The efficient use of coal resources and the safe operation of coal-fired boilers are hindered by high-temperature corrosion caused by corrosive sulphur components. To predict the impact of sulphur−nitrogen interactions on sulphur’s evolution and its mechanism of action, a conventional sulphur component evolution model (uS−N) and an improved sulphur component evolution model (S−N) that considers sulphur−nitrogen interactions were proposed in the present study. The models were built using OpenFOAM−v8 software for the coal combustion process, and the generation of SO2, H2S, COS, and CS2 was simulated and analysed under different air excess coefficients. The simulations were conducted to analyse the patterns of SO2, H2S, COS, and CS2 generation at different air excess factors. The results show that, compared with the uS−N condition, the simulated values of coal combustion products (SO2, H2S, COS, and CS2) under the S−N condition were closer to the experimental values, and the errors of dif... [more]

Alternative sour2ces of energy are on the rise primarily because of environmental concerns, in addition to the depletion of fossil fuel reserves. Currently, there are many alternatives, approaches, and attempts to introduce alternative energy sources in the field of transport. This article centers around the need to explore additional energy sources beyond the current ones in use. It delves into individual energy sources that can be utilized for transportation, including their properties, production methods, and the advantages and disadvantages associated with their use across different types of drives. The article not only examines the situation in the Czech Republic but also in other nations. In addition to addressing future mobility, the thesis also considers how the utilization of new energy sources may impact the environment.

The multi-objective optimization of methanol distillation is a critical and complex issue in the methanol industry. The three-column methanol distillation scheme is first simulated with Aspen Plus to provide the initial value of the NSGA-III algorithm. The operating parameters are optimized through the Python-Aspen platform. The total annual cost and CO2 emissions are considered the objective function. A small value of indicator generational distance can be achieved by increasing the number of generations, which is helpful in improving algorithm convergence. The NSGA-III algorithm has good convergence and distribution performance. By comparing the optimized results with the original ones, the total annual cost and CO2 emissions are, respectively, reduced by 5.35% and 12.80% when the operating parameters of the methanol distillation sequence are optimized through NSGA-III. As a result, substantial economic and energy savings can be made, offering great potential to improve the performan... [more]

The involvement of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which is highly combustible and explosive, greatly increases risk in road transport. A 3D numerical model was conducted in FLACS, which depicts the dynamic process and variation of combined effects along the multi-directions of LPG explosion under an actual case. With the simulation of scenarios, power-law explosion and fireball models were used to reproduce the results, and the dynamic evolution of specific parameters during the LPG explosion process was analyzed. The results reveal that the LPG explosion’s expansion around the expressway moved along the spaces between obstacles, while conditions at the site of the accident had an enhancement effect on LPG/air mixture accumulation. The propagation trajectory of the shock wave in the horizontal direction presented a regular circle within 623.73 ms, and the overpressure was enough to lead to extensive damage to surrounding structures. Further, shock wave-driven overpressure brought hazar... [more]

Soils contaminated by mining activities are a major environmental concern, and to avoid this type of environmental impact, carrying out high-cost processes is necessary. For this reason, a solution is proposed in this study in order to eliminate the soils contaminated by mining activities and, in turn, prevent the soil’s contaminating elements from causing harm. All this is achieved by using contaminated soils as raw materials for the production of ceramics for bricks. For this purpose, the materials were initially characterized physically and chemically, and different ceramic test pieces were manufactured with different percentages of clay and contaminated soil, subsequently determining the physical properties and the leaching of toxic elements. In this way, it was possible to evaluate, via innovative data mining and fuzzy logic techniques, the influence of the contaminated soil's contribution on the properties of ceramics. Based on this, it was possible to affirm that the contaminate... [more]

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is considered the primary source of NOx in the atmosphere, and among several abatement processes, catalytic decomposition is the most promising. The thermal energy necessary for this reaction is generally provided from the external side of the reactor by burning fossil fuels. In the present work, in order to overcome the limits related to greenhouse gas emissions, high heat transfer resistance, and energy losses, a microwave-assisted N2O decomposition was studied, taking advantages of the microwave’s (MW) properties of assuring direct and selective heating. To this end, two microwave-susceptible silicon carbide (SiC) monoliths were layered with different nickel−cobalt−aluminum mixed oxides. Based on the results of several characterization analyses (SEM/EDX, BET, ultrasound washcoat adherence tests, Hg penetration technique, and TPR), the sample showing the most suitable characteristics for this process was reproduced in the appropriate size to perform specific MW-as... [more]

Due to growing concern over environmental impacts and the pressure to lower carbon footprints in the metals industry, hydrogen (H2) has gained attention as a promising alternative for the replacement of carbon as a reductant and fuel. This paper evaluates the potential use of hydrogen as an energy source and reducing agent during the processing of waste printed circuit boards (waste PCBs) from e-waste through black copper smelting. The effect of the use of carbon and hydrogen during the reduction−oxidation process was analysed and compared from the perspective of thermodynamics and heat balance. The thermodynamic analyses of waste-PCB processing were carried out using the FactSage thermochemical package for the smelting process at temperatures from 1473 K to 1673 K (1200−1400 °C). The results show that the CO2 emissions can be reduced by 73% when hydrogen is used as the reducing agent. A minimum of 10 wt% of waste PCBs in the feed material can be used to replace the necessary carbon to... [more]

A livestreaming supply chain composed of a single manufacturer and a single streamer in the low-carbon market is examined. Motivated by the actual production and operation, both the manufacturer and the streamer have a chance to dominate the supply chain. Low-carbon strategies and livestreaming marketing modes of the supply chain are studied. The impacts of the consumer’s price sensitivity coefficient, low-carbon preference, and streamer’s promotion sensitivity coefficient on the equilibrium results are further studied. The results show that: the streamer achieves the optimal level of promotion effort in the resale mode under both power structures. The manufacturer achieves the optimal low-carbon level in the commission mode when the promotion sensitivity coefficient is smaller under both of two power structures. The streamer’s profit is optimal in the resale mode, while the manufacturer’s profit is optimal in the commission mode when under the streamer-led structure. Two parties’ prof... [more]

Tenderness is one of the most appreciated quality characteristics in beef by consumers. Meat aging is the most recognized natural methodology to improve tenderness in beef. The current study was designed to evaluate if ultrasonication was able to simulate (ultrasonication alone) or to grant an additional effect (aging plus ultrasonication) to two different aging methods (dry and wet) on the sensory profile of the beef Longissimus lumborum muscle. The two aging methods (dry and wet), or ultrasonication for 40 min (US), had no effect (p > 0.05) in overall consumer acceptability. However, in terms of sensory attribute liking, the highest values (p < 0.05) were observed in the ultrasonicated and wet-aged meat for 10 d and the dry-aged meat for 10 d, without difference between them (p > 0.05). It is concluded that ultrasound offers the possibility to obtain tender meat without the cost and contamination risks implicated in the dry-aging method.

Limitations regarding process design, optimization, and control often occur when using particular process simulators. With the implementation of connection methodologies, integrated tools could be made by coupling popular process simulation software with each other or with programming environments. In the current paper, we summarized and categorized the existing research regarding the application of multi-software engineering in the chemical industry, with an emphasis on software connections. CAPE-OPEN, COM, OPC, and native integration were discussed in detail, with the intention to serve as a guide for choosing the most suitable software combination and connection. These hybrid systems can handle complex user-defined problems and can be used for decision support, performing custom unit operations, operator training, process optimization, building control systems, and developing digital twins. In this work, we proposed the use of process simulator Aspen HYSYS linked together with the n... [more]

Thermoelectric generator (TEG) has important applications in automotive exhaust waste heat recovery. The Back propagation neural network (BP) can predict the electrical generating performance of TEG efficiently and accurately due to its advantage of being good at handing nonlinear data. However, BP algorithm is easy to fall into local optimum, and its training data usually have deviation since the data are obtained through the simulation software. Both of the problems will reduce the prediction accuracy. In order to further improve the prediction accuracy of BP algorithm, we use the genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize BP neural network by selection, crossover, and mutation operation. Meanwhile, we create a TEG for the heat waste recovery of automotive exhaust and test 84 groups of experimental data set to train the GA−BP prediction model to avoid the deviation caused by the simulation software. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the GA−BP model is better than that of the B... [more]

This research aimed to assess the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential of methanol extract of Wilckia maritima, a plant belonging to the family Brassicaceae, which is enriched with natural antioxidants. Qualitative phytochemical studies showed the presence of numerous compounds including glycosides, phenols, triterpenoids, and GC-MS studies revealed the presence of 35 bioactive components, including n-hexadecanoic acid (26.96%), 9,12,15 octadecatrienoic acid (cis) (25.52%), 3,5 di-hydroxy-6-methyl 2,3-di-hydro-4-pyran 4-one (14.35%), and 3-tertiary butyl-4-hydroxy-anisol (11.68%) as major components, which are thought to be responsible for anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potentials of methanol extract of W. maritima., flavonoids, steroids, tannins, and saponins. The antioxidant potential of the extract was determined by performing various assays, including DPPH free radical scavenging, ferrous reducing, and hydrogen peroxide assays, which showed significant percentage inhibiti... [more]

Ventilation Air Methane (VAM) refers to the release of fugitive methane (CH4) emissions into the atmosphere during underground coal mining operations. Growing concerns regarding the greenhouse effects of CH4 have led to a worldwide effort in developing efficient and cost-effective methods of capturing CH4. Among these, absorption-based processes, particularly those using Ionic Liquids (ILs) are appealing due to their advantages over conventional methods. In this study, the solubility of CH4 in various ILs, expressed by Henry’s law constant, is first reviewed by examining a wide range of experimental techniques. This is followed by a review of thermodynamic modelling tools such as the extended Henry’s law model, extended Pitzer’s model, Peng−Robinson (PR) equation of state, and Krichevsky−Kasarnovsky (KK) equation of state as well as computational (Artificial Neural Network) modelling approaches. The comprehensive analysis presented in this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding o... [more]

Laser-induced thermal crack propagation (LITP) is a high-quality and efficient processing method that has been widely used in fields such as glass cutting. However, the problem of trajectory deviation often arises in actual cutting operations, especially in asymmetric cutting. To address this issue, a low-temperature gas cooling trajectory deviation correction technique was proposed in this study. This technique modifies the temperature and stress distribution by spraying low-temperature gas onto the processing surface and maintaining a relative position with the laser, thereby correcting the trajectory deviation. The finite element simulation software ABAQUS was employed to numerically simulate the dynamic propagation of temperature fields, thermal stress, and cracks in the asymmetric linear cutting and circular cutting of soda-lime glass with the proposed low-temperature gas cooling trajectory deviation correction technique, and the correction mechanism was elucidated. In the simulat... [more]

The motility behavior of suspended microorganisms plays an essential role in the properties of active fluids. Despite the important progress in our understanding of microorganisms’ motility in recent years, there are still several open questions about the dynamics of cell motility in active suspensions. Of special interest is the relationship between cell motility and age. In this study, cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. CPCC 534 was used as the model microorganism, and the cell trajectories were tracked for 78 days during the cell growth period. Results showed that the length of cell trajectories had substantially increased from the exponential growth phase to the stationary phase and had declined at the end of the stationary phase. Similar trends were observed for the cells’ mean squared displacement (MSD), the time-dependent diffusion coefficient of cell suspensions, and the cell displacement probability density function (PDF). These results suggest that the cellular age of microorga... [more]

Iron-modified biochar adsorbent shows its promise for removing Cr(VI) from water. However, the traditional dry-grinding modification methods to prepare iron-modified biochar (DFeBC) usually result in the aggregation of iron oxide particles, thus impeding the adsorption capacity. Herein, blue-green algae waste derived biochar modified in a wet process by K2FeO4 (WFeBC) was developed, and it showed well-distributed iron oxide on the surface of the biochar. As a result, WFeBC displayed a larger theoretical adsorption capacity of 66.22 mg/g than that of DFeBC (48.54 mg/g). It was found that the uniform-distributed iron oxide and abundant oxygen functional groups of WFeBC played an important role in the removal process of Cr(VI). In the adsorption process, the reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) by Fe(II) promoted the removal of hexavalent chromium. The Cr(VI) will be attracted by protonated oxygen functional groups through electrostatic interaction and complexation in an acid environment. All t... [more]

Identifying the gender of a person and his age by way of speaking is considered a crucial task in computer vision. It is a very important and active research topic with many areas of application, such as identifying a person, trustworthiness, demographic analysis, safety and health knowledge, visual monitoring, and aging progress. Data matching is to identify the gender of the person and his age. Thus, the study touches on a review of many research papers from 2016 to 2022. At the heart of the topic, many systematic reviews of multimodal pedagogies in Age and Gender Estimation for Adaptive were undertaken. However, no current study of the theme concerns connected to multimodal pedagogies in Age and Gender Estimation for Adaptive Learning has been published. The multimodal pedagogies in four different databases within the keywords indicate the heart of the topic. A qualitative thematic analysis based on 48 articles found during the search revealed four common themes, such as multimodal... [more]

The exhaustion of fossil energy and the severe pollution induced by using plastics has forced people to embark on the road to sustainable development. The high value of the recycling of plastics has become an important part of energy conservation. Microwave treatment, owning specific interactions between the electric field and the molecules of treated materials, presents potential advantages in the application of plastic pyrolysis. Therefore, the research status of the microwave-assisted pyrolysis (MAP) of plastics to produce high-value-added liquid oil, gas, and solid carbon was reviewed in this paper. The effects of plastic properties, microwave treatment parameters, microwave absorbers, co-pyrolysis, catalysts, and reactor devices on the process and the products were analyzed. It is essential to optimize the experimental design by studying microwave-assisted co-pyrolysis technology and the application of catalysts, understanding the mechanism of co-pyrolysis to improve product selec... [more]

Anomaly detection for core temperature has great significance in maintaining the safety of nuclear power plants. However, traditional auto-encoder-based anomaly detection methods might extract the latent space features with redundancy, which may lead to missing and false alarms. To address this problem, the idea of feature disentangling is introduced under the auto-encoder framework in this paper. First, a feature disentangling auto-encoder (DAE) is proposed where a latent space disentangling loss is designed to disentangle the features. We further propose an incrementally feature disentangling auto-encoder (IDAE), which is the improved version of DAE. In the IDAE model, an incremental feature generation strategy is developed, which enables the model to evaluate the disentangling degree to adaptively determine the feature dimension. Furthermore, an iterative training framework is designed, which focuses on the parameter training of the newly incremented feature, overcoming the difficul... [more]

In recent years, chemical experiment accidents have frequently occurred, resulting in injuries and fatalities among researchers. It is crucial to address this issue to improve laboratory safety. Based on many publications, it is clear that human error makes a major contribution to many laboratory accidents which contain hazardous processes. However, there is limited research focusing on human error in laboratory safety, and there is also a lack of effective measures to assess Human Error Probability (HEP) for experimental process safety. Therefore, we propose an improved Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM) which is based on risk data to assess the HEP during hazardous processes in chemical experiments. The proposed method adjusts nine Common Performance Conditions (CPCs) in conventional CREAM to make them suitable to describe chemical experiments. Then, in contrast to the traditional approach, this study uses the definition of risk as the support to collect CPC data... [more]

Due to the excitation generated by the periodically alternate pumping of dual-hydraulic cylinders, vibration of concrete pump trucks (CPT) occurs. Excessive boom vibration will seriously affect the service life and operation safety of CPT. At the same time, the long boom structure of a CPT makes it very sensitive to the posture and pumping conditions, which directly affect the vibration characteristics of CPT in different postures and different working conditions. This paper establishes a finite element model of a type of CPT. Through force analysis of concrete in the straight pipe and elbow pipe during the pumping and reversing stages, an excitation model of the conveying pipe is established. Based on the secondary development of HyperWorks, a finite element model of CPT with multiple postures is built, and the dynamic response under multiple conditions is analyzed. Finally, the accuracy of the finite element model of CPT and the excitation model of the conveying pipe is verified by e... [more]

Nanotechnology is an emerging multidisciplinary field that has the potential to offer solutions to pharmaceutical challenges starting from drug delivery to therapeutic applications. The plant-mediated method is eco-friendly and the most inexpensive of the various techniques used to synthesize nanoparticles (NPs). In this study, silver (Ag) NPs have been successfully synthesized using leaf extract of Catharanthus roseus and Ocimum tenuiflorum. X-ray diffraction revealed an average crystalline size of 19.96 and 21.42 nm for C. roseus and O. tenuiflorum-mediated Ag NPs, respectively. Further, shape, size, and elemental composition were analyzed using a scanning electron microscope, transmission electron microscope (TEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectral technique. TEM study revealed spherical/spheroidal-shaped Ag NPs were formed between 10−48 nm with C. roseus and 17−55 nm with O. tenuiflorum. Both synthesized Ag NPs inhibited Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, where the effect w... [more]

Intelligent manufacturing under Industry 4.0 assimilates sophisticated technologies and artificial intelligence for sustainable production and outcomes. Blockchain paradigms are coined with Industry 4.0 for concurrent and well-monitored flawless production. This article introduces Sustainable Production concerned with External Demands (SP-ED). This method is more specific about energy production and the distribution for flawless and outage-less supply. First, the energy demand is identified for internal and external users based on which sustainability is planned. Secondly, Ethereum blockchain monitoring for a similar production and demand satisfaction is coupled with the production system. From two perspectives, the monitoring and condition satisfaction processes are validated using federated learning (FL). The perspectives include demand distribution and production sustainability. In the demand distribution, the condition of meeting the actual requirement is validated. Contrarily, the... [more]

Batch processes in the biopharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing industries often develop new products to meet changing market demands. When the dynamic models of these new products are trained, dynamic modeling with limited data for each product can lead to inaccurate results. One solution is to extract useful knowledge from past historical production data that can be applied to the product of a new grade. In this way, the model can be built quickly without having to wait for additional modeling data. In this study, a subspace identification combined common feature learning scheme is proposed to quickly learn a model of a new grade. The proposed modified state-space model contains common and special parameter matrices. Past batch data can be used to train common parameter matrices. Then, the parameters can be directly transferred into a new SID model for a new grade of the product. The new SID model can be quickly well trained even though there is a limited batch of data. The effec... [more]

Many fundamental decisions in the process design of a separation task are conducted in an early stage where, unfortunately, process simulation does not have the highest priority. Subsequently, during the setup of the digital twin, dedicated experiments are carried out in the design space that was established earlier. These experiments are most often too complicated to conduct directly. This paper addresses the idea of a combined approach. The early-stage buffer screening and optimization experiments were planned with the Design of Experiments, carried out and then analyzed statistically to extract not only the best buffer composition but also the crucial model parameters, in this case the isotherm dependency on the buffer composition. This allowed the digital twin to predict the best buffer composition, and if the model-predicted control was applied to keep the process at the optimal productivity at a predetermined purity. The methodology was tested with an industrial peptide purificat... [more]