Advanced computer modeling has enabled British Petroleum (BP) to determine the best design and operating conditions for its oil refinery in Kwinana. BP teamed up with the Curtin University of Technology and the University of Newcastle to develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for the refinery’s catalyst strippers, which use steam to separate hydrocarbons from the process that breaks up heavy crude oil into smaller molecular parts. A team led by Curtin’s Center of Process Systems Computations (CPSC) used the CFD model to evaluate the internal structure that impacts the interactions between gases and solids, and to determine the optimal mix of steam, catalyst, and hydrocarbons inside the stripper. CPSC director Vishnu Pareek says simulating a few seconds of real-time interaction in the catalyst stripper used to take weeks. “This project used innovative techniques to achieve realistic flow predictions with the least amount of computational effort required,” he says. BP says the CFD model will help save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on steam usage.
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Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications researchers have experimented with using visible light from commercial light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit data wirelessly at speeds of up to 230 Mbit per sec. One advantage to using light to carry data over Wi-Fi or another system is that the lights are already in the room, says Fraunhofer researcher Jelena Vucic. A signal from a LED is generated by slightly flickering all the lights in unison at a rate millions of times faster than the human eye can detect. Although the bandwidth for commercial LEDs is limited to a few megahertz, Vucic’s team increased the amount tenfold by filtering out all the light except for the blue part of the spectrum. The researchers say the data rate could be doubled with some modulation adjustments.
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