Hotspot Endurance Testing of Thin Amorphous Silicon Solar Foils: The importance of reliability

Thin-film amorphous Silicon (a-Si) technology has been up and coming in recent years in order to achieve an efficiency comparable to crystalline Silicon (c-Si). Although the technology has existed for quite some time, it has not been researched as much as its crystalline counterpart, especially not in the hotspot reliability sector. The hotspot...

Thermo-mechanical numerical analyses in support of fire endurance assessment of ordinary soda-lime structural glass elements

Purpose: Glass material is largely used for load-bearing components in buildings. For this reason, standardized calculation methods can be used in support of safe structural design in common loading and boundary conditions. Differing from earlier literature efforts, the present study elaborates on the load-bearing capacity, failure time and...

An Investigation of Electric Propulsion in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles through a Variable-Fidelity Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation Approach

The medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays a key role in both military and civilian applications around the world. However, in a world where electric UAVs are increasingly becoming the norm, the MALE UAV is still primarily powered by hydrocarbon fuels and its design is very much constrained by existing general...

Feasibility of using electric drone main rotors for electricity generation vs. solar panels for indefinite flight

An idea was proposed to allow an autonomous drone to have indefinite flight times over the ocean by applying renewable energy technologies and theory to generate electricity in flight. This is considered less as a way to save energy, but to permit the use of such a drone from a ship not capable of safely retrieving it. One novel component of...

Fuel Cell and Battery Hybrid System Optimization: Towards Increased Range and Endurance

Aircraft manufacturers are increasingly exploring emission-free flight or emission reduction for larger passenger aircraft. The low energy density of state-of-the-art battery technology limits the application to small, electric, fixed wing aircraft up to a flight time of approximately one hour. To overcome these limits, a combination of fuel...

Hot Mix Asphalt Recycling: Practices and Principles

Hot mix asphalt recycling has become common practice all over the world since the 1970s because of the crisis in oil prices. In the Netherlands, hot recycling has advanced to such an extent that in most of the mixtures more than 50% of reclaimed asphalt (RA) is allowed. These mixtures with such a high RA content are produced in a batch plant to...

Asphalt Mixture Fatigue Testing: Influence of Test Type and Specimen Size

Fatigue characterization of an asphalt mixture is commonly estimated by laboratory fatigue tests. Based on the classical fatigue analysis, fatigue lives obtained from different test devices are not comparable even when they are performed at the same test conditions. It is believed that there are two main reasons causing the difference in fatigue...