Red Mud from the Aluminium Industry: Production, Characteristics, and Alternative Applications in Construction Materials—A Review

About 120 million tons of red mud is produced worldwide each year. Due to its high basicity and potential leaching, its storage is a critical environmental problem. This material is typically stored in dams, which demands prior care of the disposal area and includes monitoring and maintenance throughout its useful life. Consequently, it is crucial to figure out an industrial solution able to consumes large volumes of this material. At this moment, there are several studies, the majority in metallurgical procedures, building materials, and in the chemical industry, discussing how to reuse red mud. This paper provides a review of the aluminium process, including metal importance, its global production, and the environmental impact due to its manufacture process. It presents a review of the potential application of red mud showing its overall generation, some relevant characterisation results collected from the literature, and its utilisation in diverse areas of engineering. The study aimed to highlight applications where red mud characteristics may be favourable.

Design and Test of a Multi-Axis Acoustic-Levitation Device for Non-Contact Dust Removal from Precision Instruments

To resolve the issues of the conventional dust removing method, such as electrostatic suspension and direct wiping with special lens paper, which can cause damage to precision instruments and their dependence on specific dust particle properties, we present a novel acoustic-levitation device design which incorporates an initial design of a multi-axis levitation device by Marzo. A. with our enhancement model based on the variation of transducers numbers and their spacing to achieve the dust removing efficiency and feasibility in real dust removal process. In this work, modeling simulation in COMSOL Multiphysics and light absorbance experiment are performed to evaluate the distribution of acoustic fields, trajectory of dust particles, and dust removing efficiency. With the manufactured device based on our design, the varying factors are characterized that may influence the removing efficiency when output voltage generated onto motor driven board is altered. Experiment shows 27.5 V is the most efficient voltage output with highest dust removal proportion in actual removing operations. The study demonstrates our design can achieve higher dust removing efficiency comparing to conventional methods. Whereas our design serves the purpose to solve a practical industrial problem, this paper also shows how it can be taken into the classroom as an demonstration experiment, providing an animated way to visualize the nodes and antinodes by the levitation position of particles, which help the students to not only understand the physical properties of standing waves, but also the connection from a classroom lab to an industrial solution.

RECOVERY OF GERMANIUM BY PRECIPITATION FROM STRONGLY ALKALINE SOLUTION

The research material was a strongly alkaline solution containing germanium, lead, arsenic, zinc and trace amounts of other metals, obtained by leaching of industrial material. The aim of the study was to determine the behavior of the above metals in the precipitation process using various acidic agents: HCl, H2SO4, C2H2O4, C6H8O7. The tests were carried out in a wide pH range. The behavior and role of individual ions during the acidification of germanate solution is poorly understood, hence the study of this subject was undertaken. The resulting precipitates and solutions were examined by XRF, XRD and ICP techniques. The recovery yields of individual elements was determined. Attempts were also made to precipitate Ge from a synthetic solution in order to compare the results obtained for the solution of an industrial solution. This research shows that the presence of other ions interferes with the selective recovery of Ge from research solutions. Generally, it can be said that the method of recovery by acidification is effective at low concentrations of the solution's components.

SPOF—Slave Powerlink on FPGA for Smart Sensors and Actuators Interfacing for Industry 4.0 Applications

We here present a new PLC-POWERLINK industrial solution for Industry 4.0 applications. The proposed solution provides the capability to separate the sensing functionality from the PLC-side, in demand for the reconfigurable FPGA implementation. In particular, we here provide a framework that supports the interfacing between the POWERLINK protocol and commonly used standards, such as I2C, SPI, and UART. This has been obtained by using a framework built around a soft IP-core Application Processor, which manages the interfacing with several POWERLINK slaves, able to support the data exchange with the POWERLINK Communication Processor. A practical application example and related implementation details are presented in the paper.

Digital - Benefits for Naval Platforms

Royal Navy engineers are faced with the demanding responsibility of maintaining critical equipment to have high levels of reliability, availability, and performance under tight budget constraints. To avoid operating surprises, accurate assessment of equipment operating performance is needed to judge whether mission demands can be satisfied while maintenance costs are controlled. Large volumes of data about the health of complex system elements are generally available, and the amount of data is growing steadily. However, pulling together large amounts of current data from diverse sources across a system or an enterprise to create actionable intelligence is a challenge to the organization, from the plant engineer to the chief information officer. The foregoing requirements need to be carefully considered for effective naval asset performance management (APM). This paper considers the use of digital systems on naval platforms for APM to create a purposeful, predictive-analytic solution. It examines both the technology and engineering challenges and demonstrates how data analytics techniques are being used with successful outcomes. One solution is to use Similarity-Based Modelling (SBM) within an APM system as the technology foundation for development of predictive-analytic solutions to a broad spectrum of real-time modelling needs. Such a development, outlined in this paper, has focused on providing a platform-wide, equipment-agnostic industrial solution that can meet the needs of challenging naval applications and proven commercially in the energy and marine industries. The paper also considers, from a naval OEM perspective, the Maritime Support and the Exploitation Strategy which enables, equips and empowers the Support Enterprise through Digital Transformation.

Indo-US Defence Industry Cooperation: A Prognosis

The defence industrial cooperation is a clear missing link in an otherwise expanding strategic relationship between India and the US. The one-way defence trade is not only out of sync with India’s traditional demand for technology transfer and license production from its arms suppliers, but is also contrary to Make in India initiative of the Indian government. It is, therefore, imperative for New Delhi in particular to find an industrial solution to its increasing yet skewed defence trade relationship with the Washington. Besides demanding industrial benefits from all possible defence deals with the US in the future, New Delhi has to do a few more things to deepen the industry-to-industry cooperation with the US. Among others, it has to use its defence offset policy carefully to facilitate greater military-specific technology transfers for its industry; and at the same time lay a strong foundation for a robust in-house industrial base which can receive and absorb all such transfers.

IMPROVEMENTS ON THE ELECTRIC DRIVE ELEVATOR PROTOTYPE. PART II OPERATING TESTS

The prototype of the electric elevator consists of grid power converter connected with three different loads through the adequate power converters [1]. The main objective of this paper is to develop the industrial solution of the regenerative elevator power system, a system containing DC machines, asynchronous three-phase and synchronous with permanent magnets motors. In this paper, only the improvements done on the three-phase power inverter connected to the induction motor will be described. The same improvements can be applied to the three-phase power inverter connected to the synchronous machine. The grid power converter assures the unity power factor operation. The resulted experimental results are shown.