Steam is commonly used for heating in industrial production and transmitted through the steam network. Along with the decarbonization of energy generation and utilization, electric boiler and combined heat and power (CHP) became the alternatives for steam generation. Thus, the steam network is becoming tightly coupled with the power system, which brings new challenges in the simulation and operation of the combined electric and steam system (CESS). A novel simulation approach for CESS that can balance both the simulation accuracy and speed is proposed. Piecewise linearization of the saturated steam property is used for model simplification, which accelerates the simulation speed while ensuring the accuracy. Meanwhile, the heat loss of the steam network takes both condensate loss and heat dissipation into account, which further improves the accuracy of heat loss calculation. In view of model solving, two computation frameworks are provided for back-pressure and extraction condensing the... [more]

As a key technical aspect contributing to shale gas development, nanoconfined methane flow behavior has received tremendous research interest, which remains challenging to understand clearly. The majority of previous contributions put emphasis on the mechanism model for methane confined in a single nanopore; at the same time, the other part focusing on an upscaling approach fails to capture the spatial pore-network characteristics as well as the way to assign pressure conditions to methane flow behavior. In light of the current knowledge gap, pore-network modeling is performed, in which a pore coordination number, indicating the maximum pores a specified pore can connect, gas flow regimes classified by Knudsen numbers, as well as different assigned pressure conditions, are incorporated. Notably, the pore-network modeling is completely self-coded, which is more flexible in adjusting the spatial features of a constructed pore network than a traditional one. In this paper, the nanoconfine... [more]

For the purpose of studying compact strip production (CSP) funnel-shaped mold and flexible thin-slab rolling (FTSR) funnel-shaped mold, a three-dimensional (3D) multi-field coupling mathematical model was established to describe the electromagnetic braking (EMBr) continuous casting process. To investigate the metallurgical effect of EMBr in the CSP and FTSR funnel-shaped thin-slab molds, a Reynolds-averaged Navier−Stokes (RANS) turbulence model, together with an enthalpy−porosity approach, was established to numerically simulate the effect of ruler EMBr on the behaviors of melt flow, heat transfer, solidification, and inclusion movement in high-speed casting. The simulation results indicate that the application of ruler EMBr in the CSP and FTSR molds shows great potential to improve the surface temperature of molten steel and reduce the penetration depth of downward backflow. This contributes to the melting of the slag rim near the meniscus region and facilitates the floating removal o... [more]

Recent environmental concern has been raised about the development of biocomposites because of their low cost, eco-friendliness, and biodegradability. Machining of polymeric composite is inevitable during assembly of structural components. In view of creating holes in structural composites, drilling is necessary and it is essential to carry out research to find the optimal machining parameters. The experimental assessment and prediction of the thrust force and torque involved in drilling composites reinforced with sheep horn are presented in this work. The matrix and sheep horn particles were combined in the right proportions before being moulded and poured into a mould, then allowed to cure at room temperature. Investigated properties included ultimate tensile strength, flexural strength, and hardness. To evaluate the quality of the hole, micrographs of the drilled hole were employed. When the mixture was optimised based on the properties, it was found that a 70:30 ratio produced the... [more]

The interest in the design and numerical modelling of adhesively-bonded components and structures for industrial application is increasing as a research topic. Although research on joint failure under pure mode is widespread, applied bonded joints are often subjected to a mixed mode loading at the crack tip, which is more complex than the pure mode and affects joint strength. Failure of these joints under loading is the objective of predictions through mathematical and numerical models, the latter based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), using Cohesive Zone Modelling (CZM). The Single leg bending (bending) testing is among those employed to study mixed mode loading. This work aims to validate the application of FEM-CZM to SLB joints. Thus, the geometries used for experimental testing were reproduced numerically and experimentally obtained properties were employed in these models. Upon the validation of the numerical technique, a parametric study involving the cohesive laws’ parameters... [more]

In this paper, a novel method is proposed for the incorporation of data-driven machine learning techniques into process optimization. Such integration improves the computational time required for calculations during optimization and benefits the online application of advanced control algorithms. The proposed method is illustrated via the chemical absorption-based postcombustion CO2 capture process, which plays an important role in the reduction of CO2 emissions to address climate challenges. These processes simulated in a software environment are typically based on first-principle models and calculate physical properties from basic physical quantities such as mass and temperature. Employing first-principle models usually requires a long computation time, making process optimization and control challenging. To overcome this challenge, in this study, machine learning algorithms are used to simulate the postcombustion CO2 capture process. The extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and suppor... [more]

The CNC machine tool is the passive executor of machining code. It cannot predict the machining accuracy during machining. If the error is found to be out of tolerance after processing, it will not only scrap the parts, but also greatly affect the processing efficiency. This phenomenon is very prominent when machining sculptured surface parts with five-axis machine tools. Therefore, this paper proposes a Digital Twin (DT) modeling method of five-axis machine tools for predicting Continuous Trajectory Contour Error (CTCE) caused by tracking errors and geometric errors. The DT consists of three parts: the Setpoints Trajectory (ST) model, the Actual Trajectory (AT) model considering tracking errors and geometric errors and the CTCE model. For a specific machine tool, according to the basic geometric information of the machine tool (tool length, kinematic chain information, etc.) and 41 geometric errors, the DT can be established. Inputting the Setpoints Positions (SPs) and the Linear Enco... [more]

The drying industry has grown considerably due to the tremendous demand for non-perishable food. Convective drying is one of the most popular equipment in the drying industry (food, chemical, pharmaceutical, etc.). One of the drawbacks of this equipment, when used for convective drying, is the non-uniformity in the final product quality. This study presents the development of a numerical model through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The drying chamber of a heat pump dryer is assessed from the perspective of drying air velocity and temperature profiles. The model was developed by solving different transport phenomena-related equations. The established methodology was set up to evaluate how the drying air velocity and temperature distribution affect the drying chamber. These results will define if there is a need to redesign it. The air velocity and temperature profile results show a need to redesign the chamber. Only trays 2, 3, and 4 are the ones that would achieve the drying of th... [more]

The type of solid substrate plays a critical role in determining the kinetics of the spray fluidized bed (SFB) agglomeration process. In the case of porous (also soft) primary particles (PPs), droplet aging is due to imbibition and drying. The surface properties of the substrate also change due to imbibition. The focus of the present work is to simulate the agglomeration of the spray-dried milk powder using the Monte Carlo (MC) method coupled with a drying-imbibition model. In order to extract the morphology of the formed agglomerates, an aggregation model is employed. Further, this aggregation model is employed to predict the number of positions on the PPs (later agglomerates) for droplet deposition; previously, the ‘concept of positions’ was used. The transient growth of different milk powders (whole and skim) is depicted using the enhanced MC model. The enhancement in the droplet deposition model had a prominent influence on the overall kinetics of agglomeration. As expected, this e... [more]

The main function of the athlete tracking system is to collect the real-time competition data of the athletes. Deep learning is a research hotspot in the field of image and video. With the rapid development of science and technology, it has not only made a breakthrough in theory, but also achieved excellent results in practical application. SiamRPN (Siamese Region Proposal Network) is a single target tracking network model based on deep learning, which has high accuracy and fast operation speed. However, in long-term tracking, if the target is completely obscured and out of the sight of SiamRPN, the tracking of the network will be invalid. Considering the difficulty of long-term tracking, the algorithm is improved and tested by introducing channel attention mechanism and local global search strategy into SiamRPN. Experimental results show that this algorithm has higher accuracy and prediction average overlap rate than the original SiamRPN algorithm when performing tracking tasks on lon... [more]

The volume of consumed and produced polymers is increasing in the market every day. This is due to the indispensability and convenience of polymers in all industries. The article presents the distinctive features of the use of titanium−magnesium catalysts in the process of propylene polymerization. A mathematical model of the polypropylene polymerization is presented. This model is the basis of creating an expert control complex of the propylene−ethylene block copolymer (PEBC) synthesis process and allowing a quantitative connection to be made between technological parameters of reactors, which allows control of the technological mode with the acceptable accuracy. The experiment catalytic system is microspheric titanium trichloride (MS-TiCl3) and co-catalyst-diethylaluminum chloride. Dependences of different parameters on others are illustrated. The result of the research is as follows: according to the calculations, when increasing the number of blocks in the chain, the average values... [more]

Scholars seek to recycle wasted energy to produce electricity by integrating thermoelectric generators (TEGs) with internal combustion engines (ICE), which rely on the electrical conductivity, β, of the thermal conductor strips. The TEG legs are alloyed from iron, aluminum and copper in a strip shape with specific characteristics that guarantee maximum thermo-electric transformation, which has fluctuated between a uniform, Gaussian, and exponential distribution according to the structure of the alloy. The ICE exhaust and intake gates were chosen as the TEG sides. The digital simulator twin model checks the integration efficiency through two sequential stages, beginning with recording the causes of thermal conductivity failure via filming and extracting their data by neural network procedures in the feed of the second stage, which reveal that the cracks are a major obstacle in reducing the TEG-generated power. Therefore, the interest of the second stage is predicting the cracks’ positio... [more]

The flow and heat transfer characteristics in micro-tube are very important research fields. In order to study the influence of the Reynolds number on the overall characteristics of flow and heat transfer, a 510 mm long micro-tube with dimples was constructed. Thirty-five different working conditions are considered, and the Reynolds number is between 1500 and 8100. At the same time, the change of physical properties of coolant with temperature is considered. The reliability of numerical simulation results is verified by the grid independence verification and the comparison of experimental data. The results show that the dimple will promote the instability of the flow state and improve the heat transfer efficiency. The flow state evolution formed in the stream-wise direction is basically similar, and its fully developed position remains at 76 mm, which is independent of the Reynolds number. For the fully developed region, the partial derivation of static pressure in the stream-wise comp... [more]

Solutions that aim to reduce water production in heavy oil wells have led to the design of devices known as rate-controlled production (RCP) autonomous inflow-control device (AICD) valves, which are placed in well completions and autonomously open with the oil inflow and close with water by choking the flow. These devices, which are based on Bernoulli’s principle, use a levitating disk that chokes the flow of the phase with the lowest flow resistance. This study proposes a numerical model based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology to understand these devices’ operations and propose better designs without experimentation. The numerical model was based on dynamic fluid−body interaction (DFBI) and volume of fluid (VOF) models. The model was found to respond as expected depending on the physical properties of the fluids involved in heavy oil production. Finally, some limitations were found in the numerical study that can be improved in future studies.

The requirement to counter carbon emissions is becoming urgent. Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs) have been extensively investigated recently for storing and separating gases, especially carbon dioxide. The present review aims to summarise the state of the art of ZIFs for carbon dioxide capture focusing on the structure, mechanism, optimisation, and modelling. The methods utilised for carbon capture are briefly summarized. The morphology of ZIFs with different topologies, N2-CO2 adsorption-desorption isotherms, X-ray diffraction patterns, thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) results are discussed to give insights into the textural properties, structure-activity relationship and structural-thermal stability of ZIFs. Finally, the experimental optimisation techniques, modelling and simulation studies for improving CO2 capture by ZIFs are discussed. This review should provide a comprehensive and quick understanding of this research area. It is timely to summarize and review ongoing devel... [more]

Anthropogenic climate change, global warming, environmental pollution, and fossil fuel depletion have been identified as critical current scenarios and future challenges. Cement plants are one of the most impressive zones, emitting 15% of the worldwide contaminations into the environment among various industries. These contaminants adversely affect human well-being, flora, and fauna. Meanwhile, the use of cement-based substances in various fields, such as civil engineering, medical applications, etc., is inevitable due to the continuous increment of population and urbanization. To cope with this challenge, numerous filtering methods, recycling techniques, and modeling approaches have been introduced. Among the various statistical, mathematical, and computational modeling solutions, Python has received tremendous attention because of the benefit of smart libraries, heterogeneous data integration, and meta-models. The Python-based models are able to optimize the raw material contents and... [more]

The smart and resilient transformation of manufacturing firms has flourished in the last decade. This paper investigates the smart and resilient transformation of manufacturing firms with the application of digital services. It uses a Serbian data set of 136 manufacturing firms from the Digital Servitization Survey from 2022 coordinated by IFIP WG5.7. The authors applied a different method approach through social network analysis, correlation analysis, and interviews with representatives from the manufacturing firms. The main results show that manufacturing firms that apply an adequate combination of services and digital technologies have the highest impact on the network of manufacturing firms. Moreover, the results show that applying digital technologies, such as additive manufacturing/3D printing, big data analytics, and digital twin, increases the gross annual turnover of manufacturing firms in the COVID-19 era. Finally, the results show that for a successful smart and resilient tr... [more]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological revolution that enables human-to-human and machine-to-machine communication for virtual data exchange. The IoT allows us to identify, locate, and access the various things and objects around us using low-cost sensors. The Internet of Things offers many benefits but also raises many issues, especially in terms of privacy and security. Appropriate solutions must be found to these challenges, and privacy and security are top priorities in the IoT. This study identifies possible attacks on different types of networks as well as their countermeasures. This study provides valuable insights to vulnerability researchers and IoT network protection specialists because it teaches them how to avoid problems in real networks by simulating them and developing proactive solutions. IoT anomalies were detected by simulating message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) over a virtual network. Utilizing DDoS attacks and some machine learning algorithms such a... [more]

Efficient cooling and heating solutions for nearly zero-energy solar dwellings are required to mitigate climate change and to make dwellings sustainable. The installed pipeline for a radiant heating system, which is only used for space heating when heating is necessary, can also be used to cool the room with only the enthalpic use of natural city water by releasing the natural city water through the embedded pipeline already installed for radiant heating. Natural city water used for radiant cooling can be used in necessary locations such as for toilets, washing cars, laundry facilities, and garden water, which corresponds to approximately 56% of the water we use at home. As a result, the embedded pipes that make up a radiant heating system can be converted to a passive intelligent radiant cooling system with minimal added installation and control systems. Thermal comfort and behavior analyses in an enclosure with a radiant cooling system are fulfilled through experimentation, mean radi... [more]

Mutual information (MI) has been widely used for association mining in complex chemical processes, but how to precisely estimate MI between variables of different numerical types, discriminate their association relationships with targets and finally achieve compact and interpretable prediction has not been discussed in detail, which may limit MI in more complicated industrial applications. Therefore, this paper first reviews the existing information-based association measures and proposes a general framework, GIEF, to consistently detect associations and independence between different types of variables. Then, the study defines four mutually exclusive association relations of variables from an information-theoretic perspective to guide feature selection and compact prediction in high-dimensional processes. Based on GIEF and conditional mutual information maximization (CMIM), a new algorithm, CMIM-GIEF, is proposed and tested on a fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) process with 217 vari... [more]

In industrial smelters, sulfuric acid is manufactured using the elemental sulfur in a series of three-unit operations: elemental sulfur oxidation, sulfur dioxide catalytic conversion, and sulfur trioxide absorption. The sulfur oxidation, which is the basic step in this process, is generally performed under a sulfur combustion furnace that ensures the production of the process gas stream, which will be the main supply stream to the other unit operations. In this paper, a dynamic model is developed based on the fundamental mass and energy balance, including the sulfur oxidation and the dynamic flow behavior aspects within the furnace. The obtained model is simulated in the Matlab/Simulink environment and data from an industrial plant were used to validate the model. The simulation results and the plant measurement comparison showed an accuracy of 96%, with a mean absolute error of 16.12 °C and a root mean square error of 23.27 °C. Afterwards, the effect of different operating conditions... [more]

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of the use of boron nitride (BN) and other conventional nanoparticles (Al2O3, CuO and TiO2) on pressure drop and heat transfer in a microchannel. The governing equations for forced fluid flow and heat transfer were worked out by using fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. Computational results collected from fluent CFD code for Al2O3 as the nano-particle were compared with numerical values used in the literature for validation. The basis of a water-cooled (pure water, Al2O3/Water, CuO/Water, TiO2/Water and BN/Water) smooth microchannel was outlined, and then the corresponding laminar flow and heat transfer were evaluated numerically. The results from the numerical tests (NT) express good agreement with the values found in the literature. These results also indicate, through the comparison which was performed by taking the heat transfer and pressure loss parameters between BN and other widely used conventional nanoparticles (Al... [more]

Fumaric acid is one of the most promising biorefinery platform chemicals, fruit residues being a very suitable raw material for its production in second generation biorefineries. In particular, apple pomace is a plentiful residue from the apple juice industry, with apple being the second largest fruit crop in the world, with a production that increased from 46 to 86 Mtons in the 1994−2021 period. With a global apple juice production of more than 4.5 Mtons, a similar amount of apple pomace is produced yearly. In this work, apple pomace hydrolysate has been obtained by enzymatic hydrolysis and further characterized for its content in sugars, phenolics and nitrogen using different analytic methods, based on HPLC and colorimetric techniques. Previous to the use of this hydrolysate (APH), we studied if the addition of fructose to the usual glucose-rich broth could lead to high fumaric acid yields, titers and productivities. Afterwards, APH fermentation was performed and improved using diffe... [more]

In this work, slim tube displacement tests for minimum miscibility pressure MMP were carried out. Based on the displacement data, the MMP was calculated by statistical regression using linear and quadratic extrapolation with threshold values of 90% and 95% oil recovery as well as the intersection of trend lines for immiscible and miscible displacement regimes. The obtained data show a significant variation in the range of MMP values depending on the calculation method. To clarify the MMP value, an analysis of displacement dynamics was carried out. The ratio of the volume flow rate of reservoir oil to the volume flow rate of the injected gas—flow rates ratio (FFR)—was used as a new parameter. The MMP value calculated from the FRR value extrapolation was determined as 37.09 MPa. According to the results obtained, the proposed methodology based on the displacement dynamics can be useful as a criterion for clarifying the MMP value in slim tube displacement experiments.

Texture and coating technology can significantly improve the tribological properties of mechanical components. In this study, the lubricating and wear properties of the reticular surface texture under the action of TiN were studied. Lubrication and wear experiments at different speeds were conducted using a UMT-3 wear and friction testing machine. Using Fluent fluid simulation, the bearing capacity of the oil film was obtained, and the lubrication performance of the texture was verified. The results showed that the simulation experiment and the lubrication experiment were consistent to a certain extent. For the groove width and angle parameters studied in this paper, optimal parameters existed to achieve the maximum bearing capacity, 1.27 N. Due to the high hardness and low elastic modulus of the TiN coating, the coated reticular texture was more wear-resistant, and it achieved the minimum wear volume 1.148 × 10−6 mm3 from the grinding stainless-steel matrix. The effect of the fluid dy... [more]