Felix Jiri Weinberg. 2 April 1928 — 5 December 2012

Felix Weinberg's teenage years coincided with World War II. He spent much of the war in Nazi concentration camps, starting with Terezin in December 1942, followed by Auschwitz in December 1943, and finally Buchenwald, from which he was liberated on 11 April 1945. He joined Imperial College, London as a research assistant in 1951 and completed his PhD by 1954. He was appointed to a personal chair as professor of combustion physics in 1967, and he stayed at Imperial for his entire career. Weinberg was distinguished for his optical and electrical studies of flames and his pioneering development of innovative combustion methods. He invented a family of powerful optical tools in combustion, using both broad spectrum and laser light sources. His work on electrical diagnostics led to applications of electric fields to control combustion and to improved understanding of ionization and soot formation. He developed novel combustion devices that incorporated distinctive heat exchangers, thereby permitting the ignition and burning of very low calorific fuel–air mixtures. All of these works had a propelling influence on the global evolution of environmentally benign combustion furnaces. His wide-ranging service to academia, industry and scientific societies included visiting scholar appointments at universities around the world, consultancies for petroleum, chemical, aerospace and defence organizations, and active membership on committees and boards of governance for many scientific and professional bodies. He was author, co-author or editor of four books and well over 200 papers in the scientific literature.

TOTAL AND DISTRIBUTIVE IMPACT OF FINAL SECTORAL DEMAND ON CARBON DIOXIDE EQUIVALENT IN NIGERIA

This paper analyzed the percentage rise in final (sectoral) demand undergone by the whole economy in reaction to a 1% rise of the corresponding sector and the percentage rise corresponding to the apportionment of direct sectoral demand and its resultant effect on CO2-eq emissions in Nigeria. The study adopted a longitudinal design, and the most recent input-output (I-O) table was obtained from secondary sources (Eurostat database). Results revealed increases in CO2-eq emissions from the fishing, post and telecommunication, wood and paper, petroleum, chemical and non-metallic mineral products, metal products, electricity, gas and water, wholesale trade, and public administration sectors with a total contribution of 0.04095, 0.04095, 0.04089, 0.04088, 0.04086, 0.04089, 0.04088 and 0.04087 percent respectively, while sectors that contributed the highest in terms of the distribution of direct sectoral emissions were fishing, mining/quarrying and textile/wearing apparel accounting for about 0.04101, 0.04109 and 0.04111 percent respectively. That implies a 1% increase in final demand was increasing in the corresponding sector. Based on these results, the study identified sectors that contribute the highest in terms of the distribution of direct sectoral emission and sectors that account for the highest total increase in energy consumed in the country, thus contributing to the current debate in the literature. However, emission mitigation options proposed by the IPCC report should be considered an important option in curbing these emissions in Nigeria.

Substantial Nitrogen Oxide Pollution Is Embodied in the Bilateral Trade between China and the European Union

Against the backdrop of globalization and trade facilitation, the products consumed by a country are more and more relying on the importation of those products from other countries. Therefore, the pollutant emissions of products associated are transferred from consuming countries to exporting countries, which significantly changes the spatial distribution of global pollutant emissions. The objective of this research is to analyse the embodied nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions in the trading process between China and the European Union (EU) and to further trace the interindustry and intercountry transfer paths. This study constructs a multiregional input–output (MRIO) model based on the latest EORA global supply chain database. The MRIO model quantitatively analyses the total NOx emissions from the production and consumption ends of China and the EU from 1995 to 2014. Important findings are derived from the empirical results as follows. (1) In 2014, China’s production end emissions were 1824.38 kilotons higher than those of the consumption end. By contrast, the situation in the EU was the opposite, i.e., production end emissions were 1711.97 kilotons lower than those of the consumption end. (2) In the trade between China and the EU, the EU is a net importer of embodied NOx, and China is a net exporter of embodied NOx. In 2014, 2.55% of China’s domestic NOx emissions were transferred to the EU in China-EU trade, accounting for 2.75% of China’s domestic consumption demand. (3) In 2014, Electricity, Gas and Water (397.75 kilotons), Transport (343.55 kilotons), Petroleum, Chemical and non-metallic Products (95.9 kilotons), Metal Products (49.88 kilotons), Textiles and Apparel (26.19 kilotons), are among the industries with the most embodied NOx emissions from China’s net exports during its two-way trade with the EU. (4) In the bilateral trade between the EU and China, many countries are in the state of embodied NOx net import. The top three net importers in 2014 were Germany (169.24 kilotons), Britain (128.11 kilotons), France (103.21 kilotons).

A Review on Recent Studies: Non-Traditional Machining of Titanium Alloys

Till now titanium and its alloys used in different industrial sectors. Unique material characteristics make it as desirable raw material for the automotive, aerospace, petroleum, chemical, marine and biomedical industries. It requires deformation and fabrication process as difficult-to-cut material. There are several challenges hidden under the processes. Therefore, advanced machining process performance investigation in titanium and its titanium alloys machining has taken part of the research concern. A number of research works has been done in every year to show the research direction. However, most of them are specifically in one machining process. It’s important to have a clear picture of a research area for further research consideration. Therefore, this review aim to study recent articles of non-traditional machining process of titanium and its alloys. The focus of this review was on the contribution for solving existing problems by using non-traditional machining processes, most efficient process and general overview. At the end it also provided a summary of sustainable issue of non-traditional machining processes.

Characterization of Flow Regimes in Gas-Solid Fluidized Beds via a Data Driven Framework

Gas-solid fluidized beds are widely used in petroleum, chemical, mineral, pharmaceutical, and power plant applications. The performance of fluidized bed reactors strongly depends on the flow dynamics. Characterization of a particle-laden flow has been one of the challenging issues in fluidization research. The simulation of flow in such processes is challenging as the complex dynamic systems comprised of numerous particles and fluidizing gas confined in specific devices. Nonlinear particle-particle/wall and particle-gas interactions lead to complex flow behavior of the gas-solid flows. We used MFiX to simulate a gas-solid flow in fluidized beds. A data-driven framework is trained with the data from MFiX-PIC simulations. The trained and tested machine learning model is used to characterize the flow regimes in fluidized beds. In the present study, the void fraction is used to characterize the flow regimes. However, others in the literature have used pressure, temperature, heat transfer coefficient, acoustic emission, vibration, and electrostatic charge for the characterization of flow regimes.

Diamond-Coated Mechanical Seal Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on Convolution Neural Network

Reliable remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of industrial equipment key components is of considerable importance in condition-based maintenance to avoid catastrophic failure, promote reliability and reduce cost during the production. Diamond-coated mechanical seal is one of the most critical wearing components in petroleum chemical, nuclear power and other process industries. Estimating the RUL is of critical importance. We consider the data-driven approaches for diamond-coated mechanical seal RUL estimation based on AE sensor data, since it is difficult to construct an explicit mathematical degradation model of seal. The challenges of this work are dealing with the noisy AE sensor data and modeling the degradation process with fluctuation. Faced with these challenges, we propose a pipeline method CDF-CNN to estimate the RUL for mechanical seal: WPD-KLD to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, novel CDF-based statistics to represent seal degradation process and CNN structure to estimate RUL. To acquire AE sensor data, several diamond-coated seals are tested from new to failure in three working conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately predict the RUL of diamond-coated mechanical seal based on AE signals. The proposed prediction method can be generalized to other various mechanical assets.

Three-Dimensional Numerical Analysis for Bolted Flange Joints Considering Effect of Creep

Bolted flange joints are widely used in petroleum, chemical, nuclear and power industries, etc. With more and more devices are used at high temperature, the performance of flange connections becomes more complex, especially with creep of different components in flange connection. At elevated temperature, with the loss of bolt force and gasket force due to creep, the joints are prone to leak. Based on this, this paper analyzed the relaxation of bolt force at elevated temperature due to creep of bolt, flange and gasket separately and simultaneously. Besides, the influence of different initial installation stress of bolts was also studied. The results showed bolted flange joints relaxed due to gasket creep during early short term service. However, contribution of bolt and flange creep became more and more significant with the extension of time. With considering the creep of bolt, flange and gasket simultaneously, 50% to 60% of the bolt material yield strength at room temperature was recommended as the bolt initial installation stress for the joint case studied in this paper.