Experimental Thermal Performance Characterization of Flat Grooved Heat Pipes

ABSTRACT

The thermal characterization of aluminum flat grooved heat pipes is performed experimentally for different groove dimensions. Three heat pipes with groove widths of 0.2?mm, 0.4?mm, and 1.5?mm are used in the experiments. The effect of the amount of the working fluid is extensively studied for each groove width. The results reveal that, although all three succeed in dissipating the heat input through the phase change of the working fluid by continuous evaporation and condensation, the effectiveness of the heat transfer increases with reduced groove width. Furthermore, it is observed that there exists an optimum operating point, where the temperature difference between the heating and cooling sections is at a minimum, and the magnitude of this temperature difference is a strong function of the groove width. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the combined effects of groove dimensions and the amount of the working fluid, from fully flooded to dry, is reported for the first time for aluminum flat grooved heat pipes.     

Partitioning of predominant lipophilic bioactives (squalene, α-tocopherol and β-sitosterol) during olive oil processing

The partitioning of predominant lipophilic olive bioactives (squalene, β-sitosterol and α-tocopherol) in olive oil processing was studied for the first time using common integrated olive milling plant. 7% of the oil and 5% of the squalene present in the olives was lost in the last pomace. β-sitosterol and α-tocopherol, which are mainly concentrated in the seed of the olive fruit, was recovered in virgin olive oil to a lesser extent (66%, 67%) while 10% were lost in last pomace. Thus, the loss of β-sitosterol and α-tocopherol was higher than that of squalene and oil, due to nonrecovered bound forms. 19% of the α-tocopherol and 21% of the β-sitosterol loss was unaccounted for, which can be attributed to degradation of α-tocopherol and incomplete recovery of sterols from the olive and pomace matrices. This study provides a basis for process development studies.     

Achieving real-time object detection and tracking under extreme conditions

In this survey, we present a brief analysis of single camera object detection and tracking methods. We also give a comparison of their computational complexities. These methods are designed to accurately perform under difficult conditions such as erratic motion, drastic illumination change, and noise contamination.     

Synthesis and characterization of poly(N‐vinyl‐2‐pyrrolidone) grafted sodium alginate hydrogel beads for the controlled release of indomethacin

Graft copolymers of sodium alginate (NaAlg) with N‐vinyl‐2‐pyrrolidone were prepared using azobisisobutyronitrile as initiator. The graft copolymers (NaAlg‐g‐PVP) were characterized with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, elemental analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry. Polymeric hydrogel beads of NaAlg and NaAlg‐g‐PVP were prepared by crosslinking method using glutaraldehyde (GA) as a crosslinker in the hydrochloric acid catalyst (HCl) and these beads were used to deliver anti‐inflammatory drug, indomethacin (IM). Chemical stability of the IM after encapsulation into beads was confirmed by FTIR. Preparation conditions of the NaAlg‐g‐PVP beads were optimized by considering the percentage entrapment efficiency, particle size, swelling capacity and their release data. In vitro release studies were performed in simulated gastric fluid (pH 1.2) for the initial 2 h, followed by simulated intestinal fluid (pH 7.4) for 4 h. Effects of GA concentration, exposure time to GA, drug/polymer (d/p) ratio, and concentration of HCl on the release of IM were discussed. It was observed that IM release from the beads decreased with increasing GA concentration and exposure time. IM release also decreases with increasing d/p ratio and HCl concentration. The highest IM release was obtained to be 77% for beads crosslinked with 0.027M GA. Swelling experiments were also performed to compute molecular mass between crosslinks of the beads. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2008     

Multi-verse optimization algorithm- and salp swarm optimization algorithm-based optimization of multilevel inverters

Neural Computing and Applications - Renewable energy sources are installed into both distribution and transmission grids more and more with the introduction of smart grid concept. Hence, efficient...     

CFAR processing with switching exponential smoothers for nonhomogeneous environments

Conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods use a fixed number of cells to estimate the background variance. For homogeneous environments, it is desirable to increase the number of cells, at the cost of increased computation and memory requirements, in order to improve the estimation performance. For nonhomogeneous environments, it is desirable to use less number of cells in order to reduce the number of false alarms around the clutter edges. In this work, we present a solution with two exponential smoothers (first order IIR filters) having different time-constants to leverage the conflicting requirements of homogeneous and nonhomogeneous environments. The system is designed to use the filter having the large time-constant in homogeneous environments and to promptly switch to the filter having the small time constant once a clutter edge is encountered. The main advantages of proposed Switching IIR CFAR method are computational simplicity, small memory requirement (in comparison to windowing based methods) and its good performance in homogeneous environments (due to the large time-constant smoother) and rapid adaptation to clutter edges (due to the small time-constant smoother).     

A new ECG beat clustering method based on kernelized fuzzy c-means and hybrid ant colony optimization for continuous domains

The kernelized fuzzy c-means algorithm uses kernel methods to improve the clustering performance of the well known fuzzy c-means algorithm by mapping a given dataset into a higher dimensional space non-linearly. Thus, the newly obtained dataset is more likely to be linearly seprable. However, to further improve the clustering performance, an optimization method is required to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional algorithms such as, sensitivity to initialization, trapping into local minima and lack of prior knowledge for optimum paramaters of the kernel functions. In this paper, to overcome these drawbacks, a new clustering method based on kernelized fuzzy c-means algorithm and a recently proposed ant based optimization algorithm, hybrid ant colony optimization for continuous domains, is proposed. The proposed method is applied to a dataset which is obtained from MIT–BIH arrhythmia database. The dataset consists of six types of ECG beats including, Normal Beat (N), Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC), Fusion of Ventricular and Normal Beat (F), Artrial Premature Beat (A), Right Bundle Branch Block Beat (R) and Fusion of Paced and Normal Beat (f). Four time domain features are extracted for each beat type and training and test sets are formed. After several experiments it is observed that the proposed method outperforms the traditional fuzzy c-means and kernelized fuzzy c-means algorithms.     

Electrical properties of monoazacrown ether-substituted phthalocyanines

D.c. conductivities of polycrystalline monoazacrown ether-substituted phthalocyanines (M=2H, Ni, Zn, Pb, Cu) and diphthalocyanine (M=Lu) are measured as Au-MPc-Au sandwiches to be of the order 10^–10–10^–12 S m^–1. Chemical doping with oxidants (e.g. NOBF₄) and enhancing the stacking of planar phthalocyanine moieties through the formation of alkali metal adducts with sodium and potassium ions leads to increase in conductivity of the order 10¹–10². The low conductivity and the diamagneticity of the bis(phthalocyaninato)-lutetium can be ascribed to the lack of radical nature in LuH(Pc)₂. For the a.c. conductivities, lead and lutetium complexes form a group with higher conductivities and the rest show lower conductivity. The conduction activation energies calculated from Arrhenius plots exhibit the lowest value (0.40 eV) for the lutetium compound.Part of this work was presented at NATO-ASI on Semiconductor Materials and Processing Technologies, Erice, Sicily, 1–13 July 1991.     

Modeling and solving mixed-model assembly line balancing problem with setups. Part I: A mixed integer linear programming model

This paper is the first one of the two papers entitled “modeling and solving mixed-model assembly line balancing problem with setups”, which has the aim of developing the mathematical programming formulation of the problem and solving it with a hybrid meta-heuristic approach. In this current part, a mixed-integer linear mathematical programming (MILP) model for mixed-model assembly line balancing problem with setups is developed. The proposed MILP model considers some particular features of the real world problems such as parallel workstations, zoning constraints, and sequence dependent setup times between tasks, which is an actual framework in assembly line balancing problems. The main endeavor of Part-I is to formulate the sequence dependent setup times between tasks in type-I mixed-model assembly line balancing problem. The proposed model considers the setups between the tasks of the same model and the setups because of the model switches in any workstation. The capability of our MILP is tested through a set of computational experiments. Part-II tackles the problem with a multiple colony hybrid bees algorithm. A set of computational experiments is also carried out for the proposed approach in Part-II.