Al-Khwarizmi Engineering Journal

This paper investigated the fatigue life behavior of two composite materials subjected to different times of shot peening (2, 4 and 6 min).The first material prepared from unsaturated polyester with E-glass reinforcement by 33% volume fraction. While, the second one was prepared from unsaturated polyester with aluminum powder by2.5% volume fraction. The experimental results showed that the improvement in endurance limit was obtained (for the first material) at 2, 4 and 6 min shot peening times where the percentage of maximum improvement was 25% at shot peening time of 6 min. While, the endurance limit of the second material decreased at shot peening times of 2, 4 and 6 min where the percentage of maximum reduction was 29 % at shot peening time of 6 min. The verification of experimental results was done using ANSYS.14 workbench with a good agreement in behavior between the experimental and numerical.

In this paper, experimental study has been done for temperature distribution in space conditioned with Ventilation Hollow Core Slab (TermoDeck) system. The experiments were carried out on a model room with dimensions of (1m ×1.2m ×1m) that was built according to a suitable scale factor of (1/4). The temperature distributions was measured by 59 thermocouples fixed in several locations in the test room. Two cases were considered in this work, the first one during unoccupied period at night time (without external load) and the other at day period with external load of 800W/m2 according to solar heat gain calculations during summer season in Iraq. All results confirm the use of TermoDeck system for ventilation and cooling/heating purposes in arid and hot climate for its ease, simple and good comfort performance and to save energy and improve the overall energy performance of the building by reducing the peak load.

In this work, the effect of vortex shedding on the solar collector performance of the parabolic trough solar collector (PTSC) was estimated experimentally. The effect of structure oscillations due to wind vortex shedding on solar collector performance degradation was estimated. The performance of PTSC is evaluated by using the useful heat gain and the thermal instantaneous efficiency. Experimental work to simulate the vortex shedding excitation was done. The useful heat gain and the thermal efficiency of the parabolic trough collector were calculated from experimental measurements with and without vortex loading. The prototype of the collector was fabricated for this purpose. The effect of vortex shedding at different operation conditions was examined. The variation of angles of attack and wind velocity leads to different values of vortex loading coefficients and shedding frequencies. The relation between the dynamic characteristics and solar collector performance was evaluated. The finite element method was used to estimate the dynamic characteristic of the solar collector in addition to experimental work to evaluate the relation between the dynamic behavior of the collector and its performance.

Nowadays, Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) have found many applications as industry, transportation, inspection, and other fields. Therefore, the trajectory tracking control of the nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots have an important problem. This work focus on the application of model-based on Fractional Order PIaDb (FOPID) controller for trajectory tracking problem. The control algorithm based on the errors in postures of mobile robot which feed to FOPID controller to generate correction signals that transport to torque for each driven wheel, and by means of dynamics model of mobile robot these torques used to compute the linear and angular speed to reach the desired pose. In this work a dynamics model of mobile robot was driven for the case where the centroid of mobile robot platform is not coincide with reference frame of mobile robot (i.e. reference frame is located at midpoint of driven wheels axis), while the inertia is counted for. The Evolutionary Algorithm has been used to modified the parameters (Kp, Kd, Ki,a, and b) of the FOPID controller for wheeled mobile robot. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm: that is demonstrated by applied this controller at four case studies (Circular trajectory, S-shape trajectory, Infinity trajectory, and Line trajectory at two cases, with presences of disturbance and without), these results shows good matching between desired trajectory and simulation one while error in posture goes to zero rapidly.

In the present study, advanced oxidation process / heterogeneous photocatalytic process (UV/TiO2/Fenton) system was investigated to the treatment of oily wastewater. The present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of hydrogen peroxide concentration H2O2, initial amount of the iron catalyst Fe+2, pH, temperature, amount of TiO2 and the concentration of oil in the wastewater. The removal efficiency for the system UV/TiO2/Fenton at optimal conditions and dosage (H2O2 = 400mg/L, Fe+2 = 40mg/L, pH=5, temperature =30oC, TiO2=75mg/L) for 1000mg/L load was found to be 77%. Aluminum foil cover around the reactor and air bubbling were utilized in the experiments of photo Fenton UV/ H2O2/Fe+2 homogeneous and heterogeneous systems in order to improve the removal efficiency. The removal efficiency was improved to 81% for UV/TiO2/Fenton system . The reaction was found to be of a first order throughout the systems.

In this research, production of ethanol from waste potatoes fermentation was studied using Saccharmyses cerevisiae. Potato Flour was prepared from potato tubers after cooking and drying at 85°C. Homogenous slurry of potato flour was prepared in water at solid liquid ratio 1:10. Liquefaction of potato flour slurry with α-amylase at 80°C for 40 min followed by saccharification with glucoamylase at 65°C for 2 hr .Fermentation of hydrolysate with Saccharomyces cerevisiae at 35°C for two days resulted in production of 33 g/l ethanol. The parameters studied were; temperature, time of fermentation and pH. It was found that Saccharification process is affected by enzyme Amylo 300 concentration and concentration of 1000µl/100ml gives efficient effect of the process. The best temperature for fermentation process was found to be about 35oC. Also it was noticed that ethanol production was increased as time of fermentation increased but after 48 hr further increase in fermentation time did not have appreciable effect. Finally, the optimal value of pH for fermentation process was about 5 to 6.

This work presents the construction of a test apparatus for air-conditioning application that is flexible in changing a scaled down adsorbent bed modules. To improve the heat and mass transfer performance of the adsorbent bed, a finned-tube of the adsorbent bed heat exchanger was used. The results show that the specific cooling power (SCP) and the coefficient of performance (COP) are 163 W/kg and 0.16, respectively, when the cycle time is 40 min, the hot water temperature is 90oC, the cooling water temperature is 30oC and the evaporative water temperature is 11.4oC.

The two-dimensional transient heat conduction through a thermal insulation of temperature dependent thermal properties is investigated numerically using the FVM. It is assumed that this insulating material is initially at a uniform temperature. Then, it is suddenly subjected at its inner surface with a step change in temperature and subjected at its outer surface with a natural convection boundary condition associated with a periodic change in ambient temperature and heat flux of solar radiation. Two thermal insulation materials were selected. The fully implicit time scheme is selected to represent the time discretization. The arithmetic mean thermal conductivity is chosen to be the value of the approximated thermal conductivity at the interface between adjacent control volumes. A temperature dependent specific heat capacity proposed by a 4th Degree polynomial is fitted. A good agreement is obtained when the predicted results are compared with those obtained from the analytical solution.