Radical changes are necessary to address challenges related to global warming and pollution. Ever-tightening emission standards for combustion engines have already led to a drastic reduction in the amount of harmful gas and matter emitted. Drivetrain hybridization and electrification, which are becoming increasingly popular in all sectors, are two additional ways to achieve that goal. However, within the forestry sector most of the equipments still rely on conventional mechanic or hydraulic drivetrains. An example of this is tower yarders, the workhorse of the alpine logging industry. This work simulates the duty cycle and energy flow of tower yarders in logging operations, both with conventional diesel–hydraulic configuration and a proposed hybrid configuration. The objective is to determine the potential of hybridized drivetrains for tower yarder applications. Detailed models are developed to describe the cable-based extraction of timber and tower yarder internal processes. Extensive simulations were performed to determine force, power and energy components during the harvesting operation for both the diesel–hydraulic and hybrid drivetrains. Results confirm the large potential of the hybrid configuration for efficiency improvement and emission reduction, with estimated fuel savings of 45% and 63% in the uphill and downhill configurations, respectively. Extensive sensitivity analysis further demonstrates that the hybrid concept remains effective across a wide range of cable setup and transport characteristics. This confirms the large potential of electrified drivetrains, especially in the presence of very dynamic duty cycles, as is the case in cable-based logging equipment.
Li-ion cells are one of the core components for the actual and future electric mobility. Differently from other types of applications and due to the high charge/discharge rates, the thermal-related issues in batteries for mobility are drastically relevant and can affect the reliability, the safety and the performance of the system. Indeed, limited temperature differences within a battery pack have a significant impact on its efficiency, thus it is important to predict and control the cell and battery pack temperature distribution. In the proposed study, a CFD analysis has been carried out to quantify the temperature and heat distribution on a single li-ion pouch cell. The main objective of this work is to determine the temperature imbalance on the cell and the required cooling load in order to be able to correctly design the cooling system and the best module architecture. The internal heat generation occurs as a result of electrochemical reactions taking place during charge and discharge of batteries. An electric model of the cell allows to assess the thermal power generation; the model parameters are changed according to the operative conditions to improve the accuracy, specifically to take into account varying temperature conditions and C-rates. The high accuracy of the model with respect to experimental data shows the potentiality of the proposed approach to support the optimization of Li-ion modules cooling systems and architecture design.
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