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    Cold Water Detergency of Triacylglycerol Semisolid Soils: The Effect of Salinity, Alcohol Type, and Surfactant Systems
    (2019-09-01)
    Phaodee, Parichat
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    Sabatini, David A.
    Cold water detergency of triacylglycerol semisolid soils is much more challenging than liquid vegetable oils due to poorer interaction between surfactants and semisolid soil. This research seeks to improve the removal efficiency of semisolid soils below their melting points using surfactant-based formulations containing different alcohol additives. To this end, cold water detergency of solid coconut oil and solid palm kernel oil was investigated in various surfactant/alcohol systems, including single anionic extended surfactants, single nonionic alcohol ethoxylate surfactants, and a mixture of anionic surfactants. A series of alcohols (2-butanol, 1-hexanol, 1-heptanol, 1-octanol, 1-nonanol, and 1-decanol) were added to the surfactant formulations to investigate cold water detergency improvement. While cold water detergency using surfactants alone was poor, it was considerably improved when optimum salinity (S*) and 1-heptanol, 1-octanol, or 1-nonanol were introduced to the studied surfactant formulations. The maximum detergency of solid coconut oil exceeded 90% removal in the 0.1 w/v% C<inf>14-15</inf>-8PO-SO<inf>4</inf>Na/0.2 w/v% 1-octanol/4 w/v% NaCl system (a final optimized surfactant system) at a washing temperature of 10°C versus 22.9 ± 2.2% in the surfactant alone (not at optimum salinity and no additive). Further analysis showed that improved cold water detergency using surfactant/intermediate-chain alcohols/NaCl could be correlated with high wettability (low contact angle) as well as favorable surfactant system-soil interaction as observed by lower interfacial tension values. In contrast, the improved cold water detergency was observed to be independent of dispersion stability. This work thus demonstrates that surfactant system design, including additives, can improve cold water detergency of semisolid soils and should be further explored in future research.
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    Life Cycle Assessment of Spent Sulfuric Acid from Lead-acid Traction Battery in Thailand
    (2019-01-01)
    Intang, K.
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    Khaodhiar, S.
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    Recently, especially from 2015 to 2017, Thailand produced waste of lead-acid batteries (LABs) around 11,000 tons/year on an average which traction battery accounted for around 44% or 4,800 tons/year. It was estimated that 16% of spent LABs was considered as improper management. According to literature reviews, 22% by weight of LABs is an electrolyte which is sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid used in the battery is a strong acid with pH lower than 2. A leakage of sulfuric acid during disassembling or battery cell transportation can lead to environmental impact and ecotoxicity. A primary goal of this study is to assess the environmental impact of spent sulfuric acid from expired traction battery with and without treatment before discharge. A material flow analysis illustrated a quantity of traction battery used to calculate the amount of spent sulfuric acid. The highest total amount of spent sulfuric acid (which was 1,808 tons/year from 1,299 tons/year of traction batteries and 509 tons/year of improper management) was found in 2016. These most massive quantities were used to evaluate the impact on each scenario. The result showed that directly discharged spent sulfuric acid caused higher environmental impact load than treated one. Spent sulfuric acid played a significant role in the impact potentials. Marine aquatic ecotoxicity had the greatest impact compared to the other categories. The assessment of scenario comparison assured that pH adjustment of spent sulfuric acid was able to alleviate environmental impacts for expired battery management.
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    Analyzing technique for electrical energy monitoring system in Thailand hospital
    (2017-07-12) ; ;
    Lumyong, Pichit
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    Ngamwatthanasilpa, Bandit
    An electrical energy monitoring system helps improve the security and reliability of a hospital operating system which can also indirectly enhance energy efficiency itself. However, a large hospital has a complex electrical system which leads to the big data issue from the installed monitoring system in this size-scaled hospital. Therefore, this paper proposes K-mean clustering technique, which is one of the effective data mining techniques, to analyze the big data from the electrical energy monitoring system in hospital. The case study is a large hospital with 200 in-patient beds in Thailand. Without loss of generality, electrical load profile is used for analyzing instead of using the electrical energy. Finally, the proposed data clustering technique is able to characterize electrical load profiles effectively for each hospital floor. This technique also identify the abnormality of these characterized electrical load profiles in various scenarios which hospital system operators can use them to consider the security, reliability, and energy efficiency of their operating systems.
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    Effect of additives on fuel properties and emission characteristics of micromulsion biofuels from palm oil
    (2017-07-12) ;
    Lumyong, Pichit
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    Wichadee, Sasiwimon
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    Khaodhiar, Sutha
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    Microemulsiflcation is one of the novel techniques to reduce viscosity of vegetable oils to avoid durability problems in diesel engines. Microemulsion biofuels are transparent, thermodynamically stable, and single-phase mixtures of vegetable oils and ethanol in the presence of surfactants and co-surfactants. Additives have also been included in microemulsion biofuel formulations to improve their stability and fuel properties; however, there is limited research on the effect of additives on emission characteristics of microemulsion biofuels. In this study, microemulsion biofuels were formulated from palm oil/diesel blend (1:1 v/v), ethanol, surfactant, and co-surfactants. Five additives, ethylene glycol butyl ether (EGBE), diethylene glycol ethyl ether (DEGEE), propylene glycol ethyl ether (PGEE), dipropylene glycol methyl ether (DPGME), and ethyl acetate (EA), were used to study the effect of additives on phase behaviors, fuel properties, and emission characteristics. The results showed that studied additives could improve some fuel properties of microemulsion biofuels with negligible effect on phase stability. Additionally, it was found that carbon monoxide (CO) emissions from microemulsion biofuels with DEGEE and EA, and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from microemulsion biofuels with all additives were lower than those from diesel and biodiesel. Therefore, DEGEE and EA can be considered as promising additives for microemulsion biofuel formulations, which can improve fuel properties as well as can significantly reduce CO and NO<inf>x</inf> emissions below the levels of diesel and biodiesel. These encouraging results offer options of additives for biofuel applications.
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    Optimized Microemulsion Systems for Detergency of Vegetable Oils at Low Surfactant Concentration and Bath Temperature
    (2017-07-01) ;
    Sabatini, David A.
    Triglycerides and vegetable oils are amongst the most difficult oils to remove from fabrics due to their highly hydrophobic nature; this is all the more challenging as cold water detergency is pursued in the interest of energy efficiency. Recently, extended surfactants have produced very encouraging detergency performance at ambient temperature, especially at low surfactant concentration. However, the salinity requirement for extended surfactants was excessive (4–14%) and there is limited research on extended-surfactant-based microemulsions for cold water detergency (below 25 °C). Therefore, extended-surfactant-based microemulsions are introduced in this study for cold temperature detergency of vegetable oils with promising salinity and surfactant concentration. The overall goal of this study is to explore the optimized microemulsion formulations with low surfactant and salt concentration using extended surfactant for canola oil detergency at both 25 and 10 °C. It was found that microemulsion systems achieved good performances (higher than those of commercial detergents) corresponding to IFT value 0.1–1 mN/m with the surfactant concentration as low as 10 ppm and 4% NaCl at 25 °C, and as low as 250 ppm and 0.1% (1000 ppm) NaCl at 10 °C. In addition, microemulsion systems were investigated with a different salt (CaCl<inf>2</inf>, or water hardness, versus NaCl) at 10 °C, demonstrating that 0.025% CaCl<inf>2</inf> (250 ppm) can produce good detergency; this is in the hardness range of natural water. These results provide qualitative guidance for microemulsion formulations of vegetable oil detergency and for future design of energy-efficient microemulsion systems.
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    Phase behaviors and fuel properties of palm oil-based microemulsion biofuels using sugar-based surfactants
    (2017-07-12) ;
    Charoensaeng, Ampira
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    Sorrasuchart, Nutthaporn
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    Khaodhiar, Sutha
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    Arpornpong, Noulkamol
    Due to environmental concerns and current fossil-fuel situations, palm oil has been considered as a potential vegetable oil for renewable biofuel applications in South East Asia. To solve durability problems in diesel engine caused by high viscosity of palm oil, microemulsification has led to more attention as a novel viscosity-reducing technique. Microemulsion biofuels are transparent, thermodynamically stable, and singlephase microemulsions, where the polar phase is solubilized in surfactant aggregates existing in the non-polar phase. Surfactants (surface active agents) play a key role in enhancement of the interaction between polar and non-polar phases. Since sugar-based surfactants have been derived from bio-based resources, they have been introduced to formulate microemulsion biofuels in this study. Three sugar-based surfactants, sorbitan monolaurate (SM20), sorbitan monooleate (SM80), and sorbitan trioleate (ST85) and three alcohols (butanol, hexanol, and octanol) were used as surfactants and co-surfactants, respectively. The objectives of this study are to formulate microemulsion biofuels using sugar-based surfactants, to study the effects of surfactants and co-surfactants on phase behaviors and kinematic viscosities, and to investigate the effect of surfactant/co-surfactant ratio on other fuel properties (i.e. energy content, cold flow properties, density, and ash content). The results show that the microemulsion system using SM80 and octanol at the molar ratio of 1 to 8 was considered as an optimized microemulsion biofuel formulation demonstrating comparable fuel properties to biodiesel. These results provide useful guidance for future design of environmentally friendly microemulsion biofuels.
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    Magnetization of NdFeB Permanent Magnet Considering Demagnetization Effect
    (2018-11-27) ;
    Lumyong, Pichit
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    Niroiana, Chamakorn Na
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    Electrical machine efficiency improvement has been paid more attention over the past years. Using Permanent Magnets (PMs) in various modern electrical machines is one of the most favorable approaches to increase machine efficiency. However, PMs still have a significant disadvantage that is the demagnetization issue. Therefore, these demagnetized PMs need to magnetize for regaining their initial capability considering the demagnetization level. Therefore, first of all, this paper proposes the demagnetization behavior of NdFeB PMs due to thermal effect. Then, these PMs are magnetized using a proposed simple magnetizing technique considering various demagnetization conditions. Finally, the results indicate that the most complete demagnetized PMs are able to significantly recover to their initial capability.