In this study, the biodiesel produced from soybean crude oil was prepared by a method of alkaline-catalyzed transesterification. The important properties of biodiesel were compared with those of diesel. Diesel and biodiesel were used as fuels in the compression ignition engine, and its...

A design approach is offered for individual tariffs for mass customized mobile service products, whereby operators can determine their contract acceptance rules to guarantee with a set probability their minimum profit and risk levels. It uses realistic improvements to earlier reported...

As a substitute for diesel and considered a renewable energy, rapeseed-based biodiesel has attracted increasing attention in China. The present work to estimate energy cost of rapeseed-based biodiesel in China is based on embodied energy intensities for various inputs out of a recent extended...

An experimental investigation is conducted to evaluate the effects of using diethyl ether and ethanol as additives to biodiesel/diesel blends on the performance, emissions and combustion characteristics of a direct injection diesel engine. The test fuels are denoted as B30 (30% biodiesel and 70%...

Kinetic representation of fluid dynamics is essential for describing flows far beyond the Navier–Stokes regime. Existing lattice Boltzmann models suffer from discrete rotation artifacts at high Knudsen number (Kn). In this paper, we present a new approach that directly addresses this issue and...

Most of current lattice Boltzmann (LB) research is based on the single-time relaxation approximation of the continuum Boltzmann equation. In this note we present a few critical considerations on the reasons behind the success of such an approach and discuss new developments in the direction of...

A preliminary study of the non-linear stability properties of entropic schemes versus positivity-enforcing (FIX-UP) schemes is presented for the case of two-dimensional cavity flow. It is shown that, although they operate on fairly distinct schedules, both methods achieve substantial stability...

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake induced a large number of landslides, and a vast amount of loose landslide materials deposited on steep hill slopes or in channels. Such loose materials can become sources of deadly debris flows once triggered by storms. On 13 August 2010, a storm swept Yingxiu and...