Technological Elements behind the Renewable Energy Community: Current Status, Existing Gap, Necessity, and Future Perspective—Overview

The Renewable Energy Community (REC) in Europe promotes renewable energy sources (RESs), offering social, economic, and environmental benefits. This new entity could alter consumer energy relationships, requiring self-consumption, energy sharing, and full utilization of RESs. Modernizing energy systems within the REC requires addressing self-consumption, energy sharing, demand response, and energy management system initiatives. The paper discusses the role of decentralized energy systems, the scenarios of the REC concept and key aspects, and activities involving energy generation, energy consumption, energy storage systems, energy sharing, and EV technologies. Moreover, the present work highlights the research gap in the existing literature and the necessity of addressing the technological elements. It also highlights that there is no uniform architecture or model for the REC, like in the case of microgrids. Additionally, the present work emphasizes the role and importance of technological elements in RECs, suggesting future recommendations for EMS, DSM, data monitoring and analytics, communication systems, and the software or tools to ensure reliability, efficiency, economic, and environmental measures. The authors also highlight the crucial role of policymakers and relevant policies, which could help in implementing these technological elements and show the importance of the RECs for a sustainable energy shift and transition

Laser welding of tailored blanks made of Al-Si-coated 22MnB5 steel using a filler wire and a variable energy distribution laser optics

Laser welding of Al-Si-coated steels for hot stamping in automotive applications is problematic due to the mixing of the coating layers inside the molten pool that weakens the resulting weld seam. In this case, the most common welding procedure to overcome this issue consists in removing the Al-Si layer through laser ablation prior to the joining. This method continues to be the most widely used by major producers of tailor welded blanks, although in situ ablation of the Al-Si coating can be costly and time consuming. In this work, a novel approach consisting in joining as-received (i.e., not decoated) materials using a filler wire and an innovative variable energy distribution laser optics is introduced and tested on tailor welded blanks made of 22MnB5. Tensile tests of specimens obtained from a 3(3) full factorial design of experiment have shown an average value of ultimate tensile strength of 1523 MPa, which is much higher than the one usually observed in as-received welded then hot-stamped conditions and aligned with hot-stamped base material values. Hardness test results (494-543 HV0.5) were in the typical hot-stamped base material range of values as well, while SEM-EDS analyses detected no ferrite inclusions inside the fusion zone. Variations of the main process parameters have been considered on an iso-thickness and iso-material configuration, empirically demonstrating the stability and reliability of the proposed methodology as well as its suitability for production purposes

EquilTheTA: Thermodynamic and Transport Properties of Complex Equilibrium Plasmas

EquilTheTA (EQUILibrium for plasma THErmodynamics and Transport Applications) is a web-based software which calculates chemical equilibrium product concentrations from any set of reactants and determines thermodynamic and transport properties for the product mixture in wide temperature and pressure ranges. The program calculates chemical equilibrium by using a hierarchical approach, thermodynamic properties and transport coefficients starting from recent and accurate databases of atomic and molecular energy levels and collision integrals. In the calculations, Debye length and cut-off are consistently updated and virial corrections (up to third order) can be considered. Transport coefficients are calculated by using high order approximations of the Chapman-Enskog method

PIC/Monte Carlo simulation of dielectric barrier discharge in Argon

The present work deals with the study of an atmospheric pressure Argon plasma in a parallel-plate dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) by a one-dimensional particle-in-cell/Monte Carlo code, supposing that the reactor gap is much smaller than the plate area of electrodes. Electron-neutral collisions, both elastic and inelastic, have been considered, including superelastic collisions and electron impact ionizations. The kinetic model has been coupled self-consistently with a proper electric circuit model

Analytical solutions for the energy distribution of charged particles in a weak electric field

The paper deals with the stationary distribution of charged particles moving in a material medium, having scattering and absorption properties, in which a uniform electric field is present. The purpose of the work is finding analytical solutions in simplified but physically significant situations and comparing different approximations based on a spherical-harmonics expansion of the velocity distribution