This work tackles the question of power generation by means of gasification. Growing economies and global warming are important challenges these years: so that cleaner and more efficient power plants designs have to be achieved. In this context, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plants have an important role, due to their more efficient way of producing energy since fossil fue...

The use of light ion or electron beams to compress matter to the densities required for fusion has been proposed for more than 20 years. In the past ten years, a series of light ion beam power plant conceptual designs have been published under the generic name LIBRA. Considerable advances in both physics and technology have allowed major improvements from the design performance of the earliest ...

Plant Health Monitoring In article number 2106475, Qingshan Wei, Yong Zhu, and Giwon Lee summarize the recent progress in wearable plant sensors based on their functionality, including growth sensors, physiology microclimate chemical multifunctional sensors. The designs, operating mechanisms, practical applications of these are discussed. challenges future perspectives for specifically elucidat...

Revising the master production schedule (MPS) in a rolling planning horizon environment to improve plant performance is critical in process industries with sequence dependent changeovers. Plant performance is defined in terms of process changeover time, total shortages, and finished goods inventory. Two heuristics for revising the MPS are introduced and tested against a rolling horizon MPS that...

Three-dimensional (3D) printing has a variety of applications, from efficient iterations of engineering designs to fabrication of tissues for regenerative medicine. In soft robotics, 3D-printed functional materials can be used to mimic biological functions. Soft robotics overcomes some of the limitations of traditional rigid-body robotics through the ability to conform to different shapes and t...

The efficacy of vegetative buffer strips (VBS) in removing herbicides deposited from surface runoff is related to the ability of plant species to promote rapid herbicide degradation. A growth chamber study was conducted to compare C-atrazine (ATR) degradation profiles in soil rhizospheres from different forage grasses and correlate ATR degradation rates and profiles with microbial activity usin...

This paper presents a new approach to Load Frequency Control (LFC) for a hydro-power plant. The control algorithm combines sliding mode control with H∞ technique. The dynamic model of an entire hydro-power plant has been developed. The sliding hyperplane is constructed by H∞ full state feedback control method. The ideal lossless turbine-penstock model is used in this paper to conduct the simula...

Power plant sites consist of numerous built up structures, each of which must be designed for positive margins of safety. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is a common numerical method used for determining and improving the strength and dynamic performance of such structures. With an increasing need to find optimal power plant structural designs, the most efficient FEA workflows are critical. This ...

Gravity is a crucial environmental factor regulating plant growth and development. Plants have the ability to sense a change in the direction of gravity, which leads to the re-orientation of their growth direction, so-called gravitropism. In general, plant stems grow upward (negative gravitropism), whereas roots grow downward (positive gravitropism). Models describing the gravitropic response f...