Technical and economic analysis of solvent-based lithium-ion electrode drying with water and NMP

Processing lithium-ion battery (LIB) electrode dispersions with water as the solvent during primary drying offers many advantages over N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP). An in-depth analysis of the comparative drying costs of LIB electrodes is discussed for both NMP- and water-based dispersion processing in terms of battery pack $/kWh. Electrode coating manufacturing and capital equipment cost savings are compared for water vs. conventional NMP organic solvent processing. A major finding of this work is that the total electrode manufacturing costs, whether water- or NMP-based, contribute about 8–9% of the total pack cost. However, it was found that up to a 2?×?reduction in electrode processing (drying and solvent recovery) cost can be expected along with a $3–6?M savings in associated plant capital equipment (for a plant producing 100,000 10-kWh Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) batteries) using water as the electrode solvent. This paper shows a different perspective in that the most important benefits of aqueous electrode processing actually revolve around capital equipment savings and environmental stewardship and not processing cost savings.     

Development of a low-carbon,healthy and innovative value-added riceberry rice product through life cycle design

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Life cycle assessment was applied to a riceberry rice product to support decisions on the development of an innovative, healthy, and low-carbon product...     

Assessing environmentally sustainable practices of smallholder highland farmers: a case study of maize production in Northern Thailand

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Promotion of sustainable maize production in Northern Thailand, the country’s largest maize-producing region, is crucial to securing the supply...     

On the Performance of Phase I Dispersion Control Charts for Process Monitoring

Control charts are usually implemented in two phases: the retrospective phase (phase I) and the monitoring phase (phase II). The performance of any phase II control chart structure depends on the preciseness of the control limits obtained from the phase I analysis. In statistical process control, the performance of phase I dispersion charts has mainly been investigated for normal or contaminated normal distributions of the quality characteristic of interest. Little work has been carried out to investigate the performance of a wide range of possible phase I dispersion charts for processes following non‐normal distributions. The current study deals with the proper choice of a control chart for the evaluation of process dispersion in phase I. We have analyzed the performance of a wide range of dispersion control charts, including two distribution‐free structures. The performance of the control charts is evaluated in terms of probability to signal, under normal and non‐normal process setups. These results will be useful for quality control practitioners in their selection of a phase I control chart. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On a class of mixed EWMA-CUSUM median control charts for process monitoring

Monitoring of any manufacturing, production, or industrial process can be controlled and improved by removing these special cause of variations using control charts. Shewhart-type control charts are effective to control a large amount of special variations, whereas, cumulative sum (CUSUM) and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) charts detect small and moderate variations efficiently in the process parameters. Monitoring of location parameter can be done with mean control charts under the assumption that the parameters are known or correctly estimated from in-control samples and data are free from outliers (but in practice data occasionally have outliers). In this study, we have proposed generalized mixed EWMA-CUSUM median control charts structures for known and unknown parameters based on auxiliary variables for detecting shifts in process location parameter. The proposed charts are compared with the corresponding charts for the mean, based on contaminated and uncontaminated data. Different performance measures are used to evaluate the performance of proposed control charts and revealed through results that the median-based charts are more sensitive to detect a shift in process location parameter in the presence of outliers. An illustrative example using real data is also shown for practical consideration.     

Combined effect of microwave and ultrasonication treatments on the quality and stability of sugarcane juice during cold storage

The main objective of this study was to investigate the combined effect of microwave (MW) treatment (2450 MHz for 120 s), ultrasonication (US) (24 KHz, 20 °C for 20 min) and combined treatment (MW-US) on the quality and stability of sugarcane juice (SCJ) during 21 days of storage at 4 °C. The effect of the treatments and storage time on physicochemical, bioactive compounds (total phenolic, flavonoids and ascorbic acid content) and microbial analysis of SCJ. No significant (P < 0.05) changes were observed in °Brix, while there was an increase in pH and a decrease in titratable acidity in all treatments. Compared to US and MW, MW-US treatments was more effective in preserving colour attributes, total phenolic and flavonoids contents, ascorbic acid and antioxidant capacities of the SCJ during storage. The results regarding the microbial count indicate that more microbial safety and longer shelf life was achieved by MW-US. MW-US treatment is an effective technology for improving the safety and shelf life of SCJ by minimising quality changes, retaining bioactive compounds and reducing microbial growth during storage.     

Amine-terminated aromatic and semi-aromatic hyperbranched polyamides: synthesis and characterization

A facile synthetic approach to aromatic and semiaromatic amine-terminated hyperbranched polyamides via direct polymerization of triamine (B₃) with different diacid chlorides (A₂) was explored. An aromatic triamine, 1,3,5-tris(4′-aminophenylcarbamoyl)benzene (TAPCB), was synthesized and monomers were characterized by elemental analysis, FTIR, ¹H and ¹³C NMR spectroscopy. Finally, the polycondensation reaction of TAPCB with terephthaloyl chloride (TPC), isophthaloyl chloride (IPC), sebacoyl chloride (SC) and adipoyl chloride (AC) resulted in the preparation of four hyperbranched polyamides i.e., HBPA 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. FTIR and ¹H NMR analyses confirmed the structures of the ensuing polymers and DB was found between 0.51–0.55. These thermally stable amorphous HBPAs were soluble in polar aprotic solvents at room temperature having glass transition temperatures (T_g) between 138–198 °C. Inherent viscosities (η_inh) and weight average molecular weights (M_w) were in the range of 0.27–0.35 dL/g and 1.3 × 10⁴–2.7 × 10⁴, respectively. Future prospects are envisaged.     

Multimodal image/video fusion rule using generalized pixel significance based on statistical properties of the neighborhood

Image fusion has been receiving increasing attention in the research community with the aim of investigating general formal solutions to a wide spectrum of applications such as multifocus, multiexposure, multispectral ( $IR$ -visible) and multimodal medical (CT and MRI) image and video fusion. While there exist many fusion techniques for each of these applications, it is difficult to formulate a common fusion technique that works equally well for all these applications. This is mainly because of the different characteristics of the images involved in various applications and the correspondingly different requirements on the fused image. In this work, we propose a common generalized fusion framework for all these classes, based on the statistical properties of local neighborhood of a pixel. As the eigenvalue of the unbiased estimate of the covariance matrix of an image block depends on the strength of edges in that block, we propose to employ it to compute a quantity we call as the significance of a pixel. This generalized pixel significance in turn can be used as a measure of the useful information content in that block, and hence can be used in the fusion process. Several data sets were fused to compare the results with various recently published methods. The analysis shows that for all the image types into consideration, the proposed methods improve the quality of the fused image, both visually and quantitatively, by preserving all the relevant information.