This paper investigates the model development of the state-of-power (SoP) estimation for a 43 Ah large-capacity prismatic nickel-manganese-cobalt oxide (NMC) based lithium-ion cell with a thorough aging investigation of the cells’ internal resistance increase. For a safe operation of the vehicle system, a battery management system (BMS) integrated with SoP estimation functions is crucial. In this study, the developed SoP model used for the estimation of power throughout the lifetime of the cell is coupled with a dual-polarization equivalent-circuit model (DP_ECM) for achieving the precise estimation of desired parameters. The SoP model is developed based on the pulse-trained internal resistance evolution approach, and hence the power is estimated by determining the rate of internal resistance increase. Hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC) test results are used for extraction of the impedance parameters. In the DP_ECM, Coulomb counting and extended Kalman filter (EKF) state estima... [more]

There are several methods for estimating the SoC of lithium-ion batteries that use electrochemical battery models or artificial intelligence and intelligent algorithms. These methods have numerous advantages but are complex and computationally intensive. This paper presents a new method for estimating the SoC of lithium-ion batteries based on identifying the transfer function of the measured battery voltage response to the charging current pulse. It is assumed that the transfer function of the battery changes with the state of charge. In the learning phase, a reference table of known SoCs and associated transfer functions is created. The parameters of these transfer functions form the reference points in hyperspace. In the phase of determining the unknown SoC of the battery, the parameters of the measured transfer function form a point in hyperspace that is compared with the reference points of the transfer functions for known SoCs. The unknown SoC of the battery at the particular meas... [more]

Numerical simulations were conducted to research the pre-cooling effects of water injection on the turbine inlet of a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engine under different flight conditions. Then, the performance of the water injection pre-compressor cooling (WIPCC) engine was calculated by mathematical modelling with different water to air ratios (WAR). It was the first time that the mass injection field of the turbine inlet of a TBCC engine was simulated, and it was also the first time that the performance of a subcomponent turbine engine of a TBCC was assessed. The calculation results showed the relationship of the inlet temperature with respect to WAR, inlet length and flight Mach number. The strategy for inlet length and water mass flow was proposed in order to meet the requirements of pre-cooling. When the length of the turbine inlet was 10 times the diameter of the inlet exit, the air could be cooled by 167.5 K with WAR = 0.09. The highest evaporation ratio reached at 93%.... [more]

Turbine-induced velocity deficit is the main reason to reduce wind farm power generation and increase the fatigue loadings. It is meaningful to investigate turbine-induced wake structures by a simple and accurate method. In this study, a series of single turbine wake models are proposed by combining different spanwise distributions and wake boundary expansion models. It is found that several combined wake models with high hit rates are more accurate and universal. Subsequently, the wake models for multiple wind turbines are also investigated by considering the combined wake models for single turbine and proper superposition approaches. Several excellent plans are provided where the velocity, turbulence intensity, and wind power generation for multiple wind turbines can be accurately evaluated. Finally, effects of thrust coefficient and ambient turbulence intensity are studied. In summary, the combined wake models for both single and multiple wind turbines are proposed and validated, en... [more]

Provision of an efficient water supply system (WSS) is one of the top priorities of all municipals to ascertain adequate water supply to the city. Intake is the lifeline of the water supply system and largely effects the overall plant efficiency. The required power supply is generally fed from the main grid, and a diesel generator is commonly used as a power backup source. This results in high pumping cost as well as high operational cost. Moreover, due to operation of motor pumps and other auxiliary loads, frequent maintenance is required. Therefore, to avoid various challenges and to efficiently operate the intake system, microgrid concept has been introduced in this paper. Various distributed generations (DGs) such as solar photovoltaic (PV), interior permanent magnet machine (IPM) wind turbine generator and Battery energy storage system (BESS) are incorporated in the microgrid system. Additionally, a new approach based on adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is proposed, w... [more]

Italy’s first renewable energy community, located in the municipality of Magliano Alpi, was established under Italian Law 8/2020 on Energy Communities in December 2020. The community is composed of eight stakeholders and involves, in addition to public buildings in the municipality of Magliano Alpi, some residential users and small and medium-sized enterprises, realizing public−private cooperation aimed at reducing energy dependence on the public grid and, at the same time, contributing to the decarbonization of the energy sector. This article provides an analysis of the economic and energy performance during the first year of renewable community piloting. The study analyzes data collected with the community energy management system and introduces a number of key performance indices useful for evaluating further development and optimization options.

The importance of energy supply and demand has been emphasized over the past few years. Renewable energy without regional bias continues to attract attention. The improvement of the economic feasibility of renewable energy leads to the expansion of the supply, and the global supply of solar modules is also rapidly increasing. Recently, the price of polysilicon for solar modules is also rising significantly. Interest in recycling waste modules is also increasing. However, the development of cost-effective treatment technology for solar modules that have reached the end of their commercial useful life is still insufficient. We are going to propose the standards necessary to restore and reuse so-called waste solar modules in a more eco-friendly and economical way. A crystalline solar module is an aggregate of individual solar cells. The technology is stable and has good durability. The efficiency of crystalline solar cells has dramatically improved in recent decades. The grade of cell tha... [more]

With worldwide activities of carbon neutrality, clean energy is playing an important role these days. Natural gas (NG) is one of the most efficient clean energies with less harmful emissions and abundant reservoirs. This work aims at developing a swarm intelligence-based tool for NG forecasting to make more convincing projections of future energy consumption, combining Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA). The XGBoost is used as the core model in a nonlinear auto-regression procedure to make multi-step ahead forecasting. A cross-validation scheme is adopted to build a nonlinear programming problem for optimizing the most sensitive hyperparameters of the XGBoost, and then the nonlinear optimization is solved by the SSA. Case studies of forecasting the Natural gas consumption (NGC) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Netherlands are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed hybrid model in comparison with five other intelligence optimization alg... [more]

In the context of the ‘carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals’, renewable energy, with its clean and low-carbon characteristics, has become one of the key driving forces for sustainable development in China. However, the inherent disadvantages of the renewable energy industry, such as high initial investment costs, technical difficulties, and slow returns on investment, make it difficult to compete with traditional fossil energy sources in the market economy at the initial stage of its establishment. Therefore, after considering the environmental and ecological value, economic value, and industrial growth dilemma brought by the development of renewable energy industry, subsidies as a governmental incentive measure were created to support the development and growth of the renewable energy industry. At present, there are many problems with China’s renewable energy subsidy policy in practice, such as fragmented institutional policies, lack of procedural regulations, and lagging subsid... [more]

The study presents the results of research on using fixed-bed, activated carbon (AC) adsorbers in the cleaning of heavily tar-laden producer gas from the gasification of biomass. The efficiency of removal of organic compounds as well as the remaining adsorption capacity of the bed were determined using a spectrum of commonly applied diagnostic methods, including qualitative and quantitative analyses of the adsorbed compounds and changes in the pore volume of the bed material (IN, MN). The authors compare these lab quantifications with a simple technique which is based on the analysis of the changes in the position of temperature front in the bed. The main benefit of the latter is the possibility of performing the diagnostics of the bed “online” and using low-cost temperature measurements. The test was performed using a commercially available AC Desotec AIRPEL 10-3 and real producer gas obtained through the gasification of alder chips. For tar, VOC and C2−C5 compounds, the removal effic... [more]

Sulla (Hedysarum coronarium L.) is a new candidate crop for biofuel production. A field trial was conducted in 2018−2020 in Pyrgos, Greece, and repeated in 2019−2021 to evaluate different row spacings and cover crops for weed management in sulla in a two-factor randomized complete block design (RCBD) with four replications. Four row spacings, namely 76-cm, 51-cm, 38-cm, and 19-cm, were assigned to the main plots. Three cover crops, namely farro wheat (Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccum (Schrank ex Schübler) Thell.), common vetch (Vicia sativa L.), white mustard (Sinapis alba L.), and an untreated control, were assigned to the subplots. In the first year of sulla growth, weed biomass, sulla stem, and total dry matter yield (DMY) were affected by growing cycles (p-value ≤ 0.05). The 19- and 38-cm row spacings resulted in the lowest weed biomass and the highest stem and total sulla DMY in the first year of sulla growth. White mustard was the most weed-suppressive cover crop in both years a... [more]

Lithium-ion batteries are widely used in the electric vehicle industry due to their recyclability and long life. However, a failure of lithium-ion batteries can cause some catastrophic accidents, such as electric car battery explosion fires and so on. To prevent such harm from occurring, it is essential to monitor the remaining useful life of lithium-ion batteries and give early warning. In this paper, an adaptive noise reduction approach is proposed to predict the RUL (Remaining Useful Life) of lithium-ion batteries, which uses CEEMDAN (Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise) combined with wavelet decomposition to achieve adaptive noise reduction decomposition, and then inputs the obtained IMF (Intrinsic Mode Function) components into LS−RVM (Least Square Relevance Vector Machine) for training, prediction, and reconstruction, so as to achieve high-precision prediction of RUL. Moreover, in order to verify the validity of the model, the model in this paper is... [more]

The heat storage and release performance of cascade phase change units are investigated numerically for users in Inner Mongolia’s severe cold region. Three schemes of phase change material combinations are thoroughly tested. We obtained a better material combination scheme S3 (palmitic acid + polyethylene glycol), which has higher heat storage capacity per unit mass, higher average heat flux, and better unit synchronisation performance, so that it is more suitable for solar heating and cascade heat storage units in cold regions of Inner Mongolia. This study takes into account the irradiation variation of typical days during the winter heating season. The results show that the palmitic acid and polyethylene glycol combination scheme has the highest total heat storage per unit mass. This scheme also performs well in the synchronisation of two-stage storage units. When compared to the other two schemes, the average heat flux is increased by 25.5% for the first stage unit and 16.8% for the... [more]

Membrane desalination (MD) is preferred over other desalination techniques since it requires a lower temperature gradient. Its performance can be further enhanced by preheating the intake of saline water. In this context, a novel solar-assisted air gap membrane desalination (AGMD) system was hypothesized. The motivation was derived from the fact that the use of solar energy to provide power and a pre-heating source for the intake of saline water can offer a sustainable alternative that can further enhance the acceptance of MD systems. Since solar panels suffer from a loss of efficiency as they heat up during operation, a solar-assisted air gap membrane desalination (AGMD) system can help to improve the overall system performance by (1) providing the necessary pumping power to operate the system and (2) improving solar panel performance by exchanging heat using water that is (3) used to pre-heat the saline water necessary for increased performance of the AGMD system. To verify the hypot... [more]

State-of-charge (SOC) estimation of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is the basis of other state estimations. However, its accuracy can be affected by many factors, such as temperature and ageing. To handle this bottleneck issue, we here propose a joint SOC-SOH estimation method considering the influence of the temperature. It combines the Forgetting Factor Recursive Least Squares (FFRLS) algorithm, Total Least Squares (TLS) algorithm, and Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) algorithm. First, the FFRLS algorithm is used to identify and update the parameters of the equivalent circuit model in real time under different battery ageing degrees. Then, the TLS algorithm is used to estimate the battery SOH to improve the prior estimation accuracy of SOC. Next, the SOC is calculated by the UKF algorithm, and finally, a more accurate SOH can be obtained according to the UKF-based SOC trajectory. The battery-in-the-loop experiments are utilized to verify the proposed algorithm. For the cases of temperatur... [more]

In this article the structural features of friction pairs of brakes are analyzed. Heat transfer processes with new boundary conditions are described analytically with the addition of flow conditions and the appearance of a boundary thermal layer to convective heat transfer. The joint action of heat conduction and convection fields is presented. The release of heat during friction is due to the destruction of adhesive bonds in the actual contact zones, and the stress−strain state of micro-roughnesses. It should be said that due to the presence of accompanying transfer processes, complex heat transfer is much more complex compared to purely conductive, convective, and radiative heat transfer, which significantly complicates its analytical and experimental study. In this regard, the processes of complex heat transfer are currently studied little. From the point of view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the main task of describing the transfer process is to establish a relationship betwee... [more]

To achieve the goals of low carbon emission and carbon neutrality, some urgent challenges include the development and utilization of low-carbon or zero-carbon internal combustion engine fuels. Hydrogen, as a clean, efficient, and sustainable fuel, has the potential to meet the abovementioned challenges. Thereby, hydrogen internal combustion engines have been attracting attention because of their zero carbon emissions, high thermal efficiency, high reliability, and low cost. In this paper, the opportunities and challenges faced by hydrogen internal-combustion engines were analyzed. The progress of hydrogen internal-combustion engines on the mixture formation, combustion mode, emission reduction, knock formation mechanism, and knock suppression measures were summarized. Moreover, possible technical measures for hydrogen internal-combustion engines to achieve higher efficiency and lower emissions were suggested.

This review aims to highlight the current advances in hybrid redox flow battery (HRFB) technology, encompassing one of the best combinations of efficiency, cost and flexibility due to its module construction, which offers independent scaling of power density and energy capacity. This work emphasizes the interest of the scientific community both in (i) studying the properties and principles of HRFB operation in order to improve commonly proposed systems, and in (ii) the development of energy storage devices with new reagent types or RFB concepts. The data provided enhances the reader to conclude whether novel concepts in halogen oxidizers utilization could help to overcome the problem of insufficient power and energy densities of common RFB.

Industrial power plant buildings differ from all other types of buildings, mainly due to their significant heights and volumes without internal floor sections, exceptionally heat gains during daily work, and potentially high fire risk. Those buildings consist of boiler and turbine houses with multilevel stairways. This complicated architecture creates an extraordinary natural thermal stack effect, causing special ventilation and smoke control systems requirements, adapted to their specific structures and internal conditions. The paper demonstrates a proposal for optimal thermal smoke control ventilation solutions in industrial power plant buildings designated on the basis of performance-based calculations and confirmed by CFD simulations. It demonstrates the possibilities of using daily ventilation in the boiler houses in a function of smoke control systems in the event of a fire and defines fundamental rules for designing the system. Additionally, a new method of sufficient staircase... [more]

The performance of a heat exchanger is directly related to the energy conversion efficiency of the thermal storage system, and its optimal design is an important method to improve the performance of the heat exchanger. This paper uses the distributed parameter method to analyze the effect of the structural parameters and operating parameters of a heat exchanger on the entransy dissipation rate, the entransy dissipation number, the entransy dissipation heat resistance, entropy production rate, and entropy production number in a molten salt−supercritical CO2 concentric tube heat exchanger. The results show that the entransy dissipation rate and entropy production rate have the same trend, with the structural parameters and operating parameters, as well as the changes in the entransy dissipation number and entransy dissipation thermal resistance, jointly affected by the entransy dissipation rate and the heat exchange. Based on the above indicators, single-objective and multi-objective opt... [more]

To improve the low aerodynamic efficiency and reduce the high energy consumption of a single-stage circulation control wing, a multistage circulation control wing was designed. By combining force measurement and particle image velocimetry (PIV), the aerodynamic and flow-field characteristics of an aerofoil were investigated with respect to the increase in the number of blowing slots, changes in the blowing coefficient, and different blowing ratios for three slots. The force measurement results revealed that the maximum lift-to-drag ratio resulting from simultaneous blowing into the three slots increased by 95.3% compared with that in the absence of circulation control. With an increase in the blowing coefficient, two stages were observed: separation control and supercirculation control. In the separation control stage, the lift and drag coefficients significantly increased and decreased, respectively. In the supercirculation control stage, the lift coefficient gradually increased with... [more]

The application of batteries has become more and more extensive, and the heat dissipation problem cannot be ignored. Oscillating Heat Pipe (OHP) is a good means of heat dissipation. In this paper, the methods to improve the energy conversion and flow thermal performance of micro-channel OHP are studied and summarized. The working principle, heat transfer mechanism, advantages and applications of PHP are also introduced in detail in this study. Proper adjustment of the micro-channel layout can increase the heat transfer limit of PHP by 44%. The thermal resistance of two-diameter channel PHP is 45% lower than that of conventional PHP. The thermal resistance of PHP under uneven heating can be reduced to 50% of the original. PHP pulse heating can alleviate the phenomenon of dryness. Different working fluids have different effects on PHP. The use of graphene nano-fluids as the work medium can reduce the thermal resistance of PHP by 83.6%. The work medium obtained by the mixture of different... [more]

Before selecting a proper hydraulic turbine for power generation, conflicting factors frequently emerge from the wide range of available technology alternatives. The preliminary selection of hydraulic turbines (PSHT) has been usually carried out by overlooking and/or overshadowing downstream and upstream processes. The development of a new conceptual framework that allows for including more parameters into the decision-making process at company levels is still required to avoid the danger of engaging in a one-dimensional approach, which would not only result in a reduced and simplistic vision of the choice but would also overlook the trade-offs between individual aspects and the possible unintended side-effects. This paper aims to provide empirical evidence for the PSHT by proposing a well-thought-out framework based on a mixed methodology approach (analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy-VIKOR multi-criteria methods) and focused on small hydropower projects. A total of 16 criteri... [more]

The share of energy produced by small-scale renewable energy sources, including photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, will significantly increase in the near future. These systems will be integrated in microgrids to strengthen the independence of energy consumers. This work deals with energy management in microgrids, taking into account the volatile nature of renewable energy sources. In the developed approach, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning is applied, where agents represent microgrid components. The individual agents are trained to make good decisions with respect to adapting to the energy load in the grid. Training of agents leverages the historic energy profile data for energy consumption and renewable energy production. The implemented energy management simulation shows good performance and balances the energy flows. The quantitative performance evaluation includes comparisons with the exact solutions from a linear program. The computational results demonstrate good generalis... [more]

The evolution of fracture zone controls the safety of underground coal gasification (UCG) in terms of gas emission and water leakage. In order to understand the fracture propagation in the confining rock of a UCG cavity with various influence factors, this paper implemented a set of numerical models based on different geological and operating conditions. Analysis was implemented on the mechanism of fracture propagation and its evolution characteristics, suggesting that (a) continuum expansion of the cavity leads a near-field fracture circle in confining rock initially, followed by the roof caving and successive propagation of shear band. (b) The key observed influence factors of fracture propagation are the grade of confining rock, overburden pressure, dimension of the cavity and gasifying pressure, the linear relationships between them, and the fracture height. Additionally, the fracture depth in the base board was mainly caused by tensile fracture. (c) A model was proposed based on t... [more]