A survey on tracking control of unmanned underwater vehicles: Experiments-based approach

This paper aims to provide a review of the conceptual design and theoretical framework of the main control schemes proposed in the literature for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Additionally, the objective of the paper is not only to present an overview of the recent control architectures validated on UUVs but also to give detailed experimental-based comparative studies of the proposed control schemes. To this end, the main control schemes, including proportional–integral–derivative (PID) based, sliding mode control (SMC) based, adaptive based, observation-based, model predictive control (MPC) based, combined control techniques, are revisited in order to consolidate the principal efforts made in the last two decades by the automatic control community in the field. Besides implementing some key tracking control schemes from the classification mentioned above on Leonard UUV, several real-time experimental scenarios are tested, under different operating conditions, to evaluate and compare the efficiency of the selected tracking control schemes. Furthermore, we point out potential investigation gaps and future research trends at the end of this survey.     

Experimental and numerical investigations on the heat production and thermal storage characteristics of rapid preparation amorphous powder activated coke

The heat production and thermal storage characteristics of rapid-preparation amorphous powder activated coke (RAC) were investigated. RAC was prepared by using a drop-tube reactor system. The natural oxidation characteristics of RAC were studied through combined TG–FTIR analysis and temperature-programmed experiment. Experimental results showed that CO and CO₂ were the main oxidation products of RAC in air, and that the oxidation reaction was in accordance with the Arrhenius equation and law of mass action. Thermal storage characteristics were studied through computational fluid dynamics simulation. The maximum excess temperature θ_max increases linearly with the increase of the initial temperature. The concentration fields of the products show that CO₂ is mainly concentrated in the upper part of the coke bin, and the CO generated by CO₂ at high temperature is mainly concentrated in the central part of the coke bin.     

山苍子精油与食品添加剂对水产品腐败菌的联合抑制作用研究

目的研究山苍子精油与食品添加剂对水产品腐败菌的联合抑制作用。方法采用气相色谱-质谱联用法对山苍子精油的化学组分进行分析;然后以腐败希瓦氏菌SM-R2、莓实假单胞菌SM-R1、摩拉维亚假单胞菌SM-T1为研究对象,采用微量肉汤稀释法研究5种食品添加剂的抑菌活性;通过棋盘稀释法研究山苍子精油与聚赖氨酸及柠檬酸的联合抑菌效应。结果从山苍子精油中检测出16种单体化合物,且主要成分为柠檬醛,相对含量为62.7%;天然防腐剂聚赖氨酸和柠檬酸对3株受试腐败菌株具有显著抑制作用,最小抑菌浓度分别为0.25、2 mg/mL;山苍子精油与聚赖氨酸联合抑菌时具有相加效应。结论将山苍子精油与聚赖氨酸联合使用具有相加效应,能有效扩大精油抑菌范围并减少其使用量,有望应用于冷藏水产品的绿色保鲜。     

Multi-objective optimization for efficient modeling and improvement of the high temperature PEM fuel cell based Micro-CHP system

Fuel cells due to different useful features such as high efficiency, low pollution, noiselessness, lack of moving parts, variety of fuels used and wide range of capacity of these sources can be the main reasons for their tendency to use them in different applications. In this study, the application of a high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell (HT-PEMFC) in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant has been analyzed. This study presents a multi-objective optimization method to provide an optimal design parameters for the HT-PEMFC based micro-CHP during a 14,000 h lifetime by considering the effect of degradation. The purpose is to optimize the net electrical efficiency and the electrical power generation. For the optimization process, different design parameters including auxiliary to process fuel ratio, anodic stoichiometric ratio, steam to carbon ratio, and fuel partialization level have been employed. For optimization, A new technique based on Tent mapping and Lévy flight mechanism, called improved collective animal behavior (ICAB) algorithm has been employed to solve the algorithm premature convergence shortcoming. Experimental results of the proposed method has been applied to the data of a practical plant (Sidera30) for analyzing the efficiency of the proposed ICAB based system, it is compared with normal condition and another genetic algorithm based method for this purpose. Final results showed that the difference between the maximum electrical power production under normal condition and ICAB based condition changes from 2.5 kW when it starts and reaches to its maximum value, 3.0 kW, after 14,000 h lifetime. It is also concluded that the cumulative average for the normal and the ICAB based algorithm are 24.01 kW and 27.04 kW, respectively which showed about 3.03 kW cumulative differences.     

Evaluation of grinding media wear-rate by a combined grinding method

It is well-known that lab tests on wear-rate of grinding media cannot precisely represent its industrial performance due to complex grinding conditions. Nevertheless the lab data provides reference to the industrial data. Therefore, a reproducible test method on wear-rate in lab is necessary.By providing detailed data, this paper challenges the traditional wear-rate testing methods. Two commonly used methods on wear-rate test, self-wear in water and grinding with mineral slurry, are respectively employed. However, obvious fluctuation of wear-rate/time curves indicates neither of the two normal methods is reliable.This paper introduces a wear-rate testing method on lab scale which combines self-wear in water and grinding with mineral slurry. By this method, some repeatable wear-rate/time curves are displayed after a few hours. The mechanism will be discussed in detail in this paper.     

Application of an empirical model in CFD simulations to predict the local high temperature corrosion potential in biomass fired boilers

To gain reliable data for the development of an empirical model for the prediction of the local high temperature corrosion potential in biomass fired boilers, online corrosion probe measurements have been carried out. The measurements have been performed in a specially designed fixed bed/drop tube reactor in order to simulate a superheater boiler tube under well-controlled conditions. The investigated boiler steel 13CrMo4-5 is commonly used as steel for superheater tube bundles in biomass fired boilers. Within the test runs the flue gas temperature at the corrosion probe has been varied between 625 °C and 880 °C, while the steel temperature has been varied between 450 °C and 550 °C to simulate typical current and future live steam temperatures of biomass fired steam boilers. To investigate the dependence on the flue gas velocity, variations from 2 m·s⁻¹ to 8 m·s⁻¹ have been considered. The empirical model developed fits the measured data sufficiently well. Therefore, the model has been applied within a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of flue gas flow and heat transfer to estimate the local corrosion potential of a wood chips fired 38 MW steam boiler. Additionally to the actual state analysis two further simulations have been carried out to investigate the influence of enhanced steam temperatures and a change of the flow direction of the final superheater tube bundle from parallel to counter-flow on the local corrosion potential.     

Recent Developments in Integrated Solar Combined Cycle Power Plants

Global concern for depleting fossil fuel reserves have been compelling for evolving power generation options using renewable energy sources. The solar energy happens to be a potential source for running the power plants among renewable energy sources. Integrated Solar Combined Cycle(ISCC) power plants have gained popularity among the thermal power plants. Traditional ISCC power plants use Direct Steam Generation(DSG) approach. However, with the DSG method, the ISCC plant’s overall thermal efficiency does not increase significantly due to variations in the availability of solar energy. Thermal Energy Storage(TES) systems when integrated into the solar cycle can address such issues related to energy efficiency, process flexibility, reducing intermittency during non-solar hours. This review work focuses and discusses the developments in various components of the ISCC system including its major cycles and related parameters. The main focus is on CSP technologies, Heat Transfer Fluid(HTF), and Phase Change Material(PCM) used for thermal energy storage. Further, study includes heat enhancement methods with HTF and latent heat storage system. This study will be beneficial to the power plant professionals intending to modify the solar-based Combined Cycle Power Plant(CCPP) and to retrofit the existing Natural Gas Combined Cycle(NGCC) plant with the advanced solar cycle.     

An unsupervised approach to generating generic summaries of documents

We present an optimization-based unsupervised approach to automatic document summarization. In the proposed approach, text summarization is modeled as a Boolean programming problem. This model generally attempts to optimize three properties, namely, (1) relevance: summary should contain informative textual units that are relevant to the user; (2) redundancy: summaries should not contain multiple textual units that convey the same information; and (3) length: summary is bounded in length. The approach proposed in this paper is applicable to both tasks: single- and multi-document summarization. In both tasks, documents are split into sentences in preprocessing. We select some salient sentences from document(s) to generate a summary. Finally, the summary is generated by threading all the selected sentences in the order that they appear in the original document(s). We implemented our model on multi-document summarization task. When comparing our methods to several existing summarization methods on an open DUC2005 and DUC2007 data sets, we found that our method improves the summarization results significantly. This is because, first, when extracting summary sentences, this method not only focuses on the relevance scores of sentences to the whole sentence collection, but also the topic representative of sentences. Second, when generating a summary, this method also deals with the problem of repetition of information. The methods were evaluated using ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4 metrics. In this paper, we also demonstrate that the summarization result depends on the similarity measure. Results of the experiment showed that combination of symmetric and asymmetric similarity measures yields better result than their use separately.     

Diversity of Biogas Plant Realizations

A techno‐economic analysis for four different types of biogas plant realizations was performed, including one biogas biorefinery concept. For each concept detail, a process flow diagram was created. Mass and energy balances were estimated. The net present value and payback were calculated for each concept for a better feasibility understanding. The results showed that with the used expensive substrate, namely, wheat straw, the obtained paybacks appeared to be more than 100 years. Sensitivity analysis was done for the price range of a substrate. Critical factors were defined to improve feasibility.