Damp trend Grey Model forecasting method for airline industry

This paper presents a modification of the Grey Model (GM) to forecast routes passenger demand growth in the air transportation industry. Forecast methods like Holt-Winters, autoregressive models, exponential smoothing, neural network, fuzzy logic, GM model calculate very high airlines routes pax growth. For this reason, a modification has been done to the GM model to damp trend calculations as time grows. The simulation results show that the modified GM model reduces the model exponential estimations grow. It allows the GM model to forecast reasonable routes passenger demand for long lead-times forecasts. It makes this model an option to calculate airlines routes pax flow when few data points are available.The United States domestic air transport market data are used to compare the performance of the GM model with the proposed model.     

Reducing drying energy and costs by process alterations at aggregate stockpiles

In the field of bulk solids, handling knowledge on moisture behaviour in aggregate stockpiles can be useful for process optimisation in terms of energy consumption. In the asphalt industry, an increase in moisture content leads to a significant increase in energy consumption. To determine the characteristics of moisture behaviour, correlations are investigated between theory on soil–water movements and moisture in aggregates. With column drainage experiments with porous bottom, similarities between theory and practice are found. This allows the use of theoretical hydrologic models to determine and predict the moisture behaviour in drained piles. The effect of process alterations within the system of piles on energy consumption was investigated, and a significant reduction of energy consumption was found.     

Improving travel-time reliability by the use of trip booking

The congestion of our infrastructure, particularly (urban) motorways, continues to increase. Efficient planning, for instance in freight transport, is hindered by the resulting unreliability of travel times. Another effect of this congestion is a reduced utilization rate of the road. This work presents trip booking, a method aimed at improvement of the reliability of travel times as well as an increase in the effective use of road capacity. Increased reliability facilitates better logistic planning. Furthermore, it allows the sharing of infrastructure between different modalities, with each modality having its own operational time window. The system aims at open dedicated infrastructure, such as bus lanes and dedicated freight lanes, and preserves the autonomy of both the provider and user of the infrastructure. The advantage claims are supported by simulation results for basic network configurations.     

Infrastructure Challenges Caused by Industrial Transformation to Achieve Greenhouse Gas Neutrality. Ammonia Production in the Antwerp-Rotterdam-Rhine-Ruhr Area

Several pathways for potentially greenhouse gas neutral production of ammonia have been investigated compared to today's conventional ammonia production at chemical sites in Antwerp, Dormagen, and Geleen. These pathways include on-site water electrolysis using grid electricity, off-site production via water electrolysis using renewable electricity and supply of green hydrogen to the site, pyrolysis of natural gas and conventional ammonia production coupled with CO₂-capture on-site and transport to a storage site. All pathways effectively eliminate scope 1 emissions present in conventional production but continue to emit scope 2 emissions from grid electricity consumption. Eventually, a coordinated industry-wide and cross-industry effort is needed to address the transformational changes and develop the common cross-border infrastructures.     

Conceptual design of industrial systems: an approach to support collaboration

The design of any industrial system is a complex problem where many domains are involved. Each domain developed its own way of modeling based on a mono disciplinary perception. This leads to a communication problem and consequently to expectations on the formulated solution that do not correspond with the real solution. To enable the communication between domains and to preserve the match between intentions, expectations and reality of the system to be designed, a combination of a soft and hard systems approach is used to define a Conceptual model for Industrial Systems (CIS). The use of the model during design is illustrated for the technical domain, but has proven to be applicable for the organization and information domain as well.     

Plasmon line shaping using nanocrosses for high sensitivity localized surface plasmon resonance sensing

The detection of small changes in the wavelength position of localized surface plasmon resonances in metal nanostructures has been used successfully in applications such as label-free detection of biomarkers. Practical implementations, however, often suffer from the large spectral width of the plasmon resonances induced by large radiative damping in the metal nanocavities. By means of a tailored design and using a reproducible nanofabrication process, high quality planar gold plasmonic nanocavities are fabricated with strongly reduced radiative damping. Moreover, additional substrate etching results in a large enhancement of the sensing volume and a subsequent increase of the sensitivity. Coherent coupling of bright and dark plasmon modes in a nanocross and nanobar is used to generate high quality factor subradiant Fano resonances. Experimental sensitivities for these modes exceeding 1000 nm/RIU with a Figure of Merit reaching 5 are demonstrated in microfluidic ensemble spectroscopy.     

Bionic design methodology for wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment

Large-scale handling of particulate solids can cause severe wear on bulk solids handling equipment surfaces. Wear reduces equipment life span and increases maintenance cost. Examples of traditional methods to reduce wear of bulk solids handling equipment include optimizing transport operations and utilizing resistant materials. To our knowledge, the so-called bionic design has not been utilized. Bionic design is the application of biological models, systems, or elements to modern engineering. Bionic design has promoted significant progress on the development of engineering products and systems. In order to use bionic design for wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment surfaces, this paper introduces bionic design to bulk solids handling on the basis of analogies between biology and bulk solids handling. In addition, a bionic design methodology for the wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment surfaces is formulated. Based on the bionic design methodology, two bionic models used for abrasive and erosive wear reduction of bulk solids handling equipment surfaces are proposed.     

Analysis of a Green Transport Plant for Deep Sea Mining Systems

Deep sea mining was identified in the middle of last century. However, its industrialization and commercialization today are limited in the costal mining industry due to the high mining cost and technical issues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a green transport plan of deep sea mining systems in terms of the optimal efficiency of the rigid pipe lifting system and the total energy consumption. The deep sea mining facilities considered in this paper consist of a mineral collecting machine, a flexible hose, a rigid pipe, a grinding machine, a concentrating machine and a horizontal pipe conveyor. Centrifugal pump modelling and its working principle are researched, because it is the major transport facility. The relationship between the optimal efficiency, total energy consumption, transport loss factor, and the relating mining parameters is determined by numerical simulations and fittings under Fortran and Matlab environment, and the optimization under 1st Opt environment. The research conducted in this paper is valuable for the pre-evaluation of deep sea mining transport systems and the further realization of its industrialization and commercialization process.

     

Physical properties of solid biomass

The international biomass market is growing, and is expected to be a large-scale trading market in the long term future. The demand within the European Union, however, cannot be met by local supply. Therefore, a large-scale biomass bulk terminal for both solid and liquid biomass and liquid biofuels is required to accommodate the biomass flows.The capacity for the large-scale biomass bulk terminal is set at a maximum of 40 million tons per annum, with the estimated share of solid biomass of 40-50 percent. Although some of the issues or concerns (e. g. particle breakage that leads to downstream segregation problems) with regard to storage and handling of biomass can be addressed with the knowledge gained from existing dry bulk terminals, little information is available from the perspective of biomass. Therefore, experiments have been done to determine physical properties of some biomass materials. They are required to allow the design of suitable equipment (e.g. hopper) and handle biomass materials properly, i.e. the materials are handled based on first in first out stock rotation within storage vessel and/or ground storage scheme. Failure to achieve this goal will lead to the risk of negative effects and incidents such as material degradation (due to e.g. fermentation, biological reactions), self-heating (due to exothermic reaction), health hazard, and explosion.The objective of this paper is to present various decisive physical material properties of three types of solid biomass fuels: wood pellets, wood chips and torrefied pellets. The properties studied are physical material properties and the characteristics when the materials interact with the storage and handling equipment. In addition to the results, among which particle size distribution and angle of internal friction, the experimental setup as well as the relevant standards (e.g. ASTM and CEN) will be described.     

Boosting the figure-of-merit of LSPR-based refractive index sensing by phase-sensitive measurements

Localized surface plasmon resonances possess very interesting properties for a wide variety of sensing applications. In many of the existing applications, only the intensity of the reflected or transmitted signals is taken into account, while the phase information is ignored. At the center frequency of a (localized) surface plasmon resonance, the electron cloud makes the transition between in- and out-of-phase oscillation with respect to the incident wave. Here we show that this information can experimentally be extracted by performing phase-sensitive measurements, which result in linewidths that are almost 1 order of magnitude smaller than those for intensity based measurements. As this phase change is an intrinsic property of a plasmon resonance, this opens up many possibilities for boosting the figure-of-merit (FOM) of refractive index sensing by taking into account the phase of the plasmon resonance. We experimentally investigated this for two model systems: randomly distributed gold nanodisks and gold nanorings on top of a continuous gold layer and a dielectric spacer and observed FOM values up to 8.3 and 16.5 for the respective nanoparticles.