Notwendigkeit und Vermarktung von Flexibilitätsoptionen im Energiesystem der Zukunft

Demands on production, distribution and consumption of electrical energy change fundamentally with the energy revolution. Energy purchasing costs for inflexible consumers are rising and proceeds of inflexible producers are sinking. Companies are able to reduce costs by marketing operational flexibility options. This article sets out the need of flexibility in the energy system and the new marketing options. Flexibility potentials within infrastructure plants of a chemical park are analyzed, evaluated regarding marketing and activated in the presented research project FlexChemistry.     

Simulation of Methanol and Urea Production from Catalytic Conversion of Steel Mill Gases

The time-dependent operation of methanol, ammonia, and urea production units embedded in a steel mill environment is analyzed with dynamic simulation models. From different process concepts and gas availability scenarios, a set of simulation cases is defined with blast furnace gas as carbon and coke oven gas as hydrogen source. Dynamic simulations indicate that significant CO₂ reductions require large amounts of additional H₂ from sustainable sources. From the results, global data such as carbon footprint or energy demands and details about process unit operation are obtained and processed.     

Fast Out-of-Core Octree Generation for Massive Point Clouds

We propose an efficient out-of-core octree generation method for arbitrarily large point clouds. It utilizes a hierarchical counting sort to quickly split the point cloud into small chunks, which are then processed in parallel. Levels of detail are generated by subsampling the full data set bottom up using one of multiple exchangeable sampling strategies. We introduce a fast hierarchical approximate blue-noise strategy and compare it to a uniform random sampling strategy. The throughput, including out-of-core access to disk, generating the octree, and writing the final result to disk, is about an order of magnitude faster than the state of the art, and reaches up to around 6 million points per second for the blue-noise approach and up to around 9 million points per second for the uniform random approach on modern SSDs.     

Depassivation and repassivation of stainless steels by stepwise pH change

Immersion tests with different stainless steels have been performed, while the pH was stepwise decreased and then increased again. During 8.5-day exposure, the depassivation and repassivation pH values as a function of pitting resistance equivalent number were determined. There is always a gap between both pH values (depassivation and repassivation), indicating that for every steel, there are conditions where an existing passive layer can be maintained but cannot be rebuilt after depassivation. In such environments, the passive layer is thicker, consisting mainly of molybdenum and iron rich oxides, while chromium is dissolved. Usually, depending on conditions, the passive layer is more chromium-rich, especially the inner layer. This is relevant, for example, for acidizing jobs in oil and gas industry, proving that repassivation after acidizing will happen promptly, when the pH is increased again.     

Three stage creep behavior of MgO containing ordinary refractories in tension and compression

In service tensile and compressive stresses occur in refractory linings, these stresses lead to creep of refractories. Ordinary refractories experience creep of the primary stage and may further proceed to the secondary and tertiary creep stage. For the development of advanced material models for finite element simulations it is necessary to investigate the creep behavior in all three creep stages under tensile and compressive loads. Hence, two advanced high temperature uniaxial creep testing devices, applying a wide range of tensile and compressive loads, were used to determine the three creep stages in a reasonable time under service related loading conditions. The Norton–Bailey creep equations and an inverse identification procedure were applied for the evaluation of the experimental results. A magnesia refractory was studied at elevated temperatures and its respective creep parameters for each stage were determined. The stress dependency on the creep behavior can be seen clearly on the creep curves and the corresponding creep parameters. Furthermore, a comparative study of creep parameters and creep rates was performed between the magnesia refractory and a magnesia-chromite refractory. The results demonstrate the significant asymmetrical creep behavior in tension and compression for both materials. The creep investigation in this paper favors the requirement for consideration of the three stage creep behavior and the asymmetrical creep behavior in thermomechanical modelling activities of industrial vessels.     

Survey on test data generation tools

Automating the process of software testing is a very popular research topic and of real interest to industry. Test automation can take part on different levels, e.g., test execution, test case generation, test data generation. This survey gives an overview of state-of-the art test data generation tools, either academic or commercial. The survey focuses on white- and gray-box techniques. The list of existing tools was filtered with respect to their public availability, their maturity, and activity. The remaining seven tools, i.e., AgitarOne, CodePro AnalytiX, AutoTest, C++test, Jtest, RANDOOP, and PEX, are briefly introduced and their evaluation results are summarized. For the evaluation we defined 31 benchmark tests, which check the tools capabilities to generate test data that satisfies a given specification: 24 primitive type benchmarks and 7 non-primitive type and more complex with respect to the specification benchmarks. Most of the commercial tools implement a test data strategy that uses constant values found in the method under test or values that are slightly modified by means of mathematical operations. This strategy turns out to be very effective. In general, all tools that combine multiple techniques perform very well. For example PEX uses constraint solving techniques, but in cases where the constraint solver reaches its limitations it uses random based techniques to overcome those limitations. Especially, the two commercial tools AgitarOne and PEX that combine multiple approaches to test data generation are able to pass all 31 tests. This survey reflects the status in 2011.     

Microbial Upgrading of Acetate into Value-Added Products—Examining Microbial Diversity,Bioenergetic Constraints and Metabolic Engineering Approaches

Ecological concerns have recently led to the increasing trend to upgrade carbon contained in waste streams into valuable chemicals. One of these components is acetate. Its microbial upgrading is possible in various species, with Escherichia coli being the best-studied. Several chemicals derived from acetate have already been successfully produced in E. coli on a laboratory scale, including acetone, itaconic acid, mevalonate, and tyrosine. As acetate is a carbon source with a low energy content compared to glucose or glycerol, energy- and redox-balancing plays an important role in acetate-based growth and production. In addition to the energetic challenges, acetate has an inhibitory effect on microorganisms, reducing growth rates, and limiting product concentrations. Moreover, extensive metabolic engineering is necessary to obtain a broad range of acetate-based products. In this review, we illustrate some of the necessary energetic considerations to establish robust production processes by presenting calculations of maximum theoretical product and carbon yields. Moreover, different strategies to deal with energetic and metabolic challenges are presented. Finally, we summarize ways to alleviate acetate toxicity and give an overview of process engineering measures that enable sustainable acetate-based production of value-added chemicals.