Abstract: The present study deals with natural convection flow inside vertical channel with one wall heated at uniform heat flux and the other wall isolated. The purpose of this numerical investigation is to study the differences on flow configurations in pure natural convection between air and water in vertical channels. A comparison in terms of Nusselt number and mass flow rate is then discussed. The numerical code is developed using Finite Differences scheme to solve the Navier-stokes equations under the Boussinesq assumption in two dimension. The comparison in terms of characteristic quantities shows that Nusselt number are slightly different between air and water, flow patterns are completely different and adimensionless velocity and flow rates are more important in water than in air. Physical understanding of these differences is discussed. Using water to model natural convection in an air vertical channel gives reasonable Nusselt numbers but only for small modified Rayleigh numbers. Discrepancies increases with increasing the modified Rayleigh number.

Abstract: Many fault detection techniques have been proposed in literature to extract representative features from measurements for motor fault detection, however each has its own merits and limitations. A new intelligent monitoring system is developed in this paper to integrate features from several fault detection techniques to map data features to motor health condition categories and to improve fault diagnosis accuracy. The fault diagnosis will be based on representative features extracted from the time domain, the frequency domain and the time-frequency domain, respectively. The developed intelligent monitoring system will also employ prediction information to enhance fault diagnostic accuracy, and reduce the effect of outliers in fault classification. The effectiveness of the developed intelligent monitoring system is verified by the experiments of induction motors with broken rotor bars and bearing defects.

Abstract: In this paper, the thermal and thermohydraulic performance analysis on offset finned absorber solar air heater has been investigated theoretically. The thermal efficiency indicated the portion to which the solar energy added by insolation is converted to network output. Whereas the thermohydraulic (effective) efficiency invokes to how useful energy is to accomplish a purpose. A parametric study was done to investigate the effect of variation of system and operating parameters i.e. fin spacing, fin height, air mass flow rate and insolation 950 W/m2 on the thermal and effective efficiency. The analytical approach gives adequate foresight of the performance of offset finned solar air heater and it can be helpful in designing such types of solar air heater.

Abstract: A significant phase of billet steel manufacturing is the cooling process. This phase may be completed in the finished goods warehouse and it must meet both production optimization and customer needs. The fluctuation of customer demand and production process in this phase may cause some problems of production schedule and inventory of billet steel. The decreasing of customer demand can increase the inventory level in finished goods warehouse. Therefore, the company need to consider a production planning that gives an optimum decision of billet steel production schedule. In this paper, a mathematical model of integrated production-inventory-distribution system of billet steel will be proposed. The model is used to find the optimal production schedule of billet steel, based on the relevant parameters of the productive system, such as: set-up time, processing times, and demand profile. The study is completed by a case study to investigate the proposed model.

Abstract: In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the effect of system parameters on the thermal and thermohydraulic efficiency of a wavy finned solar air heater. The performance of the wavy finned solar air heater depends on the complex geometry of wavy fin, such as fin spacing ratio(FP/2A), flow length ratio(Ld/L) and flow cross section aspect ratio(FP/Fh). An analytical investigation on the various complex geometries showed that the maximum thermal efficiency of 80.18%, 79.59% and 79.6% and the maximum thermohydraulic efficiency of 72.6%, 76.4% and 73.2% has been found for the FP/2A=1, FP/Fh=0.4 and Ld/L=10 respectively. Furthermore, wavy fin solar air heater resulted higher thermal efficiency of the order of 2.8 times and thermohydraulic efficiency of the order of 2.6 times as compared to plane solar air heater. Overall, both thermal efficiency and thermohydraulic efficiency of wavy finned solar air heater is superior.

Abstract: This paper presented the optimum performances of Switched Reluctance (SR) actuator based on the force characteristics. The validations were done by using Finite Element Analysis (FEM) using ANSYS Maxwell 3D software to obtain the distributions of magnetic flux for different configurations. The number of poles and the arc angles parameters are the main concerned. Initially, the number of poles is set to stator-to-rotor (S:R) = 6:4 poles ratio which is then varied by increasing the ratio. In addition, the arc angle for stator (βs) and rotor (βr) were also varied by ±2° degree for each configuration. Based on FEM analysis, the best results were achieved by the SR actuator with the parameters of S: R = 6:4 poles ratio and the arc angles, βs/βr = 30°/41°. This configurations show the highest and most stable increment of force compared to the others configuration.

Abstract: This paper discuss the tracking control performances of a dual-limb robotic arm system for precision motion and high speed response. In this paper, the focus is to fabricate & analyze the control performances of an upper dual-limb robotic arm system which are able to move in parallel motion. The experimental results are obtained through open-loop and closed-loop test. The system transfer function is evaluated experimentally via system identification method. In this paper the Proportional and Derivative (PD) controller is used to control the trajectory motion of the dual-limb robotic arm system. The PD controller with proportional gain Kp = 169 and derivative gain KD = 1.1412 shows good performances using step input reference. To further verify the robustness of the controller, tracking control experiments are performed with rectangular & triangular input trajectory. The PD controller shows the dual-limb robotic arm system able to show good performances with the steady state error less than 0.4° for the 15° triangular input references with 0.1Hz frequency, respectively.

Abstract: This paper is a contribution towards the identification of the best optimization algorithm to detect convenient disassembly sequences for end-of-life industrial products. Three methodologies are proposed for comparison: Artificial Colony Optimization, Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing. These algorithms are compared using case studies including partial and full disassembly.