Herein, some novel metal-free 1,3,4-oxadiazole compounds O1−O7 were evaluated for their photovoltaic properties using density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations to determine if they can serve as metal-free organic dyes in the use of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). To understand the trends in the relative efficiencies of the investigated compounds as dyes in DSSCs, their electron contributions, hole contributions, and electron−hole overlaps for each respective atom and fragment within the molecule were analyzed with a particular focus on the electron densities on the anchoring segments. As transition density matrices (TDM) provide details about the departure of each electron from its corresponding hole during excitations, which results in charge transfer (CT), the charge separation distance (Δr) between the electron and its corresponding hole was studied, in addition to the degree of electron−hole overlap (Λ). The latter, singl... [more]

Emerging large battery energy storage systems (BESSs) are key enablers in the electrification of the shipping sector. With huge government investments in BESSs, there are large gaps between the government supported BESS initiatives and actual BESS integration results on vessels. This study aims to close these gaps, allowing BESSs to become the preferred solution for ship owners without needing government support. Firstly, this industry-driven study reviews both the industrial approaches to achieve CO2 emission reductions and the fuel savings and emission reductions from 500 BESS installations on various vessels. Secondly, a 630 kWh BESS retrofitted onto a hybrid-electric vessel is used to quantitively identify the improvement requirements for installations and operations. The installations required many custom designs that were expensive and have high failure risks. The standardization of interfaces’ between BESSs and vessels is thus urgently required. The BESS was intended for spinnin... [more]

This study aims to investigate the consumer acceptance of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) charging of electric vehicle (EV) drivers. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first V2G acceptance study that is based on actual users’ experience of V2G charging. A test set up with a V2G charge point at a solar carport was constructed at the Delft University of Technology. Seventeen participants in the study were given access to a V2G-compatible Nissan LEAF and the constructed V2G charging facilities, after which they were interviewed. Clear communication of the impacts of V2G charging cycles on EV batteries, financial compensation covering these impacts, real-time insight on the battery state-of-charge and the ability to set operational parameters through a user-friendly interface were all found to foster acceptance. The main barriers for acceptance were the uncertainty associated with battery state-of-charge, the increased need for planning charging and trips, the increased anxiety about... [more]

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become increasingly popular because they are highly efficient and sustainable. However, EVs have intensive electric loads. Their penetrations into the power system pose significant challenges to the operation and control of the power distribution system, such as a voltage drop or transformer overloading. Therefore, grid operators need to prepare for high-level EV penetration into the power system. This study proposes data-driven, parameterized, individual, and aggregated EV charging models to predict EV charging loads in the urban residential sector. Actual EV charging profiles in Saskatchewan, Canada, were analyzed to understand the characteristics of EV charging. A location-based algorithm was developed to identify residential EV charging from raw data. The residential EV charging data were then used to tune the EV charging model parameters, including battery capacity, charging power level, start charging time, daily EV charging energy, and the initial st... [more]

Coal spontaneous combustion (CSC) is a disaster that seriously threatens safe production in coal mines. Revealing the mechanism of CSC can provide a theoretical basis for its prevention and control. Compared with experimental research is limited by the complexity of coal molecular structure, the quantum chemical calculation method can simplify the complex molecular structure and realize the exploration of the mechanism of CSC from the micro level. In this study, toluene and phenylacetaldehyde were used as model compounds, and the quantum chemical calculation method was adopted. The reaction processes of the methyl and aldehyde groups with oxygen were investigated with the aid of the Gaussian 09 software, using the B3LYP functional and the 6-311 + G(d,p) basis set and including the D3 dispersion correction. On this basis, the generation mechanisms of CO and CO2, two important indicator gases in the process of CSC, were explored. The calculation results show that the Gibbs free energy ch... [more]

In the example of the aviation gas turbine engine the problem of monitoring metal wear particles of friction pairs in the oil systems of gas turbine power plants is considered. The solution based on using the multi-channel cluster single-coil eddy current sensor (CSCECS) with sensitive elements in the form of single circuits is proposed. The CSCECS provides the detection of ferromagnetic and non-ferromagnetic particles and their ranking by several size groups. The sensor is invariant to the size (inner diameter) of the monitored oil pipeline and has high throughput and identical sensitivity across all channels. Two variants of the hardware structure of the debris continuous monitoring system (DCMS) prototype implementing the proposed approach are suggested. The first variant is intended for engine bench tests and contains the CSCECS with integrated preamplifiers and forced air cooling of the electronic modules. The second variant of the DCMS prototype involves the use of the uncooled s... [more]

Fast-front transients play an important role in the insulation design of any power system. When a stroke hits the shield wire or the tower of high-voltage overhead power lines, flashover may occur either along the span or across tower insulators, depending on the relevant voltages and insulation strength. As a result, backflashover may take place from the tower structure to the phase conductor whenever a huge impulse current flows along the tower towards considerably high footing impedances. For these reasons, tower modeling for transients studies is an important step in the insulation design, and also for lower voltage applications, where indirect lightning effects may play a predominant role. However, after decades of research on tower modeling, starting from the 1930s with the first model proposed by Jordan, no consensus has been reached neither on a widely accepted tower model nor on the quantitative effect of the tower models on insulation design. Moreover, the fundamental mechani... [more]

The geological storage of CO2 in the Earth’s subsurface has the potential to significantly offset greenhouse gas emissions for safe, economical, and acceptable public use. Due to legal advantages and vast resource capacity, offshore CO2 storage provides an attractive alternative to onshore options. Although offshore Lower Cretaceous reservoirs have a vast expected storage capacity, there is a limited quantitative assessment of the offshore storage resource in the southeastern United States. This work is part of the Southeast Offshore Storage Resource Assessment (SOSRA) project, which presents a high-quality potential geological repository for CO2 in the Mid- and South Atlantic Planning Areas. This is the first comprehensive investigation and quantitative assessment of CO2 storage potential for the Lower Cretaceous section of the outer continental shelf that includes the Southeast Georgia Embayment and most of the Blake Plateau. An interpretation of 200,000 km of legacy industrial 2D se... [more]

Quantitative characterization of propagation behaviors and morphology of hydraulic fractures is crucial for controlling and optimizing hydrofracturing effects. To study the disturbance deflection behaviors of multiple hydraulic fractures, a three-dimensional field-scale numerical model for multistage fracturing is established to study the shear stress disturbance and unstable propagation behavior of hydraulic fractures under different perforation cluster spacing. In the model, the thermal diffusion, fluid flow and deformation in reservoirs are considered to describe the thermal-hydro-mechanical coupling. In the numerical case study, the derived results show that the thermal effect between fracturing fluid and rock matrix is an important factor affecting fracture propagation, and thermal effects may increase the extent of fracture propagation. The size of stress shadow areas and the deflection of hydraulic fractures will increase with a decrease in multiple perforation cluster spacing i... [more]

Research was conducted on fuels with additives that selectively affect the rate of kinetic (dQk/dα) and diffusion (dQd/dα) combustion in the diesel engine cylinder. In addition to the base fuel (DFB), DFKA fuel with an additive reducing dQk/dα, DFDA fuel with an additive increasing dQd/dα, and DFS fuel with both additives were tested. The main purpose of such dQ/dα course control in the engine cylinder was to simultaneously reduce the emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM), and to increase the efficiency of the combustion process. Similar to the course of the dQ/dα, the course of the combustion temperature (Tc(α)) affects the NOx produced and the number of afterburned solid particles; the influence of the fuel additives on the functional curves was analysed. In addition to analysis of the temperature Tc(α) calculated from the indicator diagrams, Tc(α) analysis was conducted using the two-colour method, which allows the analysis of the isotherm distributions loca... [more]

The use of a grid-tied photovoltaic system with a storage battery to increase the power of objects of railway transport infrastructure above the limit on consumption from the grid with the possibility of energy saving is considered. The methods of analysis of energy processes in photovoltaic systems with a storage battery are used. They are added via the processing of archival data of power generation of a photovoltaic battery and computer modeling results. A technique of system parameter calculation to increase the power according to the given load schedule of the object at constant and maximum possible degree of power increasing is developed. The values of the average monthly generation of a photovoltaic battery at the location point of the object based on archival data are used. The principle of the control of power, consumed from the grid, according to the given values of the added and total load is developed. Using the basic schedule of added load power in connection with the grap... [more]

Wind power utilization is attracting worldwide attention in the renewable energy field, and as wind power develops from land to sea, the size of the blades is becoming incredibly larger. The fatigue test, especially the biaxial synchronous fatigue test for the blades, is becoming an indispensable step to ensure the blade’s quality before mass production, which means the biaxial independent test presently used may have difficulty reproducing the real damage for large-sized blades that oscillate simultaneously in flap-wise and edgewise directions in service conditions. The main point of the fatigue test is to carry out accelerated and reinforced oscillations on blades in the experimental plan. The target moments of critical blade sections are reached or not during the test are treated as one significant evaluation criterion. For independent tests, it is not hard to realize moment matching using additional masses fixed on certain critical blade sections, which may be not easy to put into... [more]

The perennial rhizomatous grass giant reed (Arundo donax L.) can be exploited to produce hydrogen by dark fermentation. This implies a high availability of simple sugars, like glucose and xylose, and, thus, a pre-treatment is necessary to remove lignin and expose the holocellulose to enzymatic attack. This study aimed at evaluating the hydrogen production from giant reed hydrolysates. Giant reed dry meal was pre-treated with diluted NaOH (1.2% weight/weight), then the solid fraction was separated from the alkaline black liquor by filtration, enzymatically hydrolyzed with a cellulase blend (Cellic CTec2), and fermented in mesophilic batch conditions with a microbial consortium derived from pig slurry. The impact on hydrogen yield of initial pH was evaluated by comparing the hydrogen production from hydrolysates with not adjusted (5.3) or adjusted initial pH (8.7) using NaOH or alkaline black liquor. The highest hydrogen yield, 2.0 mol/mol of hexoses, was obtained with alkaline initial p... [more]

Finding a suitable location is a key factor for long-term investment in wind turbine energy. It includes understanding the area of interest, such as the subsidence of the land. Land subsidence is a gradual decrease in the surface of the Earth due to natural and/or induced causes. It can cause damage, such as settlement problems in the ground near infrastructure including buildings and wind turbines, thus not being a suitable place for long-term investment. Here, we show a case study of land subsidence prediction and assessment of the Atsimo Andrefana region, the great south-western part of Madagascar, using theoretical simulation and satellite images from the Sentinel-1 mission using D-InSAR method. The predicted land subsidence related to the depletion of groundwater reservoirs in the Atsimo Andrefana region is around 12 mm. We found ~5 mm of subsidence related to the growing city of Toliary and with an average subsidence of 124 mm and the highest record of 167 mm in the most southern... [more]

The N2 adsorption experiment is one of the most important methods for characterizing the pore structure of shale, as it covers the major pore size range present in such sediments. The goal of this work is to better understand both the mechanisms and application of low-pressure nitrogen adsorption experiments in pore structure characterization. To achieve this, the N2 adsorption molecular simulation method, low-pressure N2 adsorption experiments, total organic carbon (TOC) analysis, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and a total of 196 shale samples from the Wufeng−Longmaxi formations in the Sichuan basin have been employed in this study. Based on the analytical data and the simulations, two parameters, the connectivity index and the large pore volume index, are proposed. These parameters are defined as the connectivity of the pore system and the volume of large nanopores (>10 nm) respectively, and they are calculated based on the N2 adsorption and des... [more]

In this paper the most promising developments of technology for gas engine-driven heat pumps for the last 15 years are presented. The purpose is to present the latest research studies and changes in this type of device, as well as to help readers to search for publications containing relevant aspects of gas engine heat pumps. Gas engine-driven heat pumps are devices for parallel heating and cooling production based on compressor heat pump technology. However, unlike heat pumps with compressors powered by electric motors, gas engine-driven heat pumps are driven by gas internal combustion engines. The reviewed solutions are an interesting alternative to traditional heating systems, characterized by the higher than 1.0 Performance Energy Ratio which expresses the degree of conversion of the energy contained in the fuel supplied to the device into energy transported to the utility needs. Presented in this review, papers show different solutions for conversion of the energy contained in the... [more]

The ocean is approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface and has a lot of resources available. Nowadays, human beings are looking for renewable ways to obtain energy. Offshore power can be obtained in several different ways. Offshore wind power is the most used renewable offshore energy. Since 2017, offshore wind power has a competitive price in comparison with conventional sources. In the 2010s, offshore wind power grew at over 30% per year. Although it has remained less than one percent of the overall world electricity generation, offshore wind power becomes quite relevant on the northern European countries from 2020. However, there are other ways to obtain energy offshore such as using tides and the sun. These types of farms are expensive and difficult to install and, therefore, we propose a combination of several renewable energies in one farm. The main ambition of this work is to try to reduce the installation and maintenance costs of the two types of offshore renewable energies by c... [more]

Transport of ore and overburden in open-pit mines is often performed with large haul trucks. Battery-electric operation of haul trucks can significantly reduce the CO2 emissions and the fossil fuel dependence of open-pit mining. This simulation study investigates the feasibility and economy of operating large haul trucks battery-electrically, charging from an electric road system in the form of overhead trolley lines. The used simulation model is verified against measurements on diesel-electric haul trucks in normal operation. The simulation model is then tested with five drive cycles representing typical operations in the Aitik copper mine in northern Sweden. This simulation study shows that battery-electric operation with an electric road is feasible. It is shown that battery-electric operation is much cheaper than diesel-electric operation under reasonable assumptions. It is also much cheaper than diesel-electric operation assisted by an electric road.

The field of non-destructive testing using thermography (NDT—Non-Destructive Testing and NDE—Non Destructive Evaluation) was established in the 1960s as a competitive and complementary method to ultrasonic or X-ray testing. Non-destructive quality control of objects is essential in modern industry, especially in mass production. It is an integral part of the quality control process. The reason for the introduction of non-destructive testing into diagnostic techniques were disasters and failures of various equipment and structures. Over the years, a division has been drawn between passive and active thermography. The aim of this publication is to present the theoretical basis of non-destructive testing with the use of active infrared thermography methods. It describes selected models of transient heat flow (thermal wave) in objects of various shapes and physical properties. They are the basis for understanding the changes in the surface temperature of the studied objects in time, which... [more]

Numerical simulations are performed within the time domain to investigate the dynamic behaviors of an SPAR-type FOWT under wave group conditions. Towards this goal, the OC3 Hywind SPAR-type FOWT is adopted, and a JONSWAP (Joint North Sea Wave Project)-based wave group is generated by the envelope amplitude approach. The FOWT motion under wave group conditions, as well as the aerodynamic, hydrodynamic, and mooring performances, is simulated by our established in-house code. The rotating blades are modelled by the blade element momentum theory. The wave-body interaction effect is calculated by the three-dimensional potential theory. The mooring dynamics are also taken into consideration. According to the numerical results, the SPAR buoy motions are slightly increased by the wave group, while the heave motion is significantly amplified. Both the aerodynamic performance and the mooring tension are also influenced by the wave group. Furthermore, the low-frequency resonant response could be... [more]

The article presents the justification for the necessity to use chassis dynamometers in the tuning process of dual-fuel trucks. The research system used and the research methodology are presented. The research results present the approach to solving problems related to setting the technical (physical) data of the tested vehicle on the dynamometer, selection of the vehicle engine operation range, the impact of the value of the forced load on the vehicle drive axle, selection of the dyno operation mode for the expected tasks and the impact of the correctness of the selection of the scope of the analysis of data on losses in the drive system. The article shows the above-mentioned influence on the test results on the dynamometer and on the tuning results. The article closes with a conclusion detailing prospects for developing the presented results.

Liquid insulation is used in high voltage equipment such as power transformers as both dielectric medium and coolant. Breakdown in liquid insulation tends to be governed either by streamer initiation under more uniform fields, or by streamer propagation under more non-uniform fields. A model streamer propagation study, which screens the effectiveness of additives based on cyclohexane and mixtures with diethylaniline (DEA) and toluene, is presented in this paper. The effect of additives, at different concentrations, on streamer propagation velocity in cyclohexane under an applied lightning impulse voltage of positive polarity is studied. Cyclohexane (ionisation potential 9.88 eV) was chosen because, being a hydrocarbon, it shares similarities with the constituents of common insulating liquids. Previous studies have also shown how, in general, the addition of additives of lower ionization potential than the bulk liquid can slow down streamer propagation in insulating liquids. A point-pla... [more]

Manual disassembly of the lithium-ion battery (LIB) modules of electric vehicles (EVs) for recycling is time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous for technicians or workers. Dangers associated with high voltage and thermal runaway make a robotic system suitable for the automated or semi-automated disassembly of EV batteries. In this paper, we explore battery disassembly using industrial robots. To understand the disassembly process, human workers were monitored, and the operations were analyzed and broken down into gripping and cutting operations. These operations were selected for automation, and path planning was performed offline. For the gripper, a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control system was implemented. A system identification method was also implemented in the form of a batch least squares estimator to form the state space representation of the planar linkages used in the control strategy of the gripper. A high-speed rotary cut-off wheel was adapted for the robot to perfor... [more]

A one-dimensional dual-pressure steam turbine (ST) model for the marine Rankine cycle is built in this paper. Based on constructal theory, the optimal design of the dual-pressure ST is performed with a fixed total volume of the high- and low-pressure STs. The total power output (PO) of the dual-pressure ST is maximized. Seventeen parameters, including the dimensionless average diameters (DADs) of the stages, steam inlet angles (SIAs) of the stages, average reaction degrees (ARDs) of the stages, and volume ratio of the high-pressure ST are taken as optimization variables. The optimal structure parameters of the stages are gained. It reveals that the total PO of the dual-pressure ST is increased by 2.59% by optimizing the average diameter of the Curtis stage, and the change in the total PO is not obvious by optimizing the average diameter of the third stage of the low-pressure ST. Both the total PO and the corresponding efficiency of the dual-pressure ST are increased by 10.8% after simu... [more]

Film cooling has been widely applied to the highly efficient thermal protection of gas turbines. By using the simplified thermal lattice Boltzmann method (STLBM), a series of large-scale simulations of film cooling are performed to dig up the mixing mechanism of double rows film cooling with the combination of forward and backward jets at the first attempt. The combination of an upstream row with forward jet and a downstream row with backward jet is considered. The Reynolds number is 4000. The blowing ratio of the upstream coolant jet is fixed as BR1=0.5. For the downstream coolant jet (BR2), five values ranging from 0.2−0.8 are considered. The inclination angles of forward jet and backward jet are 35° and 145°, respectively. The numerical results reveal that the performance of film cooling is greatly improved by backward downstream jet due to the suppression of counterrotating vortex pair (CVP). Moreover, the flow structure is changed with the blowing ratio of backward jet. An anti-CV... [more]