A numerical investigation was performed on triangular solar air collectors by integrating unique layouts of triangular and alternating triangular copper metal foams with graded and non-graded pore densities. A three-dimensional CFD model was established to solve the governing equations of coupled systems for porous and non-porous domains. The two-energy-equations model was implemented to simulate heat transfer in porous media. The mathematical model was validated with numerical and experimental tests, with maximum mean absolute percentage error of 5% and 7%, respectively. To compromise heat transfer improvement with pressure losses, a partial metal foam insertion was adopted, covering 10% to 25% of the air duct volume. The findings indicate

Microbial Desalination Cell (MDC) is capable of desalinating seawater, producing electrical power and treating wastewater. Previously, chemical cathodes were used, which were application restrictions due to operational expenses are quite high, low levels of long-term viability and high toxicity. A pure oxygen cathode was using, external resistance 50 and 150 k Ω were studied with two concentrations of NaCl in the desalination chamber 15-25 g/L which represents the concentration of brackish water and sea water. The highest energy productivity was obtained, which amounted to 44 and 46 mW/m³, and the maximum limit for desalination of saline water was (31% and 26%) for each of 25 g / L and 15 g / L, respectively, when using an ex

A reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) based a continuous sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed in this paper for the tracking problem of high order Brunovsky systems with the existence of external perturbations and system uncertainties. For this purpose, a composite control is constituted by two consecutive steps. First, the reduced-order ESO (RESO) technique is designed to estimate unknown system states and total disturbance without estimating an available state. Second, the continuous SMC law is designed based on the estimations supplied by the RESO estimator in order to govern the nominal system part. More importantly, the robustness performance is well achieved by compensating not only the lumped disturbance, but also its esti

Accurate description of thermodynamic, structural, and electronic properties for bulk and surfaces of ceria (CeO₂) necessitates the inclusion of the Hubbard parameter (U) in the density functional theory (DFT) calculations to precisely account for the strongly correlated 4f electrons. Such treatment is a daunting task when attempting to draw a potential energy surface for CeO₂-catalyzed reaction. This is due to the inconsistent change in thermo-kinetics parameters of the reaction in reference to the variation in the U values. As an illustrative example, we investigate herein the discrepancy in activation and reaction energies for steps underlying the partial and full hydrogenation of acetyl

The enhancement of the thermal and thermo-hydraulic performance of a semi-circular solar air collector (SCSAC) is numerically investigated using porous semi-circular obstacles made of metal foam with and without longitudinal porous Y-shaped fins. Two 10 and 40 PPI porous material samples are examined. Three-dimensional models are built to simulate the performance of SCSAC: model (I) with clear air passage; model (II) with only metal foam obstacles, and model (III) with metal foam obstacles as well as porous Y-fins. COMSOL Multiphysics software version 6.2 based on finite element methodology is employed. A conjugate heat transfer with a (k-ε) turbulence model is selected to simulate both heat transfer and fluid flow across the entir

The background subtraction is a leading technique adopted for detecting the moving objects in video surveillance systems. Various background subtraction models have been applied to tackle different challenges in many surveillance environments. In this paper, we propose a model of pixel-based color-histogram and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) to obtain the background model using cosine similarity (CS) to measure the closeness between the current pixel and the background model and eventually determine the background and foreground pixel according to a tuned threshold. The performance of this model is benchmarked on CDnet2014 dynamic scenes dataset using statistical metrics. The results show a better performance against the state-of the art

The pillars of sustainable development are representing the interface between environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Sustainable development is a method of planning and managing construction projects to reduce the effect of the construction process on the environment so that there is a balance between environmental capabilities and the human needs of present and future generations. Usually, Environmental sustainability is most important and effective in construction projects. The environment suffers from significant negative impacts as a result of the implementation of construction projects; therefore, this study aims to identify the effecting factors on environmentally sustainable development. The methodology of this s