The thermal performance of a flat-plate solar collector (FPSC) using novel heat transfer fluids of aqueous colloidal dispersions of covalently functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes with β-Alanine (Ala-MWCNTs) has been studied. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) with outside diameters of (< 8 nm) and (20–30 nm) having specific surface areas (SSAs) of (500 m2/g) and (110 m2/g), respectively, were utilized. For each Ala-MWCNTs, waterbased nanofluids were synthesized using weight concentrations of 0.025%, 0.05%, 0.075%, and 0.1%. A MATLAB code was built and a test rig was designed and developed. Heat flux intensities of 600, 800, and 1000 W/m2; mass flow rates of 0.6, 1.0, and 1.4 kg/min; and inlet fluid temperatures of 30, 40, and 50°C were used to perform the test runs. Using water and nanofluids, the efficiency of the FPSC was found to increase with the increase in heat flux intensity and flow rate, and decrease with the increase in inlet fluid temperature. When applying nanofluids in the FPSC and as weight concentration and SSA increased, a reduction in the values of absorber plate temperature (AP) and tube wall temperature (TW) was observed down to 2.86% and 3.03%, respectively, while the FPSC’s efficiency increased up to 9.55% for 0.1-wt% Ala-MWCNTs < 8 nm at 1.4 kg/min, compared with water. Good agreement was obtained between the experimental values and MATLAB code predictions for AP, TW, and efficiency with maximum differences of 3.02%, 3.19%, and 3.26% for water, and 4.24%, 3.94%, and 12.64% for nanofluids, respectively. Consequently, the MATLAB code was judged suitable for modeling the nanofluid-based FPSC with suitable precision. It was proved that the positive effects of using nanofluids in the FPSC were higher their negative effects on pressure drop because all the calculated values of performance index (PI) were more than 1. As weight concentration and SSA increased, PI increased up to 1.095 for 0.1-wt% Ala-MWCNTs < 8 nm. Therefore, it was concluded that the nanofluids considered in this research can usefully be employed as working fluids in FPSCs for improved thermal performance, and the 0.1-wt% water-based Ala-MWCNTs < 8 nm nanofluid was fairly the distinguished one.
Air pollution is one of the important problems facing Iraq. Air pollution is the result of uncontrolled emissions from factories, car exhaust electric generators, and oil refineries and often reaches unacceptable limits by international standards. These pollutants can greatly affect human health and regular population activities. For this reason, there is an urgent need for effective devices to monitor the molecular concentration of air pollutants in cities and urban areas. In this research, an optical system has been built consisting of aHelium-Neonlaser,5mWand at 632.8 nm, a glass cell with a defined size, and a power meter(Gentec-E-model: uno) where a scattering of the laser beam occurs due to air pollution. Two pollutants were examin
... Show MoreA second-order sliding mode control is used for high-order uncertain plants using equivalent control approach to improve the performance of control systems. They combine backstepping with quasi-continuous controller and twisting controllers. This paper considers a two of the most popular controllers that are used to solve the nonlinearities problem which are the backstepping quasi-continuous control (BQCC) and backstepping twisting controllers to control the angular velocity of a hydraulic motor to improve tracking performance and robustness to uncertainties. For the system dynamics, a linear state feedback with suitable high gain was designed as the virtual controller, where steady state error can be made arbitrarily small according to the
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In this paper, third order non-polynomial spline function is used to solve 2nd kind Volterra integral equations. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applications of this method, and to compare the computed results with other known methods.
The hydraulic behavior of the flow can be changed by using large-scale geometric roughness elements in open channels. This change can help in controlling erosions and sedimentations along the mainstream of the channel. Roughness elements can be large stone or concrete blocks placed at the channel's bed to impose more resistance in the bed. The geometry of the roughness elements, numbers used, and configuration are parameters that can affect the flow's hydraulic characteristics. In this paper, velocity distribution along the flume was theoretically investigated using a series of tests of T-shape roughness elements, fixed height, arranged in three different configurations, differ in the number of lines of roughness element
... Show MoreIn this work Laser wireless video communication system using intensity modualtion direct
detection IM/DD over a 1 km range between transmitter and receiver is experimentally investigated and
demonstrated. Beam expander and beam collimeter were implemented to collimete laser beam at the
transmitter and focus this beam at the receiver respectively. The results show that IM/DD communication
sysatem using laser diode is quite attractive for transmitting video signal. In this work signal to noise
ratio (S/N) higher than 20 dB is achieved in this work.
A system was used to detect injuries in plant leaves by combining machine learning and the principles of image processing. A small agricultural robot was implemented for fine spraying by identifying infected leaves using image processing technology with four different forward speeds (35, 46, 63 and 80 cm/s). The results revealed that increasing the speed of the agricultural robot led to a decrease in the mount of supplements spraying and a detection percentage of infected plants. They also revealed a decrease in the percentage of supplements spraying by 46.89, 52.94, 63.07 and 76% with different forward speeds compared to the traditional method.