An 11 kW R410A heat pump system with a two-stage vapor-injected scroll compressor has been developed and tested. A conventional heat pump system with a scroll compressor having the same displacement volume to the vapor-injected scroll compressor has been tested under the same conditions to serve as a baseline. The vaporinjected scroll compressor has been tested with the cycle options of both fl...

Microwave sintering is a new sintering technology developed in the middle to late period of the 1980’s, which is characterized by fast densification for ceramic materials[1]. In recent years, microwave heating has been well employed in the field of sintering and joining of ceramics as a result of its advantages against conventional methods. These ceramic materials include oxides, mixed oxides, ...

Reductions in fossil fuel use and increases in system efficiency are required to make space heating more environmentally benign. Ground loop heat pumps offer an alternative heating solution that is more environmentally benign than conventional methods. Past studies of these heat pumps have usually focused on basic system arrangements, but new advanced systems are being developed. Here, energy a...

Over the last decade, the use of biocatalysts has become an attractive alternative to conventional chemical methods, especially for organic synthesis, due to their unusual properties. Among these enzymes, lipases are the most widely used, because they are cheap, easily available, cofactor-free, and have broad substrate specificity. Combined to microwave heating in non-aqueous medium, recent res...

Temporary superheating and sustained nucleation-limited "superboiling" of unstirred liquids above the normal atmospheric boiling point have been documented during microwave heating. These phenomena are reliably observed under prescribed conditions, although the duration (of superheating) and magnitude (of superheating and superboiling) vary according to system parameters such as volume of the l...

The thermal valorization of glycerol to produce synthesis gas has been investigated under conventional and microwave heating systems. Different processes (pyrolysis, steam reforming and dry reforming) are compared, using a commercial activated carbon as catalyst. The reforming processes that employ oxidizing agents (CO2 or H2O) were found to promote higher glycerol conversions than mere termal ...

With damage tolerance rivalling advanced engineering alloys and thermoplastic forming capabilities analogous to conventional plastics, metallic glasses are emerging as a modern engineering material. Here, we take advantage of their unique electrical and rheological properties along with the classic Lorentz force concept to demonstrate that electromagnetic coupling of electric current and a magn...

The present study deals with the enzymatic synthesis of biodiesel by transesterification of Jatropha oil (Jatropha curcas L.) with ethanol in a solvent-free system. Seven commercial lipase preparations immobilized by covalent attachment on epoxy-polysiloxane-polyvinyl alcohol composite (epoxy-SiO2-PVA) were tested as biocatalysts. Among them, immobilized lipases from Pseudomonas fluorescens (li...

A continuous flow sonochemical reactor was developed capable of producing metastable cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanoplatelets with thicknesses at or below 10nm. The continuous flow sonochemical reactor included the passive in-line micromixing of reagents prior to sonochemical reaction. Synthesis results were compared with those from reactors involving batch conventional heating and batch ultrasound-...