2 research outputs found
Energy Conservation Projects to Benefit the Railroad Industry
No full textThe Energy Conservation Projects to benefit the railroad industry using the Norfolk Southern Company as a model for the railroad industry has five unique tasks which are in areas of importance within the rail industry, and specifically in the area of energy conservation. The NIU Engineering and Technology research team looked at five significant areas in which research and development work can provide unique solutions to the railroad industry in energy the conservation. (1) Alternate Fuels - An examination of various blends of bio-based diesel fuels for the railroad industry, using Norfolk Southern as a model for the industry. The team determined that bio-diesel fuel is a suitable alternative to using straight diesel fuel, however, the cost and availability across the country varies to a great extent. (2) Utilization of fuel cells for locomotive power systems - While the application of the fuel cell has been successfully demonstrated in the passenger car, this is a very advanced topic for the railroad industry. There are many safety and power issues that the research team examined. (3) Thermal and emission reduction for current large scale diesel engines - The current locomotive system generates large amount of heat through engine cooling and heat dissipation when the traction motors are used to decelerate the train. The research team evaluated thermal management systems to efficiently deal with large thermal loads developed by the operating engines. (4) Use of Composite and Exotic Replacement Materials - Research team redesigned various components using new materials, coatings, and processes to provide the needed protection. Through design, analysis, and testing, new parts that can withstand the hostile environments were developed. (5) Tribology Applications - Identification of tribology issues in the Railroad industry which play a significant role in the improvement of energy usage. Research team analyzed and developed solutions which resulted in friction modification to improve energy efficiency
Writing special procedures and subroutines on TK Solver to solve for linear/nonlinear electric circuits
No full textThe purpose of the study was to write special subroutines and procedures on the TK Solver, an equationsolving software, to solve for electrical engineering network problems and to apply the TK Solver to some other areas of electrical engineering. A main Model, System. TK , has been created to solve for linear electrical engineering networks. The model is expert in the sense that the user does not have to demonstrate his knowledge of network analysis by actually typing in the network equations. The user interaction with the software takes place on the screen, where the user has to declare the network components, their numerical values, number of nodes, the right-hand column matrix and the frequency for which the response is desired. The admittance matrix y is automatically created by the subroutines coge and cogel. The capability of expressing the result in both tabular and plot form has also been displayed. The supporting features of this model are gain, power and transfer function calculation. Another supporting model performing mesh analysis on resistive circuits has also been created and is called Matrix. TK . The user, in this model, has to feed in the number of loops and number of resistors along with the resistor values and then has to establish the presence of a resistor in a particular loop by writing 1 or 0 in a pre-generated matrix. Merely pressing F9 gives the values of loop currents. All the associated voltages can also be found out by the same model. These two models can be used by students to do problems, can be used by instructors to correct assignments and can be used in the design projects for synthesis purposes. As the second part of the thesis objective, various models have been created in different fields of electrical engineering to show the applicability of the TK Solver to those fields. Every model shows different capabilities of the TK Solver. In many of these models, special subroutines have been written by the author to accomplish the model objectives
