Search results for "aerospace"

An analytical approach for the evaluation of the optimal combustion phase in spark ignition engines

2009

It is well known that the spark advance is one of the most important parameters influencing the efficiency of a spark ignition engine. A change in this parameter causes a shift in the combustion phase, whose optimal position, with respect to the piston motion, implies the maximum brake mean effective pressure for given operative conditions. The best spark timing is usually estimated by means of experimental trials on the engine test bed or by means of thermodynamic simulations of the engine cycle. In this work, instead, the authors developed, under some simplifying hypothesis, an original theoretical formulation for the estimation of the optimal combustion phase. The most significant parame…

A Refined Model for Knock Onset Prediction in Spark Ignition Engines Fueled With Mixtures of Gasoline and Propane

2015

In the last decade, gaseous fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and natural gas (NG), widely spread in many countries, thanks to their prerogative of low cost and reduced environmental impact. Hence, bi-fuel engines, which allow to run either with gasoline or with gas (LPG or NG), became very popular. Moreover, as experimentally demonstrated by the authors in the previous works, these engines may also be fueled by a mixture of gasoline and gas, which, due to the high knock resistance of gas, allow to use stoichiometric mixtures also at full load, thus drastically improving engine efficiency and pollutant emissions with respect to pure gasoline operation without noticeable power los…

PAUT inspection of complex-shaped composite materials through six DOFs robotic manipulators

2015

The requirement to increase inspection speeds for the non-destructive testing (NDT) of composite aerospace parts is common to many manufacturers. The prevalence of complex curved surfaces in the industry provides significant motivation for the use of six-axis robots for the deployment of NDT probes in these inspections. The IntACom project, developed by TWI Technology Centre (Wales) and supported by a number of major aerospace partners and the Welsh government, has produced a prototype robotic NDT system. The prototype system is capable of inspecting complex-geometry composite components with great time savings. Two six-axis robotic arms deploy end effectors carrying phased array ultrasonic…

Optimized Topology for High Efficiency Battery Discharge Regulator

2008

In the following years power levels of 20 kW to 50 kW will be demanded by the telecommunication satellites. It is not possible to keep 0.5 kW modules with up to 100 modules in parallel and, therefore, higher power modules must be used. A higher bus voltage seems also necessary and any voltage below 150 V and above 100 V could meet the needs. In addition, new optimized topologies that process only a part of the total power delivery can be employed to improve the efficiency. In this article, design guidelines and experimental results of a high efficiency battery discharge regulator (BDR) module based on parallel power processing are given.

Stability analysis of rotor whirl under nonlinear internal friction by a general averaging approach

2016

The two main sources of internal friction in a rotor-shaft system are the shaft structural hysteresis and the possible shrink-fit release of the assembly. The internal friction tends to destabilize the over-critical rotor running, but a remedy against this effect may be provided by a proper combination of some external damping in the supports and an anisotropic arrangement of the support stiffness, or at most by the support damping alone, depending on the system geometry. The present analysis reported here considers a general asymmetric rotor-shaft system, where the rotor is perfectly rigid and is constrained by viscous–flexible supports having different stiffnesses on two orthogonal plane…

Buckling and Postbuckling of Stiffened Composite Panels with Cracks and Delaminations by Ritz Approach

2017

A Ritz approach for the analysis of buckling and post-buckling of stiffened composite panels with through-the-thickness cracks and/or delaminations is presented. The structure is modeled as the assembly of plate elements whose behavior is described by the First-order Shear Deformation Theory and von Karman’s geometric nonlinearities. Penalty techniques ensure continuity along the edges of contiguous plate elements and the enforcement of the restraints on the external boundaries. They are also used to avoid interpenetration problems. General symmetric and unsymmetric stacking sequences are considered. A computer code has been developed and used to validate the proposed method, comparing the …

Kinetics and Muscular Function in Ski Jumping

2010

Evaluation of radiated EMI in 42 V vehicle electrical systems by FDTD simulation

2007

In this paper a full 3D numerical scheme, based on the finite difference time domain method, is used to predict the electromagnetic radiated interference generated by 42 V vehicle power electronic driven electrical loads. An experimental set-up has been arranged on purpose in order to validate the proposed simulation tool. To this aim, the features of a semi-anechoic electromagnetic chamber have been exploited in order to operate in a shielded test site for the measurement of near field radiated emissions. Two different three-dimensional geometrical configurations of realistic vehicle installations of the loads, are studied. A comparative analysis among measured and computed results is perf…

ESTCube-1 in-orbit experience and lessons learned

2015

ESTCube-1 is a student satellite project lead by the University of Tartu, Estonia, and supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) via Plan for European Cooperating States (PECS). Development of ESTCube-1 has been a collaborative effort with many international partners. The satellite is shown on Figure 1 [1].

Effect of uncertain damping coefficient on the response of a SDOF system

2022

In this paper, a full probabilistic description of the response of a randomized SDOF system in both the time and the frequency domain is done. Considering that the damping of the structure does not simply relate to any single physical phenomenon, the sensitivity of the response to the randomness of the damping parameter is investigated. The stochastic analysis is conducted via the Probability Transformation Method therefore the first probability density function of the response is evaluated. The effect of the uncertain damping coefficient on the response of the SDOF system has been investigated through several numerical examples. From the response probability density function as well as fro…