Paper 3

Examples of topics that you can do with mechanisms built into Cantera:

• The formation of nitric oxides (or other pollutants)
  • explanation of the three prominent mechanisms of NOx production
  • The use of exhuast gas recirculation to reduce NOx
• Detailed analysis of H2-O2 combustion
• Influence of surface reactions on explosion limits of H2-O2
• Comparison of different chemical kinetic mechanisms and/or reduced mechanisms
• Analysis of Methane combustion
• Mathematical analysis of reaction mechanisms:
  • Sensitivity & eigenvalue analysis
  • Reduced mechanisms, quasi-equilibrium assumptions
• Combustion issues in MEMS (would require research in journals, not in textbook)

• The creation of smog from nitric oxides in the atmosphere
• Mechanism for the formation of acid rain
• Stratospheric Ozone depletion

You should scan through some of the books on reserve and see if any other topics interest you. Realize that many combustion simulations must take spatial variations into account to yield useful results, you only have the tools to perform time dependent simulations. Take this into account when selecting a topic for research.

Your audience for this paper is your peers. You may assume the reader has same thermodynamic background as you, just remember that whatever problem you write about will be new to the reader. These papers are to be written individually, though you should feel free to discuss with your peers and have them review your work.

The format for the paper will be different than the past two. We will only write a single page (no exceptions!) summary of your research result. The journal Nature often has these articles under Brief Communications. For example, here is a cool article about deadly shrimp. You should use the LaTex format for 3 column papers. I have modified a style from IEEE for our class. All the files are located here. You download all files and process in Latex to make sure you get the same results as the posted pdf file. Once that works you should only modify the file paper.tex and paper.bib. Print figures in eps format from MATLAB.

Paper 2

• There should be at least 6 components.
• The cycle should involve phase change.

This assignment is more like one long homework problem rather than an original research paper. While you should set up the problem and explain what the cycle is useful for, you do not need to provide a lengthy introduction or background information. The types of things that should be included in your paper are:

• The general purpose of the cycle.
• A schematic of the components.
• What assumptions must be made to conduct the analysis.
• Analysis of the cycle using variables, explaining how the work and heat are related to the properties of the working fluid at different states.
• Present the state of the working fluid on a P-V or T-S diagram.
• Discussion and computation of the efficiency or performance metric of interest.
• Discuss or include in your analysis non-ideality in the individual components. How do these effect the efficiency of the cycle as a whole.
• A numerical example using reasonable values for operation. You do not need to present the enthalpy at each state, just provide the performance parameters of interest such as the work provided, work needed, fuel consumed, etc.
• A comparison to the most basic cycle that accomplishes the same task (i.e. compare the basic vapor-compression cycle to a fancy refrigeration cycle).
• A discussion of practical limitations, advantages, or disadvantages of your cycle (i.e. initial cost, operating cost, reliability, fuel cost)

Other guidelines for this paper:

• The analysis you do should be your own, though you are free to read anything you like.
• You should work independently.
• You are encouraged to ask a peer to review your paper before submission.

Paper 1

• Derive the governing differential equations for the system for the general case with heat transfer, the adiabatic limit, and the isothermal limit.
• For small motions of the piston, what are the approximate, linearized DEs for the adiabatic and isothermal case. Use Taylor series to derive a second order spring equation. State the natural frequency of each system.
• Create an adiabatic simulation of the complete DEs, measure the response of the system as you sweep the frequency. Plot the amplitude vs. frequency. You should have a peak at the natural frequency that you computed analytically.
• Create a simulation of the general case with heat transfer and friction. Measure the response of the system as you sweep the frequency for different assumptions about how much friction and heat transfer are present. Explore the amplitude vs. frequency plot for different cases. Does the peak in the frequency response remain the same? Does the width of the response change? How close to ideal (adiabatic and frictionless) must the system be to obtain an accurate measure of the ratio of specific heats?
• Turn off the forcing and friction, then set your simulation to run as an initial value problem. The mass is perturbed and released. Compare the decay of the oscillations for the isothermal, adiabatic, and general case. You should find that the adiabatic case oscillates forever while heat transfer acts to damp the oscillations. However, if the heat transfer is taken to be so rapid that the system is isothermal the oscillations will also persist forever. Explain how some heat transfer can have a dampening effect while the case of very rapid heat transfer (with respect to the motion of the mass) has no damping. You should explain these effects using the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a discussion of reversible and irreversible processes.

Other guidelines for this paper are:

• The analysis you do should be your own, though you are free to read anything you like.
• You should work independently, though you do not need to work in isolation. Talking is good, though each student should do their own work and write their own interpretation of the results.
• I am not concerned with exactly what you investigate, so look at questions you find interesting. The guidelines from above are just to provide guidance. Feel free to deviate if you find things that are interesting to you.

• MATLAB code
• PDF file showing equations and results