Application of Compressible Volume of Fluid Model in Simulating the Impact and Solidification of Hollow Spherical ZrO<Subscript>2</Subscript> Droplet on a Surface

Applications of hollow spherical particles in thermal spraying process have been developed in recent years, accompanied by attempts in the form of experimental and numerical studies to better understand the process of impact of a hollow droplet on a surface. During such process, volume and density of the trapped gas inside droplet change. The numerical models should be able to simulate such changes and their consequent effects. The aim of this study is to numerically simulate the impact of a hollow ZrO₂ droplet on a flat surface using the volume of fluid technique for compressible flows. An open-source, finite-volume-based CFD code was used to perform the simulations, where appropriate subprograms were added to handle the studied cases. Simulation results were compared with the available experimental data. Results showed that at high impact velocities (U ₀ > 100 m/s), the compression of trapped gas inside droplet played a significant role in the impact dynamics. In such velocities, the droplet splashed explosively. Compressibility effects result in a more porous splat, compared to the corresponding incompressible model. Moreover, the compressible model predicted a higher spread factor than the incompressible model, due to planetary structure of the splat.     

Monitoring the aging of beers using a bioelectronic tongue

This paper deals with the implementation and the application of a bioelectronic tongue including three enzymatic biosensors based on tyrosinase and phthalocyanines as electron mediators, to evaluate the changes that occur during the aging of beers. For this purpose, alcoholic and non alcoholic beers, packaged in can and bottle, have been analyzed using cyclic voltammetry. The electrochemical signals showed significant changes during the aging process. The features extracted from the cyclic voltammograms have been used to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Data have revealed a clear discrimination among the beer classes in the aging process and the results were confirmed by Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) with Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and FeedForward Networks with Backpropagation (BP) learning method. The bioelectronic tongue has demonstrated a good capability to discriminate and classify the beer types satisfactorily in such a way, for all beer treatments, full classification accuracy was found.     

Reservoir volume optimization and performance evaluation of rooftop catchment systems in arid regions: A case study of Birjand,Iran

This study evaluated the performance of rooftop catchment systems in securing non-potable water supply in Birjand, located in an arid area in southeastern Iran. The rooftop catchment systems at seven study sites of different residential buildings were simulated for dry, normal, and wet water years, using 31-year rainfall records. The trial and error approach and mass diagram method were employed to optimize the volume of reservoirs in five different operation scenarios. Results showed that, during the dry water year from 2000 to 2001, for reservoirs with volumes of 200–20000 L, the proportion of days that could be secured for non-portable water supply was on average computed to be 16.4%–32.6% across all study sites. During the normal water year from 2009 to 2010 and the wet water year from 1995 to 1996, for reservoirs with volumes of 200–20000 L, the proportions were 20.8%–69.6% and 26.8%–80.3%, respectively. Therefore, a rooftop catchment system showed a high potential to meet a significant portion of non-potable water demand in the Birjand climatic region. Reservoir volume optimization using the mass diagram method produced results consistent with those obtained with the trial and error approach, except at sites #1, #2, and #5. At these sites, the trial and error approach performed better than the mass diagram method due to relatively high water consumption. It is concluded that the rooftop catchment system is applicable under the same climatic conditions as the study area, and it can be used as a drought mitigation strategy as well.     

Comparison of Performance of Packet Scheduling Algorithms in LTE-A HetNets

The concept of usage of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is about improving the LTE system performance by increasing the capacity and coverage of the Macro cell. In this paper, a performance comparison of various packet scheduling algorithms such as Proportional Fair, Maximum Largest Weighted Delay First and Exponential/Proportional Fair is studied in detail in the HetNets environment. The key performance indicators such as throughput, packet loss ratio, delay and fairness are considered to judge the performance of the scheduling algorithms. Various strategies such as increasing the number of Pico cells in the cell edge were used in the simulation for the performance evaluation study. The results achieved through various simulations show that adding Pico cells to the existing Macros enhances the overall system performance in addition to the various scheduling algorithms implemented in Macros. For reader’s convenience, various types of graphs have been used to represent the simulation results to better understand the performance metrics of various scheduling algorithms. Simulation results shows that overall system gain has increased because of adding Picos and thereby providing better coverage in the cell edge areas and thereby increasing the capacity of the network to provide better quality of service.     

A dynamic search pattern motion estimation algorithm using prioritized motion vectors

Motion estimation is one of the critical parts in video compression standards with a high computational load. Many motion estimation algorithms have been developed to reduce the number of search points compared to a full-search algorithm without losing the quality considerably. Most of them use fixed search patterns in their first step which may suffer from trapping into local minima or searching unnecessary blocks due to inappropriate size and type of search patterns. In this paper, a new dynamic search pattern using motion vectors of spatial and temporal neighboring blocks is proposed. The motion vectors of neighboring blocks are prioritized, in order to efficiently use of halfway stop technique. The simulation results indicate that proposed algorithm is very close to the full-search algorithm in quality, compared to other rivals. Moreover, the average number of searches is often less than other algorithms.     

Behaviour of eccentric loading of FRP confined fibre steel reinforced concrete columns

This paper presents results of testing 16 specimens, 12 of which as columns under different eccentricities and four as beams under four point loading regime. All 16 specimens were circular in cross section and were made of reinforced concrete. Four specimens served as reference specimens and were just made of reinforced concrete. The next four specimens were wrapped with carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRP). The next four specimens had steel fibres added to the concrete. The final four specimens were reinforced with steel fibres and wrapped with CFRP. From each group of specimens, one specimen was tested as a column under a concentric load, the second specimen was tested as a column under 25 mm eccentricity, the third specimen was tested as a column under 50 mm eccentricity, and the final specimen was tested as a beam under four point loading regime. The experimental programme proved that the introduction of fibres as well as wrapping the specimens with FRP improve the properties of concrete, especially its ductility.     

Elimination of inclusions and evaporation control during melting of Ti-48Al-2Cr-2Nb-1B intermetallic alloy

Titanium aluminide intermetallic compounds have an excellent capability for use in engineering structures at high temperatures. In the present work the formation of Nb rich inclusions in microstructure and evaporation of Al during melting of γ-TiAl based alloy (Ti-48Al-2Cr-2Nb-1B (at %)) was studied. The results show that the inclusions cannot be removed even with a four-stage melting process, when elemental Nb is used as raw material. However, by replacing Nb with NbAl₃ and using a three-stage melting process, the inclusions were removed from microstructure and also evaporation of Al was reduced remarkably. Otherwise, with removing elemental Al from raw material by using TiAl compound, evaporation of Al will be very low. Increasing vessel pressure from 400 to 600 mbar will not influence evaporation of Al. The article is published in the original.