Sudden expansion pipes are crucial in fluid dynamics for studying flow behavior, turbulence, and pressure distribution in various systems. This study focuses on investigating the behavior of a two-phase flow, specifically a gas–solid turbulent flow, in a sudden expansion. The Eulerian–Eulerian approach is employed to model the flow characteristics. The Eulerian–Eulerian approach treats both phases (gas and solid) as separate continua, and their interactions are described using conservation equations for mass, momentum, and energy. The study aims to understand the complex phenomena occurring in the flow, such as particle dispersion, turbulence modulation, and pressure drop. The governing equations are solved using house developed code called FORTRAN, a widely used programming language in scientific and engineering simulations. The results of this study will provide valuable insights into the behavior of gas–solid two-phase flows in sudden expansions, which have important applications in various industries, including chemical engineering, energy systems, and environmental engineering. A parametric study of the impact of particles diameters (20, 120, 220, 500 µm), the solid volume loading ratios \((0.005, 0.008, 0.01)\) and area ratios (2.25, 5.76, 9) effect of sudden expansion on the streamlines, local skin friction, pressure, velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and separation zone.

Manufacturing process accuracy is obtained by proper arrangement of fixture elements known as fixture layout. A N-3-2-1 method is used for sheet metals which requires (N + 3) fixture elements to constrain deformation normal to surface. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used for fixture layout optimization, but it requires high computational effort due to large number of populations. A new method for fixture layout optimization is proposed by integrating topology optimization into GA. In this method, topology optimization reduces the population for GA. The objective function is to reduce the population for GA and minimize total deformation normal to the plane of workpiece. The proposed approach comprised three stages. In the first stage, the initial number of clamps are determined. In the second stage, the population is reduced for GA and the feasible area of clamps are identified using the topology optimization technique. In the third stage, the number and position of clamps, earlier identified in stage one, are optimized using GA. Two different case studies are solved by varying applied load position and magnitude. The proposed method results 47.5% and 65% decreases in the population for subcase 1 and subcase 2, respectively. However, in subcase 3 and subcase 4 the population reduced was 90% and 80%, respectively. The 25% of reduced population is used as the convergence criteria. Similarly, total deformation normal to the plane is reduced in each subcase, with the highest reduction of 86.31% in subcase 1 and lowest of 59.85% in subcase 4. The experiment is performed on the first case study to validate results. This concludes that the proposed method is valid and that optimal results are found.

An L-shaped structure, intended for piezoelectric energy harvesting, is being characterized numerically to obtain extended insight into the effect of various parameters and metrics that are hard to track from experimental setups and simplified analytical models and to show the underlying mechanism of efficient piezoelectric harvesting. A numerical model was developed to analyze the structure under harmonic base excitation to obtain voltage frequency response and strain distribution data. The model takes into effect the load resistance applied between the piezoelectric patch electrodes and the damping ratio of each mode for accurate resonance amplitude evaluation. The validity of the model was confirmed by comparisons with previous experiments and showed strong agreement. The approach demonstrated that piezoelectric energy harvesting modeling, in general, is sensitive to inaccurate estimations, especially in the damping parameters, which emphasizes that rough assumptions made in analytical models will not yield results that can be discussed in correlation with experimental outcomes. This work states the guidelines for accurate piezoelectric modeling using numerical software, with the aim of enabling the investigation of complex harvesters, providing more insights to direct researchers to more proof and optimized designs that tackle broadband and energy density problems found in simple harvesters.