| 1. |
- He, Jie
(författare)
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Gasification-based Biorefinery for Mechanical Pulp Mills
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The modern concept of “biorefinery” is dominantly based on chemical pulp mills to create more value than cellulose pulp fibres, and energy from the dissolved lignins and hemicelluloses. This concept is characterized by the conversion of biomass into various bio-based products. It includes thermochemical processes such as gasification and fast pyrolysis. In thermo-mechanical pulp (TMP) mills, the feedstock available to the gasification-based biorefinery is significant, including logging residues, bark, fibre material rejects, bio-sludges and other available fuels such as peat, recycled wood and paper products. On the other hand, mechanical pulping processes consume a great amount of electricity, which may account for up to 40% of the total pulp production cost. The huge amount of purchased electricity can be compensated for by self-production of electricity from gasification, or the involved cost can be compensated for by extra revenue from bio-transport fuel production. This work is to study co-production of bio-automotive fuels, bio-power, and steam via gasification of the waste biomass streams in the context of the mechanical pulp industry. Ethanol and substitute natural gas (SNG) are chosen to be the bio-transport fuels in the study. The production processes of biomass-to-ethanol, SNG, together with heat and power, are simulated with Aspen Plus. Based on the model, the techno-economic analysis is made to evaluate the profitability of bio-transport fuel production when the process is integrated into a TMP mill.The mathematical modelling starts from biomass gasification. Dual fluidized bed gasifier (DFBG) is chosen for syngas production. From the model, the yield and composition of the syngas and the contents of tar and char can be calculated. The model has been evaluated against the experimental results measured on a 150KWth Mid Sweden University (MIUN) DFBG. As a reasonable result, the tar content in the syngas decreases with the gasification temperature and the steam to biomass (S/B) ratio. The biomass moisture content is a key parameter for a DFBG to be operated and maintained at a high gasification temperature. The model suggests that it is difficult to keep the gasification temperature above 850 ℃ when the biomass moisture content is higher than 15.0 wt.%. Thus, a certain amount of biomass or product gas needs to be added in the combustor to provide sufficient heat for biomass devolatilization and steam reforming.For ethanol production, a stand-alone thermo-chemical process is designed and simulated. The techno-economic assessment is made in terms of ethanol yield, synthesis selectivity, carbon and CO conversion efficiencies, and ethanol production cost. The calculated results show that major contributions to the production cost are from biomass feedstock and syngas cleaning. A biomass-to-ethanol plant should be built over 200 MW.In TMP mills, wood and biomass residues are commonly utilized for electricity and steam production through an associated CHP plant. This CHP plant is here designed to be replaced by a biomass-integrated gasification combined cycle (BIGCC) plant or a biomass-to-SNG (BtSNG) plant including an associated heat & power centre. Implementing BIGCC/BtSNG in a mechanical pulp production line might improve the profitability of a TMP mill and also help to commercialize the BIGCC/BtSNG technologies by taking into account of some key issues such as, biomass availability, heat utilization etc.. In this work, the mathematical models of TMP+BIGCC and TMP+BtSNG are respectively built up to study three cases: 1) scaling of the TMP+BtSNG mill (or adding more forest biomass logging residues in the gasifier for TMP+BIGCC); 2) adding the reject fibres in the gasifier; 3) decreasing the TMP SEC by up to 50%.The profitability from the TMP+BtSNG mill is analyzed in comparison with the TMP+BIGCC mill. As a major conclusion, the scale of the TMP+BIGCC/BtSNG mill, the prices of electricity and SNG are three strong factors for the implementation of BIGCC/BtSNG in a TMP mill. A BtSNG plant associated to a TMP mill should be built in a scale above 100 MW in biomass thermal input. Comparing to the case of TMP+BIGCC, the NR and IRR of TMP+BtSNG are much lower. Political instruments to support commercialization of bio-transport fuel are necessary.
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| 2. |
- Li, Qing, 1981-
(författare)
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Conformationally Constrained Oligonucleotides for RNA Targeting
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A short oligonucleotide sequence as in a single-stranded antisense oligo nucleotides (AON) or in double-stranded small interfering RNAs (siRNA) can modulate the gene expression by targeting against the cellular mRNA, which can be potentially exploited for therapeutic purposes in the treatment of different diseases. In order to improve the efficacy of oligonucleotide-based drugs, the problem of target affinity, nuclease stability and delivery needs to be addressed. Chemical modifications of oligonucleotides have been proved to be an effective strategy to counter some of these problems.In this thesis, chemical synthesis of conformationally constrained nucleosides such as 7′-Me-carba-LNA-A, -G, -MeC and -T as well as 6′, 7′-substituted α-L-carba-LNA-T (Papers I-III) was achieved through a key free-radical cyclization. 1D and 2D NMR techniques were employed to prove the formation of bicyclic ring system by free-radical ring closure as well as to identify the specific constrained conformations in sugar moieties. These sugar-locked nucleosides were transformed to the corresponding phosphoramidites and incorporated into antisense oligonucleotides in different sequences, to evaluate their physicochemical and biochemical properties for potential antisense-based therapeutic application.AONs modified with 7′-Me-carba-LNA analogues exhibited higher RNA affinities (plus 1-4°C/modification) (Papers I & III), but AONs containing α-L-carba-LNA analogues showed decreased affinities (minus 2-3°C/ modification) (Paper II) towards complementary RNA compared to the native counterpart. It has been demonstrated in Papers I-III that 7′-methyl substitution in α-L-carba-LNA caused the Tm drop due to a steric clash of the R-configured methyl group in the major groove of the duplex, whereas 7′-methyl group of carba-LNA locating in the minor groove of the duplex exerted no obviously negative effect on Tms, regardless of its orientation. Moreover, AONs containing 7′-Me-carba-LNA and α-L-carba-LNA derivatives were found to be nucleolytically more stable than native AONs, LNA modified AONs as well as α-L-LNA modified ones (Papers I-III). We also found in Paper II & III that the orientations of OH group in C6′ of α-L-carba-LNAs and methyl group in C7′ of 7′-Me-carba-LNAs can significantly influence the nuclease stabilities of modified AONs. It was proved that the methyl substitution in cLNAs which points towards the vicinal 3′-phosphate were more resistant to nuclease degradation than that caused by the methyl group pointing away from 3′-phosphate.Additionally, AONs modified with 7′-Me-carba-LNAs and α-L-carba-LNAs were found to elicit the RNase H mediated RNA degradation with comparable or higher rates (from 2-fold to 8-fold higher dependent upon the modification sites) as compared to the native counterpart. We also found that the cleavage patterns and rates by E. coli RNase H1 were highly dependent upon the modification sites in the AON sequences, regardless of the structural features of modifications (Papers II & III). Furthermore, we have shown that the modulations of Tms of AON/RNA duplexes are directly correlated with the aqueous solvation (Paper III).
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| 3. |
- Zhang, Pu, 1982-
(författare)
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Theory of transformation optics and invisibility cloak design
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Research on metamaterials has been growing ever since the first experimental realization of double negative media. The theory of transformation optics provides people with a perfect tool to make use of vast possibilities of the constitutive parameters for metamaterials. A lot of fascinating designs have been brought to us by transformation optics, with invisibility cloaks being the most intensely studied. The present thesis aims to develop the basic theory of transformation optics, and utilize it to design invisibility cloaks for various applications. After the background description of this field, the theory of transformation optics is first introduced. Formulas of transformation medium parameters and transformed fields are derived with every detail explained, so that the working knowledge of transformation optics can be grasped with minimal prerequisite mathematics. Proof of form invariance of full Maxwell’s equations with sources is presented. Design procedure of transformation optics is then demonstrated by creating perfect invisibility cloaks. The introduction to basic theory is followed by discussions on our works included in our published papers. As our first application, a method of designing two-dimensional reduced cloaks of complex shapes is proposed to relieve the difficulty of singularity occurring in perfect cloaks. The simple and intuitive method is the first way to design two-dimensional reduced cloaks of shapes other than cylindrical. Elliptical and bowtie shaped reduced cloaks are presented to verify the effectiveness of the method. Prominent scattering reduction is observed for both examples. Considering the practical realization, transformations continuous in the whole space must be the identity operation outside certain volume, and thus they can only manipulate fields locally. Discontinuous transformations are naturally considered to break the limitation. We study the possible reflections from such a transformation medium due to a discontinuous transformation by a new concept of inverse transformation. This way, the reflection falls into the framework of transformation optics as well. A necessary and sufficient condition for no reflection is derived as a special case. Unlike the invisibility realized by perfect cloaks, cloaking an object over a dielectric half-space has advantages in some particular applications. Starting from a perfect cloak, a half-space cloak is designed to achieve this. In our design, two matching strips embedded in the dielectric ground are used to induce proper reflection in the upper air space, so that the reflected field is the same as that from the bare dielectric ground. Cloaks obtained from singular transformations and even reduced models all have null principal value in their material parameters, making invisibility inherently very narrowband. In contrast, a carpet cloak designed by only coordinate deformation does not have the narrowband issue, and can perform well in a broad spectrum. The invisibility accomplished by the carpet cloak is also for the half-space case as our previous design. In this part, we extend the original version of a carpet cloak above a PEC sheet to a general dielectric ground.
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| 4. |
- Zhang, Shuai, 1983-
(författare)
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Investigating and Enhancing Performance of Multiple Antenna Systems in Compact MIMO/Diversity Terminals
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today, owners of small communicating device are interested in transmitting or receiving various multimedia data. By increasing the number of antennas at the transmitter and/or the receiver side of the wireless link, the diversity/Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques can increase wireless channel capacity without the need for additional power or spectrum in rich scattering environments. However, due to the limited space of small mobile devices, the correlation coefficients between MIMO antenna elements are very high and the total efficiencies of MIMO elements degrade severely. Furthermore, the human body causes high losses on electromagnetic wave. During the applications, the presence of users may result in the significant reduction of the antenna total efficiencies and highly affects the correlations of MIMO antenna systems. The aims of this thesis are to investigate and enhance the MIMO/diversity performance of multiple antenna systems in the free space and the presence of users.The background and theory of multiple antenna systems are introduced briefly first. Several figures of merits are provided and discussed to evaluate the multiple antenna systems. The decoupling techniques are investigated in the multiple antenna systems operating at the higher frequencies (above 1.7 GHz) and with high radiation efficiency. The single, dual and wide band isolation enhancements are realized through the half-wavelength decoupling slot, quarter-wavelength decoupling slot with T-shaped impedance transformer, tree-like parasitic element with multiple resonances, as well as the different polarizations and radiation patterns of multiple antennas.In the lower bands (lower than 960 MHz), due to the low radiation efficiency and strong chassis mode, the work mainly focused on how to directly reduce the correlations and enlarge the total efficiency. A new mode of mutual scattering mode is introduced. By increasing the Q factors, the radiation patterns of multiple antennas are separated automatically to reduce the correlations. With the inter-element distance larger than a certain distance, a higher Q factor also improved the total efficiency apart from the low correlation. A wideband LTE MIMO antenna with multiple resonances is proposed in mobile terminals. The high Q factors required for the low correlation and high efficiencies in mutual scattering mode is reduced with another mode of diagonal antenna-chassis mode. Hence, the bandwidth of wideband LTE MIMO antenna with multiple resonances mentioned above can be further enlarged while maintaining the good MIMO/diversity performance.The user effects are studied in different MIMO antenna types, chassis lengths, frequencies, port phases and operating modes. Utilizing these usefully information, an adaptive quad-element MAS has been proposed to reduce the user effects and the some geranial rules not limited to the designed MAS have also been given.
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