Flexible operation of supercritical power plant via integration of thermal energy storage

© 2018 The Author(s).This chapter presents the recent research on various strategies for power plant flexible operations to meet the requirements of load balance. The aim of this study is to investigate whether it is feasible to integrate the thermal energy storage (TES) with the thermal power plant steam-water cycle. Optional thermal charge and discharge locations in the cycle have been proposed and compared. Dynamic modeling and simulations have been carried out to demonstrate the capability of TES integration in supporting the flexible operation of the power plant. The simulation software named SimuEngine is adopted, and a 600 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant model is implemented onto the software platform. Three TES charging strategies and two TES discharging strategies are proposed and verified via the simulation platform. The simulation results show that it is feasible to extract steam from steam turbines to charge the TES and to discharge the stored thermal energy back to the power generation processes. The improved capability of the plant flexible operation is further studied in supporting the responses to the grid load demand changes. The results demonstrated that the TES integration has led to much faster and more flexible responses to the load demand changes.Peer reviewe

A New Big Data and Logistic Regression-Based Approach for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Businesses are being asked to assess an expanding volume of actual semi-structured and unstructured statistics to address the obstacles of internationalization and deal more effectively with the uncertainties of international integration. Big Data (BD) analytics can therefore play a strategic role in promoting the international expansion of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The exact connection between BD Analytics and globalization has, however, only been sporadically examined in the existing literature. In this study, a quantitative analysis using a Logistic Regression (LR) concept revealed that the interaction effects between BD Analytics architecture and BD Analytics functionality are both helpful and significant but the connection between the management of BD Analytics architecture and the Degree of Internationalization (DI) is not required for internationalization development. This shows that increasing internationalization in SMEs requires more than BD Analytics governance alone. Instead, this study emphasizes the importance of building particular BD Analytics abilities and the availability of a beneficial interaction between management of BD Analytics architecture and BD Analytics abilities that could take advantage of the new information gained via BD Analytics in SME global expansion

A New Belt and Road Framework Method Based on the Internet of Things (IoT) for Industrial Applications

A network called the Internet of things (IoT) enables data communication amongst all autonomous inanimate devices. It is a network that enables users to practice object communication. Its development marks a significant turning point in digital technologies. The IoT is growing, and with it, the amount of research being done on its foundation. The western region's economic growth should take advantage of this growth and find a path that works for it. There are many flaws and issues in the accounting system of enterprises as a consequence of the development of internal management aspects. In order to aid the west area's quick development, this article is focused on the optimization of the financial growth trajectory of that region against the "Belt and Road" framework. The interaction development route of related industries and modern urbanization is presented in this research. The future total GDP and per capita GDP of the west area are studied and reported using simulated data. According to the data, the west area's total GDP and per capita GDP will expand annually over the following 4 years and afterwards continue to grow

Nonlinear interaction of head−-on solitary waves in integrable and nonintegrable systems

This study numerically investigates the nonlinear interaction of head-on solitary waves in a granular chain (a nonintegrable system) and compares the simulation results with the theoretical results in fluid (an integrable system). Three stages (i.e., pre-in-phase traveling stage, central-collision stage, and post-in-phase traveling stage) are identified to describe the nonlinear interaction processes in the granular chain. The nonlinear scattering effect occurs in the central-collision stage, which decreases the amplitude of incident solitary waves. Compared with the leading-time phase in the incident and separation collision processes, the lagging-time phase in the separation collision process is smaller. This asymmetrical nonlinear collision results in an occurrence of leading phase shifts of time and space in the post-in-phase traveling stage. We next find that solitary wave amplitude does not influence the immediate space-phase shift in the granular chain. The space$-$phase shift of the post-in-phase traveling stage is only determined by measurement position rather than wave amplitude. The results are reversed in the fluid. An increase in solitary wave amplitude leads to decreased attachment, detachment and residence times for granular chain and fluid. For the immediate time-phase shift, leading and lagging phenomena appear in the granular chain and the fluid, respectively. These results offer new knowledge for designing mechanical metamaterials and energy-mitigating systems

Recovering Fine Details for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction

Recent works on implicit neural representations have made significant strides. Learning implicit neural surfaces using volume rendering has gained popularity in multi-view reconstruction without 3D supervision. However, accurately recovering fine details is still challenging, due to the underlying ambiguity of geometry and appearance representation. In this paper, we present D-NeuS, a volume rendering-base neural implicit surface reconstruction method capable to recover fine geometry details, which extends NeuS by two additional loss functions targeting enhanced reconstruction quality. First, we encourage the rendered surface points from alpha compositing to have zero signed distance values, alleviating the geometry bias arising from transforming SDF to density for volume rendering. Second, we impose multi-view feature consistency on the surface points, derived by interpolating SDF zero-crossings from sampled points along rays. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our method reconstructs high-accuracy surfaces with details, and outperforms the state of the art

Effect of dexmedetomidine on blood T cell proliferation, T cell subsets and phagocytic function of alveolar macrophages in young rats subjected to splenectomy

Purpose: To study the effect of dexmedetomidine on blood T cell proliferation, T cell subsets and phagocytosis of alveolar macrophages in young rats undergoing splenectomy. Methods: Fifty-four healthy male rats were used for the establishment of an animal model of splenectomy. The young rats were randomly assigned to control, model (untreated) and medication groups, each with 18 rats. The rats in the control and model groups were given physiological saline at a dose of 10 ml/kg, while those in the treatment group were injected with dexmedetomidine at a dose of 50 µg/kg. All treatments were given intraperitoneally (i.p.). T cell proliferation, T cell subset level, phagocytic index and degree of phagocytosis of alveolar macrophages were compared among the rat groups. Results: Relative to control, CD4+, CD8+ and CD4+/CD8+ levels in model and medication groups decreased significantly (p < 0.05). CD4+ and CD8+ levels were lower in the medication group than in model group. Phagocytic index and degree of phagocytosis of alveolar macrophages in model and medication groups were significantly lower than those in the control group, while phagocytic index and degree of phagocytosis of alveolar macrophages in the medication group of rats were smaller than those in model rats (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Dexmedetomidine significantly reduces immune function in splenectomy rats. However, it should be used with caution in patients with splenectomy

A Synthetic Algorithm for Tracking a Moving Object in a Multiple-Dynamic Obstacles Environment Based on Kinematically Planar Redundant Manipulators

This paper presents a synthetic algorithm for tracking a moving object in a multiple-dynamic obstacles environment based on kinematically planar manipulators. By observing the motions of the object and obstacles, Spline filter associated with polynomial fitting is utilized to predict their moving paths for a period of time in the future. Several feasible paths for the manipulator in Cartesian space can be planned according to the predicted moving paths and the defined feasibility criterion. The shortest one among these feasible paths is selected as the optimized path. Then the real-time path along the optimized path is planned for the manipulator to track the moving object in real-time. To improve the convergence rate of tracking, a virtual controller based on PD controller is designed to adaptively adjust the real-time path. In the process of tracking, the null space of inverse kinematic and the local rotation coordinate method (LRCM) are utilized for the arms and the end-effector to avoid obstacles, respectively. Finally, the moving object in a multiple-dynamic obstacles environment is thus tracked via real-time updating the joint angles of manipulator according to the iterative method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is feasible to track a moving object in a multiple-dynamic obstacles environment