ESRIG-EES colloquium: Alessandro Martulli, Kaan Hidiroglu and Hanneke Heusinkveld, MSc EES students
| When: | Tu 14-05-2019 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Where: | 5159.0110, Energy Academy, Nijenborgh 6 |
Title: Assessment of the energy efficiency evolution in the European road freight transport with a bottom-up approach.
By: Alessandro Martulli, MSc EES student.
Summary:
Road freight transport has experienced rapid growth in the last decades and due to its dependence from fossil fuels, there has been a growing interest in the development of energy conservation policies, which aimed at improving the energy efficiency. The assessment of how the technological development, that the road freight transport underwent, influenced the energy performances of the vehicles travelling becomes essential. An analysis of their energy efficiency evolution can provide this information. Few studies in the literature have addressed the evaluation of the trends of energy efficiency as well as the best metric for doing this. For this reason, the main aim of this thesis is to fill this gap and estimate how the energy performances of the European road freight transport vehicles developed in the last 40 years.
A bottom-up approach was used for the assessment of the energy efficiency evolution. This method is suitable for identifying the influence of specific factors such as speed and rolling resistance on the vehicles’ energy consumption that it is not possible to detect with aggregate data, considered by a top-down approach. Fuel economy was then adopted as indicator and it was measured by considering the sources of distortion (size, speed of detection and engine rated power). The influence of different driving behaviors on energy efficiency improvements was inspected and an estimation of the rebound effect was carried out. Finally, an exergy analysis was developed, aimed at investigating the relationship between energy efficiency and power and finding a measure to summarize the changes in both indicators.
Title: Finding Evidence for Rebound Effect with Network Analysis and Econometric Modelling in Dutch Road Freight Transport Sector.
By: Kaan Hidiroglu, MSc EES student.
Summary:
Energy efficiency improvements are important parts of emission reduction efforts in road transport sector. In this respect, it is important to understand the behavior of the road transport network with respect to these improvements. In this research, the main aim is to analyze and measure the magnitude of the spurious rebound effect in Dutch road freight transport sector from 2 different point of views; 1) a network theory analysis; 2) an econometric model regression. In this network theory analysis, the network is reconstructed based on entropy maximization method and a special metric called Spatial Filling is computed between 2005-2017. This is then compared with the Fuel Economy for 3 different vehicle categories, in order to understand if the network expanded or shrunk with respect to efficiency improvements. On the second part, an econometric analysis is conducted by creating two different multiple logarithmic regression models with different service demand metrics such as Ton-km and Vehicle-km used as dependent variables. Based on these two analyses, the behavior of the Dutch road freight transport sector will be discussed. With concluding remarks, further steps that can enhance this study will also be suggested.
Title: Laser Induced Fluorescence measurements on methane combustion.
By: Hanneke Heusinkveld, MSc EES student.
Summary:
Combustion is a process that is integrated in our everyday lives, from cooking to heating systems and transport. Methane combustion was investigated. To increase the efficiency of combustion processes and to better understand the process that happens in a flame itself. In this research the experimental setup to measure methane combustion with light induced fluorescence (LIF) was tested. LIF is used to measure the intensity of different species at a certain wavelength, in this research the species OH was measured. The hydroxyl radical is used due to its importance as a reactive species in combustion. It initiates the oxidation process by removing hydrogen atoms from the fuel source. A calibration line of the Intensity of a flame versus the OH concentration was made to be used as reference in further methane combustion research.