Evaluation of wind energy investment interest and electricity generation cost analysis for Turkey

Turkey has remarkable wind energy potential, but its utilisation rate is very low. However, in 2007, energy investors applied to the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) with 751 wind projects to obtain a 78180.2 MW wind power plant license. This paper first presents an overview of wind energy development in the world and then reviews related situations in Turkey. Second, to motivate the interest in wind energy investment, new wind power plant license applications in Turkey are analysed. Finally, wind electricity generation cost analyses were performed at 14 locations in Turkey. Capacity factors of investigated locations were calculated between 19.7% and 56.8%, and the production cost of electrical energy was between 1.73 and 4.99 $cent/kW h for two different wind shear coefficients.     

Biosorption potential of Neurospora crassa cells for decolorization of Acid Red 57 (AR57) dye

Biosorption of Acid Red 57 (AR57) on to Neurospora crassa was studied with variation of pH, contact time, biosorbent and dye concentrations and temperature to determine equilibrium and kinetic models. The AR57 biosorption was fast and equilibrium was attained within 40 min. Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin–Radushkevich (D–R) isotherm models were applied to experimental equilibrium data for AR57 biosorption at various temperatures. The equilibrium data fitted very well to all the equilibrium models in the studied concentration range of AR57. Maximum biosorption capacity (q_max) of AR57 on to N. crassa was 2.16 × 10^?4 mol g^?1 at 20 °C. The kinetics of biosorption of AR57 were analyzed and rate constants were derived. The overall biosorption process was best described by a pseudo‐second‐order kinetic model. The changes in Gibbs free energy, enthalpy and entropy of biosorption were also evaluated for the biosorption of AR57 on to N. crassa. The results indicate that the biosorption was spontaneous and exothermic in nature. Copyright © 2006 Society of Chemical Industry     

Convergence theorems by a new iteration process for a finite family of nonself asymptotically nonexpansive mappings with errors in Banach spaces

In this paper, we study a new iteration process for a finite family of nonself asymptotically nonexpansive mappings with errors in Banach spaces. We prove some weak and strong convergence theorems for this new iteration process. The results of this paper improve and extend the corresponding results of Chidume et al. (2003) [10], Osilike and Aniagbosor (2000) [3], Schu (1991) [4], Takahashi and Kim (1998) [9], Tian et al. (2007) [18], Wang (2006) [11], Yang (2007) [17] and others.     

Evaluation of confidence limit estimates of cluster analysis on molecular marker data

BACKGROUND: Diversity studies employ cluster analysis as a statistical tool, whereby relationships between individuals are shown in a dendrogram, mostly accompanied by bootstrap support for merging branches to indicate confidence limits. The objective of this study was to evaluate the reliability of the currently applied method of obtaining confidence limit estimates in cluster analysis and to propose an improved alternative bootstrap method. RESULTS: It was illustrated via a simulation study that conventional bootstrap support for cluster analysis was affected by the sample size. The reliability of merging branches decreased with increasing number of individuals in the sample. Unlike the current bootstrap support for cluster analysis, the proposed method provides confidence intervals for the similarity coefficients between individuals. To facilitate the interpretation of similarity coefficients and confidence intervals, alternative graphical presentations are proposed for both ‘similarity coefficients’ and ‘confidence interval range’. CONCLUSION: The proposed bootstrap method is not affected by the number of individuals in the sample. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry     

Investigation of wind shear coefficients and their effect on electrical energy generation

Wind measurements are generally performed below wind turbine hub heights due to higher measurement and tower costs. In order to obtain the wind speed at the hub height of the turbine, the measurements are extrapolated, assuming that the wind shear is constant. This assumption may result in some critical errors between the estimated and actual energy outputs. In this paper wind data collected in Bal?kesir from October 2008 to September 2009, has been used to show the effects of wind shear coefficient on energy production. Results of the study showed that, the difference between wind energy production using extrapolated wind data and energy production using measured wind data at hub height may be up to 49.6%.     

Thermoeconomic analysis of a trigeneration system

In this study a trigeneration plant which produces electrical power with a natural gas fed reciprocating engine and which yields absorption cooling by making use of exhaust gases of the system has been examined. In order to use both energy and financial resources most efficiently, the thermoeconomic analysis method which gives the most accurate and easy results have been applied on the system and its components. Using this method, the amount of available energy (exergy) gained, lost and destroyed have been calculated separately for each component of the system. Taking investment and operation costs of the system into account, recommendations have been given on the subject of which parameters have to be changed in what way so that the system works more efficiently.     

Reliability of Steel Truss Roof Systems Under Variable Snow Load Profiles

The probabilistic safety analysis of steel truss roof systems under variable snow load profiles is investigated. The roofs of structures such as industrial buildings or sports halls, which require wide areas, are frequently subjected to unexpectedly high loads. Therefore, compared to the residential buildings, that type of buildings often comes across failure or prohibition of usage. Probabilistic techniques are utilized for the analysis of the problem. Thirty-six steel roof structures with different structural dimensions and load variations are modelled and their failure probabilities are calculated. In this paper, a complicated stochastic analysis is reduced to the solution of a load–resistance (S–R) problem by utilizing sensitivity analyses. Firstly, the structures were designed through structural analyses, and then the sensitivity analyses were conducted to understand the response of the structure to the load and to the span-length parameters. In this paper, a reliability study which gradually monitors the effect of geometrical parameters on the failure trend is presented. Three different snow load distribution functions were used. The relation between failure, and load or structural dimension variations was investigated. The results obtained in this study are discussed and compared with the results from the literature for similar structures subjected to snow loads. It is observed that for the snow load distributions with high standard deviations the structural reliability indices may give results below the target safety levels of the design codes. Finally, the assessment of the results shows that the effect of the standard deviation of the snow load on failure probability is much more than the effect of intensity of the nominal snow load.     

Monitoring Smartphones for Anomaly Detection

In this paper we demonstrate how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian operating system and Windows Mobile in order to extract features for anomaly detection. These features are sent to a remote server because running a complex intrusion detection system on this kind of mobile device still is not feasible due to capability and hardware limitations. We give examples on how to compute relevant features and introduce the top ten applications used by mobile phone users based on a study in 2005. The usage of these applications is recorded by a monitoring client and visualized. Additionally, monitoring results of public and self-written malwares are shown. For improving monitoring client performance, Principal Component Analysis was applied which lead to a decrease of about 80% of the amount of monitored features.     

High power universal piezoelectric transformer.

This study describes a multilayer piezoelectric voltage and power transformer that has one direction poling, operates in a wide-frequency range and delivers both step-up and step-down voltages by inverting the electrical connections. In this design, the input and output electrodes are on the same side of the disk and are isolated from each other by a fixed isolation gap. The electrode pattern is a ring/dot structure such that it uses radial mode for both input and output part that are built-in on the same ceramic disk. A prototype transformer was fabricated of size 15 x 2.78 mm2 having mass of 3.8 gm. In the step-down configuration at the constant output power of 6 W, the transformer characteristics across a 100 ohms load were found to be efficiency = 92%, gain = 0.21 input voltage = 110 Vrms, and temperature rise = 20 degrees C from the room temperature. In the step-up configuration at the constant output power of 5 W, the transformer characteristics across a 5 kohms load were found to be efficiency = 97%, gain = 9.5, input voltage = 16 Vrms, and temperature rise = 8 degrees C from the room temperature. A detailed equivalent circuit analysis of the transformer was done, and the results were found to be in excellent agreement with the experimental results.     

Heat transfer of horizontal parallel pipe ground heat exchanger and experimental verification

The ground heat exchangers (GHE) consist of pipes buried in the soil and is used for transferring heat between the soil and the heat exchanger pipes of the ground source heat pump (GSHP). Because of the complexity of the boundary conditions, the heat conduction equation has been solved numerically using alternating direction implicit finite difference formulation. A software was developed in MATLAB environment and the effects of solution parameters on the results were investigated. An experimental study was carried out to test the validity of the model. An experimental GSHP system is installed at Y?ld?z Technical University Davupasa Campus on 800 m² surface area with no special surface cover. Temperature data were collected using thermocouples buried in soil horizontally and vertically at various distances from the pipe center and at the inlet and the outlet of the ground heat exchanger. Experimental and numerical simulation results calculated using experimental water inlet temperatures were compared. The maximum difference between the numerical results and the experimental data is 10.03%. The temperature distribution in the soil was calculated and compared with experimental data also. Both horizontal and vertical temperature profiles matched the experimental data well. Simulation results were compared with the other studies.