The Utilization of Fuel Cell Waste Heat at the University of Bridgeport

District heating system is cost effective and helps to reduce green house gases. It uses the waste heat from existing power plants to provide low temperature heat to the commercial and residential buildings. At UB, the 1.4 MW fuel cell system is owned by another company and the waste heat is free to us. Currently, less than 50% of the waste heat is utilized in several buildings

Numerical Study of Manifold Design for Heat Pipe Solar Collectors

This project studies an active solar water heating system which uses glass evacuated tube solar collectors. The heat pipes inside the evacuated tubes transfer the absorbed solar energy to water in the manifold through the copper headers of heat pipes. A numerical model will be developed to simulate the heat transfer and fluid flow inside the manifold under different solar radiation flux levels and fluid flow rates. The simulation results provide understanding of the heat transfer and fluid flow patterns inside the manifold and will be used to help optimize the manifold design

Developing a New Graduate Program in Sustainable Energy Engineering

© ASEE 2010The world energy demand keeps increasing in recent years due to the rapidly rising living standards and expanding populations. However, the non-renewable energy resource, fossil fuels, is running out and the crude oil supply from Middle East is unstable. To meet the energy demand and improve the energy security, developing sustainable energy, such as solar, wind, tide, geothermal, biomass energy, is a solution to this most urgent energy problems. Therefore, the rapidly increasing nationwide demand for well-qualified professionals in the sustainable energy can be predicted. In order to educate and prepare the technical and scientific workforce for the emerging sustainable energy technology, the School of Engineering at University of Bridgeport (UB) is preparing the M.S. Sustainable Energy Engineering program. In this paper, the structure of the curriculum and the course design in this program will be presented in more details

Integrating Alternative Energy Technology Into Engineering Education

© 2009 by ASEEAlternative Energy Technology attracts more and more attention as evidenced by the tremendous amount of investment from the federal government, automotive industry, and fuel cell /photovoltaic cell manufacturers. To advance the search for solutions to the world’s most pressing energy problems and to prepare our future Connecticut workforce for the emerging alternative energy technology field, University of Bridgeport (UB) has provided a graduate level course, Alternative Energy Technology. This course is related to chemistry, electronics, and mechanics and the graduate students are with different engineering background. The challenges in the teaching are addressed and the possible solutions are given in this paper. Moreover, the teaching experience in this course is helpful for the licensure application for a new M.S. program, Sustainable Energy Engineering (SEE) in the school of Engineering at UB

Teaching Computational Fluid Dynamics (Cfd) To Design Engineers

© 2008 ASEEComputational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can provide detailed thermal flow information, such as temperature field, pressure field and velocity field, in equipment and process in various industries. Due to the recent rapid growth of powerful computer resources and the development of commercial CFD software packages, CFD has been proven a useful tool for mechanical design engineers. CFD has also gained broad acceptance in the engineering education. It has been adopted in both undergraduate and graduate level courses in many universities. The teaching of CFD in current engineering education can be classified into two types, one is to focus on the numerical methods with little emphasis on using the software and the other is to introduce a CFD software as a virtual reality laboratory in Fluid Mechanics class without emphasis on teaching software. In the first type, students need strong mathematical background to succeed in the class and also need further training to effectively use modern commercial software for real industrial application. While in the second type, students only learned an abstract form of CFD processes, thus they will not be able to use CFD commercial software without further training in this area. This paper is about the use of CFD in teaching graduate students at this university who were in a two year design track program. Many of these students did not have a good background in mathematics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and programming, however, most of them were good at computer aided design in ProE and were very interested in learning CFD as a design tool in industries. STAR-CCM+ was chosen as the CFD software to teach students the entire CFD process in a single integrated software environment. After building a geometry model in ProE, students learned to import the CAD model, set up mesh model, physical model and solver, and postprocess the results in STAR-CCM+. Based on projects, CFD numerical methods and fundamentals of heat transfer and fluid flow were introduced to help students understand the CFD process, interpret, and validate simulation results

The future of the district heating system at the University of Bridgeport

Linfeng Zhang, Junling Hu, and David Cote's poster on district heating systems by examining the heating loop at the University of Bridgeport

Design of a large dynamic range readout unit for the PSD detector of DAMPE

A large dynamic range is required by the Plastic Scintillator Detector (PSD) of DArk Matter Paricle Explorer (DAMPE), and a double-dynode readout has been developed. To verify this design, a prototype detector module has been constructed and tested with cosmic rays and heavy ion beams. The results match with the estimation and the readout unit could easily cover the required dynamic range