In the development process for a fractured-porous gas reservoir with developed fracture and active water, edge water or bottom water easily bursts rapidly along the fracture to the production well, and the reservoir matrix will absorb water, reducing the gas percolation channel and increasing the gas phase percolation resistance of the reservoir matrix, therefor reducing the stable production capacity and recovery efficiency of the gas reservoir. For this reason, this paper investigates physical simulation experimental technology and mechanisms as reported by both domestic and foreign scholars regarding water invasion in fractured-porous gas reservoirs. In this paper, it is considered that the future trend and focus of water invasion experiments will be to establish a more realistic three-dimensional physical model on the basis of fine geological description, combined with gas reservoir well pattern deployment and production characteristics, and to fully consider the difference between... [more]

In the context of a world energy crisis, the only solution to control the situation is in the management of energy. One of the most important management keys is the optimization of electrical components. This article presents a complete numerical and experimental study aiming for the optimization of electrical water heaters for household use. The optimization conceives the minimization of energy consumption simultaneously with the minimization of time to heat water. Firstly, a thermal model well adapted for the case of heaters is constructed and validated experimentally and then a parametric study is conducted covering all the input power, the volume and the external area of the heater. Results are promising, showing significant energy savings are possible with an optimum setting of these parameters, thus presenting a firm tool for the optimization of heaters.

Energy consumption is a crucial domain in energy system management. Recently, it was observed that there has been a rapid rise in the consumption of energy throughout the world. Thus, almost every nation devises its strategies and models to limit energy usage in various areas, ranging from large buildings to industrial firms and vehicles. With technological advancements, computational intelligence models have been successfully contributing to the prediction of the consumption of energy. Machine learning and deep learning-based models enhance the precision and robustness compared to traditional approaches, making it more reliable. This article performs a review analysis of the various computational intelligence approaches currently being utilized to predict energy consumption. An extensive survey procedure is conducted and presented in this study, and relevant works are discussed. Different criteria are considered during the aggregation of the relevant studies relating to the work. The... [more]

This paper presents a procedure for the derivation of an equivalent thermal network-based model applied to three-core armored submarine cables. The heat losses of the different metallic cable parts are represented as a function of the corresponding temperatures and the conductor current, using a curve-fitting technique. The model was applied to two cables with different filler designs, supposed to be equipped with distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and the optical fiber location in the equivalent circuit was adjusted so that the conductor temperature could be accurately estimated using the sensor measurements. The accuracy of the proposed model was tested for both stationary and dynamic loading conditions, with the corresponding simulations carried out using a hybrid 2D-thermal/3D-electromagnetic model and the finite element method for the numerical resolution. Mean relative errors between 1 and 3% were obtained using an actual current profile. The presented procedure can be used by... [more]

Starting from the general principles of material cutting, with applicability to coal and overburden excavation using bucket wheel excavators (BWEs), this paper proposes another method for calculating the drive power of the bucket wheel excavator by computer modeling. This approach required two steps. In the first step, the volume of the excavated material for one slewing movement of the boom and for a particular excavation geometry was determined, and the slewing time in the open pit coal mine was measured. In the second one, the values of the specific energy (SE) consumption for cutting were determined by laboratory tests on samples of material taken from the open pit mine. The proposed method allows for the estimation of the load of the bucket wheel drive motor by taking into account only the specific energy necessary for the cutting of the material, the excavated volume during one slewing, and the time required to excavate this volume, and not the wear coefficients of the teeth or b... [more]

A proper assessment of the shielding effectiveness of an enclosure with aperture under subnanosecond transient interference requires a better understanding of the coupling and development mechanisms of the EM field induced inside the enclosure. In this paper, the results of a numerical study of the temporal and spatial development of the electromagnetic (EM) field in a shielding enclosure with aperture after transient interference caused by a subnanosecond high-energy EM plane wave pulse are presented. The interference pulse had Gaussian distribution of the electric and magnetic fields with amplitudes of 106 V/m and 2.68·103 A/m, respectively. The maximum pulse power density was 2.68 GW/m2. The novelty of this study was 2D and 3D images, which visualized the temporal and spatial build-up of electric and magnetic fields in the shielding enclosure within 90 ns after the transient interference. This is 58 times longer than the time needed by any EM wave to travel the distance between the... [more]

In order to increase the lifespan of hydraulic turbines in hydropower plants, it is necessary to minimize damages caused by sediment erosion. One solution is to reduce the amount of sediments by improving the design of sand trap. In the present work, the effects on sand trap efficiency by installing v-shaped rake structures for flow distribution and rib structures for sediment trapping is investigated numerically using the SAS−SST turbulence model. The v-shaped rake structures are located in the diffuser near the inlet of the sand trap, while the ribs cover a section of the bed in the downstream end. Three-dimensional models of the sand trap in Tonstad hydropower plant are created. The present study showed that integrating rib type structure can reduce the total weight of sediments escaping the sand trap by 24.5%, which leads to an improved sand trap efficiency. Consequently, the head loss in the sand trap is increased by 1.8%. By additionally including the v-shaped rakes, the total we... [more]

This study addresses the Hyperloop characterized by a capsule-type vehicle, superconducting electrodynamic suspension (SC-EDS) levitation, and driving in a near-vacuum tube. Because the Hyperloop is different from conventional transportation, various considerations are required in the vehicle-design stage. Particularly, pre-investigation of the vehicle dynamic characteristics is essential because of the close relationship among the vehicle design parameters, such as size, weight, and suspensions. Accordingly, a 1/10 scale Hyperloop vehicle system model, enabling the analysis of dynamic motions in the vertical and lateral directions, was developed. The reduced-scale model is composed of bogies operated by Stewart platforms, secondary suspension units, and a car body. To realize the bogie motion, an operation algorithm reflecting the external disturbance, SC-EDS levitation, and interaction between the bogie and car body, was applied to the Stewart platform. Flexible rubber springs were u... [more]

As the reservoir and its attribute distribution are obviously controlled by sedimentary facies, the facies modeling is one of the important bases for delineating the area of high-quality reservoir and characterizing the attribute parameter distribution. There are a large number of continental sedimentary reservoirs with strong heterogeneity in China, the geometry and distribution of various sedimentary microfacies are relatively complex. The traditional geostatistics methods which have shortage in characterization of the complex and non-stationary geological patterns, have limitation in facies modeling of continental sedimentary reservoirs. The generative adversarial network (GANs) is a recent state-of-the-art deep learning method, which has capabilities of pattern learning and generation, and is widely used in the domain of image generation. Because of the similarity in content and structure between facies models and specific images (such as fluvial facies and the images of modern riv... [more]

In the polish underground copper mines owned by KGHM Polska Miedz S.A, various types of room and pillar mining systems are used, mainly with roof deflection, but also with dry and hydraulic backfill. One of the basic problems associated with the exploitation of copper deposits is rockburst hazard. Aa high level of rockburst hazard is caused by mining the ore at great depth in difficult geological and mining conditions, among others, in the vicinity of remnants. The main goal of this study is to investigate how hydraulic backfill improves the geomechanical situation in the mining filed and reduce rockburst risk in the vicinity of remnants. Numerical modeling was conducted for the case study of a mining field where undisturbed ore remnant, 40 m in width, was left behind. To compare the results, simulations were performed for a room and pillar mining system with roof deflection and for a room and pillar mining system with hydraulic backfill. Results of numerical analysis demonstrate that... [more]

The increasing penetration of renewable energy resources such as solar and wind via power electronic inverters is challenging grid dynamics, as well as grid planning, operation, and protection. Recently, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has reported a series of similar events of the unintended loss of solar generation in Southern California over a large geographic area following the transmission-level disturbances. These events highlight the importance of understanding the characteristics of the transmission-side disturbances propagating into the distribution systems and their impacts on the operation of inverter-based resources. In this paper, a real-time electromagnetic simulation testbed is constructed for real-time electromagnetic simulations to generate realistic transmission-level disturbances and investigate their impacts on the solar PV operation under different fault types and locations, solar penetration levels, and loading levels. Through the simula... [more]

An inverter, whose inductor current is periodic, is the key equipment for photovoltaic power generation, fuel cell power generation, etc. A nonlinear inductor, whose inductance will be changed by its current, can be used to improve the grid current quality of the inverter, although making the mathematical model of the inverter system more complex. In this paper, the voltage-controlled full-bridge inverter with a nonlinear inductor is investigated and its mathematical model is established. The influence of parameters on the dynamical behaviors of this system is analyzed by using the harmonic balance method and the Floquet theory. Consequently, the mechanism for the occurrence of medium-frequency oscillation is revealed. The hardware circuit for the voltage-controlled full-bridge inverter with a nonlinear inductor is designed and some experimental results are presented for confirmation. The research results show that the mechanism for the occurrence of medium-frequency oscillation is Hop... [more]

This paper describes benchmark calculations for the APR1400 nuclear reactor performed using the high-fidelity deterministic whole-core simulator MPACT compared to reference solutions generated by the Monte Carlo code McCARD. The methodology presented in this paper is a common approach in the field of nuclear reactor analysis, when measured data are not available for comparison, and may be more broadly applied in other simulation applications of energy systems. The benchmark consists of several problems that span the complexity of single pins to a hot full power cycle depletion. Overall, MPACT shows excellent agreement compared to the reference solutions. MPACT effectively predicts the reactivity for different geometries and several temperature and boron conditions. The largest deviation from McCARD occurs for cold zero conditions in which the fuel, moderator, and cladding are all 300 K. Possible reasons for this are discussed. Excluding these cases, the ρ reactivity difference from McC... [more]

This paper proposes a deep-learning-based method for frequency-dependent grid impedance estimation. Through measurement of voltages and currents at a specific system bus, the estimate of the grid impedance was obtained by first extracting the sequences of the time-dependent features for the measured data using a long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) followed by a random forest (RF) regression method to find the nonlinear map function between extracted features and the corresponding grid impedance for a wide range of frequencies. The method was trained via simulation by using time-series measurements (i.e., voltage and current) for different system parameters and verified through several case studies. The obtained results show that: (1) extracting the time-dependent features of the voltage/current data improves the performance of the RF regression method; (2) the RF regression method is robust and allows grid impedance estimation within 1.5 grid cycles; (3) the proposed method ca... [more]

The atmosphere contains 3400 trillion gallons of water vapor, which would be enough to cover the entire Earth with a one-inch layer of water. As air humidity is available everywhere, it acts as an abundant renewable water reservoir, known as atmospheric water. The efficiency of an atmospheric water harvesting system depends on the sorption capacities of water-based absorption materials. Using anhydrous salts is an efficient process in capturing and delivering water from ambient air, especially under a condition of low relative humidity, as low as 15%. Many water-scarce countries, like Saudi Arabia, receive high annual solar radiation and have relatively high humidity levels. This study is focused on the simulation and modeling of the water absorption capacities of three anhydrous salts under different relative humidity environments: copper chloride (CuCl2), copper sulfate (CuSO4), and magnesium sulfate (MgSO4), to produce atmospheric drinking water in water-scarce regions. By using a m... [more]

Thermal barrier coating (TBC) plays a vital role in the gas turbine combustor liner (CL) to mitigate the internal heat transfer from combustion gas to the CL and enhance the parent material lifetime of the CL. This present study examined the thermal analysis and creep lifetime prediction based on three different TBC thicknesses, 400, 800, and 1200 μm, coated on the inner CL using the coupled computational fluid dynamics/finite element method. The simulation method was divided into three models to minimize the amount of computational work involved. The Eddy Dissipation Model was used in the first model to simulate premixed methane-air combustion, and the wall temperature of the inner CL was obtained. The conjugate heat transfer simulation on the external cooling flows from the rib turbulator, impingement jet, and cross flow, and the wall temperature of the outer CL was obtained in the second model. The thermal analysis was carried out in the third model using three different TBC thickne... [more]

Understanding multiphase flow and gas transport occurring in electrodes is crucial for improving the performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells. In the present study, a pore-scale model using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) was proposed to study the coupled processes of air−water two-phase flow and oxygen reactive transport processes in porous structures of the gas diffusion layer (GDL) and in fractures of the microscopic porous layer (MPL). Three-dimensional pore-scale numerical results show that the liquid water generation rate is gradually reduced as the oxygen consumption reaction proceeds, and the liquid water saturation in the GDL increases, thus the constant velocity inlet or pressure inlet condition cannot be maintained while the results showed that at t = 1,200,000 iterations after 2900 h running time, the local saturation at the GDL/MPL was about 0.7, and the maximum value was about 0.83, while the total saturation was 0.35. The current density reduced from 2.39 to... [more]

The primary motivation of this paper is to investigate the sand-retention mechanisms that occur at the opening of sand filters. Various retention mechanisms under various conditions are explored that have a particulate flow with a low concentration of sand particles (called slurry flow) such as particle shape, size, and concentration. The computational fluid dynamic (CFD)−discrete element method (DEM) model is applied to predict the retention mechanisms under steady flow conditions of the well-bore. By using coupled CFD−DEM (CFD to model the fluid flow, and DEM to model the particle flow), the physics involved in the retention mechanisms is studied. The coarse grid unresolved and the smoothed unresolved (refined grid unresolved) coupling approaches implemented in STAR-CCM+ (SIEMENS PLM) are used to transfer data between the fluid and solid phases and calculate the forces. The filter slots under investigation have different geometries: straight, keystone, wire-wrapped screen (WWS) and s... [more]

Recently, ammonium carbamate (AC) has attracted attention as a substitute for urea, which is a commonly used reductant for NOx emitted from combustion engines. The AC exists as a solid at room temperature, and it is decomposed to NH3 and CO2 gases by heating. Therefore, adequate heat transfer is an essential issue in the design of AC pyrolysis reactor. In this study, a numerical model that describes the sublimation of AC was developed. For modeling, this study considered the three different calculation zones: solid-phase zone, gas-phase zone, and sublimation zone. Additionally, during the sublimation process, collapse of upper solid AC into the hollow space below by the effect of gravity is considered. As a result, it is presented that the modeling shows reasonable information about the AC sublimation in a reactor, such as temperatures in a reactor, pressure of reactor, and flow rate of sublimated gas. However, it is also found that accurate prediction of spatial temperature distributi... [more]

Roof-mounted photovoltaic systems play a critical role in the global transition to renewable energy generation. An analysis of roof photovoltaic potential is an important tool for supporting decision-making and for accelerating new installations. State of the art uses 3D data to conduct potential analyses with high spatial resolution, limiting the study area to places with available 3D data. Recent advances in deep learning allow the required roof information from aerial images to be extracted. Furthermore, most publications consider the technical photovoltaic potential, and only a few publications determine the photovoltaic economic potential. Therefore, this paper extends state of the art by proposing and applying a methodology for scalable economic photovoltaic potential analysis using aerial images and deep learning. Two convolutional neural networks are trained for semantic segmentation of roof segments and superstructures and achieve an Intersection over Union values of 0.84 and... [more]

This work presents an extensive study on methodologies to calibrate electric energy consumption in buildings. A comparison between several calibration methodologies shows different approaches addressing the same issue, suggesting a lack of a unique methodology that is reproducible for every building. Additionally, no methodology fits the Brazilian public context, such as the predominance of Unitary Air Conditioning Systems (UACS) and buildings which have operated for more than 30 years. A new calibration methodology for performance simulation is proposed to deal with such features. The methodology is separated into two evidence-based steps according to the size of the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems used to control buildings’ indoor environments: the first step is dedicated to calibrating medium- and large-sized HVAC systems, and the second step is dedicated to calibrating small-sized HVAC systems. University Hospital of University of São Paulo (UH-USP) is used... [more]

The usage of splitter blades to enhance the performances of low specific speed pumps is common practice. Based on experimental and numerical studies, the influence of the addition of one and two splitter blades is investigated on a very low specific speed pump to assess their impact not only on the performance characteristics but also on the losses in all pump domains. First, the main characteristic curves are discussed and it is shown that the usage of splitter blades enhances the head of the pump while not impairing its efficiency. Secondly, a detailed analysis of the losses in the pump reveals that splitter blades improve the flow in all parts of the pumps, but the volute. The flow at the impeller outlet shows that splitter blades largely benefit the slip factor and discharges a more blade-congruent flow in the volute. However, higher absolute velocity at the outlet of the impeller with splitter blades increases friction at the volute wall, as confirmed by the average wall shear str... [more]

Plate fin-tube heat exchangers are widely used in air conditioning and refrigeration systems and other industry fields. Various errors made in the manufacturing process can result in the formation of an air gap between the tube and fin. Several numerical simulations were carried out for a symmetric section of plate fin-tube heat exchanger to study the influence of air gap on heat transfer under periodic flow conditions. Different locations and sizes of an air gap spanning 1/2 circumference of the tube were considered for the range of airflow velocities. Velocity and temperature fields for cases with air gap were compared with ideal thermal contact cases. Blocking of heat flow by the gap leads to the reduction of heat transfer rate. Fin discontinuity in the front of the tube causes the smallest reduction of the heat transfer rate in comparison to the ideal tube-fin contact, especially for thin slits. The rear gap position is the worst in the smallest gap range. Therefore, reversing the... [more]

Taxation exerts pressure on the economic activities of all companies, including economic entities that operate in the energy industry. This study examined the degree to which fiscal pressure influenced the financial performance of 88 publicly listed companies from the energy industry during a time frame of 16 years (2005Q1−2020Q3). By modelling financial data from the oil, gas and electricity sectors with panel data techniques, our results showed that fiscal pressure had a significant effect on the evolution of company financial performance measured by return on assets, return on equity and return on investment. The study revealed that fiscal pressure had a more positive impact on the financial performance of energy companies than a negative impact. This conclusion is important for overall taxation in the energy industry since corporate taxes, excise duties and mandatory labor contributions are basic resources for state budgets. Our empirical results imply important research directions... [more]

The article concentrates on the research of the pressure peaks in a working chamber of an axial piston pump. The main focus of the article is the influence of fluid properties on the pressure peaks value. Experimental and analytical methods were used to determine the impact of the fluid density, viscosity, compressibility and aeration. The article describes the pressure peak generation process and explains the theoretical basis of this phenomenon. A model of aerated fluid compression and models of leakage were created using CFD analysis and mathematical equations. These partial models were then merged into one consistent model in Matlab Simulink. The final result was verified by comparing the results obtained from the mathematical model with the results of the experiment. After validation, the model was used to present explicitly how each of the mentioned fluid properties affects the pressure peak value. Additionally, the test stand and measurement equipment used in the experiment were... [more]