An air conditioning system providing cooling, water heating and drying

In the tropics, air conditioning is essential as the operating daily ambient temperature is high. In Malaysia and Singapore, most of the houses and apartments are air conditioned, at least one room. Every kW of electricity consumed by the air conditioner, about 4 kW is thrown into the atmosphere. Energy is available at the inlet to the condenser at about 85oC and can be utilized for useful purposes. Here, waste heat from air conditioners is utilized for water heating and drying purposes. A water condenser fitted at the exit of compressor absorbs most of the superheat and latent heat. Even a 60% recovery of this waste energy can heat 200 litres of water to 60oC within about three hours. A dryer connected at the exit of air condenser is fitted with filter to supply clean hot air to the dryer. The system reduces global warming and the payback period is less than two years

Technology Roadmap for the 21st Century Truck Program, a government-industry research partnership

The 21st Century Truck Program has been established as a government-industry research partnership to support the development and implementation of commercially viable technologies that will dramatically cut fuel use and emissions of commercial trucks and buses while enhancing their safety and affordability as well as maintaining or enhancing performance. The innovations resulting from this program will reduce dependence on foreign oil, improve our nation's air quality, provide advanced technology for military vehicles, and enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. truck and bus industry while ensuring safe and affordable freight and bus transportation for the nation's economy. This Technology Roadmap for the 21st Century Truck Program has been prepared to guide the development of the technical advancements that will enable the needed improvements in commercial truck fuel economy, emissions, and safety

Development of Bus Drive Technology towards Zero Emissions: A Review

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive review of the latest low emission propulsion vehicles, particularly for bus applications. The challenges for city bus applications and the necessity for low emission technologies for public transportation are addressed. The review will be focusing on the London bus environment, which represents one of the busiest bus networks in the world. The low emission bus applications will be analysed from three main areas: hybrid electric buses, battery electric buses and fuel cell buses. This summarises the main technologies utilised for low emissions urban transportation applications. A comprehensive review of these low emission technologies provides the reader with a general background of the developments in the bus industry and the technologies utilised to improve the performance in terms of both efficiency and emission reduction. This will conclude with a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of the three main technologies and explore the potential opportunity of each

An integrated solar thermal and photovoltaic system

For the conversion of solar irradiation directly to electricity, Photovoltaic (PV) cells play an excellent role. Absorption of radiation beyond wave length 0.35 – 0.82 µm leads to a rise in temperature and the performance is significantly reduced as a result of temperature rise. Many attempts have been made to maintain the operating temperature of the PV cells as low as possible using both water and air cooling system fitted at the back of the panel. In this project, extensive indoor and outdoor tests have been performed to develop an integrated system to filter component of solar irradiation contributing to a temperature rise of the PV panel. For indoor tests, a Compact Source Iodide (CSI) lamp has been used to conduct experiments under controlled conditions. The outdoor test was conducted under the meteorological conditions of Singapore. The component of interest, which produces electricity, will be delivered to PV cells and, hence, there will no heating effect and performance degradation. A layer of water of about 15 mm can eliminate the components of the radiation not contributing to electricity generation. Also, absorbed radiation at the water filter enables to provide hot water

Research and innovation in transport electrification in Europe: An assessment based on the Transport Research and Innovation Monitoring and Information System (TRIMIS)

Electrification has a major role to play in decarbonising transport and in reducing its fossil fuel dependency. For transport electrification to be cost-efficient and ready for future needs, adequate research and innovation (R&I) in this field is necessary. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of R&I in transport electrification. The assessment follows the methodology developed by the European Commission’s Transport Research and Innovation Monitoring and Information System (TRIMIS). The report critically assesses research by thematic area and technologies, highlighting recent developments and future needs.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Measuring the cost-effectiveness of idle reduction technologies in heavy-duty trucks

The main objective of idle reduction devices is to reduce the amount of energy wasted by idling trucks, decrease exhaust emissions and save in fuel use and maintenance costs and vehicle life extension. To achieve reductions emissions from vehicle idling in heavy-duty trucks, strategies and actions have been employed through the use of various technologies, namely auxiliary power units (APUs), direct-fire heaters (DFHs), truck stop electrification (TSE) and advanced truck stop electrification (ATSE). Little quantitative data exists on the amount of emissions that are emitted by heavy-duty trucks during idling. In general, diesel engines emit less CO and hydrocarbons (HC) when compared to gasoline engines since fuel-lean mixtures tend to reduce CO and HC emissions. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review that illustrates the status of data present in literature for costs and emissions reduced for APUs, DFHs, TSEs and ATSEs. From the review process, a cost calculator was devised from the synthesis of literature data to measure cost-effectiveness of these technologies in dollars per year per ton per year of emissions reduced over a 30 year investment period. Data on capital costs, maintenance and operational costs, and fuel costs were reported in order to calculate net present values, payback periods and fuel savings from each technology. Given the relevant data available from various studies that compute the efficiency of competing technologies, TSEs were the most cost-effective for the investor and the truck owner in regards to NOx emissions reduction. Cost-effectiveness measured for investors at $1,707.57 and$1,473.27 per ton of NOx reduced, and $16,799.91,$22,261.44, and $20,583.79 per ton of NOx reduced for truck owners. The calculator also served as a tool to illustrate insufficient data currently present in the body of literature. Limited quantitative data and unknown variability of costs as a function of time over the 30-year investment period was used to assess best practices. Thus, policymakers and other stakeholders can benefit from this review in order to conduct future studies that would enlighten greater understanding of data points from specifications of the operating context and devise more robust models for the sake of comparing these technologies based on impact and riskM.S

Module 1 : Engineering Trends

Incorporar aquests documents a la Col·lecció del Centre de Recerca i Estudis pel Desenvolupament Organitzatiu. Considerar que el registre té més d'un arxiu, ja que s'incorpora traduït a diversos idiomes

Future grid for a sustainable green airport: meeting the new loads of electric taxiing and electric aircraft.

Lao, Liyun - Associate SupervisorThis thesis proposes a novel electric grid in the airside to meet zero-emission targets for ground movement operations in future airports, as mandated by Aeronautics Research performance target in Europe's (ACARE) FlightPath 2050. The grid delivers power from a renewable energy source through a flexible powerline using an autonomous electric taxiing robot (A-ETR) based on the concept of Energy As A Service (EAAS) for taxiing large aircraft and charging stations for ground vehicles. Four layers of optimisation are required to realise the viability of this new grid. The first optimisation layer involves creating an analytical model of the A-ETR using real-world data from Cranfield University's Airport based solar PV system and its Boeing 737 research aircraft and optimising its performance and efficiency using vehicle-level data-driven machine learning- based optimisation. As a result, the proposed grid achieves zero-emission taxiing and a 91% reduction in fuel compared to a standard baseline. The second layer optimises energy management in the microgrid using machine learning-based forecasting models to predict PV output and optimise charging and discharging cycles of A-ETR batteries to match solar resources and electricity rates. The result shows that the support vector regression (SVR) model best predicted PV output and optimised BESS charge/discharge cycles to achieve zero-emission airport ground movement operations while reducing the microgrid operating costs. However, ground traffic and load profiles increase as the model expands to include commercial airports. Therefore, the third optimisation layer develops a machine learning-based data-driven energy prediction optimisation to ensure microgrid resilience under the increased load. The model employs the Facebook Prophet algorithm to enhance the precision of energy demand prediction for airport ground movement operations across three- time horizons. The results facilitate the generation of reliable forecasts for clean energy production and ground movement energy demand at the airport. A fourth layer of optimisation has been developed to address the limitations of solar PV energy, which depend on the weather and cannot be dispatched, as well iii as the increase in airport traffic. The layer uses wind power and data from a "green" airport to complement PV power output. This model uses the stochastic model predictive control-based cascade feedforward neural network (SMPC- CFFNN) to optimise power flow between the microgrid and RES sources and support V2G capabilities. The results demonstrate that a Zero-emission microgrid for ground movement at green airports can be achieved through optimal power flow management and time optimisation. Reliability and resilience are crucial for a proposed microgrid ecosystem. We consider different network configurations to connect the existing airport grid. Two microgrid architectures, LVAC and LVDC, are compared based on their point of common connections (PCC) to evaluate the technical and economic implications on the airport's distribution network. We verify and validate the model's performance in terms of power quality, short circuit fault levels, system protection requirements, voltage profile, power losses, and equipment/system overloading to determine the optimal architecture. The results indicate that the A-ETR can provide ancillary services to the grid and enable novel emergency response systems. The comprehensive results from the multi-layered system-level optimisation approach adopted in this thesis not only validate the novelty of the proposed study but also serve to provide compelling evidence for its potential to provide viable solutions to the electrification challenges for future green airports by creating an ecosystem between airport ground operations and on-site renewable energy generating sources.PhD in Energy and Powe

A review of aircraft auxiliary power unit faults, diagnostics and acoustic measurem

The Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) is an integral part of an aircraft, providing electrical and pneumatic power to various on-board sub-systems. APU failure results in delay or cancellation of a flight, accompanied by the imposition of hefty fines from the regional authorities. Such inadvertent situations can be avoided by continuously monitoring the health of the system and reporting any incipient fault to the MRO (Maintenance Repair and Overhaul) organization. Generally, enablers for such health monitoring techniques are embedded during a product's design. However, a situation may arise where only the critical components are regularly monitored, and their status presented to the operator. In such cases, efforts can be made during service to incorporate additional health monitoring features using the already installed sensing mechanisms supplemented by maintenance data or by instrumenting the system with appropriate sensors. Due to the inherently critical nature of aircraft systems, it is necessary that instrumentation does not interfere with a system's performance and does not pose any safety concerns. One such method is to install non-intrusive vibroacoustic sensors such that the system integrity is maintained while maximizing system fault diagnostic knowledge. To start such an approach, an in-depth literature survey is necessary as this has not been previously reported in a consolidated manner. Therefore, this paper concentrates on auxiliary power units, their failure modes, maintenance strategies, fault diagnostic methodologies, and their acoustic signature. The recent trend in APU design and requirements, and the need for innovative fault diagnostics techniques and acoustic measurements for future aircraft, have also been summarized. Finally, the paper will highlight the shortcomings found during the survey, the challenges, and prospects, of utilizing sound as a source of diagnostics for aircraft auxiliary power units