Bench-Scale Investigation of Limestone Size Evolution in a Fluidized Bed Combustor

The influence of temperature, heating rate and chemical reaction on fragmentation and attrition of limestone in a fluidized bed (FB) was investigated. The intensity of fragmentation and attrition was measured in the same apparatus but at different fluidizing velocities and fluidizing media. It was found that the heating rate has a positive effect on fragmentation for the tested limestones. The effect of bed temperature on limestone fragmentation was inconclusive. The influence of chemical reaction on the fragmentation seems to be complicated; CO2 release due to calcination would prompt fragmentation while the sulfation would increase the gas diffusion resistance and depresses the fragmentation intensity. On the other hand, the CaSO3/CaSO4 layer was found to be attrition-resistant leading to small attrition rates. Attrition rate constant showed to decay exponentially with time and approaching a constant for all limestone particles. Particle sizes between 200-400 µm have larger attrition rate constant than coarse ones perhaps due to their large specific surface area

Astaxanthin production by Phaffia rhodozyma fermentation of cassava residues substrate

Cassava residues as main materials were fermented with Phaffia rhodozyma to produce astaxanthin.  Using the Box-Behnken design, the effects of sugar content, initial pH and nitrogen content were studied with the yield of astaxanthin as response value, which was evaluated to optimize the fermentation conditions of astaxanthin production.  The optimal fermentation conditions have been reached by the study: sugar content was 40 g/L, the initial pH was at 4 and nitrogen content was 8 g/L.  By validation test, the astaxanthin yield under the optimal condition, which was basically corresponded to the model prediction, was 96.83%.Keywords: astaxanthin, cassava recidues, Phaffia rhodozym

Coal Ignition Temperature in Oxygen-Enriched CFB Boiler

The oxygen-enriched Circulating fluidized bed (CFB) combustion technology is a new method to reduce CO2 emissions. The coal ignition temperature, Ti F, in an oxygen-enriched CFB boiler is an important parameter for designing the startup burner and for choosing the operating strategy during the startup process. The combustion of five types of coal under four different atmospheres (air, O2 27 %, O2 40%, O2 53%, CO2 as balance gas) was measured in a laboratory scale fluidized bed (FB) with an under-bed preheat system. Using thermocouples and a Gas Analyzer, the changes in bed temperature and the concentration of the different components, such as O2, CO2 and CO, in flue gas were directly measured to determine Ti F. It was found that Ti F decreased with increasing O2 concentration. The differences between the ignition temperatures determined in air and with 27 % O2 were not significant. At lower bed temperatures, for two coal types with higher volatiles, a two stage-ignition for volatiles and char was observed under a high O2 concentration. The time delay between the two stages decreased and finally merged into one with increasing bed temperature. Similar results were obtained in air. The coal with the higher volatile content had a lower ignition temperature in an oxygen-enriched CFB. Comparison of the ignition temperatures obtained by different methods and the feed temperatures in industrial CFB boilers showd that the measured result in a fluidized bed can be used as a reference for oxygen-enriched CFB boilers

On-Line Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis of Box Transformer Substation Based on VPRS-RBFNN

Box transformer substation (BTS) is an important power distribution environment. To ensure the safe and stable operation of the power distribution system, it is critical to monitor the BTS operation and diagnose its faults in a reliable manner. In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, this paper aims to develop a real-time and accurate online strategy for BTS monitoring and fault diagnosis. The framework of our strategy was constructed based on the IoT technique, including a sensing layer, a network layer and an application layer. On this basis, a BTS fault diagnosis method was established with variable precision rough set (VPRS) as the pre-network and the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) as the back-fed network. The VPRS and the RBFNN were selected, because the BTS faults have many characteristic parameters, with complex nonlinear relationship with fault modes. Finally, a prototype of our strategy was developed and applied to the fault diagnosis of an actual BTS. The results fully demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our strategy

Research on Heat Transfer Inside the Furnace of Large Scale CFB Boilers

Field tests in one unit of 135MWe and two units of 300MWe commercial Circulating Fluidized bed (CFB) boilers (A&B) with different structures were carried out. The influence of operating conditions on the thermal boundary layer, local heat transfer coefficient and peripheral distribution of heat transfer coefficient were studied. It was found that, in the 135MWe and 300MWe-A CFB furnace, the thickness of the thermal boundary layer was almost constant, about 100mm, and independent of the height above the distributor and the boiler load. The local heat transfer coefficient increased with increasing load as well as the coal feeding rate and air volume in both the 135MWe and 300MWe-A CFB boilers. The boiler structure and heating surface layout had a great influence on the distribution of the heat transfer coefficient in the large-scale CFB boilers. In both the 135MWe furnace and the 300MWe-B CFB boilers, the heat transfer coefficient was lower in the center than near the corner due to higher suspension density in the corner. In the 300MWe-B CFB with heating surfaces in the furnace, because of the uneven layout of the heating surface and the mal-distribution of gas-solid flow caused by the asymmetric arrangement of cyclones, heat transfer coefficients tended to be higher in the middle part than at the walls

Building extraction from high-resolution aerial imagery using a generative adversarial network with spatial and channel attention mechanisms.

Segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images is an important challenge with wide practical applications. The increasing spatial resolution provides fine details for image segmentation but also incurs segmentation ambiguities. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network with spatial and channel attention mechanisms (GAN-SCA) for the robust segmentation of buildings in remote sensing images. The segmentation network (generator) of the proposed framework is composed of the well-known semantic segmentation architecture (U-Net) and the spatial and channel attention mechanisms (SCA). The adoption of SCA enables the segmentation network to selectively enhance more useful features in specific positions and channels and enables improved results closer to the ground truth. The discriminator is an adversarial network with channel attention mechanisms that can properly discriminate the outputs of the generator and the ground truth maps. The segmentation network and adversarial network are trained in an alternating fashion on the Inria aerial image labeling dataset and Massachusetts buildings dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed GAN-SCA achieves a higher score (the overall accuracy and intersection over the union of Inria aerial image labeling dataset are 96.61% and 77.75%, respectively, and the F1-measure of the Massachusetts buildings dataset is 96.36%) and outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches

Investigation on The Hydrodynamic Properties in The External Loop of Circulating Fluidized Bed With a Loop Seal

The pressure balance and mass balance are influenced by the characteristics of different components in the loop of a circulating fluidized bed (CFB). Experiments were conducted in a 4.3 m high cold laboratory CFB test rig with a loop seal. With a fixed bed inventory and superficial gas velocity, the pressure drop of the loop seal decreased with increasing aeration, thus causing an increase in the solid circulation flux (Gs). Correspondingly, the pressure drop in the riser became higher with increasing Gs; the pressure drop of the cyclone had a non-linear relationship with Gs, and the transition point was determined in the experiment. Using the laser fiber and gas tracer method, hydrodynamic characteristics in the standpipe were directly measured. It was found that the pressure gradient, voidage, and solid height in the standpipe were affected by the pressure balance in the whole loop. By adjusting the gas flow rate and direction in the standpipe, the gas-solid slip velocity and pressure gradient changed correspondingly. Therefore, the standpipe could maintain the pressure balance and realize self-equilibrium of the loop by absorbing the pressure drop variations of other parts in the system

Gamification and Marketing Management: A Literature Review and Future Agenda

Given the motivational effect of game elements and mechanisms on user experience in various non-game contexts, gamification has widely been used as an effective marketing technique to enhance the performance of business practices. In the past decade, a variety of studies have explored and investigated the value that gamification can provide in consumer-facing marketing activities. However, there is still a dearth of granular understanding of how gamification in marketing has been studied in the current literature. This paper follows the PRISMA literature review process and systematically reviews 93 papers consisting of 111 empirical studies on gamification and marketing management. The synthesized findings provide a holistic picture of the adopted research methods, different investigated gamification affordances and advergames, various gamified industries, and marketing performance indicators regarding products, services, and brands. Five agenda points, mainly relating to methodology and themes, are further suggested.Peer reviewe