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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Computational Catalysis: Creating A User-Friendly Tool For Research And Education, Kevin P. Greenman, Peilin Liao
Computational Catalysis: Creating A User-Friendly Tool For Research And Education, Kevin P. Greenman, Peilin Liao
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
Catalysis is used in a significant portion of production processes in the industrialized world, including most processing of chemicals and fuels. This makes maximizing the efficiency of catalysts a high priority. However, the immense number of candidates for new catalysts precludes the possibility of testing all of them by experiments. Density functional theory (DFT) has been widely and successfully used to calculate material properties relevant to catalysis and to screen promising candidates for experimental testing, but there currently exists no publicly- available, user-friendly tool for performing these DFT calculations. This work details the development of such a tool for nanoHUB.org …
Thermophotovoltaic Devices: Combustion Chamber Optimization And Modelling To Maximize Fuel Efficiency, Arnold Chris Toppo, Ernesto Marinero, Zhaxylyk Kudyshev
Thermophotovoltaic Devices: Combustion Chamber Optimization And Modelling To Maximize Fuel Efficiency, Arnold Chris Toppo, Ernesto Marinero, Zhaxylyk Kudyshev
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
Currently, 110 billion cubic meters of natural gas (primarily methane), a potent greenhouse gas, are flared off for environmental and safety reasons. This process results in enough fuel to provide the combined natural gas consumption of Germany and France. The research team developed a thermophotovoltaic device to convert thermal energy to electricity at a high efficiency using proprietary emitters and combustion system. With the current focus being fuel efficiency and the combustion process, the assembly was simulated using ANSYS Fluent modelling software and the following parameters were optimized: air/fuel ratios, flow rates, and inlet sizes. Simultaneously the heat transfer across …
Grain Boundary Motion Analysis, Jeremy Marquardt, Xiaorong Cai, Marisol Koslowski
Grain Boundary Motion Analysis, Jeremy Marquardt, Xiaorong Cai, Marisol Koslowski
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
Grain growth is a mechanism to relax residual stresses in thin films. These grains grow out of the thin film surface and are known as whiskers. These whiskers can cause short circuits, so developing scalable and cost effective solutions would increase the reliability and utility of tin electronics. A popular of method of examining tin whiskering is microscopic simulation, as it provides an accurate and cost effective way to predict the consequences of proposed models. Specifically examining the evolution of grain boundaries, this paper aims to present the results of grain boundary motion simulations through a generalized program that streamlines …
Predicting And Optimizing Solar Cell Performance With Material/Surface Characteristics, Yiheng Zhu, Allison Perna, Peter Bermel
Predicting And Optimizing Solar Cell Performance With Material/Surface Characteristics, Yiheng Zhu, Allison Perna, Peter Bermel
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
Renewable energy sources have begun replacing fossil fuels at the utility scale. In particular, photovoltaics has grown rapidly in recent years. To further improve solar technology in terms of cost and efficiency and promote adoption, researchers often seek material and device level advancements. Photovoltaic simulation tools can be utilized to predict device performance before fabrication and experimentation, streamline research processes, and interpret experimental results. Therefore, we developed ContourPV, which simulates various combinations of values of different device characteristics to optimize and predict photovoltaic performance. ContourPV sweeps the inputted range of values for each chosen device or layer characteristic and obtains …
Experimental Validation Of A Numerical Phase Change Model For Microchannel Slug Flow Boiling, Christian J. Retter, Todd A. Kingston, Justin A. Weibel, Suresh V. Garimella
Experimental Validation Of A Numerical Phase Change Model For Microchannel Slug Flow Boiling, Christian J. Retter, Todd A. Kingston, Justin A. Weibel, Suresh V. Garimella
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
Thermal management of high-power electronic devices continues to be a critical challenge. Flow boiling in microchannel heat sinks has been demonstrated to be an effective method for removing high heat fluxes from these devices owing to utilization of the latent heat of the fluid and the large surface area enhancement for heat exchange. However, microchannel flow boiling technologies have yet to be broadly implemented due to a lack of experimentally validated prediction and design tools. The goal of this study is to use high-fidelity experimental data to validate a previously developed numerical phase change model, to help enable physics-based prediction …