Ti alkoxide-based catalyst system in selective ethylene dimerization: High performance through modifying by alkylsilanes

Butene-1 production through a selective ethylene dimerization is one of the largest industrial processes, which is catalyzed by homogeneous catalyst system. The common industrial catalyst system is comprised of Ti alkoxide-based catalysts in combination with AlEt₃ as an activator. In this study, the alkylsilanes were used as novel improving agents in the catalyst system for highly selective ethylene dimerization to butene-1. The nature and concentration of alkylsilanes on the dimerization rate, catalyst yield, by-product production, and selectivity to butene-1 were investigated in detail. It was found that alkylsilanes improved the productivity and selectivity of the catalyst. Moreover, the content of the solid by-product considerably decreased. The performance of the modified catalyst system was noticeably higher than that of the nonmodified one. Totally, it was proved that alkylsilanes could play a modifying role in the selective ethylene catalytic dimerization process.     

Age-based anonymity: a randomized routing approach to communication unobservability

Providing anonymous communication on networks of interconnected computers is an active area of research which aims to enhance the privacy of the users of such networks. Communication unobservability, stronger property compared to anonymity, attempts to guarantee that legitimate messages are not discernible from dummy traffic. A network with an active global adversary is one which it is assumed that all nodes in the network are potentially being monitored at all times, and also that at any time any node could be an adversary. This paper introduces a set of anonymous system design requirements for providing enhanced communication unobservability. A new anonymous networking system was designed based on these requirements to provide both sender and receiver anonymity. The proposed system has a structured peer-to-peer network architecture and a randomized routing algorithm to obfuscate the detection of communication paths and the message routing patterns. An age-based method is proposed to prevent even the first node after the sender from identifying the original sender. A simulation program was designed and implemented to test the proposed system. The effect of different parameters on the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using a simulation program.     

Estimation of oil and gas properties in petroleum production and processing operations using rigorous model

Wellhead chokes are widely used in the petroleum industry. Owning to the high sensitivity of oil and gas production to choke size, an accurate correlation to specify choke performance is vitally important. The aim of this contribution was to develop effective relationships among the liquid flow rate, gas liquid ratio, flowing wellhead pressure, and surface wellhead choke size using the support vector machines (SVMs). The accurate data set was gathered from the 15 different fields containing 100 production samples from the vertical wells at wide ranges of wellhead choke sizes. This computational model was compared with the previous developed correlations in order to investigate its applicability for subcritical two phase flow regimes through wellhead chokes. Results confirmed amazing capability of the SVM to predict liquid flow rates. The value of R² obtained was 0.9998 for the SVM model. This developed predictive tool can be of massive value for petroleum engineer to have accurate estimations of liquid flow rates through wellhead chocks.     

Modeling of viscosity for mixtures of Athabasca bitumen and heavy n-alkane with LSSVM algorithm

The resources of heavy oil and bitumen are more than those of conventional light crude oil in the world. Diluting the bitumen with liquid solvent can decrease viscosity and increase the empty space between molecules. Tetradecane is a candidate as liquid solvent to dilute the bitumen. Owning to the sensitivity of enhanced oil recovery process, the accurate approximation for the viscosity of aforementioned mixture is important to decrease uncertainty. The aim of this study was to develop an effective relation between the viscosity of Athabasca bitumen and heavy n-alkane mixtures based on temperature, pressure, and weight percentage of n-tetradecane using the least square support vector machine. This computational model was compared with the previous developed correlation and its accuracy was confirmed. The value of R² and MSE obtained 1.00 and 1.02 for this model, respectively. This developed predictive tool can be applied as an accurate estimation for any mixture of heavy oil with liquid solvent.     

A novel legitimacy preserving data hiding scheme based on LAS compressed code of VQ index tables

Data hiding is a technique for secret and secure data storing and transmission that embeds data into a media such as an image, audio, video and so on, with minimal quality degradation of the media. Some developed data hiding schemes are reversible. Reversibility property allows the media to be recovered completely after extraction of the embedded data. Vector Quantization (VQ)-based image data hiding is one of the most popular study areas in the literature. However, most VQ-based reversible data hiding schemes generate non-legitimate codes as output. In other words output codes generated by such schemes could not be decoded by the conventional VQ or VQ based decoders and may arouse the attention of interceptors. On the other hand, the existing VQ based reversible data hiding schemes that generate legitimate VQ codes as output, suffer from low capacity and poor quality of stego-image. In this paper a novel reversible data hiding scheme for VQ-compressed images based on locally adaptive data compression scheme (LAS) is proposed. Unlike other schemes, the proposed scheme doesn’t change the VQ indices; data is embedded by choosing one of the possible ways to encode each index. As a result, in comparison with the schemes that embed data by index replacement, in the proposed scheme no extra distortion is made by data embedding and the outputted codes are compatible with the conventional LAS decoder. These properties help to hide the existence of secret data and make the scheme suitable for steganography. Moreover, a framework to combine the proposed scheme with some other schemes to improve their capacity and embedding side information is proposed. Since LAS is a general data compression scheme, the proposed scheme could be used to embed data into any data formats. All existing LAS based data hiding schemes produce non-legitimate codes as their outputs and the proposed scheme is the first and only one that produces legitimate codes as output. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing LAS based schemes and some other VQ based data hiding schemes. On average, the proposed scheme embeds 2.14 bits per index with almost the same bit-rate as the bit-rate of the VQ index table.     

Investigating electrical contact resistance losses in lithium-ion battery assemblies for hybrid and electric vehicles

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are favored in hybrid-electric vehicles and electric vehicles for their outstanding power characteristics. In this paper the energy loss due to electrical contact resistance (ECR) at the interface of electrodes and current-collector bars in Li-ion battery assemblies is investigated for the first time. ECR is a direct result of contact surface imperfections, i.e., roughness and out-of-flatness, and acts as an ohmic resistance at the electrode-collector joints. A custom-designed testbed is developed to conduct a systematic experimental study. ECR is measured at separable bolted electrode connections of a sample Li-ion battery, and a straightforward analysis to evaluate the relevant energy loss is presented. Through the experiments, it is observed that ECR is an important issue in energy management of Li-ion batteries. Effects of surface imperfection, contact pressure, joint type, collector bar material, and interfacial materials on ECR are highlighted. The obtained data show that in the considered Li-ion battery, the energy loss due to ECR can be as high as 20% of the total energy flow in and out of the battery under normal operating conditions. However, ECR loss can be reduced to 6% when proper joint pressure and/or surface treatment are used. A poor connection at the electrode-collector interface can lead to a significant battery energy loss as heat generated at the interface. Consequently, a heat flow can be initiated from the electrodes towards the internal battery structure, which results in a considerable temperature increase and onset of thermal runaway. At sever conditions, heat generation due to ECR might cause serious safety issues, sparks, and even melting of the electrodes.     

Rotor/Stator Internal Phase to Phase Fault Detection in Three-Phase Wound Rotor Induction Machines

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method based on Magnetic Equivalent Circuit (MEC) to model the wound rotor three-phase induction machine under healthy and faulty conditions. Different parameters of machine such as the number of poles, number of slots, winding configuration and dimension can be selected based on designed properties of a given machine. Internal phase to phase fault is also detected by stator current signature analysis in dq frame. Saturation effect is modeled by a tunable function as well as the core nonlinearity characteristic is considered. Finally, Finite Element Method (FEM) is used to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed MEC model. Short computational time of MEC method shows that this model is suitable for electrical machine modeling and analysis.     

Design optimization of a pattern reconfigurable microstrip antenna using differential evolution and 3D EM simulation‐based neural network model

In this work, design optimization of a varicap diode loaded antenna consisting of four identical rectangular microstrips is presented as a pattern reconfigurable antenna at 5.2 GHz. The microstrips are printed on the front of a FR4 substrate with the dimensions of 40 mm × 25 mm and ε _r = 4.6, h = 1.58 mm and probe‐fed via a coupling using a rectangular microstrip line symmetrically placed between them. In first stage, S₁₁ of the antenna are obtained as its real and imaginary parts as continuous functions of geometry of the microstrip components within 3 to 7 GHz using multi‐layer perceptron (MLP) trained and validated by 3D EM simulated data. In order to determine the most suitable (MLP) architecture and training algorithm, 20 different MLP architectures are tested. Then, S₁₁ are optimized with respect to the geometry parameters using differential evolution algorithm and MLP based model. The antenna is prototyped with the optimally selected parameters and measured. From the comparison of simulation and measurement results, it can be observed that the measurement results agree with the simulation results, thus it can be concluded that the proposed antenna is a simple and successful design subject to the design purposes with together its design methodology.