Thermal transport and chemical conversion in single reacting sorbent particles

The effects of particle size and carbon dioxide concentration on chemical conversion in engineered spherical particles undergoing calcium oxide looping are investigated. Particles are thermochemically cycled in a furnace under different carbon dioxide concentrations. Changes in composition due to chemical reactions are measured using thermogravimetric analysis. Gas composition at the furnace exit is evaluated with mass spectroscopy. A numerical model of thermal transport phenomena developed previously is adapted to match the physical system investigated in the present study. The model is used to elucidate effects of reacting medium characteristics on particle temperature and reaction extent. Experimental and numerical results show that (1) an increase in particle size results in a decrease in carbonation extent, and (2) the carbonation step consists of fast and slow reaction regimes. The reaction rates in the fast and slow carbonation regimes increase with increasing carbon dioxide concentration. The effect of carbon dioxide concentration and the distinction between the fast and slow regimes become more pronounced with increasing particle size.     

No-Reference Video Quality Assessment using novel hybrid features and two-stage hybrid regression for score level fusion

This paper presents a novel No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR-VQA) model that utilizes proposed 3D steerable wavelet transform-based Natural Video Statistics (NVS) features as well as human perceptual features. Additionally, we proposed a novel two-stage regression scheme that significantly improves the overall performance of quality estimation. In the first stage, transform-based NVS and human perceptual features are separately passed through the proposed hybrid regression scheme: Support Vector Regression (SVR) followed by Polynomial curve fitting. The two visual quality scores predicted from the first stage are then used as features for the similar second stage. This predicts the final quality scores of distorted videos by achieving score level fusion. Extensive experiments were conducted using five authentic and four synthetic distortion databases. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other published state-of-the-art benchmark methods on synthetic distortion databases and is among the top performers on authentic distortion databases. The source code is available at https://github.com/anishVNIT/two-stage-vqa.     

No-reference quality assessment of dynamic sports videos based on a spatiotemporal motion model

This paper proposes an approach to improve the performance of no-reference video quality assessment for sports videos with dynamic motion scenes using an efficient spatiotemporal model. In the proposed method, we divide the video sequences into video blocks and apply a 3D shearlet transform that can efficiently extract primary spatiotemporal features to capture dynamic natural motion scene statistics from the incoming video blocks. The concatenation of a deep residual bidirectional gated recurrent neural network and logistic regression is used to learn the spatiotemporal correlation more robustly and predict the perceptual quality score. In addition, conditional video block-wise constraints are incorporated into the objective function to improve quality estimation performance for the entire video. The experimental results show that the proposed method extracts spatiotemporal motion information more effectively and predicts the video quality with higher accuracy than the conventional no-reference video quality assessment methods.     

Techno-economical evaluations of decarbonized hydrogen production based on direct biogas conversion using thermo-chemical looping cycles

Hydrogen production by biogas conversion represent a promising solution for reduction of fossil CO₂ emissions. In this work, a detailed techno-economic analysis was performed for decarbonized hydrogen production based on biogas conversion using calcium and chemical looping cycles. All evaluated concepts generate 100,000 Nm³/h high purity hydrogen. As reference cases, the biogas steam reforming design without decarbonization and with CO₂ capture by gas-liquid chemical absorption were also considered. The results show that iron-based chemical looping design has higher energy efficiency compared with the gas-liquid absorption case by 2.3 net percentage points as well as a superior carbon capture rate (99% vs. 65%). The calcium looping case shows a lower efficiency than chemical scrubbing, with about 2.5 net percentage points, but the carbon capture rate is higher (95% vs. 65%). The hydrogen production cost increases with decarbonization, the calcium looping shows the most favourable situation (37.14 €/MWh) compared to the non-capture steam reforming case (33 €/MWh) and MDEA and iron looping cases (about 42 €/MWh). The calcium looping case has the lowest CO₂ avoidance cost (10 €/t) followed by iron looping (20 €/t) and MDEA (31 €/t) cases.     

Investigation of the redox performance of pyrite cinder calcined at different temperature in chemical looping combustion

As an industrial solid waste, pyrite cinder exhibited excellent reactivity and cycle stability in chemical looping combustion. Prior to the experiment, oxygen carriers often experienced a high temperature calcination process to stabilize the physico-chemical properties, which presented significant influence on the redox performance of oxygen carriers. However, the effect of calcination temperature on the cyclic reaction performance of pyrite cinder has not been studied in detail. In this work, the effect of calcination temperature on the redox activity and attrition characteristic of pyrite cinder were studied in a fluidized-bed reactor using CH₄ as fuel. A series of pyrite cinder samples were prepared by controlling the calcination temperature. The redox activity and attrition rate of the obtained pyrite cinder samples were investigated deeply. The results showed that calcination temperature displayed significant impact on the redox performance of pyrite cinder. Considering CH₄ conversion (80%–85%) and attrition resistance, the pyrite cinder calcined at 1050?℃ presented excellent redox properties. In the whole experiment process, the CO₂ selectivity of the pyrite cinder samples were not affected by the calcination temperature and were still close to 100%. The results can provide reference for optimizing the calcination temperature of pyrite cinder during chemical looping process.     

Numerical Investigation of the Capture of Polydisperse Particles by Charged Droplets

The capture of particles by charged droplets was simulated by considering the electrostatic interactions of droplet-droplet and droplet-particle. The results indicate that the electrostatic repulsion between droplets leads to a dynamic accumulation mode of particles. However, the droplet spacing has an insignificant effect on the capture efficiency when the electrostatic deposition predominates. The increase of droplet charge remarkably improves the capture efficiency, in which the capture of fine particles accounts for the largest proportion. Compared to the droplet charge, the droplet size shows a limited improvement in the capture efficiency. Reducing the droplet velocity prolongs the capture time instead of enhancing the capture capacity per unit time, thereby improving capture efficiency.     

A triptycene derived hypercrosslinked polymer for gas capture and separation applications

This work describes facile synthesis of a porous polymeric material ( T-HCP ) using readily available reagents. Specifically, T-HCP is a thermally stable and hypercrosslinked polymer (HCP) that is essentially microporous with a high BET specific surface area (940 m² g^?1). Triptycene based polymers are known to feature internal free volume. Thus, the incorporation of triptycene units and extensive crosslinking by an external cross-linker in T-HCP makes it a promising adsorbent for small gas capture applications. Experimental results show that T-HCP demonstrated good CO₂ capture capacity of 132 mg g^?1 (273 K, 1 bar). Molecular hydrogen storage capacity of T-HCP is estimated to be 17.7 mg g^?1 (77 K, 1 bar). T-HCP revealed high CO₂/N₂ selectivity (up to 63) as well as promising CO₂/CH₄ (up to 9.1) selectivity suggesting its potential applicability for CO₂ separation from flue and natural gases.     

硼中子俘获治疗加速器ECR质子源电磁场仿真设计

电子回旋共振(ECR)质子源具有可给流强高、亮度高、可靠性高、使用频率高、易维护、小型化等优点，因而被硼中子俘获治疗(BNCT)装置的直线加速器所采用。本文利用CST软件对2.45 GHz ECR质子源进行优化设计。优化后ECR质子源的等离子体发生器腔体的尺寸为101.12 mm×45.00 mm，给出了脊波导耦合器的最优尺寸参数，使等离子体发生器腔体内电场强度提高为普通波导的4.5倍。通过Opera-3D对ECR质子源的引出电极结构进行了仿真计算，并给出了优化参数。另外，初步设计了质子源的线圈磁铁系统，优化了磁场分布。本文结果为质子源的研制提供了数据。     

负径向电场对带电粒子俘获率影响的数值模拟

本文采用数值方法求解Grad-Shafranov方程反演EAST典型长脉冲放电实验(炮号33068)的平衡位形和磁场分布，进而结合粒子在托卡马克电磁场中的运动方程，模拟氘离子在负径向电场存在时的运动轨迹，并统计不同负径向电场下的氘离子俘获率。结果表明：随负径向电场的增大，氘离子轨迹由扩张通行轨迹向外翻香蕉轨迹再向内翻香蕉轨迹，最后向压缩通行轨迹演变；氘离子俘获率随负径向电场的增大而减小，氘离子初始速度越小，其变化越大。     

Zeolite imidazolate framework (ZIF)-based mixed matrix membranes for CO2 separation: A review

Mixed matrix membranes (MMMs), which combine the good separation performance of inorganic materials with the low cost of polymers, have emerged as a research hotspot for gas separation membranes. Zeolite imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) are widely used as fillers to prepare MMMs owing to their advantageous characteristics, such as adjustable pore channels, unsaturated sites, and easy functionalization. For MMMs, three directions can be employed as criteria for improvement compared with pristine polymeric membranes. In this article, the progress of ZIF-based MMMs is reviewed from the aspects of sole-ZIF-based MMMs and modified ZIF-based MMMs. Both strategies improve the separation performance through different improvement directions and mechanisms. Our analysis shows that the synergistic effect of the modified filler can change the structure of the membranes, such as by improving the filler–polymer interface voids, which provides a foundation to overcome the trade-off effect to a certain extent. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2020 , 137, 48968.