Thermodynamic performance of three conceptual systems for biomass-derived olefin production with electricity cogeneration was studied and compared via exergy analysis at the levels of system, subsystem and operation unit. The base case was composed of the subsystems of gasification, raw fuel gas adjustment, methanol/light olefin synthesis and steam & power generation, etc. The power case and fuel case were designed as the combustion of a fraction of gasification gas to increase power generation and the recycle of a fraction of synthesis tail gas to increase olefin production, respectively. It was found that the subsystems of gasification and steam & power generation contribute ca. 80% of overall exergy destruction for each case, of which gasifier and combustor are the main exergy destruction sources, due to the corresponding chemical exergy degrading of biomass and fuel gas. The low efficiency of 33.1% for the power case could be attributed to the significant irreversibility of the com... [more]

The growing demand for the integration of surface mount design (SMD) antennas into miniaturized electronic devices has imposed increasing limitations on the structure dimensions. Examples include embedded antennas in applications such as on-board devices, picosatellites, 5G communications, or implantable and wearable devices. The demands for size reduction while ensuring a satisfactory level of electrical and field performance can be managed through constrained numerical optimization. The reliability of optimization-based size reduction requires utilization of full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis, which entails significant computational costs. This can be alleviated by incorporating surrogate modeling techniques, adjoint sensitivities, or the employment of sparse sensitivity updates. An alternative is the incorporation of multi-fidelity simulation models, normally limited to two levels, low and high resolution. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for accelerated antenna miniaturiz... [more]

Multi-tube multi-fin heat exchangers are extensively used in various industries. In the current work, detailed experimental investigations were carried out to establish the flow/heat transfer characteristics in three distinct heat exchanger geometries. A novel perforated plain fin design was developed, and its performance was evaluated against standard plain and louvred fins designs. Experimental setups were designed, and the tests were carefully carried out which enabled quantification of the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics. In the experiments the average velocity of air was varied in the range of 0.7 m/s to 4 m/s corresponding to Reynolds numbers of 600 to 2650. The water side flow rates in the tubes were kept at 0.12, 0.18, 0.24, 0.3, and 0.36 m3/h corresponding to Reynolds numbers between 6000 and 30,000. It was found that the louvred fins produced the highest heat transfer rate due to the availability of higher surface area, but it also produced the highest pressur... [more]

In the drilling of horizontal wells, the drill cuttings tend to settle down on the low side of the annulus due to gravity and form a stationary bed, which results in hole cleaning problems. In this paper, a novel type of drillpipe with an elliptical shape was proposed to alleviate inadequate hole cleaning during the drilling of horizontal wells. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamic (CFD) Eulerian-Eulerian approach with the Realizable k-ɛ turbulence model was developed to predict the solid−liquid two-phase flow in the annular space. Numerical examples were given to investigate the influence of different parameters on cuttings’ transport behavior, and the elliptical drillpipe was compared with the circular drillpipe. The annular cuttings concentration, annular pressure drop, and hole cleaning efficiency were evaluated. The numerical results clarify the potential of the elliptical drillpipe to enhance the hole cleaning efficiency without significantly increasing the annular pre... [more]

To reduce the greenhouse effect, it is important to reduce not only carbon dioxide but also methane emissions. Methane gas can be not only a fossil fuel (natural gas) but also a renewable energy source when it is extracted from biomass. After biogas has been purified, its properties become closer to those of natural gas or methane. Natural gas is an alternative energy source that can be used for spark-ignition engines, but its physicochemical properties are different from those of gasoline, and the spark-ignition engine control parameters need to be adjusted. This article presents the results of a study that considers a spark-ignition engine operating at different speeds (2000 rpm, 2500 rpm, and 3000 rpm) and the regulation of the timing of intake valve closure when the throttle is partially open (15%), allowing the engine to maintain the stoichiometric air−fuel mixture and constant spark timing. Studies have shown a reduction in engine break torque when petrol was replaced by natural... [more]

As the number of available renewable energy sources has increased annually, there has been a corresponding rise in the levels of pollution created by traditional electricity generation, ultimately contributing to breaking down the stability of the electrical system at large. Therefore, there is an increasing need to integrate the use of nonpolluting electricity sources, such as pumped storage hydropower plants (PSHP), to ensure the stability of the power system and to maintain the frequency of the system from year-to-year. This paper addresses the issue of PSHP being unsuitable for providing Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) services and proposes real measurements of the aggregation approach to obtain different data arrays. Based on this, the proposed methodology is orientated toward obtaining transfer functions that were developed using the parametric identification models, and the efficiency of these functions was thoroughly investigated. The proposed transfer function in this pape... [more]

European Union Member States are called upon to meet internationally proposed environmental goals. This study is based, in particular, on the recommendation of the European Union (EU), which encourages Member States to pursue effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions, including through appropriate changes in the behavioral habits of citizens. In this respect, among the main sectors involved, transport and mobility should certainly be mentioned. National institutions should be adequately involved in order to achieve the objectives set; in this regard, universities must certainly be considered for their educational value. These latter, for instance, could commit to improving the environmental performance of the mobility of their commuter students (to a not insignificant extent), since commuting modes are often the cause of high CO2 emissions; indeed, they still largely involve the use of internal combustion engines based on fossil fuels. In this paper, the effectivenes... [more]

In order to gain a comprehensive view of electric vehicles (EVs) technologies and understand the emphasis of current research, this study evaluated the most relevant themes related to EVs through a bibliometric analysis using the keyword “electric vehicle” as the input. The Web of ScienceTM (WoS) database was used because it is considered ideal for bibliometric analysis. The VOSviewer software was adopted as a bibliometric analysis tool to visualize the networks of authors, countries, journals and keywords. The analysis carried out on 9 November 2021 retrieved a total of 29,304 documents in the period 2000 to 2021. The results show that in the last nine years the number of publications about EVs has grown significantly. The China is the leading nation in the field of EV research, contributing the largest number of publications in the world, with the main authors and research institutions involved. The journal Energies stands out as the main publishing periodical. Keyword analysis showe... [more]

With the recent proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), maintaining power quality within acceptable limits in future distribution grids will become a challenging task. A specific concern is the spread of Supraharmonics in the range from 2 to 150 kHz, generated by modern power electronic devices. In this paper, the long term Supraharmonic distortion from three differently sized electric vehicle charging infrastructures is analyzed in frequency and time domain. At the monitored sites several interruptions of EV charging processes were observed due to poor power quality. It was found that vehicles disconnect when exposed to high levels of harmonic distortion. Moreover, the impact of the charging EVs on the Supraharmonic distortion and the interaction with the background distortion for the individual sites is discussed. Results show that a general increase in Supraharmonics emission can be expected due to the rising number of EVs. However, measurements also indicate that damping effects... [more]

This paper examines the exergy efficiency and exergy destruction rate of the R744/R404A cascade refrigeration system (CRS) using an internal heat exchanger in supermarkets according to various conditions affecting the system. A refrigerant of a low-temperature cycle uses R744 and a refrigerant of a high-temperature cycle in the CRS uses R404A. Experiments were conducted by changing various conditions on the high- and low-temperature side, and exergy analysis was performed accordingly. The main results are summarized as follows: (1) the lower the total exergy destruction rate of the CRS, the higher the exergy efficiency of the system, and accordingly the coefficient of performance (COP) of the system is also improved. (2) In the CRS, since the optimum cascade evaporation temperature exists (about −16 °C), it can be said that the limit point, that is, the cascade evaporation temperature with the maximum COP of the system, is the optimum point at about −16 °C. Therefore, at this optimum p... [more]

The continuous quest for improving the performance of heat exchangers, together with ever more stringent volume and weight constraints, especially in enclosed applications like internal combustion engines and electronic devices, has stimulated the search for compact, high-performance units. One of the shapes that has emerged from a vast body of research is the disc-shaped heat exchanger, in which the fluid to be heated/cooled flows through radial—often bifurcated—channels carved inside a metallic disc. The disc in turn exchanges thermal energy with the hot/cold source (the environment or another body). Several studies have been devoted to the identification of an “optimal shape” of the channels: most of them are based on the extremization of some global property of the device, like its monetary or resource cost, its efficiency, the outlet temperature of one of the fluids, the total irreversibility of the process, etc. The present paper demonstrates that-for all engineering purposes the... [more]

The China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) is a small, sodium-cooled fast reactor with 20 MW(e) of power. Start-up tests of the CEFR were performed from 2010 to 2011. The China Institute of Atomic Energy made some of the neutronics start-up-test data available to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as part of an international neutronics benchmarking exercise by distributing the experimental data to interested organizations from the member states of the IAEA. This benchmarking aims to validate and verify the physical models and neutronics simulation codes with the help of the recorded experimental data. The six start-up tests include evaluating criticality, control-rod worth, reactivity effects, and neutron spectral characteristics. As part of this coordinated research, the IAEA performed neutronics calculations using the Monte Carlo codes Serpent 2 and OpenMC, which can minimize modeling assumptions and produce reference solutions for code verification. Both codes model a thr... [more]

In this study, we investigated the applicability of an automobile shredder residue (ASR) as an energy and recycling resource. First, ASR gasification was conducted in a fixed-bed reactor (throughput = 1 kg/h) at different temperatures (800, 1000, and 1200 °C) and an equivalence ratio of 0.1−0.5. Clay bricks were prepared with the solid residue obtained from the gasification process to address the issue of solid-residue production in pyrolysis. The syngas (H2 + CO) from ASR gasification had maximum and minimum yields of approximately 86 and 40 vol.%, respectively. Furthermore, the yield of syngas increased with the temperature and equivalence ratio (ER); therefore, the optimum conditions for the ASR gasification were determined to be a temperature of 1200 °C and an ER of 0.5. In addition, solid residues, such as char and ash, began to melt due to thermal heating in the range of 1300−1400 °C and were converted into melting slag, which was subsequently used to manufacture clay bricks. The... [more]

One of the requirements for the safe operation of customer premises equipment (CPE) is an adequate grounding system as a means to divert high fault currents to the ground. In this work we report on the results of an experimental study of the impulse characteristics at a charging voltage of 30 kV on the surge protective device connected to 16 earth electrodes and installed at two sites, giving various ground resistance at low voltages, RDC values. All of these grounding electrodes were installed and tested under the same charging voltage to determine the effectiveness of ground electrodes toward the damage of a modem at the premises. We observed that modems did not experience damage when the ground electrode of the distribution pole (DP) had an RDC below 30 Ω in general and below 46 Ω when ground electrodes installed in low resistivity soil were used. The impulse polarity did not affect the damage susceptibility of the CPE.

Municipal waste management in the EU has been challenged to a thorough transformation towards a Circular Economy. It is addressed by a number of quantitative policy targets, including a restriction on municipal waste landfilling to 10% in 2035. This paper presents the data on municipal waste composition in a large Polish city, based on thorough waste sorting analyses. On average, 374 kg of municipal waste is collected per capita in Wroclaw, of which 41% are separately collected fractions. The approach to implement the EU recycling targets until 2035 is presented, including an increase of sorting and recycling efficiency and a significant share of recyclables being retrieved from the residual waste fraction. Notwithstanding the recycling targets, an important stream of residual waste remains, amounting to 200 k ton in 2020 and approx. 130 k ton in 2035, which is available for energy recovery. The respective LHV values range from 8.5 to 7.6 MJ/kg. The results indicate that the residual w... [more]

Perhaps as much as 50% of the oil-in-place in carbonate formations around the world is locked away in the easy to bypass microporosity. If some of this oil is unlocked by the improved recovery processes focused on tight carbonate formations, the world may gain a major source of lower-rate power over several decades. Here, we overview the Arab D formation in the largest oil field on earth, the Ghawar. We investigate the occurrence of microporosity of different origins and sizes using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and pore casting techniques. Then, we present a robust calculation of the probability of invasion and oil saturation distribution in the nested micropores using mercury injection capillary pressure data available in the literature. We show that large portions of the micropores in Arab D formation would have been bypassed during primary drainage unless the invading crude oil ganglia were sufficiently long. We also show that, under prevailing conditions of primary drainage o... [more]

An effective way to enhance the heat transfer in mini and micro electronic devices is to use different shapes of micro-channels containing vortex generators (VGs). This attracts researchers due to the reduced volume of the electronic micro-chips and increase in the heat generated from the devices. Another way to enhance the heat transfer is using nanofluids, which are considered to have great potential for heat transfer enhancement and are highly suited to application in practical heat transfer processes. Recently, several important studies have been carried out to understand and explain the causes of the enhancement or control of heat transfer using nanofluids. The main aim upon which the present work is based is to give a comprehensive review on the research progress on the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics of nanofluids for both single- and two- phase models in different types of micro-channels. Both experimental and numerical studies have been reviewed for traditional an... [more]

Energy-economic simulation models with high levels of detail, high time resolutions, or large populations (e.g., distribution networks, households, electric vehicles, energy communities) are often limited due to their computational complexity. This paper introduces a novel methodology, combining cluster-based time series aggregation and sampling methods, to efficiently emulate simulation models using machine learning and significantly reduce both simulation and training time. Machine learning-based emulation models require sufficient and high-quality data to generalize the dataset. Since simulations are computationally complex, their maximum number is limited. Sampling methods come into play when selecting the best parameters for a limited number of simulations ex ante. This paper introduces and compares multiple sampling methods on three energy-economic datasets and shows their advantage over a simple random sampling for small sample-sizes. The results show that a k-means cluster samp... [more]

Pollutant emissions have been a topic of interest in the last decades. Not only environmentalists but also governments are taking rapid action to reduce emissions. As one of the main contributors, the transport sector is being subjected to strict scrutiny to ensure it complies with the short and long-term regulations. The measures imposed by governments clearly involve all the stakeholders in the logistics sector, from road authorities and logistic operators to truck manufacturers. The improvement of traffic conditions is one of the perspectives in which the reduction of emissions is being addressed. Optimization of traffic flow, avoidance of unnecessary stops, control of the cruise speed, and coordination of trips in an energy-efficient way are necessary steps to remain compliant with the upcoming regulations. In this study, we have estimated the CO2 and NOx emissions in heavy-duty vehicles while traversing signalized intersections, and we examined the differences between various beha... [more]

This paper presents the theoretical analysis and experimental verification of a direct fault harmonic identification approach in a converter-fed electric drive for automated diagnosis purposes. On the basis of the analytical model of the proposed real-time direct fault diagnosis, the fault-related harmonic component is calculated using recursive DFT (RDFT) and Goertzel DFT (GDFT), applied instead of the full spectrum calculations required in the most popular FFT algorithm. The simulation model of an inverter sensorlessly controlled induction motor drive is linked with the induction machine rotor fault model for testing the sensitivity of the GDFT- and RDFT-based fault diagnosis to state variable estimation errors. According to the presented simulation results, the accuracy of the direct identification of a fault-related harmonic is sensitive to the quality of fault harmonic frequency estimation. The sensitivity analysis with respect to RDFT and GDFT algorithms is included. Based on the... [more]

This paper comprehensively reviews the current status of multidisciplinary technologies in electric vehicles. Because the electric vehicle market will expand dramatically in the coming few years, research accomplishments in power electronics technology for electric vehicles will be highly attractive. Challenges in power electronics technology for driving electric vehicles, charging batteries, and circuit topologies are being explored. This paper aims primarily to address the practical issues of the future electric vehicles and help researchers obtain an overview of the latest techniques in electric vehicles, focusing on power electronics-based solutions for both current and future electric vehicle technologies. In this work, different medium-and high-voltage DC-AC inverter topologies are investigated and compared in terms of power losses and component requirements. Recent research on electric vehicle power converters is also discussed, with highlighting on soft-switching and multilevel... [more]

In this study, Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and multi-objective genetic algorithm were used to obtain optimum parameters of the channels with frustum of a cone with better flow and heat transfer performance. Central composite face-centered design (CCF) was applied to the experimental design of the channel parameters, and on this basis, the response surface models were constructed. The sensitivity of the channel parameters was analyzed by Sobol’s method. The multi-objective optimization of the channel parameters was carried out with the goal of achieving maximum Nusselt number ratio (Nu/Nu0) and minimum friction coefficient ratio (f/f0). The results show that the root mean square errors (RSME) of the fitted response surface models are less than 0.25 and the determination coefficients (R2) are greater than 0.93; the models have high accuracy. Sobol’s method can quantitatively analyze the influence of the channel parameters on flow and heat transfer performance of the channels. When... [more]

The permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) is a highly efficient energy saving machine. Due to its simple structural characteristics, good heat radiation capability, and high efficiency, PMSMs are gradually replacing AC induction motors in many industrial applications. The PMSM has a nonlinear system and lies on parameters that differ over time with complex high-class dynamics. To achieve the excessive performance operation of a PMSM, it essentially needs a speed controller for providing accurate speed tracking, slight overshoot, and robust disturbance repulsion. Therefore, this article provides an overview of different robust control techniques for PMSMs and reviews the implementation of a speed controller. In view of the uncertainty factors, such as parameter perturbation and load disturbance, the H∞ robust control strategy is mainly reviewed based on the traditional control techniques, i.e., robust H∞ sliding mode controller (SMC), and H∞ robust current controller based on Hamilt... [more]

In this paper, a low-concentration photovoltaic/thermal (LCPV/T) coupled with air-source heat pump (AHP) system is proposed which fully utilizes the heat generated by LCPV/T and improves the performance of the AHP. The system is built and investigated in the Transient System Simulation Program (TRNSYS) and an experimental room model is established to verify the feasibility of the system. The performance of the system is researched from the perspective of energy and exergy, and the system performance with LCPV/T and without LCPV/T is compared. Finally, the influence of the variation of key parameters of the system is studied. The results indicated that on the coldest day, the electrical efficiency of LCPV/T reached 10% which was equal to the electrical exergy efficiency. The maximum thermal efficiency was 31.88% while thermal exergy efficiency was 2.7%. The maximum coefficient of performance (COP) of AHP was 3.3, and the thermal exergy efficiency was 47%. The indoor temperature was main... [more]

Light-emitting diodes based on quantum dots as an active emission can be considered as a promising next generation for application in displays and lighting. We report a theoretical investigation of green emission at 550 nm of microcavity inorganic−organic light-emitting devices based on Zn (Te, Se) alloy quantum dots as an active layer. Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) has been applied as a bottom mirror. The realization of high-quality DBR consisting of both high and low refractive index structures is investigated. The structures applied for high refractive index layers are (ZrO2, SiNx, ZnS), while those applied for low index layers are (Zr, SiO2, CaF2). DBR of ZnS/CaF2 consisting of three pairs with a high refractive index step of (Δn = 0.95) revealed a broad stop bandwidth (178 nm) and achieved a high reflectivity of 0.914.