Investigation on a vertical radial flow adsorber designed by a novel parallel connection method

Due to the increasing global demand for industrial gas, the development of large-scale cryogenic air separation systems has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Increasing the height of the adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber used in cryogenic air separation systems may efficiently increase the treatment capacity of the air in the adsorber. However, uniformity of the flow distribution of the air inside the adsorber would be deteriorated using the height-increasing method. In order to reduce the non-uniformity of the flow distribution caused by the excessive height of adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber, a novel parallel connection method is proposed in the present work. The experimental apparatus is designed and constructed; the Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) technique is used to develop a CFD-based model, which is used to analyze the flow distribution, the static pressure drop and the radial velocity in the newly designed adsorber. In addition, the geometric parameters of annular flow channels and the adsorption bed thickness of the upper unit in the parallelconnected vertical radial flow adsorber are optimized, so that the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously. Comparisons are made between the height-increasing method and the parallel connection method with the same adsorber height. It is shown that using the parallel connection method could reduce the difference between the maximum and minimum radial static pressure drop by 86.2% and improve the uniformity by 80% compared with those of using the height-increasing method. The optimal thickness ratio of the upper and lower adsorption units is obtained as 0.966, in which case the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously, so that the adsorbents in adsorption space could be used more efficiently.

A multi-objective multi-memetic algorithm for network-wide conflict-free 4D flight trajectories planning

Under the demand of strategic air traffic flow management and the concept of trajectory based operations（TBO）,the network-wide 4D flight trajectories planning（N4DFTP） problem has been investigated with the purpose of safely and efficiently allocating 4D trajectories（4DTs）（3D position and time） for all the flights in the whole airway network.Considering that the introduction of large-scale 4DTs inevitably increases the problem complexity,an efficient model for strategiclevel conflict management is developed in this paper.Specifically,a bi-objective N4 DFTP problem that aims to minimize both potential conflicts and the trajectory cost is formulated.In consideration of the large-scale,high-complexity,and multi-objective characteristics of the N4DFTP problem,a multi-objective multi-memetic algorithm（MOMMA） that incorporates an evolutionary global search framework together with three problem-specific local search operators is implemented.It is capable of rapidly and effectively allocating 4DTs via rerouting,target time controlling,and flight level changing.Additionally,to balance the ability of exploitation and exploration of the algorithm,a special hybridization scheme is adopted for the integration of local and global search.Empirical studies using real air traffic data in China with different network complexities show that the proposed MOMMA is effective to solve the N4 DFTP problem.The solutions achieved are competitive for elaborate decision support under a TBO environment.