• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
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Sargassum spp is an invasive macroalgae and an alternative feedstock for bioethanol production. Sargassum spp biomass was subjected to high-pressure technology for biomass fractionation under different operating conditions of temperature and residence time to obtain glucan enriched pretreated solids (32.22 g/100 g of raw material). Enzyme hydrolysis process at high pretreated solid loading (13%, w/v) and enzyme loading of 10 FPU/g of glucan was performed, obtaining 43.01 g/L of glucose corresponding to a conversion yield of 92.12%. Finally, a pre-simultaneous saccharification and fermentation strategy (PSSF) was performed to produce bioethanol. This operational strategy produced 45.66 g/L of glucose in the pre-saccharification stage, and 18.14 g/L of bioethanol was produced with a glucose to bioethanol conversion yield of 76.23%. The development of this process highlights the feasibility of bioethanol production from macroalgal biomass in the biorefinery concept.

Aiming at the energy multivariate heterogeneity of thermal system and natural gas system, a novel optimization model of integrated energy system considering thermal inertia and gas inertia is proposed. First, the dynamic characteristics of the thermal system in the integrated energy system are studied, and the inertia model of the heat network pipeline and thermal building is established. Second, the characteristics of natural gas pipeline network storage are studied, and the natural gas storage and pressure energy generation models are established. Then, the optimization objective of the minimum integrated operating cost of the integrated energy system is established, and the YALMIP solver is used to solve it. Finally, a numerical example is introduced to analyze the operating cost of the integrated energy system in different scenarios, and it is verified that the integrated energy system optimization model considering the inertia of the thermal and gas proposed in this paper can effectively improve the system regulation capability and reduce the system operating cost.

Multiple sound source separation in a reverberant environment has become popular in recent years. To improve the quality of the separated signal in a reverberant environment, a separation method based on a DOA cue and a deep neural network (DNN) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a pre-processing model based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is utilized for recorded signal dereverberation, which makes source separation more efficient. Then, we propose a multi-source separation algorithm combining sparse and non-sparse component points recovery to obtain each sound source signal from the dereverberated signal. For sparse component points, the dominant sound source for each sparse component point is determined by a DOA cue. For non-sparse component points, a DNN is used to recover each sound source signal. Finally, the signals separated from the sparse and non-sparse component points are well matched by temporal correlation to obtain each sound source signal. Both objective and subjective evaluation results indicate that compared with the existing method, the proposed separation approach shows a better performance in the case of a high-reverberation environment.

The current crude phenol separation process is featured by the conventional distillation columns and its close boiling range between the components significantly increases the energy consumption. Compared to the conventional heat integrated technology, the advanced heat integrated technology has more or less advantage of simple structure, higher energy efficiency and economic benefit in some specific separation schemes but is lack of the application in process transformation. It has the potential to be a high-energy-efficient way to improve the energy efficiency of the crude phenol separation process. An improved middle vapor recompression distillation column (IMVRC) was proposed on the basis of the conventional middle vapor recompression distillation column (MVRC), with more consideration of operating pressure set and separated stage. The vapor recompression distillation column (VRC) and MVRC are used as the competitive configurations to estimate the performance of IMVRC for separating three different boiling range mixtures. Besides, the crude phenol process is established as two steam-driven and three electrical-driven processes with the conventional and advanced heat integrated technologies used. Furthermore, the flexibility of IMVRC for the process design is investigated and the extended structure of IMVRC (E-IMVRC) for the crude phenol separation process is achieved. The results show the IMVRC has the preferable energy and total annual cost (TAC) benefits in all the different boiling range mixtures. And the different separated stage makes the distinct structure of IMVRC with different cooling and heating duty arrangement, which benefits the potential heat integrated flexibility in the process design. Consequently, the electrical-driven processes have the significant TAC saving than the steam-driven processes. Moreover, the E-IMVRC performs best in all the 4E analysis.

Due to the uncertainty and fluctuation of distributed generation (DG) and load, the operation of active distribution network (ADN) is affected by multi-dimension factors which are described by massive operation scenarios. Efficient and accurate screening of severely restricted scenarios (SRSs) has become a new challenge in ADN planning. In this paper, a novel bi-level coordinated planning model which combines the short-time-scale operation problem with the long-time-scale planning problem is proposed. At the upper level, the demand response (DR) resource, an effective non-component planning resource characterized by low capacity price, high energy price, and short contract term, is co-optimized with the configuration of lines and energy storage systems (ESSs) to achieve the economic trade-off between the investment cost and the operation cost under SRSs. At the lower level, with the planning scheme obtained from the upper level, massive operation problems are optimized to minimize the daily operation cost; and the SRSs are provided to the upper level through a shadow-price-based scenario screening method, which simulates the planning information (i.e., the restricted degrees of operation scenarios) feedback process from ADN operators to ADN planners. Case studies on a 62-node distribution system in Jianshan New District, Zhejiang Province, China, illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed bi-level coordinated planning model considering DR resources and SRSs.

The "solid-liquid" leakage and low thermal conductivity of organic phase change materials limit their wide range of applications. In this paper, a novel carbon fiber/boron nitride (CF/BN)-based nested structure was constructed, and then, a series of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-based phase change composites (PCCs) with high thermal conductivity and mechanical strength were prepared via the simple vacuum adsorption technology by employing the CF/BN nested structure as the heat conduction path and supporting material and the in situ obtained cross-linking epoxy resin as another supporting material. The thermal conductivity of the obtained PCC is as high as 0.81 W/m K, which is 7.4 times higher than that sample without the CF/BN nested structure. The support of the double skeletons confers the obtained PCCs with excellent mechanical strength. Surprisingly, there is not any deformation for PCCs under the pressure of 128.5 times its own weight during the phase change process. In addition, the phase change enthalpy of the obtained PCC is as high as 107.9 J/g. All the results indicate that the obtained PEG-based PCCs possess huge application potential in the field of industrial waste heat recovery.