Journal of Energy Engineering

Crude oil and gas are strategic commodities for U.S. national energy security. The demand for fossil fuel energy will continue to grow amid dwindling global supply. Other energy sources, such as oil sands and heavy oil production, are expected to provide a significant portion of the anticipated shortfall with diversity. The drive towards economic oil sands recovery has become a focal point in the pursuit of low-cost, bulk production methods for competitive oil sands production. The hopper-attached belt-wagon (HAB) system is one of the potential economic haulage systems being pursued towards this strategic goal. The use of this technology will introduce unique dynamic, design, and implementation problems that must be articulated, modeled, and solved via advanced research. The HAB system kinematics and dynamics have been modeled as a planar mechanism of six-bar linkages using the Newton-Euler formulation. A virtual HAB prototype model has been developed and simulated in the automatic dynamic analysis of mechanical systems software environment. The computational simulation results show that the required joint torques vectors vary with time and the HAB system has good operating characteristics. The main novelty of this research is the application of the Newton-Euler-Kutzbach formulation and virtual engineering for creating efficient equipment-formation models toward economic haulage of materials.

The paper proposes a new measurement technique for estimating the local and total leakage rates in typical residential buildings. It is based on the duct pressurization technique in which the duct system is pressurized by using a calibrated fan while all registers are sealed off. It also includes a zone bag that can be inserted inside the duct system to create an artificial partial restriction and consequently different levels of leak pressures and flows. An experimental facility Air Duct Leakage Laboratory (ADLL) has been established, which has two different air duct configurations and a wide range of known leakage levels controlled by holes created at several locations of ductwork. The proposed technique has been validated by experiments at the ADLL. The validation results indicated that the proposed technique could be a good method for accurately estimating the total and local leakages and provides a great opportunity to focus on right locations to repair and to provide accurate information if the duct repair is cost effective.

This study evaluated the feasibility of utilizing low-grade heat sources such as solar energy or waste heat from industrial processes for desalination. The premise of the approach is that saline waters can be desalinated by evaporation and condensation of fresh water at near-ambient temperatures at low pressures. Low pressures can be achieved naturally in the head space of water columns of height equal to the local barometric head. By connecting the head space of such a saline water column to that of a distilled water column, and by maintaining the temperature of the former about $15–20°\mathrm{C}$ above that of the latter, fresh water can be evaporated from the saline column and condensed in the distilled water column. In this study, it is proposed to use a sensible heat thermal energy storage (TES) system to heat the head space of the saline water column. The TES can be maintained at the desired temperature using solar energy and/or waste heat from thermal power plants, refrigeration plants, or air conditioning units. This paper presents the feasibility of the proposed approach, where the TES is maintained at the design temperature by a solar-powered absorption refrigeration system (ARS) augmented by an electric heater. Results of this feasibility study show that the heat rejected by an ARS of cooling capacity of $3.25\mathrm{kW}$ (0.975 tons of refrigeration) along with an additional energy input of $208\mathrm{kJ}∕\mathrm{kg}$ of desalinated water is adequate to produce desalinated water at an average rate of $4.5\mathrm{kg}∕\mathrm{h}$ . The solar panel area required for this application was $25{\mathrm{m}}^2$ . An integrated process model and performance curves of the proposed approach are presented.

In this study, a widely used software package, Trace 700 was used to simulate the energy consumption of the heating and cooling loads of two residential homes and compare them with their experimental values. One home is classified as a zero energy home (ZEH) and employs advanced construction features, which is designed to consume significantly less energy than a normal home. The baseline home is of the exact same dimensions and floor plan as the ZEH, but uses more traditional construction practices. Trace was used to model both homes during periods where both cooling and heating were used, respectively, for an available period of two weeks in 2005. Actual weather data from the vicinity were obtained during the monitoring phase and were introduced into Trace as input data to create a more accurate representation of the conditions. The difference between the simulated predictions and the actual experiments showed an average difference of 2.25 and 6.29% for the baseline house for cooling electric energy and heating energy, respectively, while that difference was 10.67% in cooling for the ZEH. No estimate is presented to the difference in the heating mode for the ZEH due to a plumbing problem. The data showed the ZEH reduced the cooling load by about 76% experimentally and 75% by simulation. The simulation comparison between the baseline and ZEH indicate a reduction of the heating load of about 12%.