The effect of intelligent semi-active thermal exchange-fuzzy controller in structural rehabilitation by attenuating seismic responses of structural systems is investigated. In the suggested control system, MR dampers and sensors are employed as a semi-active controller. Resultant control forces of MR damper are administrated by providing external voltage supply, during the earthquakes and high ...

Direct conversion of heat into electricity through advanced thermoelectric (TE) materials has been one of the most attractive solutions to the severe environmental and energy issues facing humanity. In recent years, great progress has been made in improving their dimensionless figure of merit (ZT), which determines the conversion efficiency of TE devices. ZT is related to three “interlocked” fa...

Presently, the only commercially available power generating thermoelectric (TE) modules are based on bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) alloys and are limited to a hot side temperature of 250 °C due to the melting point of the solder interconnects and/or generally poor power generation performance above this point. For the purposes of demonstrating a TE generator or TEG with higher temperature capabili...

Dilution of the intake air of the SI engine with the inert gases is one of the emission control techniques like exhaust gas recirculation, water injection into combustion chamber and cyclic variability, without scarifying power output and/or thermal efficiency (TE). This paper investigates the effects of using argon (Ar) gas to mitigate the spark ignition engine intake air to enhance the perfor...

To properly estimate a thermoelectric material's performance, one should be able to characterize a single thermoelectric (TE) element with a large temperature gradient. In this work, we present an experimental setup including a Z-meter that can heat the sample to a very high temperature of 1200 °C in vacuum. The Z-meter can simultaneously measure all three thermoelectric parameters (Seebeck coe...

Thermoelectric (TE) materials, which can convert unused waste heat into useful electricity or vice versa, could play an important role in solving the current global energy challenge of providing sustainable and clean energy. Nevertheless, thermoelectrics have long been too inefficient to be utilized due to the relatively low energy conversion efficiency of present thermoelectrics. One way to ob...

Novel low-dimensional thermoelectric (TE) materials suffer from poor mechanical reliability, which limits their applications, especially in mechanically harsh environments. Here, we propose a new concept, in which the novel, abundant, thermally stable TE-nanostructures are dispersed and then intimately embedded inside a protective, mechanically reliable tetragonal ZrO2 (TZP) ceramic matrix with...

The application of a temperature difference (∆T) across a solid conductor causes mobile charge carriers to diffuse from hot to cold regions, giving rise to a thermoelectric voltage ∆V=-Se. ∆T. The prefactor Se is called the thermopower or Seebeck coefficient which describes how electrical energy can be generated from the thermal energy. The great majority of today’s thermoelectric (TE) research...