Pistons are fundamental structural elements in any engineering practices such as mechanical, civil, aerospace, and offshore engineering. Their strength strongly depends on buckling load, and such information is a major requirement in the design process. Euler's linear buckling equation is the most common and most used model in design. It is well suited for linear elastic members without geometrical imperfections and nonlinear behavior. Several analytical and experimental investigations of typical hydraulic cylinders have been carried out through the years but most of the available standards still use a linear approach with many simplifications. Pistons are slender beams with not-uniform cross section, which need a stronger effort than the classical Euler's approach. The present paper aims to discuss limitations of current DNV standards for piston design in offshore technologies when compared to classical numerical approaches and reference results provided by the existing literature.

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The filtering hydro cyclone is a solid–liquid separation device, generally conical in shape. The hydro cyclone allows the separation of microplastics from water, to facilitate micro-recycling. To test the capabilities of a hydro cyclone at separating microplastics from water, Rietema’s standard sizes, mathematical and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling were used. The results show that, even dough the mathematical model in unreliable when considering parameters out-side standard operation conditions, hydro cyclone microplastic separation can be achieved at 98% efficiency. Particles reach the outlet on average in 1.5 s for a flow velocity of 2 m/s, and denser microplastics end up in the underflow.

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<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Drive cycles have been the official way to create standardized comparisons of fuel economy and emission levels between vehicles. Since the 1970s these have evolved to be more representative of real-world driving, with today’s standard being the World Harmonized Light Vehicle Testing Procedure. The performance of battery electric vehicles which consist of electric drives, battery, regenerative braking and their management systems may differ when compared to that of vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines. However, drive cycles used for evaluating the performance of vehicles, were originally developed for conventional powered vehicles. Moreover, the kinematic parameters that can distinguish the real-world performance of the differently powered vehicles are not fully known. This work aims to investigate the difference between vehicles powered by pure internal combustion engine, electric hybrid and pure electric drive. A route was selected to develop drive cycles with three representative vehicles one for each category and data was collected. Efforts were made for minimizing the effect of traffic flow between vehicles during the experiments. A numerical model of Nissan Leaf, was constructed in GT-Suite software and validated against current standard drive cycles data from the Argonne National Laboratory. Two drive cycles were developed using a micro-trip approach, for intermediate and harsh driving conditions. The results from the novel drive cycles show the inevitable distinctions between differently powered vehicles, giving an estimated range prediction that is very similar to the one from the World Harmonized Light Vehicle Testing Procedure.</div></div>