Exhaust Gas Recirculation on a Nano-Coated Combustion Chamber of a Diesel Engine Fueled with Waste Plastic Oil

Managing waste plastic is becoming a severe challenge. The industry and researchers have been looking at various opportunities in line with circular economy principles for effective plastic waste management. In that context, plastic waste valorization to oil as a substitute to fossil fuel has gained recent attention. In the literature, there exist few studies showing the use of oil derived from waste plastics in blends with other conventional fuels in compression ignition (CI) engines; however, studies on CI engines that use 100% waste-derived fuels are limited. Additionally, the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) concepts and the use of nano-coated chambers (like pistons, valves and cylinders heads) have been gaining interest purely from the engine performance enhancement perspective in recent years. Therefore, this study investigates engine performance by combining exhaust gas from the EGR technique and waste plastic oil (WPO) as inputs, followed by thermal coatings in the CI engine chambers for performance enhancement. The experimental setup of the engine is developed, and the engine’s piston, valve and cylinder heads are coated with Al2O3-SiO4 material. The CI engine’s energy, emission, and combustion characteristics are tested, followed by a scenario analysis compared with diesel-only fuel. The tested scenarios include a WPO + Al2O3-SiO4, WPO + Al2O3-SiO4 + 10% EGR, and WPO + Al2O3-SiO4 + 20% EGR. The results show that the piston crown’s thermal coating increased the combustion performance. Significant impacts on the carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and smoke characteristics are observed for different %EGR rates. The results also showed that the cooled EGR engine has decreased nitric oxide emissions. Overall, the results show that WPO combined with exhaust gas could be a potential fuel for future CI engines

Reparation of voltage disturbance using PR controller-based DVR in Modern power systems

The Smart Grid environment gives more benefits for the consumers, whereas the power quality is one of the challenging factors in the smart grid environment. To protect the system equipment and increase the reliability, different filter technologies are used. Even though, consumers’ expectations towards the power quality are not fulfilled. To overcome these drawbacks and enhance the system reliability, a new Custom Power Devices (CPD) are introduced in the system. Among different CPDs, the Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) is one of the voltage compensating devices that is used to improve the power quality during distortions. When the distortions such as voltage swell and sag occur in the distribution system, the control strategy in the DVR plays a significant role. In this article, the DVR performance using Proportional Integral (PI), Proportional Resonant (PR) controllers are analyzed. A robust optimization algorithm called Self Balanced Differential Evolution (SBDE) is used to find the optimal gain values of the controllers in order to reach the target of global minimum error and obtain fast response. Then, a comparative analysis is performed between different controllers and verified that the performance of PR controller is superior than the other controllers. It has been found that the proposed PR controller strategy reduces the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) values for all types of faults. The proposed SBDE optimized DVR with PR controller reduces the THD value less than 4% under voltage distoration condition. The DVR topology is validated in MATLAB/SIMULINK in order to detect the disturbance and inject the voltage to compensate the load voltage