Elliptical double corrugated tubes for enhanced heat transfer

The thermal performance at constant pumping power conditions was numerically investigated in ellipse and super ellipse-based double corrugated tubes. A significant increase in thermal efficiency in double corrugated tubes is accompanied with a reasonable penalty in flow reduction for the cases modelled. An ellipse and a super ellipse-based double corrugated tubes were modelled at laminar fully hydraulically developed incompressible flow. Each base geometry was analysed holding either hydraulic diameter constant or the cross-sectional area constant. The pressure drop was normalized to the length of each modelled tube in order to maintain the pumping power. Thermal analysis was conducted under constant wall temperature boundary condition. The governing equations for non-isothermal flow were solved using the finite element method, and the results of the simulations were normalized to an equivalent straight tube. Numerical results predict a thermal efficiency enhanced by 400% maintaining 4.2 times lower volumetric flow rate in double corrugated tubes at the same pressure drop. The global performance evaluation criterion increases up to 14% for the double corrugated tubes with an ellipse-base and up to 11% for the tubes with super ellipse-base

Electrical Control of Optical Emitter Relaxation Pathways enabled by Graphene

Controlling the energy flow processes and the associated energy relaxation rates of a light emitter is of high fundamental interest, and has many applications in the fields of quantum optics, photovoltaics, photodetection, biosensing and light emission. While advanced dielectric and metallic systems have been developed to tailor the interaction between an emitter and its environment, active control of the energy flow has remained challenging. Here, we demonstrate in-situ electrical control of the relaxation pathways of excited erbium ions, which emit light at the technologically relevant telecommunication wavelength of 1.5 $\mu$m. By placing the erbium at a few nanometres distance from graphene, we modify the relaxation rate by more than a factor of three, and control whether the emitter decays into either electron-hole pairs, emitted photons or graphene near-infrared plasmons, confined to $<$15 nm to the sheet. These capabilities to dictate optical energy transfer processes through electrical control of the local density of optical states constitute a new paradigm for active (quantum) photonics.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Application of an improved parameter estimation approach to characterize enhanced heat exchangers

The main goals of this paper are twofold: to provide an improved parameter estimation procedure that enables the accurate evaluation of heat transfer correlations for the Nusselt number and to present a new procedure for identifying the presence of transition in the flow regime. In the first goal, it needs to be pointed out that although this kind of approach is based on temperature measurements, in the literature, the classical parameter estimation approach uses the overall heat transfer coefficient. To reduce uncertainty in the evaluation of internal and external heat transfer coefficients, in the improved procedure, the measured temperature data were directly used without any intermediate elaboration. The validation of the new procedure, carried out by means of synthetic data, highlighted that both the relative error on each estimated parameter and the amplitude of the confidence intervals were reduced by minimizing the objective function expressed in terms of outlet temperature of the tube side of the heat exchanger. With regard to the transition regime, the numerical outcomes revealed that both in the laminar and turbulent regimes, the amplitude of the confidence intervals of the estimated parameters was very small; in the transition regime, the amplitude became wide. Therefore, this parameter served as a useful indicator to identify the presence of transition in the flow regime. This finding enabled a new indirect methodology, called the transition alert procedure, to be developed for identifying the Reynolds number value at which transition of the flow regime occurred. This method is an iterative subsampling of the dataset based on the observation of the amplitude of the confidence intervals. To assess the robustness of the methodologies proposed here, the improved parameter estimation procedure and the transition alert procedure were applied to the obtained experimental data by analyzing a counter-flow heat exchanger with double corrugated tubes. In this kind of tube, the condition when the transition from the laminar to the turbulent flow regime occurs is not known a priori

Optimised long-read sequence bioinformatics tool for the analysis of the resistome and microbial communities

Public deliverable D-JRP12-2.1 & 2.2 'Optimised long-read sequence bioinformatics tool for the analysis of the resistome and microbial communities, publicly available' from FARMED EJP: Fast Antimicrobial Resistance and Mobile-Element Detection using metagenomics for animal and human on-site test

Phonon-mediated mid-infrared photoresponse of graphene

The photoresponse of graphene at mid-infrared frequencies is of high technological interest and is governed by fundamentally different underlying physics than the photoresponse at visible frequencies, as the energy of the photons and substrate phonons involved have comparable energies. Here, we perform a spectrally resolved study of the graphene photoresponse for mid-infrared light by measuring spatially resolved photocurrent over a broad frequency range (1000-1600 cm-1). We unveil the different mechanisms that give rise to photocurrent generation in graphene on a polar substrate. In particular, we find an enhancement of the photoresponse when the light excites bulk or surface phonons of the SiO2 substrate. This work paves the way for the development of graphene-based mid-infrared thermal sensing technology

Phonon-Mediated Mid-Infrared Photoresponse of Graphene

The photoresponse of graphene at mid-infrared frequencies is of high technological interest and is governed by fundamentally different underlying physics than the photoresponse at visible frequencies, as the energy of the photons and substrate phonons involved have comparable energies. Here, we perform a spectrally resolved study of the graphene photoresponse for mid-infrared light by measuring spatially resolved photocurrent over a broad frequency range (1000–1600 cm^–1). We unveil the different mechanisms that give rise to photocurrent generation in graphene on a polar substrate. In particular, we find an enhancement of the photoresponse when the light excites bulk or surface phonons of the SiO₂ substrate. This work paves the way for the development of graphene-based mid-infrared thermal sensing technology