed the pore throat structure and mineral composition of tight core, and then the oil drop visualization instrument was used to study the discharge behavior of oil drop during dynamic imbibition. The oil drop discharge form was analyzed, and the influence of various factors on the oil drop discharge behavior was explored, and then the dynamic imbibition performance of surfactant in tight cores was obtained. The core throat diameter was mainly distributed in 0.07−1.1 μm, and the hydrophilic mineral content in core reached 50.8%. In the case of fluid flow in fracture, the oil drop discharge... [more]

Water distribution networks need to improve system efficiency. Hydropower is a clean and renewable energy that has been among the key solutions to environmental issues for many decades. As the turbine is the core of hydropower plants, high attention is paid to creating new design solutions and increasing the performance of turbines in order to enhance energy efficiency of leakage by pressure control. Hence, design and performance analysis of a new turbine is a crucial aspect for addressing the efficiency of its application. In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is coupled with experimental tests in order to investigate the optimal performance of a new centrifugal turbine. The behavior of the flow through the turbine runner is assessed by means of velocity profiles and pressure contours at all components of the machine under different operating conditions. Finally, the turbine geometry is scaled to a real water distribution network and an optimization procedure is p... [more]

Discriminating multiphase methane (adsorbed and free phases) in coals is crucial for evaluating the optimal gas recovery strategies of coalbed methane (CBM) reservoirs. However, the existing volumetric-based adsorption isotherm method only provides the final methane adsorption result, limiting real-time dynamic characterization of multiphase methane in the methane adsorption process. In this study, via self-designed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) isotherm adsorption experiments, we present a new method to evaluate the dynamic multiphase methane changes in coals. The results indicate that the T2 distributions of methane in coals involve three different peaks, labeled as P1 (T2 < 8 ms), P2 (T2 = 20−300 ms), and P3 (T2 > 300 ms) peaks, corresponding to the adsorbed phase methane, free phase methane between particles, and free phase methane in the sample cell, respectively. The methane adsorption Langmuir volumes calculated from the conventional volumetric-based method qualitatively agre... [more]

Industrial applications need to use different systems for the problem of gas cleaning. A lot of processes have been developed, such as the use of a venturi for gas cleaning and pollution reduction. Additionally, several studies have been developed especially in terms of pressure drop because it is one of the main parameters to determine its efficiency. While the phenomenon of mass transfer in a venturi scrubber has not found much attention, in the present study, a mass transfer two-dimensional simulation is developed for gasification gas cleaning through a venturi scrubber with boundary conditions represented in air inlet velocities of 10, 15, and 20 m/s and water inlet mass flow of 0.02, 0.04 and 0.06 kg/s. In this work, Navier−Stokes equations are solved numerically and the mass transfer technique is treated by the volume of fluid (VOF) model, using CFD software. The obtained results were analyzed by presenting the mass fraction, velocity and pressure contours, and profiles. The prob... [more]

Cross-docking is an excellent way to reduce the space required to store goods, inventory management costs, and customer order delivery time. This paper focuses on cost optimization, scheduling incoming and outgoing trucks, and green supply chains with multiple cross-docking. The three objectives are minimizing total operating costs, truck transportation sequences, and carbon emissions within the supply chain. Since the linear programming model is an integer of zero and one and belongs to NP-hard problems, its solution time increases sharply with increasing dimensions. Therefore, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) were used to find near-optimal solutions to the problem. Then, these algorithms were compared with criteria such as execution time and distance from the ideal point, and the superior algorithm in each criterion was identified.

Battery management is the key technical link for electric vehicles. A good battery management system can realize the balanced charge and discharge of batteries, reducing the capacity degradation and the loss of health caused by battery overcharge and discharge, which all depend on the real-time and accurate estimation of the battery’s state of charge (SOC). However, the battery’s SOC has highly complex nonlinear time-varying characteristics related to the complex chemical and physical state and dynamic environmental conditions, which are difficult to measure directly, and this has become a difficulty in design and research. According to the characteristics of ternary lithium-ion batteries of electric vehicles, a battery SOC dual estimation algorithm based on the Variable Forgetting Factor Recursive Least Square (VFFRLS) and Multi-Innovation Unscented Kalman Filter (MIUKF) is proposed in this paper. The VFFRLS algorithm is used to estimate battery model parameters, and the MIUKF algorit... [more]

Renewable energy sources have begun to arouse interest worldwide. The UN Sustainable Development Agenda has defined access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy as one of its main goals. This paper contains a description of the research on the assessment of the validity of employing surveying methods to capture topographic data in order to select locations suitable for small hydropower plants. For the purpose of this study, a section of a natural watercourse with the surrounding area was measured by means of the photogrammetric method using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and, for comparison, by means of the precise positioning method using the GNSS system with the RTN kinematic technique (GNSS RTN). Publicly available measurement data from airborne laser scanning (LIDAR) were also used for the analyses. In order to assess the accuracy of the methods employed, the discrete data describing the relief were analysed, and then continuous data in raster form were analysed.... [more]

Water hammer influences the life cycle of hydraulic passages and may even cause catastrophic structural failures. Several catastrophic failures of hydraulic power units have been reported in the literature due to the effects of transient regimes. The objective of the study is to highlight the global trend in water hammer assessment and to quantify the effect of factors influencing overpressure in hydraulic passages during load rejection in different hydropower plants. A brief and concise literature review is conducted to document the parameters associated with the water hammer phenomenon and to thereby identify the necessary prerequisites to validate theoretical and numerical results against experimental data. The purpose of the analysis is to identify extreme transient loads on hydraulic passages in order to properly adapt hydropower unit operation, to make recommendations for design and industry, and to guide the progress of adapted models and numerical simulations to capture complex... [more]

New modelling tools are required to accelerate the decarbonisation of the building sector. Urban building energy modelling (UBEM) has recently emerged as an attractive paradigm for analysing building energy performance at district and urban scales. The balance between the fidelity and accuracy of created UBEMs is known to be the cornerstone of the model’s applicability. This study aimed to analyse the impact of traditionally implicit modeller choices that can greatly affect the overall UBEM performance, namely, (1) the level of detail (LoD) of the buildings’ geometry; (2) thermal zoning; and (3) the surrounding shadowing environment. The analysis was conducted for two urban areas in Stockholm (Sweden) using MUBES—the newly developed UBEM. It is a bottom-up physics-based open-source tool based on Python and EnergyPlus, allowing for calibration and co-simulation. At the building scale, significant impact was detected for all three factors. At the district scale, smaller effects (<2%)... [more]

Revealing the variation law of thermal diffusivity of sandy soil can provide a theoretical basis for the engineering design and construction in cold and arid regions. Based on experimental data of sandy soil samples, the distribution characteristics and influence of dry density and moisture content on thermal diffusivity are analyzed in this work. Then, the prediction model based on the empirical fitting formula and RBF neural network method for thermal diffusivity of frozen and unfrozen sandy soil is established, and the prediction accuracy of different prediction methods is compared. The results show that (1) thermal diffusivity of sandy soil is positively correlated with the particle size. With the increase of sand size, thermal diffusivity of sandy soil increases significantly. (2) Partial correlation among natural moisture content, dry density, and thermal diffusivity varies with different frozen and unfrozen conditions. (3) For unfrozen sandy soil, the binary RBF neural network p... [more]

Breakthroughs in smart grid technology make it possible to deliver electricity in controlled and intelligent ways to improve energy efficiency between the user and the utility. Demand-side management strategies can reduce overall energy usage and shift consumption to reduce peak loads. Electric water heaters account for 40% of residential energy consumption. Since they are thermal storage devices, advanced control strategies can improve their efficiency. However, existing methods disregard the connection between the user and the grid. We propose a centrally adapted control model that allows for coordinated scheduling to adapt the optimal control schedule of each EWH, spreading the load into off-peak periods to ensure that the grid’s generation capacity is not exceeded. We consider two strategies for the delivery of hot water: temperature matching, and energy matching with Legionella sterilisation, and compare them to a baseline strategy where the thermostat is always switched on. Simul... [more]

Capacitive power transfer (CPT) technique possesses the advantages of safety, isolation, low cost, and insensitivity to conductive barriers. To charge lithium-ion batteries, CPT should possess the output profile consisting of first constant current (CC) output and later constant voltage (CV) output. To fulfill the output profile, many power switches or compensation components are added in the CPT circuit, which is not expected due to the bulky size and additional losses. To reduce the redundancy of the CPT system, an Lx-PS CPT circuit with only five compensation components is proposed in this paper. After a systematic analysis and a parameter design procedure, the proposed CPT circuit can realize input ZPA at both CC and CV modes. In addition, the output current at CC mode and the output voltage at CV mode are all adjustable based on the charging demands of different loads. Finally, simulations are done to prove the analysis in this paper. Compared to previous research, the CPT circuit... [more]

Climate change is an issue nowadays present in almost all of the media daily, but information can be manipulated very easily. It is a fact that, in the last decades, greenhouse gas emissions have multiplied, and to tackle climate change efficiently, it is necessary to analyze their origin and their relationship with regards to countries, population, production, etc. When analyzing a country’s emissions, not only the total emissions, but also the emissions in relation to its population, production, etc., should be considered. In this paper, a new parameter (CE2N) that merges total emissions, and emissions per capita and per GDP is proposed and applied, obtaining, for the first time, a unified and universal parameter that considers the emission efficiency and total emissions at the same time and can be used in all countries. We validated this new parameter with its implementation in previous environmental models, and the results obtained showed that CE2N would help to increase the transp... [more]

The use of nanofluids as dielectric liquids for transformer insulation has been widely investigated during the last decade. A number of authors have performed extensive studies on liquids produced from different types of nanoparticles and base fluids, providing evidence of their good dielectric properties. Nevertheless, nanodielectric fluids are still at the research stage, and they are far from being a solution that can be applied to real transformers. One of the aspects that might be clarified is their compatibility with the rest of the materials present in the transformer and their behavior throughout the life of the equipment. This paper studies the aging process of cellulose impregnated with an ester-based nanofluid and compares it with the process that takes place when the impregnation liquid is a natural ester. Accelerated aging experiments were performed, and physical and chemical characterization of the process with several analytical techniques was carried out. The mechanical... [more]

Rammed earth (RE) is a low-tech recyclable building material with good heat storage and moisture absorption performance that can better maintain the stability of the indoor thermal environment and improve indoor comfort. With innovations in and the development of new technology, the field of rammed earth construction technology is gradually expanding. However, deficiencies in the thermal insulation of traditional rammed earth structures make it impossible for them to meet China’s building energy codes in cold regions. This study constructs a comprehensive evaluation index of the thermal performance of rammed earth walls that is based on the heat transfer mechanism, optimizing the thickness of the boundary conditions of the building interior’s design temperature, as well as the energy demand and economic efficiency. This research also offers a new design for the thermal insulation of rammed earth construction by combining the building energy savings design code with WUFI Pro software. T... [more]

To explore the influence of crack angle on the mechanical properties, energy evolution, and damage evolution of sandstone, uniaxial loading tests were conducted on sandstones with different crack angles. Through the stress−strain curve, the influence of the crack angle on the mechanical properties was analyzed. Based on energy theories and principles, the influence of crack angle on the energy conversion mechanism was analyzed. Based on crack angle and dissipated energy, a damage model considering the initial damage to the fractured sandstones was established. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) The strength and elastic modulus of sandstone decrease with an increase in crack angle, and Poisson’s ratio increases with an increase in crack angle; prefabricated cracks affect the crack initiation position, and accelerate the formation of fracture surfaces. (2) The stress−strain curve was divided into compaction stage, elastic stage, yield stage, and failure stage. The larger the crack... [more]

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of using anomaly detection in cyclic communication as a method aimed at protecting industrial installations from steganographic communication and a wide range of cyberattacks. The analysis was performed for a method based on deterministic finite automaton and the authors’ method using cycles. In this paper, we discuss the cycle detection algorithm and graph construction as well as demonstrate an anomaly detection method for cyberattack detection that utilizes stochastic elements, such as time-to-response and time-between-messages. We present a novel algorithm that combines finite automaton determinism modeling consecutive admissible messages with a time-domain model allowing for random deviations of regularity. The study was conducted for several test scenarios, including C&C steganographic channels generated using the Modbus TCP/IP protocol. Experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the algorithms are presented for both methods.... [more]

The article analyzes the thermal degradation in the inert and oxidative atmosphere of waste vinyl panels, the main component of which is PVC. Both pyrolysis and incineration of plastic waste are difficult, complex and multifaceted processes due to several physical and chemical phenomena occurring during their performance. The coupled TG-MS (thermogravimetry-mass spectrometry) analysis combined with the Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (TG-FTIR) analysis was used to identify the decomposition mechanisms of waste vinyl panels. Thermogravimetric tests were carried out for two heating rates of 5 and 20 K/min in the temperature range of 40−1000 °C, mass losses were determined, and products resulting from thermal degradation were identified. It was found that the individual components decompose at different temperatures depending on the heating rate and the choice of an inert or oxidative atmosphere. Vinyl floor panels were treated in terms of secondary raw material, which, in the lig... [more]