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•Experiments using butanol-gasoline blends prepared with different blend ratio.•Visualization of in-cylinder flame using a combustion endoscopic system.•Evaluation of captured combustion images using spatial flame distribution for butanol-gasoline fuel blends.•Analysis of combustion, emission, and performance characteristics for the same blends.

Renewable energy is found to be an effective alternative in the field of power production owing to the recent energy crises. Among the available renewable energy sources, solar energy is considered the front runner due to its ability to deliver clean energy, free availability and reduced cost. Photovoltaic (PV) modules are placed over large geographical regions for efficient solar energy harvesting, making it difficult to carry out maintenance and restoration works. Thermal stresses inherited by photovoltaic modules (PVM) under varying environmental conditions can lead to failure of internal components. Such failures when left undetected impart a number of complications in the system that will lead to unsafe operation and seizure. To avoid the aforementioned uncertainties, frequent monitoring of PVM is found necessary. The fault identification in PVM using essential features taken from aerial images is presented in this study. The feature extraction procedure was carried out using convolutional neural networks (CNN), while the feature selection process was carried out by the J48 decision tree method. Six test conditions were considered such as delamination, glass breakage, discoloration, burn marks, snail trail, and good panel. Bayes Net (BN) and Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers were utilized as primary classifiers for all the test conditions. Results obtained from the classifiers were compared and the best classifier for fault detection in PVM is suggested.

The present study investigates the potential of artificial neural network for predicting the performance and emission characteristics of a compression ignition (CI) engine. A number of experiments are performed using diesel, rubber seed oil (RSO) and its methyl ester (RSOME) as the primary fuel, and ethanol as the secondary fuel in a dual fuel engine. The experimental data obtained is used for training and testing the neural network. The predictions are performed using feed forward-back propagation training algorithm. Engine load and ethanol energy share is used as network input parameters, and brake thermal efficiency (BTE), brake specific energy consumption (BSEC), NOx, HC, CO and smoke are the predicted parameters. The prediction performance of the network is measured by comparing it with experimental data. The measurement of statistical error shows that ANN can predict BTE, BSEC, NOx, HC, CO and smoke for a dual fuel engine with high accuracy.