Molecular dynamics simulation of supercritical CO2 microemulsion with ionic liquid domains: Structures and properties

Supercritical carbon dioxide microemulsions are great medium to combine two immiscible substances through forming nanoscale polar cores in nonpolar continuous phase with the help of proper surfactants. The properties of microemulsions could be significantly affected by their constituents and structures. In this work, molecular dynamics simulation was implemented to study supercritical carbon dioxide microemulsions containing ionic liquid [bmim][PF6] and water by adding surfactant Ls-36. Results showed that the above components could form spherical aggregates in CO2 bulk phase with [bmim][PF6] and some water as the inner core, surfactant headgroups and water as the intermediate shell, and surfactant tails as the outer shell. The microstructure information about the outer shell was further investigated by defining an angle between the surfactant tail and the normal direction of the aggregate outer surface, which ranged from 78° to 125°. The influence of the ionic liquid content on the size and structure of microemulsions was explored and the best molar ratio between the ionic liquid and surfactant was around 1.25 for getting maximum water solubility.

Heat transfer model of two-phase flow across tube bundle in submerged combustion vaporizer

In order to optimize the design of the submerged combustion vaporizer(SCV), an experimental apparatus was set up to investigate the heat transfer character outside the tube bundle in SCV. Several experiments were conducted using water and CO_2 as the heat transfer media in the tubes, respectively. The results indicated that hot air flux, the initial liquid level height and the tube pitch ratio had great influence on the heat transfer coefficient outside the tube bundle(ho). Finally, the air flux associated factor β and height associated factor γ were introduced to propose a new hocorrelation. After verified by experiments using cold water, high pressure CO_2 and liquid N_2 as heat transfer media, respectively, it was found that the biggest deviation between the predicted and the experimental values was less than 25%.

Optimization of Fixed-Bed Design for Natural Gas Mercury Removal by Sulfur Doped into Porous Activated Carbon

The present work reports the synthesis and application of sulfur doped into porous activated carbon for removing elemental mercury from natural gas using a bench-scale fixed-bed reactor. A series of experiments were carried out to investigate the optimization of Hg0 capture. Furthermore, our experimental results about optimum conditions to remove Hg0 were 1:10 of sulfur to activated carbon impregnation ratio, 350°C of impregnation temperature, and 3 hours of impregnation time. This research showed that the prepared adsorbents were capable to remove remarkable amount of Hg0 (23.615 mg/g) at high adsorption efficiency. This study may serve as reference on natural gas power plants for the removal of Hg0 using the same conditions.

Topology optimization of simplified convective heat transfer problems using the finite volume method

Topology optimization of simplified convective heat transfer has been widely studied,but most existing studies are based on the finite element method(FEM);methods based on the finite volume method(FVM)have been less studied.In this paper,a topology optimization method based on FVM was proposed for a simplified convective heat transfer problem.We developed a novel adjoint sensitivity analysis method applicable to FVM,which included adjoint equations,corresponding boundary conditions,and sensitivity analysis equations.Additionally,a program for the proposed topology optimization method was developed in open field operation and manipulation(OpenFOAM)and portable,extensibletoolkit for scientific computation(PETSc).Thus,large-scale topology optimizations could be performed in parallel.Furthermore,numerical examples of the classical two-dimensional(2D)and 3D optimization problems were considered.The results verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.The results of large-scale 3D examples show an interesting phenomenon that for the optimized designs with few features,the large-scale topology optimization is still valuable for obtaining more effective structural shapes.