The planning and scheduling of the operations involved in the outages of nuclear power plants has a great impact in terms of the outage costs (replacement power, labor cost, etc.), use of scarce resources and implementation of safety procedures. Prior to 1979, before the accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), refueling was the driving factor of outages of nuclear power plants: maintenance plans w...

Abstract With the increase of automobiles on hand in China, automobile refueling emissions, as an important part volatile organic compounds (VOC), have been paid more and attention. Frequent is related to fuel vapor concentration operation safety gas stations. Reducing emissions can improve recovery efficiency reduce waste Therefore, research test began attract However, due long pre-processing ...

This paper addresses the problem of controlling the receiver aircraft to achieve a successful aerial refueling. For the performance verification of the controller, a new set of nonlinear, 6-DOF, rigid body equations of motion for the receiver aircraft has been derived. The equations are developed using the reference frame as one that is attached to, translates and rotates with the tanker aircra...

We revisit the peer-to-peer on-orbit satellite refueling problem, in which the maneuvering satellites are allowed to interchange their orbital positions. We show that the problem is computationally hard by reducing it to a special case of the three-index assignment problem. On the positive side, we show that the size of instances in practice is such that a state-of-the-art integer programming s...

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are hindered by their limited payload and duration. Consequently, UAVs spend little time in their area of operation, returning frequently to base for refueling. The effective payload and duration of small UAVs is increased by moving the support base closer to the operating area; however this increases risk to personnel. Performing the refueling operations a...

Autonomous aerial refueling technology is an effective solution to extend flight duration of unmanned aerial vehicles, and also a great challenge due to its high risk. For autonomous probeand-drogue refueling tasks, relative navigation to provide relative position between the receiver aircraft and the refueling drogue is the first and essential step, and vision-based method is the most frequent...

Autonomous in-flight air refueling is an important capability for the future deployment of unmanned air vehicles, since they will likely be ferried in flight to overseas theaters of operation instead of being shipped unassembled in containers. This paper introduces a vision sensor based on active deformable contour algorithms, and a relative navigation system that enables precise and reliable b...

Abundant availability and potential for lower CO2 emissions are drivers for increased utilization of natural gas in automotive engines for transportation applications. However scarce refueling resources for on-road vehicles impose an infrastructure limited barrier on natural gas use in transportation. A novel ‘bimodal’ engine which can operate in a compressor mode has been developed that allows...