Non-thermal plasma technology for the abatement of NOx and SOx from the exhaust of marine diesel engine

Non-thermal plasma based technology is proposed to the abatement of NOx and SOx of the exhaust gas from marine diesel engine. Proposed technology uses electron gun and microwave energy to generate the plasma. Fundamentals of non-thermal plasma and chemistry are presented with a set of simulation results of the reduction of NOx and SO2 for a typical two stoke marine diesel exhaust engine which is supported by an experimental results obtained with microwave plasma. A new scheme is also proposed in this paper to generate required plasma for the treatment of NOx and SOx form high exhaust flow rate

Reduction of NOx and PM in Marine Diesel Engine Exhaust Gas using Microwave Plasma

Abatement of NOx and particulate matters (PM) of marine diesel exhaust gas using microwave (MW) non-thermal plasma is presented in this paper. NOx mainly consist of NO and less concentration of NO2 in a typical two stoke marine diesel engine and microwave plasma generation can completely remove NO. MW was generated using two 2kW microwave sources and a saw tooth passive electrode. Passive electrode was used to generate high electric field region within microwave environment where high energetic electrons (1-3eV) are produced for the generation of non-thermal plasma (NTP). 2kW gen-set diesel exhaust gas was used to test our pilot-scale MW plasma reactor. The experimental results show that almost 100% removal of NO is possible for the exhaust gas flow rate of 60l/s. It was also shown that MW can significantly remove soot particles (PM, 10nm to 365nm) entrained in the exhaust gas of 200kW marine diesel engine with 40% engine load and gas flow rate of 130l/s. MW without generating plasma showed reduction up to 50% reduction of PM and with the plasma up to 90% reduction. The major challenge in these experiments was that igniting the desired plasma and sustaining it with passive electrodes for longer period (10s of minutes) as it required fine tuning of electrode position, which was influenced by many factors such as gas flow rate, geometry of reactor and MW power

Non-thermal plasma system for marine diesel engine emissions control

Air pollutants generated by ships in both gaseous and particulate forms, have a long term effect on the quality of the environment and cause a significant exposure risk to people living in proximities of harbors or in neighboring coastal areas. It was recently estimated, that ships produce at least 15% of the world’s NOx (more than all of the world’s cars, buses and trucks combined), between 2.5 - 4% of greenhouse gases, 5% black carbon (BC), and between 3-7% of global SO2 output. Estimation of contribution of maritime shipping to global emissions of VOC and CO is not yet available. In order to reduce the environmental footprint of ships, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) recently issued the legislation of Marpol Annex VI guidelines which implies especially the introduction of, inter alia, stricter sulphur limits for marine fuel in ECAs under the revised MARPOL Annex VI, to 3.50% (from the current 4.50%), effective from 1 January 2012; then progressively to 0.50 %, effective from 1 January 2020, subject to a feasibility review to be completed no later than 2018. The limits applicable in Emission Control Zones (ECAs) for SOx and particulate matter were reduced to 1.00%, beginning on 1 July 2010 (from the original 1.50%); being further reduced to 0.10 %, effective from 1 January 2015. The Tier III controls apply only to the specified ships built from 2016 while operating in Emission Control Areas (ECA) established to limit NOx emissions, outside such areas the Tier II controls apply. The United States and Canada adopted national regulations enforcing IMO Tier III equivalent limits within the North American ECA effective 2016. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule for Category III ships, however, references the international IMO standards. If the IMO emission standards are indeed delayed, the Tier III standards would be applicable from 2016 only for US flagged vessels. One of the proposed solutions towards marine diesel emission control is the non-thermal plasma process. We designed and built a non-thermal plasma reactor (NTPR) using a combination of Microwave (MW) and Electron Beam (EB) for treatment of marine diesel exhaust gas. A numerical model has been developed to better understand the marine exhaust gas/plasma kinetics. The reactor modelling and design can sustain 10kW of combined MW and EB power with a gas flow rate of 200l/s. The removal of NOx and SOx was continuously monitored using a portable dual Testo gas analyzer system while all other parameters (MW power, EB power, gas temperature/flow rate, etc.) were remotely recorded & stored through a Labview DAQ system. The reactor performance in NOx and SOx removal will be tested on a 200 kW two stroke marine engine. This study is a part of the DEECON (Innovative After-Treatment System for Marine Diesel Engine Emission Control) FP7 European project.The work was supported by the European Commission under DEECON FP7 European Project "Innovative After-Treatment System for Marine Diesel Engine Emission Control", contract No. 284745

An Experimental Study on Solar Flat Plate Collector Using an Alternative Working Fluid

This paper describes the performance of a solar water heater with an alternative working fluid. A solar flat plate collector of fIxed orientation was fabricated and connected to a heat exchanger, which was kept inside the water storage drum. The developed collector was a low temperature device operating with the temperature range of ambient to 100°C. Acetone was selected as an alternative working fluid and allowed to re-eirculate in a closed loop. A shell and tube type heat exchanger (non-mixing) was designed and fabricated for the heat transfer between acetone and water. The solar intensity increased from 55 mw/cm2 at 8.30 am to 85 mw/cm2 at 1.30 pm and decreased to 64 mw/cm2 at 5.00 pm. The absorber plate temperature, which remained nearly constant for the first two hours, went up to 90°C in the next two hours. It was nearly constant from 11.00 am to 1.30 pm and then dropped down to 72°C in the afternoon. The hot fluid was found to loose heat to the surrounding water at more or less constant rate from 11.30 am to 5.00 pm. The highest temperature of acetone (70°C) was observed during 1.00 pm to 2.00 pm. The temperature of water increased from 30°C to a maximum of 62°C. Overall efficiency of the system was found to be 45% while considering the solar input to the heat gained by the water. Alternative working fluids such as acetone, methanol or ethanol may be considered for substituting water in the flat plate collector in view of the fact that the fluids have low boiling point coupled with high latent heat of evaporation

Chromium coated silicon nitride electron beam exit window

A Si3N4 membrane with a thin Cr coating is proposed and demonstrated as an electron beam exit window. On average, 85% electron power transmission efficiency was achieved with a 1 μm thick Si3N4 membrane coated with 1 μm thick Cr and the membrane sustained a beam current of up to 3 mA at 60 keV electron energy for the continuous operation of 3 min. However, for an uncoated membrane of same thickness, the average electron power transmission efficiency was 71% and the maximum beam current sustained was 800 μA. It was also shown that a one micron thick Si3N4 square membrane window of 10 mm × 10 mm could withstand a differential pressure of 1.3 bars.The work carried out at Brunel University was co-funded by the EC Seventh Framework Programme theme FP7-SST-2011-RTD-1 for the DEECON project (grant number 284745)

Runtime-guided management of stacked DRAM memories in task parallel programs

Stacked DRAM memories have become a reality in High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. These memories provide much higher bandwidth while consuming less power than traditional off-chip memories, but their limited memory capacity is insufficient for modern HPC systems. For this reason, both stacked DRAM and off-chip memories are expected to co-exist in HPC architectures, giving raise to different approaches for architecting the stacked DRAM in the system. This paper proposes a runtime approach to transparently manage stacked DRAM memories in task-based programming models. In this approach the runtime system is in charge of copying the data accessed by the tasks to the stacked DRAM, without any complex hardware support nor modifications to the application code. To mitigate the cost of copying data between the stacked DRAM and the off-chip memory, the proposal includes an optimization to parallelize the copies across idle or additional helper threads. In addition, the runtime system is aware of the reuse pattern of the data accessed by the tasks, and can exploit this information to avoid unworthy copies of data to the stacked DRAM. Results on the Intel Knights Landing processor show that the proposed techniques achieve an average speedup of 14% against the state-of-the-art library to manage the stacked DRAM and 29% against a stacked DRAM architected as a hardware cache.This work has been supported by the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant (GA 321253), by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 779877). M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal fellowship number RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Qualitative trait loci analysis for seed yield and component traits in sunflower

The present investigation was carried out to identify the molecular markers associated with various characters in sunflower using recombinant inbred lines. Linkage analysis was carried out and five linkage groups were  obtained with 19 simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers. Linkage mapconstruction, single marker analysis (SMA) and composite interval mapping analysis were carried out with SSR primers and quantitative traits. In SMA, out of 50 SSR markers, a total of 29 SSR markers were found to be significantly linked to various traits. The adjusted R2 for the regression equation varies from 3.2 to 29.8%. Two traits namely, days to flowering and seed color recorded above 20% R2 value. Hull weight recorded above 10% R2 value. In inclusive composite interval mapping (ICIM), the quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis resulted into two QTLs namely, seed and volume weight. QTL analyses were performed through inclusive  composite interval mapping (ICIM). The QTL analysis revealed each oneQTL for traits namely, stripes on seed margin, stripes between seed  margin, 100-seed weight and seed yield. The LOD ranged from 1.5 to 1.9. The adjusted R2 value ranged 10.6 (seed yield) to 65.0 (stripes between seed margin) percent. Among these QTL, QTL on stripes on seed margin and stripes between seed margin may be considered as potential as they recorded very high phenotypic variation accounted. As the distance between the flanking marker is more than 5 cm, fine mapping of this QTL region with more markers may be attempted to utilize these QTL in the marker assisted back cross programme.Key words: Sunflower, Simple sequence repeats (SSR), quantitative trait loci (QTL), hundred seed weight, stripes on seed margin, stripes between seed margin, seed yield

RESPONSE OF RICE TO BALANCED FERTILIZATION IN TYPIC USTIFLUVENT SOIL

Balanced fertilizer uses in food grain crops including rice is one of the important considerations in providing food security to the burgeoning population and promoting soil quality in sustainable intensive agriculture. Wide spread negative nutrient balance in different production system can be overcome by adopting integrated nutrient management. Field experiments were conducted in farmers holding belonging to Padugai series (Typic Ustifluvents) to investigate the response of rice to balanced fertilization. The treatments employed in the study were T1) Control T2) Farmer‘s practice (125, 62.5, 62.5 kg N, P2O5, K2O), T3) 100% NPKS Zn (120: 38: 38: 20: 5 kg N, P2O5, K2O, S and Zn - kharif and 150: 50: 50: 20: 5 kg N, P2O5, K2O, S and Zn - rabi), T4 ) T3  minus N, T5) T3 minus P, T6) T3 minus K, T7) T3 minus PK, T8) T3 minus S, T9) T3 minus Zn, T10 ) T3 minus S Zn, T11) 75% NPK + S + Zn + PM @ 4 t ha-1 and T12) 50% NPK + S + Zn + PM @ 4 t ha-1. The test crop was rice with variety ADT 43 (Kharif) and BPT 5204 (Rabi). The experiment was conducted in RBD design with three replications. The highlight of the outcome was All the treatment caused a significant increase in growth and yield over control. The tallest plant, highest tiller count, LAI, chlorophyll content was observed with treatment involving 75% NPK + S + Zn + PM @4tha-1 and was closely followed by 100% NPKS Zn and 50% NPK + S + Zn + PM @ 4 t ha-1. The highest grain yield (5650, 6080 kg ha-1), straw yield (6910, 7418 kg ha-1), highest grain yield response (2905, 2925 kg ha-1), percent increase in grain (105.8, 116.9) and straw (108. 114.1) in kharif and rabi respectively was realised in 75% NPK + S + Zn + PM @ 4 t ha-1. There was perceptible reduction in growth and yield of rice, where there was omission of single or two nutrients in the fertilizer schedule.  To conclude, balanced fertilization with INM strategy not only maximizes the rice yield but also maintains soil health and nutrient saving