A feasibility study of improved heat recovery and excess heat export at a Swedish chemical complex site

New ambitious targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased energy efficiency in industry and in the stationary energy sector provide incentives for industrial plants to investigate opportunities for substantially increasing recovery and use of excess heat from their operations. This work investigates the economic feasibility of recovering industrial excess heat at a Swedish chemical complex site for increased site internal heat recovery or export to a regional district heating (DH) network. The work is based on investment cost data estimated in previous work by the authors. A site‐wide heat collection and distribution system based on circulating hot water was envisioned, which is also connected to a regional DH network. With the help of multiobjective optimization, the optimal heat contributions from the individual plant sites were identified that minimize the total system cost for a large range of options involving different quantities of internally recovered heat and heat export to the DH system. A payback period analysis was conducted together with a risk assessment to take into account uncertainty regarding utility steam production cost and heat sale price. The results of the study indicate that a payback period of around 3 years can be achieved for a number of cases in which 30% to 50% of the total excess heat produced by the site plants is recovered. Although it seems more profitable to recover heat at the site rather than exporting heat to the DH system only, profitability appears to be maximized by hybrid solutions that allow a share of the excess heat to be sold to the DH system and some heat to be recovered at the site simultaneously.     

Photophysics of Two-Dimensional Perovskites—Learning from Metal Halide Substitution

2D perovskites offers a rich playing field to explore exciton physics and they possess a great potential for a variety of opto-electronic applications. Whilst their photophysics shows intricate interactions of excitons with the lattice, most reports have so far relied on single compound studies. With the exception of variations of the organic spacer cations, the effect of constituent substitution on the photophysics and the nature of emitting species, in particular, have remained largely under-explored. Here PEA₂PbBr₄, PEA₂PbI₄, and PEA₂SnI₄ (where PEA stands for phenylethylammonoium) are studied through a variety of optical spectroscopy techniques to reveal a complex set of excitonic transitions at low temperature. Weak high-energy features are attributed to vibronic transitions breaking Kasha's, for which the responsible phonons cannot be accessed through simple Raman spectroscopy. Bright peaks at lower energy are due to two distinct electronic states, of which the upper is a convolution of the free exciton and a localized dark state and the lower is attributed to recombination involving shallow defects. This study offers deeper insights into the photophysics of 2D perovskites through compositional substitution and highlights critical limits to the communities’ current understanding of processes in these compounds.     

Environmentally Benign Oxidation of Alkylphenols to p-Benzoquinones: A Comparative Study of Various Ti-Containing Catalysts

Catalytic properties of Ti-containing porous solids were compared in the oxidation of 2,3,6-trimethylphenol (TMP) with H₂O₂ to produce 2,3,5-trimethyl-1,4-benzoquinone (TMBQ, vitamin E key intermediate). Mesoporous titanium–silicates with di(oligo)nuclear Ti centers, metal–organic framework MIL-125 and amorphous TiO₂ demonstrated 100 % selectivity toward TMBQ. Titanium–silicates prepared by evaporation-induced self-assembly revealed superior performance in terms of product yield and catalyst reusability.     

A High-Level Approach to Analyze the Effects of Soft Errors on Lossless Compression Algorithms

In space applications, the data logging sub-system often requires compression to cope with large amounts of data as well as with limited storage and communication capabilities. The usage of Commercial off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware components is becoming more common, since they are particularly suitable to meet high performance requirements and also to cut the cost with respect to space qualified ones. On the other side, given the characteristics of the space environment, the usage of COTS components makes radiation-induced soft errors highly probable. The purpose of this work is to analyze a set of lossless compression algorithms in order to compare their robustness against soft errors. The proposed approach works on the unhardened version of the programs, aiming to estimate their intrinsic robustness. The main contribution of the work lies in the investigation of the possibility of performing an early comparison between different compression algorithms at a high level, by only considering their data structures (corresponding to program variables). This approach is virtually agnostic of the downstream implementation details. This means that the proposed approach aims to perform a comparison (in terms of robustness against soft errors) between the considered programs before the final computing platform is defined. The results of the high-level analysis can also be used to collect useful information to optimize the hardening phase. Experimental results based on the OpenRISC processor are reported. They suggest that when properly adopted, the proposed approach makes it possible to perform a comparison between a set of compression algorithms, even with a very limited knowledge of the target computing system.     

Hierarchical architecture for motion and depth estimations based on color cues

Journal of Real-Time Image Processing - This work presents an FPGA implementation of a highly parallel architecture for the motion and disparity estimations of color images. Our system implements...     

Simplified Approach Based on Polynomial Equations to Predict the Permeability of Micro‐perforated Polymeric Films

A simplified approach to predict the mass transport properties of micro‐perforated films was presented in this work. In particular, the proposed mathematical model was based on a second‐degree polynomial function. Different types of micro‐perforated films with two thicknesses (35 and 25 µm) were tested for gas and water vapour permeability, under proper conditions. The films differed in both number of holes per unit area and hole diameter. Corresponding non‐perforated films were also tested. The experimental data obtained were used to validate the model. Moreover, the surface response plot of the interactions between hole diameter and number of holes per area relative to oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide permeability were determined. Results of the mean relative deviation modulus (E%) between the experimental and predicted data confirmed the ability of the proposed model to predict the permeability of micro‐perforated films. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.