Lean combustion is environment friendly with low NOx emissions and also provides better fuel efficiency in a combustion system. However, approaching towards lean combustion can make engines more susceptible to lean blowout. Lean blowout (LBO) is an undesirable phenomenon that can cause sudden flame extinction leading to sudden loss of power. During the design stage, it is quite challenging for the scientists to accurately determine the optimal operating limits to avoid sudden LBO occurrence. Therefore, it is crucial to develop accurate and computationally tractable frameworks for online LBO detection in low NOx emission engines. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we propose a deep learning approach to detect lean blowout in combustion systems. In this work, we utilize a laboratory-scale combustor to collect data for different protocols. We start far from LBO for each protocol and gradually move towards the LBO regime, capturing a quasi-static time series dataset at each condition. Using one of the protocols in our dataset as the reference protocol and with conditions annotated by domain experts, we find a transition state metric for our trained deep learning model to detect LBO in the other test protocols. We find that our proposed approach is more accurate and computationally faster than other baseline models to detect the transitions to LBO. Therefore, we recommend this method for real-time performance monitoring in lean combustion engines.

Tire blowouts lead to dozens of highway deaths every year. For autonomous trucks, they pose a prickly problem: how to regain control without a human driver at the wheel. "We can talk about redundancy in our sensors, machine-learning algorithms and all this fancy stuff until we're blue in the face," said Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics. "But at the end of the day, if you press the brake pedal and your tires don't respond, it's not useful." Kodiak is working with Bridgestone Americas to share information that could lead to more robust tire safety.

The price of oil has fallen over 60% since the summer 2014, and anybody reading the news sees it mentioned on a daily basis. With all of the negativity portrayed in the day-to-day headlines, many forget that the oil and gas business is one of the largest, most globally-important industries in the world. As the Motley Fool has called out, there is a huge amount of opportunity in the oil and gas industry, notably because it has weathered times like this before. One of the things that happens during downturns is that companies innovate. As we have seen historically, the companies that emerge the strongest during these times are the ones who adopt innovative technologies to promote growth.