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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Thermophotovoltaic Devices: Combustion Chamber Optimization And Modelling To Maximize Fuel Efficiency, Arnold Chris Toppo, Ernesto Marinero, Zhaxylyk Kudyshev Aug 2018

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 …


Evaluation And Analysis Of Ethane Transformation To Liquid Hydrocarbons Through Steam Cracking, Christian Omar Villa Santos, Wasiu Peter Oladipupo, Taufik Ridha, Rakesh Agrawal Aug 2018

Evaluation And Analysis Of Ethane Transformation To Liquid Hydrocarbons Through Steam Cracking, Christian Omar Villa Santos, Wasiu Peter Oladipupo, Taufik Ridha, Rakesh Agrawal

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Process design and sensitivity studies for a steam cracking reactor was performed. Steam cracking is commonly employed to convert ethane to ethylene, a building block of many other products. Although this technology is generally employed at large scale (>6 Billion pounds of ethylene per year), understanding the process and its economic performance is critical to set target criteria for other processes under development. Aspen Plus was used to simulate the ethane steam cracking reactor and other process units. Sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the most efficient and cost-effective operation regarding product yield. The results show that the maximum …


Electronic Effect Of Platinum Alloy Catalysts On Olefin Hydrogenation Kinetics, Colin Reedy, Jeff Miller, Stephen Purdy Aug 2018

Electronic Effect Of Platinum Alloy Catalysts On Olefin Hydrogenation Kinetics, Colin Reedy, Jeff Miller, Stephen Purdy

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Dehydrogenation of alkanes is the first step in transforming light hydrocarbons into liquid fuels and chemicals. This process has traditionally used platinum alloys as catalysts. Alloys are used industrially because they have a greater selectivity than monometallic platinum. Alloying platinum with an inactive promoter modifies the crystalline structure of the surface (geometric effect), and the 5d electrons in platinum responsible for chemistry (electronic effect); both have been suggested to be primarily responsible for dehydrogenation selectivity in platinum alloys. Alloy catalysts have been synthesized using early 3d transition metal promoters with the same Pt3M crystal structure. X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy …


Metabolic Comparison Of Wild-Type And Transgenic Synechocystis Pcc 6803 Cyanobacteria, Ian A. Mcluckey, John A. Morgan, Joel Yu King Hing Aug 2017

Metabolic Comparison Of Wild-Type And Transgenic Synechocystis Pcc 6803 Cyanobacteria, Ian A. Mcluckey, John A. Morgan, Joel Yu King Hing

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Calvin-Benson (CBB) cycle is an essential part of nature. This phenomenon allows carbon molecules in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to be converted into useful energy in the form of sugars. Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms capable of utilizing energy from sunlight to drive this cycle and are also readily engineered. In hopes of improving this cycle, we compared a wild-type version of the Synechocystis PCC6803 cyanobacteria to an engineered version overexpressing the enzyme FBA (fructose-biphosphate aldolase), called 70 glpX, to deduce how the overexpressing strain is able to be more photosynthetically efficient. To do this, comparative metabolomics were done …


Dynamic Behavior Of A Clamped-Clamped Bi-Stable Laminate For Energy Harvesting, Ajay V. Kumar, Andres F. Arrieta Ph.D., Myungwon Hwang Aug 2016

Dynamic Behavior Of A Clamped-Clamped Bi-Stable Laminate For Energy Harvesting, Ajay V. Kumar, Andres F. Arrieta Ph.D., Myungwon Hwang

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Multi-stable laminates have many applications in morphing structures, energy harvesting devices, and metamaterials due to the specific characteristics attributed to the exhibited stable states. Changes between stable states allow for large deflections, on-demand variation of the stiffness of compliant structures embedded within these elements, and control of effective dynamic properties in periodic lattices. These changes in state can be accessed via a snap-through instability triggered by introducing a well-defined activation energy. The resulting oscillations could enable broadband energy harvesting via piezoelectric transduction and resistive circuits. In this paper, a clamped-clamped bi-stable laminate is studied to understand the behavior of the …


Synthesizing Bismuth Telluride Nanowires In A Large Scale And Investigating The Energy Filtering Effect By Blending Bismuth Telluride Nanowires And Silver Nanoparticle In Thermoelectrics, Henka Darsono, Haiyu Fang, Yue Wu Oct 2013

Synthesizing Bismuth Telluride Nanowires In A Large Scale And Investigating The Energy Filtering Effect By Blending Bismuth Telluride Nanowires And Silver Nanoparticle In Thermoelectrics, Henka Darsono, Haiyu Fang, Yue Wu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

More than 50% of the energy sources becomes “waste” energy generally dissipated to the atmosphere in the form of heat. Thermoelectric effect is a conversion of temperature difference to electric voltage and can be used to convert the wasted heat to useful work. Nanomaterials have great potentials in the field of thermoelectric effect since they have properties that can allow higher efficiency in converting this wasted heat to electricity as compared to bulk materials. The purpose of this project is to develop a method to synthesize bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) nanowires on a large scale and incorporate …


Photolithography In Fabrication Of Thin-Film Solar Cells, Yusheng Zhu, Rakesh Agrawal Oct 2013

Photolithography In Fabrication Of Thin-Film Solar Cells, Yusheng Zhu, Rakesh Agrawal

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Solar energy has steadily increased its efficiency and cost-effectiveness throughout the past three decades and seems poised to compete with current primary energy (natural gas, oil, coal) as the need for alternative energy sources rises. One type of solar cell, thin-film cells, often relies on use of permanent photomasks in order to imprint a pattern onto the front metal contact. However, these machined metal masks are rigid and do not allow for different designs to be explored as current masks encounter difficulties in machining grids thin enough for optimization. Photolithography, traditionally used in the microfabrication field, provides a method in …


Environmental Monitoring In Preparation For The Installation Of A Green Roof, Andrew N. Martin, Ming Qu Oct 2013

Environmental Monitoring In Preparation For The Installation Of A Green Roof, Andrew N. Martin, Ming Qu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Green roofs are becoming an increasingly popular way to improve the environmental, economic, and aesthetic performance of both new and existing buildings. Along with the green roofs themselves, it is also common to install sensors to measure various environmental parameters that are affected by or important to the operation of the roof such as precipitation, temperature, and runoff. However, for most of these systems, the sensors are installed at the same time or even after the green roof. Therefore, no before-and-after comparisons can be made for those roofs. To account for this missing data, monitoring equipment was installed on a …