This study attempt to fill the research gap by figuring out the dynamic effects of foreign capital inflows effect on renewable energy and non-renewable consumption by using the time series non-linear ARDL approach for BRICS from 1991 to 2019. Non-linear ARDL estimates show that positive change in foreign capital inflows has a positive effect on renewable consumption in Brazil, India, and South Africa in long run. Also, the negative change in foreign capital inflows exhibits negatively liked with renewable energy consumption in BRICS economies, except Russia in long run. We find that positive shock in foreign capital inflows tends to increase non-renewable energy consumption in BRICS except India in the long run. Finding suggests that negative change in foreign capital inflows has negative impacts on non-renewable energy consumption in India and Brazil, while the positive effect in only China in the long run.

The Ni-containing catalysts based on ceria−zirconia doped with Ti and Ti+Nb were prepared by the solvothermal method in supercritical fluids. Ni deposition was carried out by incipient wetness impregnation and the one-pot technique. All materials were investigated by a complex of physicochemical methods (XRD, BET, TEM, H2-TPR). Samples catalytic properties were studied in methane dry reforming in the plug-flow reactor. Conversions of CH4 and CO2, H2/CO ratio, and CO and H2 yields were measured, and detailed kinetics analysis was carried out. The influence of Ni loading method and support modification on the catalytic behavior in the methane dry reforming process was studied. The preparation method of catalysts affects the textural characteristics. For one-pot samples, pore volume and surface area are lower than for impregnated samples. For catalysts on modified supports, strong metal−support interaction was shown to increase catalytic activity. A reduction pretreatment of samples was s... [more]

Based on resource carrying capacity, this study used the revised theory of relative resource carrying capacity (RRCC) and introduced an innovative concept of relative fossil energy carrying capacity (RFECC), which evaluates the degree of fossil energy sustainability based on the relationship between economy, population, and environment. This study took China and the United States as the study objects, took the whole country as the reference area, and calculated the RFECC of population, economic, and environmental resources from 2000 to 2018. Therefore, based on the comparative analysis, the following conclusions were drawn: (i) there is a big difference in the RFECC between China and the United States, which is manifested in the inverted U-shaped trend in China and the U-shaped trend in the United States; (ii) the relative fossil energy carrying states in China and the United States are different, mainly reflected in the economy and environment; (iii) the gap in RFECC between China and... [more]

Trolleybus transport refers to contemporary challenges related to a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases and CO2 into the atmosphere formulated by international institutions, such as the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or the European Union. Departure from fossil fuels in urban transport is one of the key challenges for the coming years. Trolleybuses are an important tool in this task, even though their importance was declining in the past. Nowadays, due to, among others, technological development, in particular the availability of high-capacity batteries, their long life and low weight, trolleybus transport is becoming popular again. The use of the existing overhead contact infrastructure of the trolleybus network and small on-board batteries allow expanding the spatial accessibility of zero-emission public transport. Thus, this reduces the social differentiation in access to environmentally friendly transport that does not emit pollutan... [more]

Due to the rapid increase in electric vehicles (EVs) globally, new technologies have emerged in recent years to meet the excess demand imposed on the power systems by EV charging. Among these technologies, a mobile energy storage system (MESS), which is a transportable storage system that provides various utility services, was used in this study to support several charging stations, in addition to supplying power to the grid during overload and on-peak hours. Thus, this paper proposes a new day-ahead optimal operation of a single MESS unit that serves several charging stations that share the same geographical area. The operational problem is formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP), where the objective is to minimize the total operating cost of the parking lots (PLs). Two different case studies are simulated to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed system compared to the current approach.

The main objective of the current work was to enhance the transformer fault diagnostic accuracy based on dissolved gas analysis (DGA) data with a proposed coupled system of support vector machine (SVM)-bat algorithm (BA) and Gaussian classifiers. Six electrical and thermal fault classes were categorized based on the IEC and IEEE standard rules. The concentration of five main combustible gases (hydrogen, methane, ethane, ethylene, and acetylene) was utilized as an input vector of the two classifiers. Two types of input vectors have been tested; the first input type considered the five gases in ppm, and the second input type considered the gases introduced in the percentage of the sum of the five gases. An extensive database of 481 had been used for training and testing phases (321 data samples for training and 160 data samples for testing). The SVM model conditioning parameter “λ” and penalty margin parameter “C” were adjusted through the bat algorithm to develop a maximum accuracy rate... [more]

The aim of this study was the investigation of the effect of growth conditions of energy willow (Salix viminalis L.) on its physical and chemical parameters towards lignocellulosic biofuels. This work is linked to the global trend of replacing fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy and renewable fuels. This energy transition is dictated by the reduction of the human-induced greenhouse effect (to the greatest extent by industrial development). Changing from traditional to renewable energy sources results in industry becoming less dependent on fuels whose sources are beginning to run out, and in energy processing being broken down into smaller sectors with greater flexibility to change and less susceptibility to failure. The use of lignocellulosic raw materials such as wood, straw, food industry waste, wood, and post-consumer products such as old furniture for energy purposes allows the use of substances which bind the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in their cellular structure... [more]

In the course of our investigations, we burned high-quality logs as well as wood briquettes in a conventional, manually fed mixed-fired boiler, under different operating parameters. Based on the evaluation of the measurement results, there is a significant difference in terms of recoverable energy and carbon monoxide emissions for the two fuels burned in the same device at different air supply parameters. Studies have shown that a constantly changing position of the draft control door has an adverse effect on carbon monoxide emissions as well as the energy produced. In the case of a constant draft door setting, the preset values that can be considered ideal for energy yield and CO emissions were determined for the two fuel types. The obtained results were compared with the requirements according to the MSZ EN 303-5 standard.

Facilitating the proper handling of water is one of the main challenges to overcome when trying to improve fuel cell performance. Specifically, enhanced removal of liquid water from the porous gas diffusion layers (GDLs) holds a lot of potential, but has proven to be non-trivial. A main contributor to this removal process is the gaseous transport of water following evaporation inside the GDL or catalyst layer domain. Vapor transport is desired over liquid removal, as the liquid water takes up pore space otherwise available for reactant gas supply to the catalytically active sites and opens up the possibility to remove the waste heat of the cell by evaporative cooling concepts. To better understand evaporative water removal from fuel cells and facilitate the evaporative cooling concept developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, the effect of gas speed (0.5−10 m/s), temperature (30−60 °C), and evaporation domain (0.8−10 mm) on the evaporation rate of water from a GDL (TGP-H-120, 10 wt% PT... [more]

In the construction of ecological civilization, green innovation has become an important driving force for the sustainable development of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper uses panel data of state-owned listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019 to explore mixed-ownership reform’s influence on the green transformation of SOEs and its specific mechanisms. The results show that the diversity of mixed shareholders, the depth of mixed equity, and the restriction of mixed equity significantly promote the SOEs’ green innovation. Moreover, there are distinctions in the impact of the shareholding ratio of heterogeneous shareholders on green innovation. Only the increase in the shareholding ratio of foreign shareholders has a positive correlation with green innovation. The mechanism tests indicate that the mixed-ownership reform plays a governance role in the green transformation of SOEs by optimizing the reasonable allocation of environmental protection subsidies and propelling environmenta... [more]

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) is considered as an efficient and constantly expanding eco-friendly methodology for thermochemical processing of high moisture waste biomass into solid biofuels and valuable carbonaceous materials. However, during HTC, a considerable amount of organics, initially present in the feedstock, are found in the process water (PW). PW recirculation is attracting an increasing interest in the hydrothermal process field as it offers the potential to increase the carbon recovery yield while increasing hydrochar energy density. PW recirculation can be considered as a viable method for the valorization and reuse of the HTC aqueous phase, both by reducing the amount of additional water used for the process and maximizing energy recovery from the HTC liquid residual fraction. In this work, the effects of PW recirculation, for different starting waste biomasses, on the properties of hydrochars and liquid phase products are reviewed. The mechanism of production and evo... [more]

Due to globalization and increased market competition, forwarding companies must focus on the optimization of their international transport activities and on cost reduction. The minimization of the amount and cost of fuel results in increased competition and profitability of the companies as well as the reduction of environmental damage. Nowadays, these aspects are particularly important. This research aims to develop a new optimization method for road freight transport costs in order to reduce the fuel costs and determine optimal fueling stations and to calculate the optimal quantity of fuel to refill. The mathematical method developed in this research has two phases. In the first phase the optimal, most cost-effective fuel station is determined based on the potential fuel stations. The specific fuel prices differ per fuel station, and the stations are located at different distances from the main transport way. The method developed in this study supports drivers’ decision-making regar... [more]

In this article, a novel dynamic economic load dispatch with emission based on a multi-objective model (MODEED) considering demand side management (DSM) is presented. Moreover, the investigation and evaluation of impacts of DSM for the next day are considered. In other words, the aim of economical load dispatch is the suitable and optimized planning for all power units considering different linear and non-linear constrains for power system and generators. In this model, different constrains such as losses of transformation network, impacts of valve-point, ramp-up and ramp-down, the balance of production and demand, the prohibited areas, and the limitations of production are considered as an optimization problem. The proposed model is solved by a novel modified multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm (MOABC). In order to analyze the effects of DSM on the supply side, the proposed MODEED is evaluated on different scenarios with or without DSM. Indeed, the proposed MOABC algorithm... [more]

Smart buildings use Internet of Things (IoT) sensors for monitoring indoor environmental parameters, such as temperature, humidity, luminosity, and air quality. Due to the huge amount of data generated by these sensors, data analytics and machine learning techniques are needed to extract useful and interesting insights, which provide the input for the building optimization in terms of energy-saving, occupants’ health and comfort. In this paper, we propose an IoT-based smart building (SB) solution for indoor environment management, which aims to provide the following main functionalities: monitoring of the room environmental parameters; detection of the number of occupants in the room; a cloud platform where virtual entities collect the data acquired by the sensors and virtual super entities perform data analysis tasks using machine learning algorithms; a control dashboard for the management and control of the building. With our prototype, we collected data for 10 days, and we built two... [more]

Brazil is a tropical country with continental dimensions and abundant solar resources that are still underutilized. However, solar energy is one of the most promising renewable sources in the country. The proper inspection of Photovoltaic (PV) solar plants is an issue of great interest for the Brazilian territory’s energy management agency, and advances in computer vision and deep learning allow automatic, periodic, and low-cost monitoring. The present research aims to identify PV solar plants in Brazil using semantic segmentation and a mosaicking approach for large image classification. We compared four architectures (U-net, DeepLabv3+, Pyramid Scene Parsing Network, and Feature Pyramid Network) with four backbones (Efficient-net-b0, Efficient-net-b7, ResNet-50, and ResNet-101). For mosaicking, we evaluated a sliding window with overlapping pixels using different stride values (8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256). We found that: (1) the models presented similar results, showing that the most... [more]

Energy poverty is a problem that affects all member states of the European Union to a varying degree, including Poland, where about 9% of the population is at risk of energy poverty. The article aims to show the changes in energy poverty in Poland in 2010−2018. The specific goal, however, is to evaluate government measures aimed at reducing energy poverty through investments based on renewable energy sources. To present changes in the level of energy poverty in 2010−2018, the authors proposed a new synthetic measure that unifies several different measures used by researchers and allows for a comprehensive assessment of this phenomenon. The conducted research showed that in 2010−2018 there was a slow but visible decrease in the level of energy poverty in Poland. In addition, the article indicates investments in renewable energy sources that may have a positive impact on reducing the scale of energy poverty in Poland. The programs implemented with national and EU public funds, which fina... [more]

The introduction of autonomous cars will help to improve road traffic safety, and the use of a cargo trailer improves the energy efficiency of transport. One of the critical (collision) road situations has been considered, where immediate counteraction is required in a space that has been only partly defined. This research work was aimed at determining the impact of the trajectory planning method and the values of some parameters of the control system on the feasibility of safe avoidance of an obstacle that has suddenly appeared. The obstacle is assumed to be a motor vehicle moving on a road intersection along a collision path in relation to the autonomous car-trailer unit (CT unit) travelling at high speed. Analysis of cooperation between several non-linear models (representing the car, trailer, tyre−road interaction, and driving controller) has been carried out. Mathematical models of the control system and the CT unit have been built. The process of selection of temporary and variab... [more]

It is popular that correlated seismic failures spread over the fault tree of a seismic probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) for a nuclear power plant (NPP). To avoid the calculational difficulty of core damage frequency (CDF), the fault tree has been simplified by replacing correlated seismic failures with one typical seismic failure by assuming a full correlation among the correlated seismic failures. Then, the approximate seismic CDF of a seismic single-unit PSA (SUPSA) has been calculated for decades with this simplified SUPSA fault tree. Furthermore, current seismic multi-unit PSAs (MUPSAs) have been performed with imperfect seismic MUPSA models that were generated by combining such imperfect seismic SUPSA fault trees. The authors of this study recently developed a method that can calculate an accurate seismic CDF by converting correlated seismic failures into seismic common cause failures (CCFs). In this study, accurate and imperfect MUPSA models were created and their seismic CD... [more]

One of the main benefits of Building Information Modelling is the capability of improving the decision-making process thanks performing what-if tests on digital twins of the building to be realized. Pairing BIM models to Building Energy Models allows designers to determine in advance the energy consumption of the building, improving sustainability of the construction. The challenge is to consider as many elements involved in the energy balance as possible and shuffling their parameters within a certain range. In this work, the automatic creation of a relevant set of design options to be analyzed for searching the optimum has been carried out. Firstly, the usual workflow that would be applied manually has been automatically followed by running scripts and codes, depending just on the initial setup given by the user. Although the procedure is very resource consuming, the main advancement relies in the reduction of the manual intervention and the possibility of creating large datasets of... [more]

The article presents the results of a study on the preparation and use of faba bean waste and potato peel pellets for energy purposes. Physical and mechanical characteristics (moisture, density, ash content) of faba bean waste and potato peel pellets were investigated. The largest fraction of flour was formed on a sieve with 1 mm holes: faba bean waste—28.2 ± 2.02 g, potato peels—29.09 ± 0.73 g. For this experiment, samples were taken by mixing faba bean waste (four variants) and potato peel in the ratio of 1:1; 1:2; 1:3; 1:4 by volume (12 samples). It was found in this study that the density of pellets (DM) ranged from 1226.22 ± 13.88 kgm−3 to 1349.79 ± 6.79 kgm−3. The pellet moisture ranged from 6.70 ± 0.04% to 3.64 ± 0.13%. The lower calorific value of dry fuel pellets ranged from 15.27 ± 0.43 MJkg−1 to 16.02 ± 0.50 MJkg−1. The ash content of the pellets ranged from 8.05 ± 0.57% to 14.21 ± 0.05%. The ST temperature of the experimentally measured mixture of faba bean waste and potato... [more]

Demand response has been widely developed during recent years to increase efficiency and decrease the cost in the electric power sector by shifting energy use, smoothening the load curve, and thus ensuring benefits for all participating parties. This paper introduces a Demand Response Alert Service (DRAS) that can optimize the interaction between the energy industry parties and end users by sending the minimum number of relatable alerts to satisfy the transformation of the load curve. The service creates appliance models for certain deferrable appliances based on past-usage measurements and prioritizes households according to the probability of the use of their appliances. Several variations of the appliance model are examined with respect to the probabilistic association of appliance usage on different days. The service is evaluated for a peak-shaving scenario when either one or more appliances per household are involved. The results demonstrate a significant improvement compared to a... [more]

Inexpensive carbon sources offering an alternative to glucose are searched for to reduce costs of docosahexaenoic acid production by microalgae. The use of waste glycerol seems substantiated and prospective in this case. The objective of this study was to determine the production yield of heterotrophic microalgae Schizochytrium sp. biomass and the efficiency of docosahexaenoic acid production in various types of cultures with waste glycerol. Cultivation conditions were optimized using the Plackett−Burman method and Response Surface Methodology. The highest technological performance was obtained in the fed-batch culture, where the concentration of Schizochytrium sp. biomass reached 103.44 ± 1.50 g/dm3, the lipid concentration in Schizochytrium sp. biomass was at 48.85 ± 0.81 g/dm3, and the docosahexaenoic acid concentration at 21.98 ± 0.36 g/dm3. The highest docosahexaenoic acid content, accounting for 61.76 ± 3.77% of total fatty acids, was determined in lipid bodies of the Schizochytr... [more]

This paper presents different methods for the design of a hand-launchable, fixed wing, fuel cell-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to maximize flight endurance during steady level flight missions. The proposed design methods include the development of physical models for different propulsion system components. The performance characteristics of the aircraft are modeled through empirical contributing analyses in which each analysis corresponds to an aircraft subsystem. The contributing analyses are collected to form a design structure matrix which is included into a multi-disciplinary analysis to solve for the design variables over a defined design space. The optimal solution is found using a comprehensive optimization tool developed for long endurance flight missions. Optimization results showed a significant improvement in UAV flight endurance that reached up to 475 min with take-off ratio equals to 59 min/kg. Wind tunnel and bench-top tests and HiL simulation tests are performed... [more]

Coal consumption and CO2 emissions are the major concerns of the 21st century. Solar aided (coal-fired) power generation (SAPG) is paid more and more attention globally, due to the lesser coal rate and initial cost than the original coal-fired power plant and CSP technology respectively. In this paper, the off-design dynamic performance simulation model of a solar aided coal-fired power plant is established. A 330 MW subcritical coal-fired power plant is taken as a case study. On a typical day, three various collector area solar fields are integrated into the coal-fired power plant. By introducing the solar heat, the variations of system performances are analyzed at design load, 75% load, and 50% load. Analyzed parameters with the change of DNI include the thermal oil mass flow rate, the mass flow rate of feed water heated by the solar energy, steam extraction mass flow rate, coal consumption, and the plant thermal efficiency. The research results show that, as DNI increases over a day... [more]

Solute tracer tests are an established method for the characterization of flow and transport processes in fractured rock. Such tests are often monitored with borehole sensors which offer high temporal sampling and signal to noise ratio, but only limited spatial deployment possibilities. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is sensitive to electromagnetic properties, and can thus be used to monitor the transport behavior of electrically conductive tracers. Since GPR waves can sample large volumes that are practically inaccessible by traditional borehole sensors, they are expected to increase the spatial resolution of tracer experiments. In this manuscript, we describe two approaches to infer quantitative hydrological data from time-lapse borehole reflection GPR experiments with saline tracers in fractured rock. An important prerequisite of our method includes the generation of GPR data difference images. We show how the calculation of difference radar breakthrough curves (DRBTC) allows to ret... [more]