Improving Traffic Efficiency With Lane Guidance Based on Desired Speeds

Drivers initiate a discretionary lane change when they perceive an anticipated improvement in their own driving condition from moving to another lane. However, such a lane change can slow down other vehicles on the target lane, and even worse initiate a disturbance. In this work, we argue that the blocking effect triggered by individual lane...

Governing Equation Identification of Nonlinear Single Degree-of-Freedom Oscillators With Coulomb Friction Using Explicit Stick and Slip Temporal Constraints

The friction force at joints of engineering structures is usually unknown and not directly identifiable. This contribution explores a procedure for obtaining the governing equation of motion and correctly identifying the unknown Coulomb friction force of a mass-springdashpot system. In particular, a single degree-of-freedom system is...

UneVEn: Universal Value Exploration for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

VDN and QMIX are two popular value-based algorithms for cooperative MARL that learn a centralized action value function as a monotonic mixing of per-agent utilities. While this enables easy decentralization of the learned policy, the restricted joint action value function can prevent them from solving tasks that require significant coordination...

Ethics of smart cities: Towards value-sensitive design and co-evolving city life

The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data,...

Elongated particles in fluidized beds: From lab-scale experiments to constitutive models

Gas-solid fluidized beds are widely used in various industries due to their favourable mixing, and mass and heat transfer characteristics. Fluid catalytic cracking, polymerization, drying, and granulation are a few examples of their applications. In recent years, there has been increased application of fluidized beds in biomass gasification and...

Effect of lift force and hydrodynamic torque on fluidisation of non-spherical particles

The aim of many industrial processes is to manipulate solid particle aggregates within gas suspensions. Prime examples of such processes include fluidised bed reactors, cyclone separators, and dust collectors. In recent years, fluidised bed reactors have been used in the gasification of biomass particles. When fluidised, these particles are...

Multiscale simulation of elongated particles in fluidised beds

In this paper, we present a number of key numerical methods that can be used to study elongated particles in fluid flows, with a specific emphasis on fluidised beds. Fluidised beds are frequently used for the production of biofuels, bioenergy, and other products from biomass particles, which often have an approximate elongated shape. This...

Design analysis of a decentralized equilibrium-routing strategy for intelligent vehicles

Intelligent vehicle technologies are opening new possibilities for decentralized vehicle routing systems, suitable for regulating large traffic networks, and at the same time, capable of providing customized advice to individual vehicles. In this study, we perform a rigorous simulation-based analysis of an in-vehicle routing strategy that...

Fluid medium effect on stresses in suspensions of high-inertia rod-like particles

The rheology of suspensions of high-inertia (or granular) non-spherical particles characterized by high particle Stokes and Reynolds numbers is rarely investigated. In this study, we investigate the rheology of suspensions of inertial rod-like particles of aspect ratio 4 subjected to shear flow. In particular, the effect of fluid medium (air,...

Optimal lane guidance for improving traffic efficiency on homogeneous freeway sections

Nonspherical particles in a pseudo-2D fluidized bed: Experimental study

Fluidization is widely used in industries and has been extensively studied, both experimentally and theoretically, in the past. However, most of these studies focus on spherical particles while in practice granules are rarely spherical. Particle shape can have a significant effect on fluidization characteristics. It is therefore important to...

Non-spherical particles in a pseudo-2D fluidised bed: Modelling study

Fluidised beds are used in a variety of processes because of their favourable mass and heat transfer characteristics. In this and many other processes, non-spherical particles are commonplace, which can drastically affect the fluidisation behaviour. In this study, we use numerical models to study non-spherical fluidisation behaviour in detail...

Assessing the representativeness of durability tests for wood pellets by DEM Simulation: Comparing conditions in a durability test with transfer chutes

Dust generation when handling wood pellets is related to the durability of the product, in other words the wear rate of particles subject to forces. During transport, storage and handling wood pellets undergo different forces when interacting with different pieces of equipment.<br/><br/>This paper assesses the representativeness of the tumbling...

Fluidization of spherocylindrical particles

Multiphase (gas-solid) flows are encountered in numerous industrial applications such as pharmaceutical, food, agricultural processing and energy generation. A coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element method (DEM) approach is a popular way to study such flows at a particle scale. However, most of these studies deal with...

Systematic comparison of the use of annular and Zernike circle polynomials for annular wavefronts

The theory of wavefront analysis of a noncircular wavefront is given and applied for a systematic comparison of the use of annular and Zernike circle polynomials for the analysis of an annular wavefront. It is shown that, unlike the annular coefficients, the circle coefficients generally change as the number of polynomials used in the expansion...