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(Volume: 2, Issue: 7)
Analysis on the Drivetrain Components and Their Control Boost Electric Vehicle Performance
Electric Vehicles (EVs) have become very common now that about 2.3 million electric cars have been sold in the first quarter of 2023, the International Energy Agency declares. The ‘no fuel, no emissions’ feature, the low running as well as the maintenance costs with easy charging and efficient driving might be quoted as the basic reasons for the success of EVs. However, when speaking about the performance and the efficiency of EVs in particular, the powertrains involving the engine and its associated drivetrain have a major role. It is because they are a group of components, which deliver power to the wheels to move. Usually, the drivetrain system encompasses components like, electric motors, inverters, DC-DC converter and an energy source. So, in the context of research, various researchers have dealt with different ways to improve the performance of EVs with minimum power loss, since the available energy from the battery is of much concern in EVs. The choice of motor and the optimal control of their parameters, the proper choice of the material and the utilization of DC-DC converters with adaptive voltage level controls and the better choice of battery material with improved battery management systems are to name a few research options in enhancing the EVs. Hence, the efficiency analysis on various drivetrain components will certainly improve the EV efficiency. One such analysis can be seen in the Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 32(1), being conducted by Muhammad Helal Uddin, Sharith Dhar, Asif Mohammed Siddiqee, Rahul Chowdhury, Akramul Haque, Mohammed Saifuddin Munna of Premier University, Chattogram, Bangladesh. Employing a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM), the researchers have analysed the effect of two drivetrain topologies, one with bidirectional DC-DC converter and the other lacking it, on the efficiency of the entire system and its powertrain components. Additionally, the researchers have tried to find whether the Field Oriented Control (FOC) or the Direct Torque Control (DTC) is superior in rendering good dynamic response for the PMSM. Pointing that the variable voltage-controlled drivetrains well-suits the urban driving cycles, the researchers provide a research direction of analysing the total harmonic distortion in voltage and current to enhance the lifetime and efficiency of EV motors. Image Credit: www.vecteezy.com
Improving Flare Gas Recovery Using Optimally-Designed Ejectors
“Industrialization with zero greenhouse gas emissions” is what the present world aims at. The petrochemical industries, the oil refineries and the natural gas processing industries, which usually liberate and blaze tonnes of flammable useful gases (flare gases) as air pollutants for safety with no financial or environmental benefits, also seek effective means to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and the resultant is the “Flare Gas Recovery System”. By employing this system, not all the gases are flared wastefully. Instead, a controlled volume of the flare gases of varying pressures is collected at the inlet of the flare stack, compressed and treated for use in power/heat generation, fuel gas generation and utilization in the industrial and commercial applications. Hence the gases questioning the safety of the industrial plant, even after flare gas recovery, are alone flared with less harmful air pollutants as well as black soot. The compressors and the ejectors have a dominant role in the flare gas recovery process, since they compress the collected gases at the venting points to increase their pressure and reduce their volume, making it easy for further processing or utilization. Generally, the ejectors in the compressors have a constricted nozzle with two inlets and one outlet. Of the two inlets, one is for the passage of high motive fluid and the other is for the flow of low pressure entrained gas from the venting points of the flare stack. The ejectors are designed in such a way that the high motive fluid creates a low-pressure zone near its nozzle, entraining large quantity of low-pressure gases, and leaving out highly pressurized compressed gases at its diverging discharge outlet. Hence, better the design of the ejector, the better will be the flare gas recovery and the productive usage. A group of three Iranian researchers, Mehdi Moghaddasi, Mostafa Keshavarz Moraveji and Omid Alizadeh, have attempted to create an optimal design for the ejector geometry to increase the gas flow in the gas recovery ejectors. In their research being published in Chemical Engineering Communications, Taylor & Francis, the researchers have used the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm to optimally design the two- phase ejector’s geometrical parameters like, the throat length and its diameter, nozzle diameter, liquid inlet diameter and the converging as well as the diverging section angle. Simulating and modelling their design using the FLUENT software, the researchers have pointed out that the entrainment rates increased with the decrease in the throat length and the converging angle, provided that the diverging angle and the diameters of the throat as well as the nozzle had an increase. Similar approaches to increase flare gas recovery, considering various parameters in the entire Gas Flaring and Recovery System, is always expected from the upcoming researchers to eliminate the burning of useful gasoline products into hazardous ashes! Image Courtesy: www.freepik.com
Applying Deep Learning Approaches on Respiratory Sounds Aid Lung Abnormality Detection
Lung ailments, be it Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), asthma, occupational lung diseases or pulmonary hypertension, have become very common now that people of ages above 35 are at the utmost risk. These ailments are highly dreadful that the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated COPD as the third leading cause of death across the globe, at the same time the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Doctors usually diagnose these diseases by performing a lung auscultation procedure, which allows the trachea-bronchial tree of the lungs to be examined for airflow changes. The air flow changes within the lungs need careful observation because different lung ailments exhibit different anomalous respiratory sounds, which simply result from the airflow changes caused by inflammatory tissues or the accumulation of phlegm inside the lung tissues. Few anomalous lung sounds include rhonchus, squawk, crackle, wheeze, stridor and pleural rub, of which the crackles, the wheezes or their combinative sound is almost enough to detect any lung ailment in prior. However, manual interpretation of the sounds as that belonging to a particular respiratory ailment is very cumbersome because each disease will vary with a slight change in the abnormal sounds of the respiratory system and it differs from person to person. It is this situation, when the machine learning approaches can render hand. Numerous researchers in the past have employed computer-driven respiratory sounds to automatically classify lung as normal or abnormal. With the advent of deep-learning approaches, the features for lung abnormality are automatically learnt from the data, rather than inputting it manually. One such deep learning approach for lung abnormality detection has been presented by Jawad Ahmad Dar, Kamal Kr Srivastava and Alok Mishra in Vol. 164 of Computers in Biology and Medicine, Elsevier. Proposing the Water Cycle Swarm Optimizer-based Hierarchical Attention Network (WCSO-based HAN) and utilizing the significant spectral features from two datasets, which contain wheezes, crackles and a combination of these sounds, these researchers have classified the abnormal and the normal respiratory sounds with a maximum accuracy of 92%. Hence, the future research can be centred around finding approaches, which can classify the abnormal sound along with its specific ailment from their normal counterparts.
Image credit: www.vecteezy.com
Microalgae Cultivation-cum-Biodiesel Extraction for Efficient and Pollutant-Free Hydroelectric Power Plant
Ours is a planet with water as the major content than land. Hence, hydropower plants can be viewed as a renewable and sustainable source of electricity production for the future. Various factors like, clean energy with less production and maintenance costs, and decreased air pollutant levels also supports this fact. However, there is a major challenge with hydroelectric power generation and that is ‘water quality retainment’. Generally, in a hydropower plant, the water stored in a reservoir flows down on a turbine to create mechanical energy that gets converted to electrical energy using a generator. The reservoir is usually large with greater depths of still water, causing eutrophication of water with larger amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and other plant nutrients, oxygen stratification, change of water salinity and harmful algal blooms with more cyanobacteria. This water quality deterioration because of electricity generation not only harms the water-based living species, but also hinders the human life either directly or indirectly. Various researches of the past have dealt with water quality retainment in the hydropower sectors. Nowadays, growing micro algae on top of the reservoir water seeks attention as the most promising way to retain water quality. The reason is that the microalgae absorb the excess nutrients of eutrophication, aids in toxin removal and avoids oxygen depletion due to photosynthesis. Do you know that oil from microalgae can be used for biodiesel production? So, will it not be a double production or conservation of renewable energy, if the microalgae used for water quality retainment in the reservoirs of hydropower plants be used for biofuel synthesis? This is what Rahim Zahedi, Abolfazl Ahmadi and Siavash Gitifar have aimed at in their research, being published in Vol: 34 of the Journal of Environmental Management, Elsevier. As per the Iranian researchers, if the oil from the cultivated, extracted and dried microalgae can be converted to biodiesel, the generator of the hydropower plants can be fuelled by an optimal proportion of the yielded biodiesel and natural diesel. The result is an increase in the hydropower plant’s efficiency and lifespan with no water quality degradation. The budding researchers should opt for similar approaches, so as to boost the renewable energy production with no adverse environmental impacts. Image Credit: www.vecteezy.com
Enhance Cloud-Based Security Services for Unauthorized User Identification
Nowadays, virtual access to remote servers, networks, storage databases and various software over the Internet is possible within seconds on a ‘pay- as you use’ basis. The technological paradigm that enables this activity is ‘Cloud computing’. Providing infrastructure, platform or software as a service through private, public or hybrid deployment models, cloud computing allows an end user or an organization to have broader access to networks with varied devices, numerous servers, pooled resources within the clouds or between the clouds with increased dynamic scalability. However, the interoperability nature and the virtually- distributed resource utilization of the cloud computing resources also raise security concerns during authentication and authorization. Several authentication and authorization protocols like, Single Sign-on, OpenID, OAuth2 and OpenID Connect do exist to enable the end user to access multiple websites with a single set of credentials or accounts created from an Identity Provider, which offers user authentication as a service. Nowadays, rendering Security as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud environment is more prevalently employed among the organizations, so as to manage their cybersecurity threats using a third-party service provider. The reason is that the organizations need not rely on human intervention or spent cost on any-related hardware or software with updated security settings. “User Access Control and Authentication Model (UACAM)” is one such cloud security service to identify unauthorized user behaviour and it is being proposed by D. Stalin David and his team of five members in Computers, Materials & Continua, 70(2). Employing Right-to-Access and Authentication-Software-as-a-Service (RTAA-SaaS) and OpenID authentication with multiple agents under each category, the UACAM enables the user to find a reliable and trustworthy authentication and authorization service in the cloud. Being an internet era with growing number of users or organizations, the cloud-based resource utilization and data communication is never going to be stopped and new security issues will still emerge. Hence, upcoming researchers have a great scope in the field of cloud- based network security.
Image Credit: www.vecteezy.com
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