Search

This research investigates the effect of nanoparticle-diesel fuel blends on combustion characteristics, performances and exhaust emissions of a four-stroke single-cylinder diesel engine. Three types of nanoparticles employed in this experiment were aluminium oxide, carbon nanotubes and silicon oxide. The nanoparticles were dispersed in a dosage of 25 ppm, 50 ppm and 100 ppm with pure diesel and were labelled as DA25, DA50, DA100 (aluminium oxide blends), DC25, DC50, DC100 (carbon nanotubes blends) and DS25, DS50, DS100 (silicon oxide blends). The ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometer analysis was done for 200 h to quantify the stability of the nanoparticle-diesel fuel blends. The blended fuels were experimentally tested with YANMAR TF120M diesel engine at engine loads of 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% at a constant 1800 rpm engine speed. The results revealed that the brake specific fuel consumption reduced by up to 19.8% and brake thermal efficiency enhanced by 18.8%. Silicon oxide blends show better results than aluminium oxide blends in many aspects, such as higher combustion pressure, lower brake specific fuel consumption and lower carbon monoxide emissions. Aluminium oxide and silicon oxide show stable blend conditions with 28.1% and 22.0% absorption ratio at 200 h sedimentation time, while carbon nanotube blends were least stable with absorption ratio reducing to less than 30% after 10 h. Combustion analysis of carbon nanotube blends with diesel show that carbon nanotubes have the potential to be further researched as an additive for diesel fuel due to significant combustion improvement in NO x emissions. However, the issue on the stability of carbon nanotube blends must be resolved before its potential can be fully utilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays 3D bioprinting, due to its high structural reconstruction and low cost, has been a promising technology and gained expectation in the treatment of vascular diseases. Although some studies have reported that 3D printing of large-sized blood vessels in the human body has been achieved, there are still some problems to be solved urgently, such as the unfulfilled microvascular simulation and inferior biocompatibility and mechanical strength of scaffold materials. In this paper, the hybrid bioink prepared with gelatin, sodium alginate and carbon nanotubes were manufactured into cylindrical scaffolds through the collaboration between the vertical directional extrusion of printing nozzle and axial rotation of stepper motor module. Mouse epidermal fibroblasts were inoculated into the inner and outer walls of hollow tubular scaffolds to fabricate engineered blood vessels. The internal diameters of the bionic circular tubes printed in batches were 3 mm with an average wall thickness of 0.5 mm and a length of 7–10 cm. Results demonstrated that the proper doping of carbon nanotubes could effectively increase the mechanical properties of the composite scaffolds. Also, quantitative experiments proved that a small amount of doping of carbon nanotubes had little effect on cytotoxicity, and the constructs could meet the requirements of biomimetic vascular. Schematic illustration of the synthesis and 3D printing of the gelatin-based alginate/carbon nanotubes vessel constructs. Unlabelled Image [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]