Increased prices for nonrenewable heating fuels (such as propane, heating oil, and natural gas) have residential and farm consumers seeking more sustainable solutions to their heating needs. Price increases among these fuels will remain a trend as a combination of decreased reserves and increased demand continues to limit supply (EIA, 2012). Pellets produced from abundant biomass sources—such a...

Micro (0.5–10 kW) organic Rankine cycle (ORC) power systems are nowadays considered for domestic power generation. Selection of a suitable expander is one of the most important problems connected with the domestic ORC system design. Volumetric machines or micro-turbines can be adopted as an expander in domestic ORC systems. Scroll and screw expanders are a common choice and were successfully ap...

The current study investigates experimentally the potential of integrating a scroll expander into a micro cogeneration steam Rankine cycle. This expander technology is not an existing technical option for such applications; consequently an existing oil-free scroll compressor is adapted to run in an expander mode with water as working fluid. The performance of the adapted scroll expander, with d...

The goal of this manuscript is to establish a novel computational model for stretch-induced skin growth during tissue expansion. Tissue expansion is a common surgical procedure to grow extra skin for reconstructing birth defects, burn injuries, or cancerous breasts. To model skin growth within the framework of nonlinear continuum mechanics, we adopt the multiplicative decomposition of the defor...

Experimental comparisons of the nutritional value of different wheat cultivars commonly use feeds in meal form even though the large-scale broiler producers use steam pelleted feeds. The aim of this experiment was to examine the effect of steam pelleting on the performance, dietary N-corrected apparent metabolisable energy (AMEn), total tract dry matter retention (DMR), nitrogen retention (NR) ...

The influences of pelleting and 13-glucanase supplementation on the digestibility of dietary components in a barley-based diet were investigated in pigs fitted with cannulas in the terminal ileum. The diet contained 49.0% starch, 18.9% crude protein and 14.8% dietary fiber, with arabinoxylans (4.9%), mixed-linked ~-glucans (3.4%) and cellulose (3.3%) as the main fiber components. Pelleting incr...

Conceptual design of scroll expander and scroll compressor for 10 kW-class Stirling engine utilizing solar energy as heat source has been carried out. CO2 was chosen as the working fluid, since it is nontoxic, inflammable and it has relatively higher density among probably usable gases. Gas temperature at the expander inlet was set at 700 C, and that at the compressor inlet was at 40°C. System ...

Expander graphs are highly connected sparse nite graphs. The property of being an expander seems signi cant in many of these mathematical, computational and physical contexts. For practical applications it is very important to construct expander and Ramanujan graphs with given regularity and order. In general, constructions of the best expander graphs with a given regularity and order is no eas...

Expander graphs are relevant to theoretical computer science in addition to the construction of high-performance switching networks. In communication network applications, a high degree of symmetry in the underlying topology is often advantageous, as it may reduce the complexity of designing and analyzing switching and routing algorithms. We give explicit constructions of expander graphs that a...