Road transportation has received the attention of researchers due to its higher carbon footprint. Alternative fuels present major advantages in terms of environmental sustainability. For this reason, an enviro-economic analysis of alternative fuels carries great significance. However, scarce attempts have been rendered in order to ascertain the impact of a hydroxy gas (HHO) and compressed natural gas (CNG) mixture on sustainable environmental development. The current study addresses this issue by employing an HHO–CNG mixture and gasoline in spark ignition (SI) engines for the purposes of performance and environmental pollutants measurement. Then, engine emission data were substituted for Weibull distribution in order to establish suitability for 50 and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The mixture outperformed gasoline in terms of brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC) and emission contents. On average, hydroxy gas with CNG produced 10.59% lower oxides of nitrogen (NO_X) comparative to gasoline. Finally, the enviro-economic analysis also turned out to be in favor of the hydroxy gas mixture owing to a saving of 36.14% in USD/year due to 27.87% lower production of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission.

Methanol showed promising results as an alternative to gasoline fuel. However, there exists a research gap for the effect of oxygenated fuel on lubricant oil deterioration along-with engine performance and emissions. This study aims the very topic. The characteristics of SI engine were evaluated for two different loads and nine different engine speeds. The lubricant oil samples were taken out from engine oil sump after 100 h of engine operations using gasoline (G) and M12 sequentially. The brake power of M12 was observed higher in comparison with G. The maximum BTE of 23.69% was observed for M12 on lower load and 2800 rpm. On average, the 6.05% and 6.31% decrease in HC emissions were observed using M12 in comparison with G at lower and higher load respectively. M12 produced 32.52% higher NOx emissions than that of G at lower load. The reduction in kinematic viscosities at 40°C of lubricant oil were found 11.61% and 18.78% for M12 and G respectively. TAN, specific gravity, flash point and ash content of lubricant oil were observed 10.23%, 0.079%, 5.81% and 0.97% higher for M12 respectively. The lubricant oil composition could be developed in future for such fuels which may prolong its life cycle.

Due to the particularity of welding processes, the mechanical properties of welded joint materials, especially the yield strength, are unevenly distributed, and there are also a large number of micro cracks, which seriously affects the safety performance of welded joints. In this study, to analyze the effect of the uneven distribution of yield strength on the crack propagation path of welded joints, other mechanical properties and residual stresses of welded joints are ignored. In the ABAQUS 6.14 finite element software, the user-defined field (USDFLD) subroutine is used to define the unevenly distributed yield strength, and extended finite element (XFEM) is used to simulate crack propagation. In addition, the static crack finite element model of the welded joint model is established according to the crack propagation path, which is given the static crack model constant stress intensity factor load, and the influence of an uneven yield strength distribution on mechanical field is analyzed. The results show that the crack length of welded joints as well as the plastic deformation range of the crack tip in high stress areas can be reduced with the increase of yield strength along the crack propagation direction. Moreover, the crack deflects to the low yield strength side. This study provides an analytical reference for the crack path prediction of welded joints.

Coal Mining enterprises deploy numerous monitoring devices to ensure safe and efficient production using target detection technologies. However, deploying deep detection models on edge devices poses challenges due to high computational loads, impacting detection speed and accuracy. A mining target detection dataset has been created to address these issues, featuring key targets in coal mining scenes such as miners, safety helmets, and coal gangue. A model is proposed to improve real‐time performance for edge mining detection tasks. Detection performance is enhanced by incorporating a Pixel‐wise Normalization Spatial Attention Module (PN‐SAM) into the MobileNet‐v3 bneck structure and replacing the h‐swish activation function with Mish, providing more prosperous gradient information transfer. The proposed model, YOLO‐v4‐LSAM, shows a 3.2% mAP improvement on the VOC2012 dataset and a 2.4% improvement on the mining target dataset compared to YOLO‐v4‐Tiny, demonstrating its effectiveness in mining environments. These enhancements enable more accurate and efficient detection in resource‐constrained edge environments, contributing to safer and more reliable monitoring in coal mining operations.

The lubrication phenomenon is used to reduce friction and wear between two rubbed surfaces, such as in engine and cutting processes. Different oils such as mineral oil and synthetic lubricant are being used for this purpose. With the passage of time, the demand of energy will get higher and natural resources and mineral lubricants will be diminished. Furthermore, biodegradation of mineral oil is too slow, and it remains on the surface of earth for a long period of time, creating atmospheric pollution. To overcome this problem, bio lubricants are being used to reduce wear and friction due to their high biodegradability. In order to increase the lubrication capacity of castor oil, a 1 wt. % concentration of MoS₂ nanoparticles was added to the base oil. Moreover, to stabilize the additives, 2 wt. % gum arabic and 1 wt. % Oleic acid (OA) were also added. Then, multiple tests, such as of physicochemical properties, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), and atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) of synthetic lubricant and conventional lubricant, were carried out before and after the operational running of 100 h on the diesel engine for each lubricant at 75% throttle, 2200 rpm, and 50% of total load. The results show that the behavior of newly prepared MoS₂-based synthetic lubricant possessed higher characteristics in some physicochemical properties and was marginally lacking in other properties compared to shell lubricant. The flash point and specific gravity of synthetic lubricant were decreased compared to shell oil, with relative decreases of 0.27% and 1.15%, respectively. Ash and kinematic viscosity of 40 °C had a relative increase of 4.17% and 1.61%, respectively, and at a kinematic viscosity of 100 °C, the pour points and total base number (TBN) were relatively increased at 1.09%, 6.02%, and 1.38%, respectively, with respect to the properties of the shell lubricant. Moreover, this analysis evaluated that the reduction of wear and tear in synthetic lubricant regarding chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), and iron (Fe) was decreased by 21.12%, 3.39%, and 0.96%, respectively, but in the case of aluminum (Al) the wear and tear was marginally increased, at 1.17%, compared to shell lubricant. In the case of calcium (Ca) and zinc (Zn), the concentration was decreased by 3.59% and 17.41%, respectively. The FTIR analysis shows that all the peaks of the synthetic lubricant and shell lubricant were overlapping each other in the first three regions of the mid-IR spectra from 4000 to 1500 cm⁻¹ and had the same functional groups—hydroxyl stretch (O-H), alkanes (C-H), carbonyls (C=O), aromatic amines (C-N), and alkyl halides (C-Br)—which were attached but fluctuating in the fingerprint region. The results show that shell lubricant can be replaced with MoS₂-based synthetic lubricant because the latter has superior friction reduction and load-bearing capability and can compete favorably with commercial shell oil in wear protection when additivated with MoS₂-based nanoparticles, and hence can be a good alternative for diesel engine oil.