Système thermodynamique | EPFL Graph Search

En thermodynamique classique, un système thermodynamique est une portion de l'Univers que l'on isole par la pensée du reste de l'Univers, ce dernier constituant alors le milieu extérieur. Le système thermodynamique n'est pas forcément défini par une frontière matérielle, ni nécessairement connexe. Les gouttes de liquide dans un brouillard, par exemple, définissent un système thermodynamique. Le milieu extérieur considéré est constitué par la portion d'Univers en interaction avec le système étudié. Ainsi, le mouvement de la planète Jupiter ou l'heure de la marée n'ont pas besoin d'être considérés pour interpréter le comportement du gaz contenu dans une bulle de savon. La séparation, même fictive, entre le système et le milieu extérieur est appelée « paroi » ou « enceinte ». Une paroi est dite perméable si elle laisse passer de la matière et imperméable dans le cas contraire. Une paroi est dite diatherme si elle laisse passer de la chaleur et adiabatique dans le cas contraire. Selon l

Modeling and analysis of ethanol production in Escherichia coli

Yannick Mettraux

The ethanol production for biofuels is meant to be increased in the next years, but the yield could be improved. The goal of this study is to build a model of Escherichia coli KO11 to perform a rational design to improve the yield of ethanol production. The model was written in Cell Designer. The kinetic equations were picked up from the literature, with their kinetic parameters. All parameters of the equations couldn’t be directly extracted from the literature, and the initial metabolite concentrations couldn’t be found in the literature, due to thermodynamical infeasibility or incompleteness of data. Flux balance analysis was used to determine the steady state fluxes and a thermodynamical analysis determined the metabolites concentration. Together these data allows computations of missing paramaters. The metabolite time course was governed by mass-balance equations and the system could be solved numerically. The main results are the enzyme maximal rates and the thermodynamically feasible initial concentrations. The next step was to correct the model for stability. Differents ways were explored to obtain stability of the model, but they failed

2010

Impact of water activity on the mineralogy of hydrated cement

Luis Guillermo Baquerizo Ibarra

Cement hydrates and their chemically bound water content are sensitive to changes in relative humidity (RH) and temperature. This may cause specific solid volume changes affecting dimensional properties of hydrated cement paste such as shrinkage, swelling and expansion, and therefore impact the performance and the transport properties of cementitious materials. The present thesis studies the impact of drying conditions on the structure and thermodynamic properties of crystalline cement hydrates in different hydration states (i.e. varying molar water contents). The cement hydrates studied include the most important AFm and AFt phases present in different types of cements. A novel multi method approach, including XRD, TGA, DSC, sorption balance measurements, sorption calorimetry and the hydrate pair ¿ humidity buffer method, was used to derive physico-chemical boundary conditions and the thermodynamic properties of the studied hydrated phases. The stability and hydration states of AFm phases depend on the anion content and the exposure conditions. Some phases such as monosulfoaluminate and hydroxy-AFm are very sensitive to different relative humidities. On the other hand monocarboaluminate and strätlingite present very good volume stability with varying RH. Ettringite shows a strong hysteresis during desorption/adsorption, and the thermodynamic properties associated with its decomposition and reformation were determined. The experimental results were included into a thermodynamic model capable of predicting the response of cementitious systems considering the ¿true¿ crystal water content on the final phase assemblage in two different scenarios: i) during hydration, even at conditions where the amount of water added was insufficient for complete hydration, and ii) during drying and re-wetting processes in already hydrated systems. Our work hence opens the possibility to model the response of various cement materials exposed to different climatic conditions and to engineer cementitious systems with respect to minimizing volume changes in the course of drying, which may positively impact properties like drying shrinkage and total porosity.

EPFL2015

Determining The Potential Of Salinity Gradient Energy Source Using An Exergy Analysis

Arash Emdadi

Mixing of fresh (river) water and salty water (seawater or saline brine) in a control fashion would produces an electrical energy known as salinity gradient energy (SGE). Two main conversion technologies of SGE are membrane-based processes; pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) and reverse electrodialysis (RED). In PRO, semipermeable membranes placed between the two streams of solutions allow the transport of water from low-pressure diluted solution to high-pressure concentrated solution. RED requires two alternating semipermeable membranes that allow the diffusion of the ions but not the flow of H2O. Lifetime and power density of the semipermeable membrane are two main factors affecting on deployment of PRO and RED. Semipermeable membranes with lifetime greater than 10 years and power density higher than 5 W/m(2) would lead to faster development of this conversion technology. An exergy analysis of an SGE system of sea-river can be applied to calculate the maximum potential power for electricity generation. Seawater is taken as reference environment (global dead state) for calculating the exergy of water since the seawater is the final reservoir. Once the fresh water is mixed with water of the sea or lake it becomes unuseful for human, agricultural or industrial uses loses all its exergy. Aqueous sodium chloride solution model is used in this study to calculate the thermodynamic properties of seawater. This model does not consider seawater as an ideal model and provides accurate thermodynamics properties of sodium chloride solution. As a case study, exergy calculation of Iran's Urmia Lake- GadarChay River system. The chemical exergy analysis considers sodium chloride (NaCl) as main salt in the water of Lake Urmia. The sodium chloride concentration is more than 200 g/L in recent years. Based on the exergy results the potential power of this system is 329 MW. This results indicates a high potential for constructing power plant for salinity gradient energy conversion.

Amer Soc Mechanical Engineers2016