Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Chemical Engineering / Keith L. Hohn / Extensive research has gone into developing and modeling the three-way catalyst (TWC) to reduce the emissions of hydrocarbons, NOx and CO from gasoline-fueled engines level. However, much less has been done to model the use of the three-way catalyst to treat exhaust from natural gas-fueled engines. Our research address this gap in the literature by developing a detailed surface reaction mechanism for platinum based on elementary-step reactions. A reaction mechanism consisting of 24 species and 115 elementary reactions was constructed from literature values. All reaction parameters were used as found in the literature sources except for steps modified to improve the model fit to the experimental data. The TWC was simulated as a one-dimension, isothermal plug flow reactor (PFR) for the steady state condition and a continuous stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) for the dithering condition. This work describes a method to quantitatively simulate the natural gas engine TWC converter performance, providing a deep understanding of the surface chemistry in the converter. Due to the depletion of petroleum oil and recent volatility in price, synthesizing value-added chemicals from biomass-derived materials has attracted extensive attention. 1, 3-butadiene (BD), an important intermediate to produce rubber, is conventionally produced from petroleum. Recently, one potential route is to produce BD by dehydration of 2, 3-butanediol (BDO), which is produced at high yield from biomass. This reaction was studied over two commercial forms of alumina. Our results indicate acid/base properties greatly impact the BD selectivity. Trimethylamine can also modify the acid/base properties on alumina surface and affect the BD selectivity. Scandium oxide, acidic oxide or zirconia dual bed systems are also studied and our results show that acidic oxide used as the second bed catalyst can promote the formation of BD, while 2,5-dimethylphenol is found when the zirconia is used as the second bed catalyst which is due to the strong basic sites.

Les problèmes de pollution liés au secteur automobile sont connus depuis les années 1940. Les Etats-Unis ont été les premiers impactés à cause du "boom" automobile de l'entre-deux guerres, et ont mis en place les premières lois anti-pollution en 1960. Faisant suite à ces directives et aux deux chocs pétroliers, différents engagements de limitations d’émission pris au niveau planétaire sont nés depuis une vingtaine d’années. Le Protocole de Kyoto et les directives de l'Union Européenne (norme Euro 6c actuellement en vigueur) en sont les principales illustrations récentes. Cette thèse s’inscrit dans la continuité des travaux entrepris il y a presque cinquante ans, afin de poursuivre les efforts en matière de réduction de consommation et de pollution des véhicules automobiles. Elle propose ainsi une méthode de visualisation rapide avec les moyens informatiques actuels, du comportement aéraulique interne dans la culasse et la chambre de combustion des moteurs thermiques. L’objectif est de pouvoir prévoir ces variations de manière fiable et rapide à l’aide d’outils de simulation numérique, afin de limiter la fabrication, la quantité et le coût des prototypes à tester. / Pollution problems related to the automotive sector have been known since the 1940s. The United States was the first to be impacted by the automotive "boom" of the inter-war period, and introduced the first anti-pollution laws in 1960. Following these directives and the two oil shocks, various commitments for global emission limitations have been born for some 20 years. The Kyoto Protocol and the European Union directives (Euro 6c currently in force) are the main recent illustrations. This thesis is in line with the work undertaken almost fifty years ago in order to continue efforts to reduce consumption and pollution of motor vehicles. It thus proposes a method of rapid visualization with the present computer means, of the internal aeraulic behaviour in the cylinder head and the combustion chamber of the spark-ignition engines. The goal is to be able to predict these variations reliably and quickly using numerical simulation tools, in order to limit the manufacture, quantity and cost of the prototypes to be tested.

<p>The energy consumption is continuous to increase around the world and with that follows the demand for sustainable solutions for future energy systems. With growing energy consumption from fossil based fuels the threat of global warming through release of CO₂ to the atmosphere increases. The demand for cooling is also growing which would result in an increased consumption of electricity if the cooling demand was to be fulfilled by electrically driven cooling technology. A more sustainable solution can be to use heat-driven absorption cooling where waste heat may be used as driving energy instead of electricity.</p><p>This thesis focuses on the role and potential of absorption cooling in future energy systems. Two types of energy systems are investigated: a district energy system based on waste incineration and a distributed energy system with natural gas as fuel. In both cases, low temperature waste heat is used as driving energy for the absorption cooling. The main focus is to evaluate the absorption technology in an environmental perspective, in terms of reduced CO₂ emissions. Economic evaluations are also performed. The reduced electricity when using absorption cooling instead of compression cooling is quantified and expressed as an increased net electrical yield.</p><p>The results show that absorption cooling is an environmentally friendly way to produce cooling as it reduces the use of electrically driven cooling in the energy system and therefore also reduces global CO₂ emissions. In the small-scale trigeneration system the electricity use is lowered with 84 % as compared to cooling production with compression chillers only. The CO₂ emissions can be lowered to 45 CO₂/MWhc by using recoverable waste heat as driving heat for absorption chillers. However, the most cost effective cooling solution in a district energy system is a combination between absorption and compression cooling technologies according to the study.</p><p>Absorption chillers have the potential to be suitable bottoming cycles for power production in distributed systems. Net electrical yields over 55 % may be reached in some cases with gas motors and absorption chillers. This small-scale system for cogeneration of power and cooling shows electrical efficiencies comparable to large-scale power plants and may contribute to reducing peak electricity demand associated with the cooling demand.</p>

With increasing concerns about the harmful effects of conventional liquid fossil fuel emissions, natural gas has become a very attractive alternative fuel to power prime movers and stationary energy conversion devices. This research studies the injection and ignition numerically for natural gas (mainly methane) as a fuel applied to diesel engine. Natural gas injector and glow plug ignition enhancement are two of the most technical difficulties for direct injection natural gas engine design. This thesis models the natural gas injector, and studies the characteristics of the internal flow in the injector and natural gas jet in the combustion chamber during the injection process. The poppet valve model and pintle valve model are the first reported models to simulate the natural gas injector to improve the traditional velocity and pressure boundary conditions. This thesis also successfully models the glow plug assisted natural gas ignition and combustion processes by developing a glow plug discretized model and a novel virtual gas sub-layer model. Glow plug discretized model can describe the transient heat transfer, and adequately represents the thin layers of heat penetration and the local temperature difference due to the cold gas jet impingement. The virtual gas sub-layer model considers complicated physical processes, such as chemical reaction, heat conduction, and mass diffusion within the virtual sub-layers without significantly increasing computational time and load. KIVA-3V CFD code was chosen to simulate the fluid flow. Since the KIVA-3V is designed specifically for engine research application with conventional liquid fuels, many modifications have been implemented to facilitate this research.

With increasing concerns about the harmful effects of conventional liquid fossil fuel emissions, natural gas has become a very attractive alternative fuel to power prime movers and stationary energy conversion devices. This research studies the injection and ignition numerically for natural gas (mainly methane) as a fuel applied to diesel engine. Natural gas injector and glow plug ignition enhancement are two of the most technical difficulties for direct injection natural gas engine design. This thesis models the natural gas injector, and studies the characteristics of the internal flow in the injector and natural gas jet in the combustion chamber during the injection process. The poppet valve model and pintle valve model are the first reported models to simulate the natural gas injector to improve the traditional velocity and pressure boundary conditions. This thesis also successfully models the glow plug assisted natural gas ignition and combustion processes by developing a glow plug discretized model and a novel virtual gas sub-layer model. Glow plug discretized model can describe the transient heat transfer, and adequately represents the thin layers of heat penetration and the local temperature difference due to the cold gas jet impingement. The virtual gas sub-layer model considers complicated physical processes, such as chemical reaction, heat conduction, and mass diffusion within the virtual sub-layers without significantly increasing computational time and load. KIVA-3V CFD code was chosen to simulate the fluid flow. Since the KIVA-3V is designed specifically for engine research application with conventional liquid fuels, many modifications have been implemented to facilitate this research.

Buildings contribute a significant part to the electricity demand profile and peak demand for the electrical utilities. The addition of renewable energy generation adds additional variability and uncertainty to the power system. Demand side management in the buildings can help improve the demand profile for the utilities by shifting some of the demand from peak to off-peak times. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning contribute around 45% to the overall demand of a building. This research studies two strategies for reducing the peak as well as shifting some demand from peak to off-peak periods in commercial buildings: 1. Use of gas heat pumps in place of electric heat pumps, and 2. Shifting demand for air conditioning from peak to off-peak by thermal energy storage in chilled water and ice. The first part of this study evaluates the field performance of gas engine-driven heat pumps (GEHP) tested in a commercial building in Florida. Four GEHP units of 8 Tons of Refrigeration (TR) capacity each providing air-conditioning to seven thermal zones in a commercial building, were instrumented for measuring their performance. The operation of these GEHPs was recorded for ten months, analyzed and compared with prior results reported in the literature. The instantaneous COPunit of these systems varied from 0.1 to 1.4 during typical summer week operation. The COP was low because the gas engines for the heat pumps were being used for loads that were much lower than design capacity which resulted in much lower efficiencies than expected. The performance of equivalent electric heat pump was simulated from a building energy model developed to mimic the measured building loads. An economic comparison of GEHPs and conventional electrical heat pumps was done based on the measured and simulated results. The average performance of the GEHP units was estimated to lie between those of EER-9.2 and EER-11.8 systems. The performance of GEHP systems suffers due to lower efficiency at part load operation. The study highlighted the need for optimum system sizing for GEHP/HVAC systems to meet the building load to obtain better performance in buildings. The second part of this study focusses on using chilled water or ice as thermal energy storage for shifting the air conditioning load from peak to off-peak in a commercial building. Thermal energy storage can play a very important role in providing demand-side management for diversifying the utility demand from buildings. Model of a large commercial office building is developed with thermal storage for cooling for peak power shifting. Three variations of the model were developed and analyzed for their performance with 1) ice storage, 2) chilled water storage with mixed storage tank and 3) chilled water storage with stratified tank, using EnergyPlus 8.5 software developed by the US Department of Energy. Operation strategy with tactical control to incorporate peak power schedule was developed using energy management system (EMS). The modeled HVAC system was optimized for minimum cost with the optimal storage capacity and chiller size using JEPlus. Based on the simulation, an optimal storage capacity of 40-45 GJ was estimated for the large office building model along with 40% smaller chiller capacity resulting in higher chiller part-load performance. Additionally, the auxiliary system like pump and condenser were also optimized to smaller capacities and thus resulting in less power demand during operation. The overall annual saving potential was found in the range of 7-10% for cooling electricity use resulting in 10-17% reduction in costs to the consumer. A possible annual peak shifting of 25-78% was found from the simulation results after comparing with the reference models. Adopting TES in commercial buildings and achieving 25% peak shifting could result in a reduction in peak summer demand of 1398 MW in Tampa.

Around three-quarters of Bangladeshis (total population 164 million) live in rural areas: only 25% of these households have access to grid electricity with non-reliable supply despite the country’s successful rural electrification program, kerosene is the predominant source for lighting, and woody biomass is virtually the only option available for cooking. Aside from this energy service challenges the rural population also struggles with unsafe drinking water in terms of widespread arsenic contamination of well water. Access to electricity, clean cooking gas, and safe drinking water services are genuine needs of the rural poor and are essential to improving welfare. These needs can be addressed individually or using an integrated approach. Anaerobic digesters are now a proven technology and remain economically promising in the rural setting, where connection to the public electric and gas grids are not available/either not cost effective or feasible, and where energy and water scarcity are severe. As the technologies continue to improve, and as energy and safe water becomes scarce and fossil fuel energy prices rise, renewable energy based services and technological integration becomes more viable techno-economically. In these circumstances, the integration of biogas digester with power generation and water purification unit is an innovative concept that could be applied in remote areas of Bangladesh.   This work presents a new concept for integrated polygeneration and analyzes the techno-economic performance of the scheme for meeting the demand of electricity, cooking energy and safe drinking water of 30 households in a rural village of Bangladesh. This study considers a holistic approach towards tackling both of these issues via integrated renewable energy-based polygeneration employed at the community level. The polygeneration unit under consideration provides electricity via cow dung-fed digester, which in turn is coupled to a gas engine. Excess digester gas is employed for cooking, while waste heat from the process drives a membrane distillation unit for water purification. The specific technologies chosen for the key energy conversion steps are as follows: plug-flow digester; internal combustion engine; and air-gap membrane distillation. The technical features, energy consumption, and potential of renewable energy use in driving the main integrated processes are reviewed and analyzed in this thesis. This study also examines one approach by investigating the application of suitable membrane technologies, specifically air gap membrane distillation (AGMD), as a promising method for small-scale, low cost deployment.    Experimental results show that the tested AGMD prototype is capable of achieving high separation efficiency, as all product water samples showed arsenic levels below accepted limits. Mass flows and energy balance, life cycle cost (levelized cost) of producing electricity, cooking gas and safe drinking water as well as the payback period of such a polygeneration system were studied. The results indicate that this polygeneration system is much more competitive and promising than other available technologies when attempting to solve the energy and arsenic-related problems in Bangladesh. One of the main encouraging issues of this integrated system is the levelized cost of the three major services: cooking gas (0.015 USD/kWh), electricity (0.042 USD/kWh–an orders of magnitude lower than comparable photovoltaic or wind systems) and safe drinking water (0.003 USD/liter). Additionally, the payback period is between 2.6 to 4 years. / <p>QC 20150516</p>

The energy consumption is continuous to increase around the world and with that follows the demand for sustainable solutions for future energy systems. With growing energy consumption from fossil based fuels the threat of global warming through release of CO2 to the atmosphere increases. The demand for cooling is also growing which would result in an increased consumption of electricity if the cooling demand was to be fulfilled by electrically driven cooling technology. A more sustainable solution can be to use heat-driven absorption cooling where waste heat may be used as driving energy instead of electricity. This thesis focuses on the role and potential of absorption cooling in future energy systems. Two types of energy systems are investigated: a district energy system based on waste incineration and a distributed energy system with natural gas as fuel. In both cases, low temperature waste heat is used as driving energy for the absorption cooling. The main focus is to evaluate the absorption technology in an environmental perspective, in terms of reduced CO2 emissions. Economic evaluations are also performed. The reduced electricity when using absorption cooling instead of compression cooling is quantified and expressed as an increased net electrical yield. The results show that absorption cooling is an environmentally friendly way to produce cooling as it reduces the use of electrically driven cooling in the energy system and therefore also reduces global CO2 emissions. In the small-scale trigeneration system the electricity use is lowered with 84 % as compared to cooling production with compression chillers only. The CO2 emissions can be lowered to 45 CO2/MWhc by using recoverable waste heat as driving heat for absorption chillers. However, the most cost effective cooling solution in a district energy system is a combination between absorption and compression cooling technologies according to the study. Absorption chillers have the potential to be suitable bottoming cycles for power production in distributed systems. Net electrical yields over 55 % may be reached in some cases with gas motors and absorption chillers. This small-scale system for cogeneration of power and cooling shows electrical efficiencies comparable to large-scale power plants and may contribute to reducing peak electricity demand associated with the cooling demand. / QC 20101209

The diploma thesis deals with a proposal of the four - stroke gas engine. There are mentioned the basic draft calculations of a crank mechanism and overhead valves. Further deals with a strenght calculation of the engine piston and analysis state of stress of the engine piston by the help of Finite Element Metod.

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