Considering the problems of total disturbances, i.e., higher harmonics, model uncertainties and external excitations in a practical vibration control system, a compound vibration suppression method is proposed for an all-clamped plate, which combines sliding mode control (SMC) with reduced-order extended state observer (RESO). First, a state space model of the all-clamped plate with inertial actuator is established. Second, a RESO is designed to estimate the system state variables and total disturbances in real time. In addition, the total disturbances can further be attenuated by RESO through a feedforward compensation part. Third, a sliding mode controller based on the estimation values is designed for a vibration control system. The Lyapunov stability theorem is further applied to prove the stability of the whole closed-loop vibration control system with the proposed controller. Finally, vibration control experiment equipment is built based on the NI-PCIe acquisition card, inertial... [more]

The development of global and regional energy markets is one of the most important problems of the current state of global economic relations and is one of the highest-priority areas in the formation of national and regional strategies for the socio-economic development of any country. The role of energy supply is focused on monitoring and compliance with standards. However, in recent years, the importance of energy supply to the housing stock has increased significantly, which has led to an expansion of the role of management within the framework of the risk management function. Kazakhstan has a Unified electric power system, which is represented by a set of power stations, transmission lines, and substations that provide reliable and high-quality energy supply to consumers. Currently, the main task within the framework of the priority of the development of Kazakhstan’s energy sector is to build up the energy base and provide the growing needs of the population and the economy with th... [more]

Microchannel structures possess high efficiency and high boiling heat transfer coefficient of two-phase flow. In particular, the grid structure has the advantages of a simple pattern, large load capacity, and good surface adaptability. Employing the laser-based powder bed fusion (L-PBF) manufacturing technology, a new method of forming heat transfer grids with a controllable structure is proposed in this study. The formation principle, process, and the reasons for improvements in the boiling heat transfer performance were investigated with stainless steel materials. Laser scanning with varying scan spacings was used to prepare multiple structures with different grid widths and wall heights. On this basis, the porosity and pore morphology of the grid structures were analyzed, followed by pool boiling heat transfer experiments. The results revealed that the grid structure significantly affected the nucleate boiling behavior and increased the critical heat flux (CHF). It was found that th... [more]

Aqueous salt solutions (LiCl) were impregnated into a porous host matrix to create composite desiccant materials (silica gel). The authors of this paper fabricated and analyzed composite desiccant-coated aluminum sheets (DCAS) with varying LiCl mass concentrations. Nitrogen sorption results revealed that the Brunauer−Emmett−Teller (BET) surface area and pore volume of the composite desiccant-coated aluminum sheets decreased. Furthermore, composite DCAS had lower nitrogen sorption than silica-gel-coated aluminum sheets (SGCAS). According to the results, the composite DCAS had the highest thermal conductivity, measuring 6.1 Wm−1 K−1, doubling that of the SGCAS. For evaluating sorption kinetics, the linear driving force model (LDF) was used, and composite DCAS showed greater dynamic sorption quantities and sorption rate coefficients than SGCAS. Furthermore, three different moisture sorption isotherm models were used to fit the experimental results: the Brunauer−Emmett−Teller (BET) model,... [more]

This paper shows the technical−economic, operational and environmental feasibility of four off-grid hybrid power systems to supply energy to the Cerrito de los Morreños community in Ecuador. These configurations consist of combinations of diesel generators, solar photovoltaic systems, and battery energy storage systems. Each configuration was simulated and the results were analyzed for two different load conditions: (1) the existing load profile and (2) a reduced load profile by incorporating an energy efficiency initiative. Homer Pro software was used to perform the simulations. The planning horizon for the simulations was selected to be 15 years. The results showed the diesel/photovoltaic/battery configuration with energy efficiency showed the best performance, which was achieved with a photovoltaic system of 160 kWp, the existing generator of 165 kW and a storage system of 283 kWh. The stand-alone diesel generator and photovoltaic/diesel configurations showed higher Net Present Cost... [more]

The safety of power batteries has received more and more attention in promoting electric vehicles. The external short circuit is particularly prominent as an abnormal and harmful event of a battery, and the exploration of in-situ low-cost detection technology for such an event is the starting point of this paper. By building an experimental bench that could detect the external short circuit of the battery and obtain the acoustic, electrode, and temperature responses, the resulting acoustic analysis would establish an internal connection with the electrode and temperature measurement when the external short circuit occurs. The respective acoustic response characteristics of different initial battery states of charge were analyzed by selecting appropriate acoustic characteristic parameters in the time and frequency domains. The acoustic measurement could represent the battery abnormality synchronously like the electrode measurement, and the results of the damage and rearrangement of the... [more]

In this work, a novel agent-based day-ahead power management scheme is proposed for multiple-microgrid distribution systems with the intent of reducing operational costs and improving system resilience. The proposed power sharing algorithm executes within each microgrid (MG) locally, and the neighboring MGs cooperate via a multi-agent system cooperation scheme, established to model the communication among the agents. The power management for each agent is modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) including two objectives: maximizing load coverage and minimizing the operating costs. The proposed MOP is solved using the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), where a set of Pareto optimal solutions is obtained for each agent through the NSGA-II. The final solution is obtained using an Analytical Hierarchical Process. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated using a benchmark 4-MG distribution system. It is shown that the proposed power management sche... [more]

The highly efficient Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (IPMSM) is ubiquitous choice in Electric Vehicles (EVs) for today’s automotive industry. IPMSM control requires accurate knowledge of an immeasurable critical Permanent Magnet (PM) flux linkage parameter. The PM flux linkage is highly influenced by operating temperature which results in torque derating and hence power loss, unable to meet road loads and reduced life span of electrified powertrain in EVs. In this paper, novel virtual sensing scheme for estimating PM flux linkage through measured stator currents is designed for an IPMSM centric electrified powertrain. The proposed design is based on a Uniform Robust Exact Differentiator (URED) centric Super Twisting Algorithm (STA), which ensures robustness and finite-time convergence of the time derivative of the quadrature axis stator current of IPMSM. Moreover, URED is able to eliminate chattering without sacrificing robustness and precision. The proposed design detects... [more]

The growth of high-quality compound semiconductor materials on silicon substrates has long been studied to overcome the high price of compound semiconductor substrates. In this study, we successfully fabricated nanowire solar cells by utilizing high-quality hetero p-n junctions formed by growing n-type III-V nanowires on p-silicon substrates. The n-InAs0.75P0.25 nanowire array was grown by the Volmer−Weber mechanism, a three-dimensional island growth mode arising from a lattice mismatch between III-V and silicon. For the surface passivation of n-InAs0.75P0.25 core nanowires, a wide bandgap InP shell was formed. The nanowire solar cell was fabricated by benzocyclobutene (BCB) filling, exposure of nanowire tips by reactive-ion etching, electron-beam deposition of ITO window layer, and finally metal grid electrode process. In particular, the ITO window layer plays a key role in reducing light reflection as well as electrically connecting nanowires that are electrically separated from each... [more]

CO2 emissions reduction from coal-fired power plants is an urgent issue in Japan, as well as around the world. The purpose of this study is to estimate the CO2 emissions and economy of using carbonized wood pellets produced overseas and co-fired at coal-fired power plants in Japan. We examined carbonized wood pellets produced in Canada and Vietnam, since those countries are major exporters of wood pellets for Japan. The results obtained are as follows: (1) The CO2 emissions and calculated cost per calorific value of carbonized wood pellets (CP25), which have a fixed carbon content of 25 wt.%, are lower than those of wood pellets at the port of import in Japan. When the fixed carbon of carbonized biomass is controlled at 25 wt.% or more via a carbonizer, sufficient pyrolysis gas (the heat source used for drying and carbonization without auxiliary fuel) can be obtained. (2) Carbonized wood pellets manufactured in Vietnam are more economical than those manufactured in Canada, since the re... [more]

The modern power system is characterized by the massive integration of renewables, especially wind power. The intermittent nature of wind poses serious concerns for the system operator owing to the inaccuracies in wind power forecasting. Forecasting errors require more balancing power for maintaining frequency within the nominal range. These services are now offered through conventional power plants that not only increase the operational cost but also adversely affect the environment. The modern power system emphasizes the massive penetration of wind power that will replace conventional power plants and thereby impact the provision of system services from conventional power plants. Therefore, there is an emergent need to find new control and balancing solutions, such as regulation reserves from wind power plants and electric vehicles, without trading off their natural behaviors. This work proposes real-time optimized dispatch strategies for automatic generation control (AGC) to utilize... [more]

Local path planning is a key task for the motion planners of autonomous vehicles since it commands the vehicle across its environment while avoiding any obstacles. To perform this task, the local path planner generates a trajectory and a velocity profile, which are then sent to the vehicle’s actuators. This paper proposes a new local path planner for autonomous vehicles based on the Attractor Dynamic Approach (ADA), which was inspired by the behavior of movement of living beings, along with an algorithm that takes into account four acceleration policies, the ST dynamic vehicle model, and several constraints regarding the comfort and security. The original functions that define the ADA were modified in order to adapt it to the non-holonomic vehicle’s constraints and to improve its response when an impact scenario is detected. The present approach is validated in a well-known simulator for autonomous vehicles under three representative cases of study where the vehicle was capable of gene... [more]

Meeting the generation schedule in a wind farm is a major issue. This work utilized battery energy storage systems (BESS) integrated wind farms (WF) to supply energy to the power grid at a pre-determined generation schedule, which was set previously based on the meteorological forecast and BESS characteristics. This study proposed the integration of two independently controlled BESS into the WF to balance stochastic power deviations between actual wind power and scheduled power. By utilizing linear optimization and solving in MATLAB, simulation models of the operations of BESS-integrated WF have been developed. The technical performance of the BESS-integrated wind farm on meeting the generation schedule, along with the cost benefits and profit attributed to the BESS, is therefore measured by a series of indices. The simulation on a practical wind farm, i.e., Adama-I WF, Ethiopia shows that even though it depends on the type of state exchanging strategy adopted, the developed methodolog... [more]

Maintenance and repair of wind turbines contribute to the higher costs of wind energy. In this paper, various technologies of structural repair of damaged and broken wind turbine blades are compared. The composite plates, mimicking damaged blade parts, were damaged and repaired, using various available curing and bonding technologies. Technologies of repair with hand layup lamination, vacuum repair with hand layup and infusion, ultraviolet repair and high temperature thermal curing were compared. The repaired samples were tested under tensile static and fatigue tests, and subject to microscopic X-ray investigations. It was observed that both the strength of the repaired structures and the porosity depend on the repair technology used. Vacuum-based technologies lead to relatively stiff and lower-strength repaired plates, while ultraviolet-curing technologies lead to average stiffness and high strength. High-temperature vacuum curing leads to the highest maximum stress. Hand layup (both... [more]

Nowadays, the restructuring of power systems is extremely urgent due to the depletion of fossil fuels on the one hand and the environmental impact on the other. In the restructured environment, the incorporation of renewable energy sources and storage devices is key as they have helped achieve a milestone in the form of microgrid technology. As the restructuring of the power system increases, there are several types of generation sources, and distribution companies express their interest in trading in a deregulated environment to operate economically. When considering the power system deregulation, the contract value deviates in some situations, resulting in an imbalance between the generation and the energy consumption, which can bring the system into a power outage condition. In particular, load frequency control has been a great challenge over the past few decades to ensure the stable operation of power systems. This study considers two generation sources: mini-hydro in GENCO-1 and... [more]

To address the problem of DC bus voltage surge caused by load demand fluctuation in an off-grid microgrid, here, an adaptive energy optimization method based on a hybrid energy-storage system to maintain the stability of DC bus voltage is presented. The adaptive energy optimization method consists of three parts: the average filtering algorithm, extracting fluctuating power in demand load; the supercapacitor terminal voltage control, keeping the terminal voltage of the supercapacitor near reference; and the battery pack balance control, adjusting the charge/discharge to balance the state of charge for battery packs. In this proposed method, after extracting the fluctuating power by the low-pass filter when the demand load fluctuates, the battery packs release the power to offset the low-frequency fluctuation load and the supercapacitor to instantaneously compensate the high-frequency fluctuation power, to prolong the service life of batteries and maintain the stability of DC bus voltag... [more]

Restrictions on emissions are being imposed by regional and international shipping organisations, which raise the question of which marine fuel and technology can most effectively replace heavy fuel oil and diesel engines. The aim of this study is to find appropriate advanced combined gas and steam turbine cycles for marine propulsion systems in a large container ship with respect to the evolving maritime environmental regulations. The selection criteria are the thermodynamic performance, emissions, size, and weight of advanced combined gas and steam turbine cycles in a large container ship. Two baselines are used: a diesel engine using marine diesel oil and a combined gas and steam turbine system using liquefied natural gas and marine diesel oil. Then, liquefied natural gas cycles are examined based on fuel replacement and enhanced to assess the benefits of liquefied natural gas over marine diesel oil. The results show that the enhanced liquefied natural gas combined gas and steam tur... [more]

In this article, a cascade fuzzy neural network (FNN) control approach is proposed for position control of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system with high coupling and underactuated. For the attitude loop with limited range, the FNN controller parameters were trained offline using flight data, whereas for the position loop, the method based on FNN compensation proportional-integral-derivative (PID) was adopted to tune the system online adaptively. This method not only combined the advantages of fuzzy systems and neural networks but also reduced the amount of calculation for cascade neural network control. Simulations of fixed set point flight and spiral and square trajectory tracking flight were then conducted. The comparison of the results showed that our method had advantages in terms of minimizing overshoot and settling time. Finally, flight experiments were carried out on a DJI Tello quadrotor UAV. The experimental results showed that the proposed controller had good perfo... [more]

Recently, because of the increase in the number of connections to Distributed Generation (DG), the problem of lowering voltage stability in the distribution system has become an issue. Reactive power compensators, such as Static Synchronous Compensators (STATCOM), may be used to solve the problem of voltage stability degradation. However, because of the complexity of the distribution system, it is very difficult to select the installation location for STATCOM. Furthermore, when installed in the wrong location, economical efficiency and availability problems may occur. This paper proposes a Virtual STATCOM Configuration and Control method that would operate like a single STATCOM based on multiple DGs connected to the system. The proposed Virtual STATCOM has the merit of being economical by using existing facilities without adding new power facilities, and it solves the problem of the difficulty of selecting the installation location because of the complexity of the distribution system.... [more]

Climate change already affects all inhabited regions of the world, with human influence contributing to many observed changes in climate extremes and to mitigate this trend, important decisions have been taken by different world organizations and countries to achieve global net-zero emissions. At the European Union level (EU27 countries), two of the main pillars for achieving carbon neutrality are: (1) The “Energy Efficiency First principle” in the formulation of energy policy and in taking relevant investment decisions and (2) the electrification of the energy sector, supported by generating electricity through endogenous renewable energy sources. In this context, a comprehensive review was carried out on what has been developed by the scientific community and main international energy organizations on the electrification of the energy sector. Additionally, with the purpose of better understanding the state of the art of a country regarding the decarbonization process, the Portuguese... [more]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between the construction sector and the rest of the Chinese economy in the energy consumption as it is crucial in energy consumption of the whole economy. Therefore, this paper uses the Modified Hypothetical Extraction Method (MHEM) to quantify the linkages of energy consumption in 2002, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2017 and 2018, providing a new perspective for energy consumption linkage studies in China. In this paper we discover the volumes and paths of energy consumption net flows from other blocks to the construction sector and identify the key energy suppliers of the construction sector. The empirical findings show that the indirect energy consumption exceeded the direct energy consumption between 2002 and 2018, representing more than 90% of total (direct plus indirect) energy consumption of the construction sector. Between 2002 and 2018, the indirect energy consumption of the construction sector increased from 27,579 to... [more]

Nowadays, the noise pollution of internal combustion engines is a very important factor influencing human health and is the main noise source of urban environmental noise. Additionally, the main source of gasoline engine noise consists of combustion noise in the cylinder, where the combustion noise is influenced by the combustion processes within the combustion chamber, especially the cyclic variation in the engine combustion. Thus, the inter-relationship between engine noise, cyclic variation and combustion is of great interest to be explored. Moreover, despite the environmental advantages of clean energy, the impact of different fuels on the internal combustion engine’s noise emissions cannot be ignored. As a result, in this work, three blends were prepared and used as test fuels, namely pure gasoline (E0), 10% hydrous ethanol (E10W) and 20% hydrous ethanol (E20W) by volume, accompanied by engine operating at a steady speed of 2000 r/min under various loads. The experimental results... [more]

Cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) is a typical enhanced oil recovery method for heavy oil reservoirs. In this paper, a new model for the productivity of a CSS well in multilayer heavy oil reservoirs is proposed. First, for the steam volume of each formation layer, it is proposed that the total steam injection volume will be split by the formation factor (Kh) for the commingled steam injection mode. Then, based on the equivalent flow resistance principle, the productivity model can be derived. In this model, the heavy oil reservoir is composed of a cold zone, a hot water zone, and a steam zone. Next, using the energy conservation law, the equivalent heating radius can be calculated with the consideration of the steam overlay. Simultaneously, a correlation between the threshold pressure gradient (TPG) and oil mobility is also applied for the productivity formula in the cold zone and the hot water zone. Afterward, this model is validated by comparing the simulation results with the results o... [more]

In this study, using response surface methodology and central composite design, regression models were developed relating 12 input factors to the supply air outlet humidity ratio and temperature of 4-fluid internally-cooled liquid desiccant dehumidifiers. The selected factors are supply air inlet temperature, supply air inlet humidity ratio, exhaust air inlet temperature, exhaust air inlet humidity ratio, liquid desiccant inlet temperature, liquid desiccant concentration, liquid desiccant flow rate, supply air mass flow rate, the ratio of exhaust to supply air mass flow rate, the thickness of the channel, the channel length, and the channel width of the dehumidifier. The designed experiments were performed using a numerical two-dimensional heat and mass transfer model of the liquid desiccant dehumidifier. The numerical model predicted the measured values of the supply air outlet humidity ratio within 6.7%. The regression model’s predictions of the supply air outlet humidity ratio match... [more]

This Special Issue of Energies contains the successful invited submissions [...]