Abstract

Abstract: Buried pipeline systems form a key part of global lifeline infrastructure, and any significant disruption to the performance of these systems often translates into undesirable impacts on regional businesses, economies, or the living conditions of citizens. This chapter addresses the considerations associated with the seismic risk assessment of pipelines providing transmission of natural gas or liquid hydrocarbons, and pipelines that are part of a gas distribution system serving a region. Particular reference is made with respect to philosophy, approaches, and technologies adopted in designing and operating pipelines to minimize pipeline damage during earthquakes. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Optimizing city logistics is a topic of great importance for big cities today. Even though the environmental- and economical consequences of the increasing goods transportation fleet has been present for quite some time, actions from affected stakeholders has not been taken until just recently.  In this brief 9 week project the aim has been to,  from a design point-of-view, in this complex topic, give a suggestion and raise a discussion onto how goods transportation in cities can be made in the future.  The basic idea is to get the consignments as close to the consignees and their travel patterns as possible. Public transportation networks are an existing grid where people are moving around and can potentially be used for combined transport of goods and people. The outcome of this concept is focusing on light parcel delivery towards private consignees, due to the increasing e-commerce trend. By using small transporter vehicles connected to buses, light parcels can be distributed throughout a city and easily accessible for consignees at the bus stops.  The transporter vehicle developed through this project aims to conceptualize connectivity and integration between mobility and parcel delivery services, to ease the every day life of urban citizens as well as decrease the environmental- and economical impacts which the distribution vehicle-fleet of today entails.  The design of the transporter vehicle is an interpretation of how a autonomous distribution vehicle can look like in a future city environment where the integration of public-utility-vehicles is of greater importance.

Abstract

Recently, the use of renewable energy sources (RES) and electric vehicles (EVs) has been rapidly increased worldwide. As a result of the highly fluctuating nature of RES, the charging and discharging rates of EVs significantly have to be increased, and so the lifespan of EV batteries decreases. In this paper, an optimization-based method is proposed to smooth voltage fluctuations due to various RES types by optimally controlling the charging and discharging power of EVs and the reactive power of the RES inverters. To extend the lifespan of the EV battery, EV power fluctuations and their minimum preset state of charge (SOC) are considered in the proposed optimization model. For this purpose, a new multi-objective function is formulated, including (1) voltage fluctuations, (2) EV power fluctuations, and (3) the deviation of SOC of EVs from their minimum desired level. The use of the hull moving average (HMA) is proposed to mitigate voltage fluctuations, which eliminates the lag problem of the widely used movingaverage methods. The gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is utilized to accurately solve the optimization model. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method to smooth voltage fluctuations while considering degradation and charging plan of EV batteries. Peer reviewed