Pierre D'Ans

Haute Ecole Libre de Bruxelles - Ilya Prigogine | HELB

Breathing control exercises are an important component of occupational therapy in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Delivering these exercises in group settings may enhance their benefits. Therefore, this study assessed the effectiveness of breathing control exercises delivered in a group format to patients with severe COP...

Four different LiBr-based composite materials have been synthesized with silica gel or activated carbon as host porous matrix. High salt contents were incorporated in these composites: 37 wt% and 53 wt% for silica gel/LiBr composites; 32 wt% and 42 wt% for activated carbon/LiBr composites. The performance of these materials in conditions representa...

Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), secondary source of critical metals, are usually recycled to recover precious metals. Alternative routes, aiming to pre-concentrate critical metals, were tested at lab scale. An up-scaling process is proposed involving a thermomechanical separation of PCB and surface mounted devices (SMD). PCB without SMD are treated b...

Seasonal heat storage technologies are the key for a widespread use of solar thermal energy in residential applications. This can be achieved using hygroscopic salts encapsulated in a porous matrix with a high pore volume. Using strontium bromide encapsulated in the mesoporous MIL-101(Cr) Metal-Organic Framework, a heat storage density of 233 kW h/...

In order to comply with the targeted collection rates set by new European waste management regulations, a better knowledge of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) collection flows is needed. This paper highlights the importance of considering the regional spatial context to develop an appropriate waste collection strategy. Through mater...

Grands émetteurs de gaz à effet de serre à la production, les matériaux de construction issus des filières thermiques peuvent être, dans certains cas, substitués par des « éco-matériaux ». L’économie circulaire pousse de plus en plus à intégrer des déchets dans les chaînes de production. Ce travail analyse la possibilité d’intégration de déchets ur...

Wear mitigation in a sliding couple is challenging if wear has to be minimized on both surfaces. In this paper, ball-on-disk testing is performed on sliding couples where both surfaces (ball and disk) are treated for wear resistance. Studied materials are pack borided H13 tool steel (ASTM A681), pack borided AISI 420 stainless steel (ASTM A276) and...

Water sorption thermochemical heat storage is a promising way to provide dwellings with renewable central heating. It requires the use of several cubic meters of materials per dwelling. Depending on the design of the heating system, specific heat and mass transfer issues occur. For instance, the heat transfer rate in reactive medium and the kinetic...

Thermochemical heat storage exploits thermal solar energy to produce sustainable residential heating, obtained by exothermal reaction between bromides and water vapour. A protocol to test the corrosion of surrounding materials is discussed in the case of SrBr2 contacting copper or steel. Corrosion depth >1 mm y⁻¹ is found for steel in conditions wh...

Strontium bromide, SrBr2, has a strong potential for the recovery, storage and controlled release of low grade heat (<100 °C). SrBr2 is currently only produced at lab scale, making it unaffordable for large scale application. In this paper, a route for cost-effective industrial scale production of SrBr2, of a potentially lower purity but still fit-...

The treatment of end-of-Life products is one of the key steps for progression towards a circular economy. In this context, mobile phone recycling has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to the high metal concentrations in printed circuit assemblies (PCAs). Contrary to precious metals, the recycling technologies for tantalum and rar...

Composite materials based on a silica gel loaded with CaCl2 are of great interest for seasonal thermochemical heat storage. In order to improve the performance of these materials for this application, and to evaluate their multi-cycle stability, a new synthesis protocol is proposed, based on successive impregnation/drying steps by using a matrix wi...

Porous materials are recognized as very promising materials for water-sorption-based energy storage and transformation.This study presents the first attempt to use Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) as host matrices of salts for the preparation of composite sorbents for seasonal heat storage. We have considered six water stable MOFs (i. e. MIL-127(Fe)...

The excellent matching between the sorption and desorption temperatures of hexahydrated SrBr2 and those required for solar heat storage for building applications, the high heat of reaction (67.5 kJ/mol of water) coupled with the gain/loss of 5 mol of water per mole of salt make this salt an appealing sorbent for solar thermal energy storage applica...

In order to measure the absorption or restitution property of the materials used in podiatry, an accelerated test measuring the restitutive character of functional orthoses has been designed. It makes an effective distinction between the coefficient of restitution (Cr) of propulsion elastomers such as Jogtene (0.740±0.010) and Dynatene (0.774±0.014...

Multiple surface treatment technologies are used as an example of: (i) simultaneous selection of materials and processes; (ii) selection of multiple materials each of which fulfills different functions; and (iii) selection of materials with incompatibility issues. A questionnaire-based screening algorithm uses a small surface treatment database mos...

A tool is developed to rank surface treated materials with respect to thermal fatigue. It comprises a modelling of the temperature profile in the component and an adaptation of the Coffin–Manson model for surface treatments fatigue. It is used as a performance index and discussed onto several surface treatments and multi-treatments relevant for the...

Repeated fast surface temperature transients can damage the materials and/or their surface treatments by thermal fatigue. This happens in aluminium diecasting devices. One conducted thermal fatigue tests with samples of hot work tool steel, respectively untreated, simply borided and protected by a multi-layer. In the last case, top coat is yttria s...

For the first time, a unique expert system able to give assistance to designers in surface engineering has been built. Not only is this software able to provide multi-layer coating solutions, but it is also able to rank different solutions according to their technico-economical interest. In addition to its ability to solve corrosion and wear concer...

A strategy is proposed to cope with combined thermal fatigue and hot corrosion resistance affecting industrial coatings. It allows comparing different materials, coatings and geometries with respect to thermal cracking and then properly selecting protective coatings. It uses a thermo-mechanical model combining the heat transfer conditions, thermal...