Life Cycle Analysis Based Evaluation of Desulfurisation Technologies

The study evaluates current desulfurisation technologies, namely hydrodesulfurisation (HDS), oxidativedesulfurisation (ODS) and supercritical fluid methods (SCF) considering different stages of life cycle. To evaluate these technologies, a functional unit of mass per unit of weight was chosen to weigh the environmental damage caused by each process. The assessment criteria include energy consumption categories (electricity, fuel oil, and diesel) and environmental impacts categories (global warming, acidification, and photochemical ozone formation). The total environmental impact was calculated based on Eco-99 indicators. Of the total environmental impacts, production is the most critical for both HDS and ODS technologies. Overall, SCF is identified as most energy saving technique

The Impact of Texting on Comprehension

This paper presents a study of the effects of texting on English language comprehension. The authors believe that English used in texting causes a lack of comprehension for English speakers, learners, and texters. Wei, Xian-hai and Jiang (2008:3) declare “In Netspeak, there are some newly-created vocabularies, which people cannot comprehend them either from their partial pronunciation or from their figures.” Crystal (2007:23) claims; “variation causes problems of comprehension and acceptability. If you speak or write differently from the way I do, we may fail to understand each other.”  In this paper, the authors conducted a questionnaire at Aligarh Muslim University to ninety respondents from five different Faculties and four different levels. To measure respondents’ comprehension of English texting, the authors gave the respondents abbreviations used by texters and asked them to write the full forms of the abbreviations. The authors found that many abbreviations were not understood, which suggested that most of the respondents did not understand and did not use these abbreviations.

Performance Evaluation of a Novel Multigeneration Plant of Cooling, Power, and Seawater Desalination Using Supercritical CO2 Partial Cooling, ME-TVC Desalination, and Absorption Refrigeration Cycles

Multigeneration systems have gained popularity and approval from scientific minds due to the enhancements these systems bring to total energy utilization efficiency. The use of waste heat from different thermodynamic cycles ensures deceleration of environment pollution. In this paper, a newly conceptualized poly-generation system combining power, cooling and desalination is proposed. Despite the high efficiency generated by the next generation supercritical CO2 (sCO2) Brayton cycles, the pre-coolers (cooling components) of the power block experience a substantial amount of low-grade energy loss. Utilizing this energy loss to increase thermal efficiency further has been the driving force behind this research. The proposed system has three subsystems which are sCO2 Partial cooling cycle with reheat for power generation, followed by a ME-TVC (multi-effect desalination-thermal vapor compression) cycle for producing fresh water and finally an absorption refrigeration cycle (ARC) to provide refrigeration effect. The waste heat from precoolers of sCO2 partial cooling cycle are being utilized by the desalination plant and refrigeration cycle for enhanced system performance. A comprehensive mathematical model is developed and a parametric assessment is performed. The parametric investigation focuses on the primary performance parameters, namely net power output, freshwater yield, energy utilization efficiency, coefficient of performance, and gain output ratio, to assess the multi-generation system's performance across various operational scenarios. The variables that are optimized are turbine inlet temperature of the sCO2 cycle, temperature difference of the generator and the evaporating temperature of the absorption cycle, the number and temperature of the effects of the desalination system. The results show that the greatest energy efficiency of the developed system is up to 70%. The 1st law energy efficiency is termed as Energy Utilization Factor (EUF) in the present work. This term adheres to the logic of the first law of thermodynamics by relating the total energy outputs to the system (work plus refrigeration capacity and heat supplied to the desalination plant) to the total energy input. Using the default parameters, the COP of the ARC is 0.667 and the EUF of the combined system is 59%. Both of these values are higher when compared to previous combined cycles found in literature

An optimum control-based approach for Dynamic Positioning of vessels

This paper presents a solution to the problem of Dynamic Positioning of vessels in Arctic environments, using a finite-horizon optimal control based approach. As the first step, an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) based non-linear observer is developed for estimating both the vessel states and unknown inputs such as ice load. To perform better set point control and disturbance rejection, a Non-linear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) is employed for dynamic positioning. Using the developed estimation and control strategies, successful simulation results are obtained. � 2016 IEEE.Scopu

Effects of copper nanoparticles on performance, muscle and bone characteristics and serum metabolites in broilers

Abstract Three hundred and twenty day old Hubbard broilers were randomly allocated to four treatments (8 replicates, 10 birds/pen) and were raised under standard management conditions. Birds in the first group served as control and were fed a corn based diet, while birds in the remaining three groups i.e.; A, B and C were fed with a basal diet supplemented with copper nanoparticles (CuNP) at 5, 10 and 15 mg /kg of diet respectively for 35 days. Supplementation of CuNP linearly increased (P≤0.05) body weight (BW), average daily weight gain (ADWG) and feed intake (FI) in broilers. Uric acid, glucose levels in blood and feed conversion ratio (FCR) reduced linearly (P≤0.05) with CuNP supplementation in diet. Supplementation of CuNP in the diet also linearly increased (P≤0.05) tibia weight, length, diameter, weight/length index (W/L) and Tibiotarsal index (TT index). Inclusion of CuNP in broilers diet linearly increased the measured parameters of muscle i.e.; pH, fiber diameter, fiber cross-sectional area, fascicle diameter, fascicle cross-sectional area (P≤0.05). Concentration of copper, iron, calcium and phosphorous in blood also increased line-arly (P ≤ 0.05) with CuNP supplementation. Overall, CuNP positively affected the growth performance, histological characteristics of muscles, bone strength and serum metabolites in broilers.</jats:p&gt