Technical Papers and Presentations

Photovoltaic systems can degrade with moisture. The addition of an edge-seal containing a desiccant can reduce the amount of water reaching the interior. This report discusses the modeling of the water transport into the system to determine the amount of edge seal and desiccant ... Read More

The extrusion of polyolefin pipes suffers degradation due to mechanical design problems of the extrusion die that is commonly used. This study uses numerical and computational approaches to detect problematic areas in the die geometry. Simulations show that in the conventional die there ... Read More

Experimental data for oscillations occurring at the three phase contact line of an evaporating HFE 7000 meniscus on a silica substrate is presented. The frequency of the oscillations were found to depend on the local value of the evaporative heat ?ux. The thickness, slope, and curvature ... Read More

Powder detergents containing sodium percarbonate and bleach activators undergo chemical decomposition when exposed to high relative humidity. Controlling the moisture intake in finished product packs is therefore a fundamental need in order to guarantee product stability during the whole ... Read More

All spacecraft systems must be minimized with respect to mass, power, and volume. Here, we focus on current efforts to improve system efficiency and reliability for water separation systems to be used on crewed vehicles. These development efforts combine sub-scale systems testing and ... Read More

A novel combined photovoltaic-thermal panel can simultaneously increase the conversion efficiency of the PV cell and utilize some of the excess thermal energy created by the conversion process (see Figure 1). The Conjugate Heat Transfer physics in COMSOL was used to create a two ... Read More

The objective of this paper is to analyze the temperature variations within a superheater tube of a solar receiver steam generator. The tube is heated by concentrated, collimated solar irradiation with major cooling by an internal steam flow. The influence of heat loss by radiation, ... Read More

In this work we solve a model to simulate the drying of potatoes slices. The model considers both the transport of free and vapor water by applying a mechanistic approach. The critical moisture point (CMP) was considered, since it is a transition zone and it represents the point where ... Read More

A clothing system should offer the user a period of relatively comfort. However, changes in the ambient conditions over day affect the heat and mass transport in the system, influencing the user comfort perception. In order to gather information to allow the optimization of clothing ... Read More

Char combustion is one of the most important reactions in the process of Underground Coal Gasification (UCG). Experiments are performed in a boat reactor under near isothermal condition to demonstrate effects of heat and mass transfer and bed diffusion through ash layer. To obtain a ... Read More