Investigation on Phase Change Behavior of Paraffin Phase Change Material in a Spherical Capsule for Solar Thermal Storage Units

In this work, the melting and solidification behaviour of paraffin phase change material encapsulated in a stainless steel spherical container has been studied experimentally. A computational fluid dynamics analysis has also been performed for the encapsulated phase change material (PCM) during phase change process. In the melting process, the hot air, used as the heat transfer fluid enters the test section and flows over the spherical capsule resulting in the melting of phase change material. In the solidification process, the ambient air flows over the capsule and received heat from phase change material resulting in the solidification of phase change material. In the computational fluid dynamics, the constant wall boundary condition is employed for both melting (75°C) and solidification (36°C) processes since the internal conductive resistance offered by the PCM is much higher compared to the outer surface convective resistance. The time required for complete solidification and melting of the phase change material obtained from the computational fluid dynamics analysis are validated with the experimental results and a reasonable agreement is achieved. The reason for the deviation between the results are analyzed and reported.     

Group theory transformation for Soret and Dufour effects on free convective heat and mass transfer with thermophoresis and chemical reaction over a porous stretching surface in the presence of heat source/sink

The group theoretic method is applied for solving the problem of combined effect of thermal diffusion and diffusion thermo on free convective heat and mass transfer over a porous stretching surface in the presence of thermophoresis particle deposition with variable stream conditions. The application of one-parameter groups reduces the number of independent variables by one and consequently, the system of governing partial differential equations with the boundary conditions reduces to a system of ordinary differential equations with appropriate boundary conditions. The equations along with the boundary conditions are solved numerically by using Runge Kutta Gill integration scheme with shooting technique. Impact of Soret and Dufour effects in the presence of thermophoresis particle deposition with chemical reaction plays an important role on the flow field. The results thus obtained are presented graphically and discussed.     

Homotopy analysis method for chemical reaction and thermophoresis effects on heat and mass transfer for mhd hiemenz flow over a porous wedge in the presence of heat radiation

An analytical technique, namely, the homotopy analysis method, is applied to analyze the effect of chemical reaction and thermophoresis particle deposition on the MHD mixed convective heat and mass transfer for a Hiemenz flow over a porous wedge in the presence of heat radiation. The fluid is assumed to be viscous and incompressible. Analytical and numerical calculations are carried out for different values of dimensionless parameters, and an analysis of the results obtained shows that the flow field is influenced appreciably by the buoyancy ratio as well as by the thermal diffusion and suction/injection parameters. The effects of these parameters on the process characteristics are investigated methodically, and typical results are illustrated. An explicit, totally analytical, and uniformly valid solution is derived which agrees well with numerical results.     

Hydrous iron oxide for removal of inorganic contaminants in simulated stormwater: A batch sorption kinetics study

Urban stormwater runoff, which consists of inorganic and organic contaminants, is a major source of pollutants to receiving waters and therefore they need to be removed. Simultaneous removal of contaminants, Cd²⁺, Cu²⁺, Ni²⁺, Zn²⁺ (heavy metal cations), and SeO₄²⁻ (oxyanion) from a simulated stormwater by a hydrous ferric oxide (HFO) was studied in batch and column sorption experiments. In the batch experiment the rate of sorption of the ions was rapid at the beginning and reached equilibrium in approximately 300 min. The amounts of ions sorbed were proportionate to the respective initial concentration of the ions added to the HFO. Cluster analysis showed that all heavy metals had similar sorption behavior, whereas Se had a distinctly different sorption process. Of the three different kinetic models tested the pseudo-first order kinetic model fitted the data the best. The column experimental results beyond 180 min were consistent with those of the batch experiment that the removal efficiencies of the ions were in proportion to the ion concentration in the feed. Below 180 min, Cu appeared to be preferentially removed than Zn.     

ATmega8535 MICROCONTROLLER BASED BLOOD SODIUM ANALYZER USING ISE DIRECT POTENTIOMETRY

A low cost microcontroller based Sodium analyzer is developed to measure the concentration of sodium in blood serum. A dedicated ATmega8535 based microcontroller and its associated peripherals are employed for the hardware. This paper explains the details of interfacing, calibration, and procedure of operation. The Sodium Ion Selective Electrode (ISE) is used as sensor for the measurement. Software is developed in ‘C’ language in order to measure, analyze, and to display the results. The blood samples are collected from many patients. Sodium concentration is measured from the collected samples. The performance of the instrument is studied by using linear regression analysis.     

CREW: Cost and Reliability aware Eagle-Whale optimiser for service placement in Fog

Integration of Internet of Things (IoT) with industries revamps the traditional ways in which industries work. Fog computing extends Cloud services to the vicinity of end users. Fog reduces delays induced by communication with the distant clouds in IoT environments. The resource constrained nature of Fog computing nodes demands an efficient placement policy for deploying applications, or their services. The distributed and heterogeneous features of Fog environments deem it imperative to consider the reliability performance parameter in placement decisions to provide services without interruptions. Increasing reliability leads to an increase in the cost. In this article, we propose a service placement policy which addresses the conflicting criteria of service reliability and monetary cost. A multiobjective optimisation problem is formulated and a novel placement policy, Cost and Reliability-aware Eagle-Whale (CREW), is proposed to provide placement decisions ensuring timely service responses. Considering the exponentially large solution space, CREW adopts Eagle strategy based multi-Whale optimisation for taking placement decisions. We have considered real time microservice applications for validating our approaches, and CREW has been experimentally shown to outperform the existing popular multiobjective meta-heuristics such as NSGA-II and MOWOA based placement strategies.     

Multi-virtual wireless mesh networks through multiple channels and interfaces

Wireless Networks - The high flexibility of the wireless mesh networks (WMNs) physical infrastructure can be exploited to provide communication with different technologies and support for a variety...