The topic of frost formation on the heat exchanger surface has been gaining interest since the late 1940s. Scientists and industrial engineers from many scientific and R&D units around the world have been trying to understand the nature of frosting and implement solutions to prevent such an unwanted phenomenon from having a significant impact on the performance of heat exchangers (such as a decrease in heat transfer efficiency, mechanical damage, and condensation risk). The aim of this article is to summarize the present state of knowledge dedicated to frost formation types and morphology, review, and discuss the most recent studies relevant to the challenge of frost formation, focusing on the evaporator of the domestic refrigerator. The different types of domestic refrigerators are summarized, as are the different types of evaporators inside them. Common methods of testing frost formation phenomena on the evaporator are revisited in this article, and the analysis of the most recent ma... [more]

The influence of stacking patterns, through the different spacer and skid sizes, on the transient temperature distribution uniformity of large-size forgings in a 112-m3 electrical heat treatment furnace was investigated by conducting CFD simulations and real-scale experimental validation. A 3D CFD model of the electrical furnace was generated, including a heat-treating chamber, axial flow fans, large size blocks, skids, and spacers. Real-scale temperature measurements on instrumented test blocks during the heat treatment process were carried out to validate the CFD simulations. Results indicated that the CFD model was capable enough to determine the transient temperature evolution of the blocks with a maximum average deviation of about 6.62% compared to the experimental measurements. It was found that significant temperature non-uniformities of up to 379 K on the surfaces of the blocks due to the non-optimum stacking pattern were experienced by the blocks. Such non-uniformities could b... [more]

The article is dedicated to the methodology of designing component-in-the-loop (CiL) testing systems for automotive powertrains featuring several drivelines, including variants with individually driven axles or wheels. The methodical part begins with descriptions of operating and control loops of CiL systems having various simulating functionality—from a “lumped” vehicle for driving cycle tests to vehicles with independently rotating drivelines for simulating dynamic maneuvers. The sequel contains an analysis that eliminates a lack of clarity observed in the existing literature regarding the principles of building a “virtual inertia” and synchronization of loading regimes between individual drivelines of the tested powertrain. In addition, a contribution to the CiL methodology is offered by analyzing the options of simulating tire slip taking into account a limited accuracy of measurement equipment and a limited performance of actuating devices. The methodical part concludes with two e... [more]

This paper presents an improved mathematical model for calculating the solar test factor (STF) and solar reliability factor (SRF) of a photovoltaic (PV) automated equipment. By employing a unified metrics system and a combined testing suite encompassing various energy-efficient testing techniques, the aim of this paper is to determine a general fault coverage and improve the global SRF of a closed-loop dual-axis solar tracking system. Accelerated testing coupled with reliability analysis are essential tools for assessing the performance of modern solar tracking devices since PV system malfunctioning is directly connected to economic loss, which is an important aspect for the solar energy domain. The experimental results show that the unified metrics system is potentially suitable for assessing the reliability evaluation of many types of solar tracking systems. Additionally, the proposed combined testing platform proves efficient regarding fault coverage (overall coverage of 66.35% for... [more]

This study explored the suitability of simulation tools for accurately predicting fluidized bed gasification in various scenarios without disturbing the operational system, and dedicating time to experimentation, in the aim of benefiting the decision makers and investors of the low-carbon waste-based bioenergy sector, in accelerating circular bioeconomy solutions. More specifically, this study aimed to offer a customized circular bioeconomy solution for a rice processing residue. The objectives were the simulation and economic assessment of an air atmospheric fluidized bed gasification system fueled with rice husk, for combined heat and power generation, by using the tools of Aspen Plus V9, and the Aspen Process Economic Analyzer. The simulation model was based on the Gibbs energy minimization concept. The technological configurations of the SMARt-CHP technology were used. A parametric study was conducted to understand the influence of process variables on product yield, while three di... [more]

Unlocking oil from tight reservoirs remains a challenging task, as the existence of fractures and oil-wet rock surfaces tends to make the recovery uneconomic. Injecting a gas in the form of a foam is considered a feasible technique in such reservoirs for providing conformance control and reducing gas-oil interfacial tension (IFT) that allows the injected fluids to enter the rock matrix. This paper presents a modeling strategy that aims to understand the behavior of near-miscible foam injection and to find the optimal strategy to oil recovery depending on the reservoir pressure and gas availability. Corefloods with foam injection following gas injection into a fractured rock were simulated and history matched using a compositional commercial simulator. The simulation results agreed with the experimental data with respect to both oil recovery and pressure gradient during both injection schedules. Additional simulations were carried out by increasing the foam strength and changing the inj... [more]

When a distance relay protects a transmission line located on a dual circuit tower, a coupling effect will occur between the two circuits. Transposition of the circuits can reduce the mutual impedances, but this does not cater to the zero-sequence mutual coupling impedance during earth faults. As a result, the impedance measured by a distance relay under phase-to-earth fault conditions in these circumstances will not represent the correct impedance to the fault point unless these effects are taken into account. On multi-circuit lines, primarily if they operate in parallel, a zero-sequence mutual coupling should be considered when calculating settings for distance protection function. A 220 kV parallel line sharing the same tower was analysed using DigSilent Power Factory in the simulations. Phase-to-earth faults in different configurations were analysed on this system, and the reach of the protection relay was then estimated for operation. The results confirm how a protection relay can... [more]

Low salinity waterflooding (LSW) has shown promising results in terms of increasing oil recovery at laboratory scale. In this work, we study the LSW effect, at laboratory scale, and provide a basis for quantifying the effect at field scale by extracting reliable relative permeability curves. These were achieved by experimental and numerical interpretation of laboratory core studies. Carbonate rock samples were used to conduct secondary and tertiary unsteady-state coreflooding experiments at reservoir conditions. A mathematical model was developed as a research tool to interpret and further validate the physical plausibility of the coreflooding experiments. At core scale and a typical field rate of ~1 ft/day, low salinity water (LS) resulted in not only ~20% higher oil recovery compared to formation water (FW) but also recovered oil sooner. LS water also showed capability of reducing the residual oil saturation when flooded in tertiary mode. The greater oil recovery caused by LSW can be... [more]

The manner in which an ultra-lean hydrogen flame stabilizes and blows off is crucial for the understanding and design of safe and efficient combustion devices. In this study, we use experiments and numerical simulations for pure H2-air flames stabilized behind a cylindrical bluff body to reveal the underlying physics that make such flames stable and eventually blow-off. Results from CFD simulations are used to investigate the role of stretch and preferential diffusion after a qualitative validation with experiments. It is found that the flame displacement speed of flames stabilized beyond the lean flammability limit of a flat stretchless flame (ϕ=0.3) can be scaled with a relevant tubular flame displacement speed. This result is crucial as no scaling reference is available for such flames. We also confirm our previous hypothesis regarding lean limit blow-off for flames with a neck formation that such flames are quenched due to excessive local stretching. After extinction at the flame n... [more]

This study investigates different cases to obtain optimal Window-to-Wall ratio (WWR) in seven different climate conditions based on the Köppen−Geiger climate classification. The optimal WWR was decided based on the minimum amount of total energy use (total of cooling, heating, and lighting energy use) of a building model during a complete year. The impact of overhang and automatic blinds were assessed on the optimization of WWR for a building with integrated automatic lighting control. Moreover, three different windows with different U-values and features were employed in order to analyze their effect on the energy use and WWR of the building. IDA-Indoor Climate and Energy (IDA-ICE) was used to carry out the simulations. The software has been validated based on ASHRAE Standard 140. Based on each climate condition, orientation, employed window type, and comfort conditions, an optimal range with a specific combination of window with blind, overhang, or neither was found.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in companies is advancing rapidly. Consequently, multidisciplinary research on AI in business has developed dramatically during the last decade, moving from the focus on technological objectives towards an interest in human users’ perspective. In this article, we investigate the notion of employees’ trust in AI at the workplace (in the company), following a human-centered approach that considers AI integration in business from the employees’ perspective, taking into account the elements that facilitate human trust in AI. While employees’ trust in AI at the workplace seems critical, so far, few studies have systematically investigated its determinants. Therefore, this study is an attempt to fill the existing research gap. The research objective of the article is to examine links between employees’ trust in AI in the company and three other latent variables (general trust in technology, intra-organizational trust, and individual competence trust).... [more]

This paper presents the effect of a composite poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate PEDOT:PSS and copper-doped nickel oxide (Cu:NiOx) hole transport layer (HTL) on the performance of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Thin films of Cu:NiOx were spin-coated onto fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass substrates using a blend of nickel acetate tetrahydrate, 2-methoxyethanol and monoethanolamine (MEA) and copper acetate monohydrate. The prepared solution was stirred at 65 °C for 4 h and spin-coated onto the FTO substrates at 3000 rpm for 30 s in a nitrogen glovebox. The Cu:NiOx/FTO/glass structure was then annealed in air at 400 °C for 30 min. A mixture of PEDOT:PSS and isopropyl alcohol (IPA) (in 1:0.05 wt%) was spun onto the Cu:NiOx/FTO/glass substrate at 4000 rpm for 60 s. The multilayer structure was annealed at 130 °C for 15 min. Subsequently, the perovskite precursor (0.95 M) of methylammonium iodide (MAI) to lead acetate trihydrate (Pb(OAc)2·3H2O) was spin-coated at 4000... [more]

The dynamic characteristics of hydropower unit governing systems considerably influence the stability of hydropower units and the connected power system. The dynamic performances of hydropower units with power regulation mode (PRM) and opening regulation mode (ORM) are different. This paper establishes a detailed linear model of a hydropower unit based on the Phillips−Heffron model. The damping characteristic and stability of two regulation modes with different water inertia time constants TW were analyzed. ORM tended to provide negative damping, while PRM often provided positive damping in the major parts of the frequency range within the normal frequency oscillations when TW was large. Eigenvalue analysis illustrated that PRM has better stability than ORM. To validate the analysis, a simulation under two typical faults WAS conducted based on a nonlinear model of a hydropower unit. The simulation results illustrated that the responses of units with PRM are more stable in terms of impo... [more]

Energy efficiency in the building industry is related to the amount of energy that can be saved through thermal improvement. Therefore, it is important to determine the energy saving potential of the buildings to be thermally upgraded in order to check whether the set targets for the amount of energy saved will be reached after the implementation of corrective measures. In real residential buildings, when starting to make energy calculations, one can often encounter the problem of incomplete architectural documentation and inaccurate data characterizing the object in terms of thermal (thermal resistance of partitions) and usable (number of inhabitants). Therefore, there is a need to search for methods that will be suitable for quick technical analysis of measures taken to improve energy efficiency in existing buildings. The aim of this work was to test the usefulness of the type Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models of inference model for predicting the energy efficiency of actual residential bui... [more]

Air-core coil current transformer is a key piece of equipment in the digital substation development. However, it is more vulnerable to various faults when compared with the traditional electromagnetic current transformer. Aiming at understanding the effect of various parameters on the performance of the air-core coil current transformer, this paper investigates the influence of these factors using the maximum information coefficient. The interference mechanism of influencing factors on the transformer error is also analyzed. Finally, the Stacking model fusion algorithm is used to predict transformer errors. The developed base model consists of deep learning, integrated learning and traditional learning algorithms. Compared with gated recurrent units and extreme gradient boosting algorithms, the prediction model based on stacking model fusion algorithm proposed in this paper features higher accuracy and reliability which helps improve the performance and safety of future digital substat... [more]

The amount of heat lost through the envelope of a building is one of the most important variables that affects the energy performance evaluation of a house. In addition, it is especially important to estimate and accurately diagnose the amount of heat produced by windows. In Korea, windows’ U-values reflect a building’s initial design values and thermal characteristics that determine the thermal performance of an existing building, and is a factor that can overestimate the energy performance of a building. Therefore, there is a need for a field measurement method that can accurately measure the total U-value of windows in an existing house. This study provides a method of quantitatively measuring the total U-value of windows using the infrared (IR) method in ISO 9869-2. As a result of measuring the U-value using the infrared (IR) method, the Korean Standard (KS F 2278) for window performance test result values and the root mean square error (cvRMSE) for the U-value measurements using t... [more]

When performing AC/DC-DC/AC power conversions, multilevel converters provide several advantages as compared to classical two-level converters. This paper deals with the dynamic modeling, control, and robustness assessment of multilevel flying-capacitor converters. The dynamic model is derived using the Power-Oriented Graphs modeling technique, which provides the user with block schemes that are directly implementable in the Matlab/Simulink environment by employing standard Simulink libraries. The performed robustness assessment has led to the proposal of a divergence index, which allows for evaluating the voltage balancing capability of the converter using different voltage vector configurations for the extended operation of the converter, namely when the number of output voltage levels is increased for a given number of capacitors. A new variable-step control algorithm is then proposed. The variable-step control algorithm safely enables the converter extended operation, which prevents... [more]

Defining distinctive areas of the physical properties of rocks plays an important role in reservoir evaluation and hydrocarbon production as core data are challenging to obtain from all wells. In this work, we study the evaluation of lithofacies values using the machine learning algorithms in the determination of classification from various well log data of Kazakhstan and Norway. We also use the wavelet-transformed data in machine learning algorithms to identify geological properties from the well log data. Numerical results are presented for the multiple oil and gas reservoir data which contain more than 90 released wells from Norway and 10 wells from the Kazakhstan field. We have compared the the machine learning algorithms including KNN, Decision Tree, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM. The evaluation of the model score is conducted by using metrics such as accuracy, Hamming loss, and penalty matrix. In addition, the influence of the dataset features on the prediction is investig... [more]

Wind power prediction (WPP) of wind farm clusters is important to the safe operation and economic dispatch of the power system, but it faces two challenges: (1) The dimensions of the input parameters for WPP of wind farm clusters are very high so that the input parameters contain irrelevant or redundant features; (2) it is difficult to build a holistic WPP model with high-dimensional input parameters for wind farm clusters. To overcome these challenges, a novel short-term WPP model for wind farm clusters, based on sequential floating forward selection (SFFS) feature selection and bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) deep learning, is proposed in this paper. First, more than 300,000 input features of the wind farm cluster are constructed. Second, the SFFS method is applied to sort the high-dimensional features and analyze the rule that the forecasting accuracy changes with the number of features to obtain the optimal number of features and feature sets. Finally, based on the res... [more]

Electroporation is a phenomenon that consists of increasing the permeability of the cell membrane by means of high-intensity electric field application. Nowadays, its clinical application to cancer treatment is one of the most relevant branches within the many areas of electroporation. In this area, it is essential to apply homogeneous treatments to achieve complete removal of tumors and avoid relapse. It is necessary to apply an optimized transmembrane potential at each point of the tissue by means of a homogenous electric field application and appropriated electric field orientation. Nevertheless, biological tissues are composed of wide variety, heterogeneous and anisotropic structures and, consequently, predicting the applied electric field distribution is complex. Consequently, by applying the parallel-needle electrodes and single-output generators, homogeneous and predictable treatments are difficult to obtain, often requiring several repositioning/application processes that may l... [more]

This paper discusses the question of heat flux distribution between bristle package and rotor during a rubbing event. A three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (3D CFD) model of the brush seal test rig installed at the Institute of Thermal Turbomachinery (ITS) was created. The bristle package is modelled as a porous medium with local non-thermal equilibrium. The model is used to numerically recalculate experimentally conducted rub tests on the ITS test rig. The experimentally determined total frictional power loss serves as an input parameter to the numerical calculation. By means of statistical evaluation methods, the ma in influences on the heat flux distribution and the maximum temperature in the frictional contact are determined. The heat conductivity of the rotor material, the heat transfer coefficients at the bristles and the rubbing surface were identified as the dominant factors.

In the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that human activities and the activities of enterprises affect the environment. Therefore, it is important to learn about the methods in which companies minimize the negative effects of their activities. The article presents the steps taken and innovative actions carried out by enterprises in the energy sector. The article analyzes innovative activities undertaken and implemented by enterprises from the energy sector. The relationships between innovative strategies, including, inter alia, digitization, and Industry 4.0 solutions, in the development of companies and the achieved results concerning sustainable development and environmental impact. Digitization has far exceeded traditional productivity improvement ranges of 3−5% per year, with a clear cost improvement potential of well above 25%. Enterprises on a large scale make attempts to increase energy efficiency by implementing the state-of-the-art innovative technical and techn... [more]

The rising demand for lower noise emissions of car ancillary units due to electrification and higher customer expectations regarding driving comfort results in the need for more silent car components. Hydraulic driven car components in particular are often identified as a major source of noise in the system. Therefore, it is mandatory to investigate the noise sources inside the hydraulic system. In this work, a combined CFD-FEM approach is applied to estimate the flow-induced noise radiation of a mechanically driven transmission pump. To achieve this goal, the mapping procedure to hand over the pressure field from the CFD to the FEM mesh must be valid. For this purpose, the error during the mapping process is evaluated and different parameters, which influence the mapping results, are analyzed. Additionally, the impact of the time step size and the length of the time signal on the frequency resolution of the force signal is investigated to get an appropriate excitation force for the vi... [more]

New types of power system transients with lower time constants are emerging due to the replacement of synchronous generation with converter interfaced generation and are challenging the modeling approaches conventionally applied in power system simulation. Quasi-stationary simulations are based on classical phasor models, whereas EMT simulations calculate the instantaneous values of models in the time domain. In addition to these conventional modeling approaches, this paper investigates simulation based on dynamic phasor models, as has been proposed by the Shifted Frequency Analysis. The simulation accuracy of the three modeling approaches was analyzed for characteristic transients from the electromagnetic to the electromechanical phenomena range, including converter control as well as low inertia transients. The analysis was carried out for systems with converter interfaced and synchronous generation whilst considering the simulation step size as a crucial influence parameter. The res... [more]

Based on the general theory of fractional order derivatives and integrals, application of the Caputo−Fabrizio operator is analyzed to improve a mathematical model of a two-mass system with a long shaft and concentrated parameters. Thus, the real transmission of complex electric drives, which consist of long shafts with a sufficient degree of adequacy, is presented as a two-mass system. Such a system is described by ordinary fractional order differential equations. In addition, it is well known that an elastic mechanical wave, propagating along a drive transmission with a long stiff shaft, creates a retardation effect on distribution of the time−space angular velocity, the rotation angle of the shaft, and its elastic moment. The approach proposed in the current work helps to take in account the moving elastic wave along the shaft of electric drive mechanism. On this basis, it is demonstrated that the use of the fractional order integrator in the model for the elastic moment enables it t... [more]