Climate warming will increase the drought exposure of many forests world-wide. It is not well understood how trees adapt their hydraulic architecture to a long-term decrease in water availability. We examined 23 traits characterizing the hydraulic architecture and growth rate of branches and the dependent foliage of mature European beech (Fagus sylvatica) trees along a precipitation gradient (8...

This paper presents a hydraulic hybrid vehicle drive train to improve the fuel efficiency of a passenger car. The developed hydro-mechanical drive train enables independent control of the torque at each wheel. The motivation for developing this drive train is a hydraulic hybrid vehicle test bed for the Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power at the University of Minnesota. The hydro-mechan...

This paper describes a unified approach to modeling and simulation of hydraulic systems using bond graphs. Unlike the others, the causalities are not applied in bond graph settings. This leads that mathematical model is generated in the form of differential algebraic equation (DAEs) and solved as such by suitable solver. Bond graph model of simple hydraulic system has developed using program Bo...

Hydraulic cylinder actuators are used extensively in industrial, construction and agricultural works. The small sized outlet ports of the cylinders resist the flow of discharged oil; and as a result the piston motion is slowed down. This causes a lot of heat generation and energy loss within the actuators. The study investigates and analyzes the possibilities of reducing the hydraulic resistanc...

The goal of the study was to explore hydraulic traits in a 4-year-old loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) plantation to better understand plasticity of this species to resource availability. The influence of a factorial combination of irrigation (130 mm year 1 versus 494 mm year ) and fertilization (0 kg N ha 1 year 1 versus 80 kg N ha 1 year ) on stand-level transpiration, canopy stomatal conductan...

Current theory presumes that natural selection on vascular traits is controlled by a trade-off between efficiency and safety of hydraulic architecture. Hence, traits linked to efficiency, such as vessel diameter, should show biogeographic patterns; but critical tests of these predictions are rare, largely owing to confounding effects of environment, tree size and phylogeny. Using wood sampled f...

Battery is a vital subsystem in an electric vehicle with regenerative braking system. The energy efficiency of an electric vehicle is improved by storing the regenerated energy in an electric battery, during braking, and reusing it during subsequent acceleration. Battery possesses a relatively poor power density and slow charging of regenerated energy, when compared to hydro-pneumatic accumulat...

Improving the hydraulic performance of waste stabilization ponds (WSPs) is an important management strategy to not only ensure protection of public health and the environment, but also to maximize the potential reuse of valuable resources found in the treated effluent. To reuse effluent from WSPs, a better understanding of the factors that impact the hydraulic performance of the system is neede...