Scale formation on the wall of a mechanically stirred vessel—experimental assessment and interpretation using computational fluid dynamics

Accelerated growth of scale was studied in a baffled agitated reactor, which could be disassembled into nine sections, allowing quantitative determination of scale thickness. A coordinate measuring machine was used to determine the scale thickness on individual wall segments. The growth pattern of the scale was found to be nonuniform due to the variation of fluid velocity near the wall at various heights. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation showed that fluid flow is time‐dependent and has two distinct flow zones, one involving recirculation through the impeller in the lower part of the vessel and the other involving lower velocities due to the flow separation at the wall in the upper part. CFD simulation also showed the presence of macroinstabilities, which manifest as asymmetrical and chaotic flow structures with relatively long‐time scales. Scale growth is found to be prominent in regions where the fluid velocity and wall shear stresses are low. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 3912–3922, 2018     

A Compromise Ratio Method with an Application to Water Resources Management: An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set

Water resources management can be regarded as an iterative process of general decision making considering the applications and modifications of waters and related lands within a geographic region. This process helps decision makers to balance their diverse requirements and applications of water as an environmental resource, and to recognize how their activities can have impacts on the long-term sustainability. This paper introduces a new compromise ratio method based on Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets under multiple criteria in real-life situations. Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy weighted averaging (AIFWA) operator is applied to aggregate individual judgments of the decision makers to rate the relative importance of the selected criteria and potential alternatives. Then a new Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy ranking index is proposed to analyze the potential alternatives. Finally, the performance of the proposed fuzzy decision-making method is illustrated to a real water resources management problem from the recent literature. Computational results demonstrate that the presented method can be utilized in a large-scale multi-level assessment process to assist the decision makers the optimal solution among the potential alternatives with multiple conflicting and compromising criteria.     

The Passive Film Characteristics of Cold Deformed Pure Copper

In the present study, the effect of cold deformation on the electrochemical and passive behaviors of pure copper in 0.01 M NaOH solution was investigated. The dislocation density in cold deformation was calculated using a recently developed JAVA-based software, materials analysis using diffraction, based on Rietveld’s whole x-ray pattern fitting methodology. At the thickness reduction of 70%, the microhardness measured as 125.30 HV, which is 1.56 times than that in the annealed pure copper (80.25 HV). Potentiodynamic polarization plots and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurements showed that increasing the cold deformation offers better conditions for forming the passive films. In the Mott-Schottky analysis, no evidence for n-type behavior was obtained which indicates that the oxygen vacancies and the copper interstitials did not have any significant population density in the passive films. Also, this analysis revealed that with increasing cold deformation, the acceptor density of the passive films decreased.     

Estimation of oil and gas properties in petroleum production and processing operations using rigorous model

Wellhead chokes are widely used in the petroleum industry. Owning to the high sensitivity of oil and gas production to choke size, an accurate correlation to specify choke performance is vitally important. The aim of this contribution was to develop effective relationships among the liquid flow rate, gas liquid ratio, flowing wellhead pressure, and surface wellhead choke size using the support vector machines (SVMs). The accurate data set was gathered from the 15 different fields containing 100 production samples from the vertical wells at wide ranges of wellhead choke sizes. This computational model was compared with the previous developed correlations in order to investigate its applicability for subcritical two phase flow regimes through wellhead chokes. Results confirmed amazing capability of the SVM to predict liquid flow rates. The value of R² obtained was 0.9998 for the SVM model. This developed predictive tool can be of massive value for petroleum engineer to have accurate estimations of liquid flow rates through wellhead chocks.     

Bootstrap Technique for Risk Analysis with Interval Numbers in Bridge Construction Projects

Bridges are principal and vital transportation structures. If risk management is not considered in bridge construction projects, objectives cannot be delivered on time, on budget, or with suitable quality results. Risk data set sizes and experts’ judgments are not usually sufficient for analyzing significant risks in bridge construction projects; moreover, the statistical distributions for risk parameter estimates are usually unknown. Standard parametric statistical techniques cannot provide appropriate solutions for cases with small data sets or unknown distributions. This paper proposes a new hybrid approach by using a nonparametric resampling technique and interval computations for risk analysis, in particular, for bridge construction projects. Bootstrap techniques produce more accurate inferences for comparing parametric techniques and are an alternative when the underlying parametric assumptions are not considered. Increasingly, because of the complexity and uncertainty in decision making at bridge projects, it is easier or more natural to provide interval values for parts or all of decision-making judgments. Furthermore, the goal of reducing standard deviations for both risk probability and risk impact compared with the conventional approach is another conclusion of this paper. The proposed approach is applied to a case in Iran to show the validity of the approach.     

A possibilistic programming approach for the location problem of multiple cross-docks and vehicle routing scheduling under uncertainty

This article considers the design of cross-docking systems under uncertainty in a model that consists of two phases: (1) a strategic-based decision-making process for selecting the location of cross-docks to operate, and (2) an operational-based decision-making process for vehicle routing scheduling with multiple cross-docks. This logistic system contains three echelons, namely suppliers, cross-docks and retailers, in an uncertain environment. In the first phase, a new multi-period cross-dock location model is introduced to determine the minimum number of cross-docks among a set of location sites so that each retailer demand should be met. Then, in the second phase, a new vehicle routing scheduling model with multiple cross-docks is formulated in which each vehicle is able to pickup from or deliver to more than one supplier or retailer, and the pickup and delivery routes start and end at the corresponding cross-dock. This article is the first attempt to introduce an integrated model for cross-docking systems design under a fuzzy environment. To solve the presented two-phase mixed-integer programming (MIP) model, a new fuzzy mathematical programming-based possibilistic approach is used. Furthermore, experimental tests are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented model. The computational results reveal the applicability and suitability of the developed fuzzy possibilistic two-phase model in a variety of problems in the domain of cross-docking systems.     

Combined heat transfer of radiation and forced convection flow of participating gases in a three-dimensional recess

This research work presents a numerical investigation of three-dimensional combined convection-radiation heat transfer over a recess including two inclined steps in a horizontal duct. To simulate the inclined surface boundaries, the blocked off method is employed for both fluid mechanic and radiation problems. The fluid is treated as a gray, absorbing, emitting and scattering medium. In numerical solution of the governing equations including conservation of mass, momentum and energy, the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system is used. These equations are solved numerically using the CFD techniques to obtain the temperature and velocity fields. Discretized forms of the governing equations are obtained by the finite volume method and solved using the SIMPLE algorithm. Since the gas is considered as a radiating medium, all of the convection, conduction and radiation terms are presented in the energy equation. For computation of radiative term in energy equation, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is solved numerically by the discrete ordinates method (DOM) to find the divergence of radiative heat flux distribution inside the radiating medium. The effects of radiation-conduction parameter, optical thickness and albedo coefficient on heat transfer behavior of the system are presented. Comparison of numerical results with the available data published in open literature shows a good agreement.     

An interaction stress analysis of nanoscale elastic asperity contacts

A new contact mechanics model is presented and experimentally examined at the nanoscale. The current work addresses the well-established field of contact mechanics, but at the nanoscale where interaction stresses seem to be effective. The new model combines the classic Hertz theory with the new interaction stress concept to provide the stress field in contact bodies with adhesion. Hence, it benefits from the simplicity of non-adhesive models, while offering the same applicability as more complicated models. In order to examine the model, a set of atomic force microscopy experiments were performed on substrates made from single-walled carbon nanotube buckypaper. The stress field in the substrate was obtained by superposition of the Hertzian stress field and the interaction stress field, and then compared to other contact models. Finally, the effect of indentation depth on the stress field was studied for the interaction model as well as for the Hertz, Derjaguin-Muller-Toporov, and Johnson-Kendall-Roberts models. Thus, the amount of error introduced by using the Hertz theory to model contacts with adhesion was found for different indentation depths. It was observed that in the absence of interaction stress data, the Hertz theory predictions led to smaller errors compared to other contact-with-adhesion models.     

Risk constrained self-scheduling of hydro/wind units for short term electricity markets considering intermittency and uncertainty

In view of the intermittency and uncertainty associated with both the electricity production sector of restructured power system and their competitive markets, it is necessary to develop an appropriate risk managing scheme. So that it is desirable to trade-off between optimum utilization of intermittent generation resources (i.e. renewable energy resources), uncertain market prices and related risks in order to maximize participants' benefits and minimize the corresponding risks in the multi-product market environment. The main goal of this paper is to investigate risk management by introducing a novel multi-risk index to quantify expected downside risk (EDR) which is caused by both the wind power and market price uncertainties. Value-at-Risk (VaR) method is used to assess the mentioned risk issue by the proposed weighted EDR, so that an optimal trade-off between the profit and risk is made for the system operations. Also, the roulette wheel mechanism is employed for random market price scenario generation wherein the stochastic procedure is converted into its respective deterministic equivalents. Moreover, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model is employed to characterize the stochastic wind farm (WF) generation by predetermined mean level and standard deviation of wind behavior as well as temporal correlation. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer stochastic framework for a hydro-wind power system scheduling and tested on a generation company (GENCO).