Description:
Pulsed Eddy Current (PEC) sensors possess proven functionality in measuring ferromagnetic material thickness. However, most commercial PEC service providers as well as researchers have investigated and claim functionality of sensors on homogeneous structural steels (steel grade Q235 for example). In this paper, we present design steps for a PEC sensing set-up to measure thickness of cast iron, which is unlike steel, is a highly inhomogeneous and non-linear ferromagnetic material. The setup includes a PEC sensor, sensor excitation and reception circuits, and a unique signal processing method. The signal processing method yields a signal feature which behaves as a function of thickness. The signal feature has a desirable characteristic of being lowly influenced by lift-off. Experimental results show that the set-up is usable for Non-destructive Evaluation (NDE) applications such as cast iron water pipe assessment.
Description:
Pulsed Eddy Current (PEC) sensors possess proven functionality in measuring ferromagnetic material thickness. However, most commercial PEC service providers as well as researchers have investigated and claim functionality of sensors on homogeneous structural steels (steel grade Q235 for example). In this paper, we present design steps for a PEC sensing set-up to measure thickness of cast iron, which is unlike steel, is a highly inhomogeneous and non-linear ferromagnetic material. The setup includes a PEC sensor, sensor excitation and reception circuits, and a unique signal processing method. The signal processing method yields a signal feature which behaves as a function of thickness. The signal feature has a desirable characteristic of being lowly influenced by lift-off. Experimental results show that the set-up is usable for Non-destructive Evaluation (NDE) applications such as cast iron water pipe assessment.
Description:
Three high-temperature solar receiver design concepts are being evaluated as part of the Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative (ASTRI): a flux-optimised sodium receiver, a falling particle receiver, and an expanding-vortex particle receiver. Preliminary results from performance modelling of each concept are presented. For the falling particle receiver, it is shown how particle size and flow rate have a significant influence on absorptance. For the vortex receiver, methods to reduce particle deposition on the window and increase particle residence time are discussed. For the sodium receiver, the methodology for geometry optimisation is discussed, as well as practical constraints relating to containment materials
Description:
The paper addresses the problem of efficiently deploying sensors in spatial environments, e.g. smart buildings, for the purpose of monitoring environmental phenomena. By modelling the environmental fields using spatio-temporal Gaussian processes, a new and efficient optimality criterion of minimizing prediction uncertainties is proposed to find the best sensor locations. Though the environmental processes spatially and temporally vary, the proposed approach of choosing sensor positions is not affected by time variations, which significantly reduces computational complexity of the optimization problem. The sensor deployment problem is then solved by a practically and feasibly polynomial algorithm, where its solutions are guaranteed. The proposed approaches were implemented in a real tested space in a university building, where the obtained results are highly promising.
Description:
Evaluating the impact of scholarly papers plays an important role for addressing recruitment decision, funding allocation and promotion, etc. Yet little is known how actual geographic distance influences the impact of scholarly papers. In this paper, we leverage the law of geographic distance and citations between different institutions to weight quantum Pagerank algorithm for objectively measuring the impact of scholarly papers. The results indicate that the weighted quantum PageRank algorithm can better differentiate the impact of scholarly papers compared to PageRank algorithm.
Description:
Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs) which bridge the gap between online and offline interactions among users have received increasing popularity. The unique cold-start nature makes event recommendation more challenging than traditional recommendation problems, since even for two events with the same content, they may not happen at the same time, the same location, or be organized by the same host. Existing event recommendation algorithms mainly exploit the basic context information (e.g., location, time and content), while the social influence of event hosts and group members have been ignored. In this paper, we propose a Social Information Augmented Recommender System (SIARS), which fully exploits the social influence of event hosts and group members together with basic context information for event recommendation. In particular, we combine the information of EBSNs and other social networks to characterize the social influence of event hosts, and take interactions between group members into consideration for event recommendation. In addition, we propose a new content-aware recommendation model using the topic model to find the most similar topic the event belongs to, and a new location-aware recommendation model integrating location popularity with location distribution for event recommendation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SIARS outperforms other recommendation algorithms.
Description:
Finite element analysis incorporating the shear strength reduction method was applied to study the west slope stability of an open cut mine in Australia using Mohr–Coulomb and generalized Hoek–Brown criteria. The pit of the mine had multiphase excavations and reached 180 m in depth. The study investigated three slope configurations, namely, Stage 1 inter ramp slope 43°, Stage 2 inter ramp slope 49° and optimized Stage 2 slope 54°. When implementing the generalized Hoek–Brown failure criterion, the equivalent factor of safety was 1.96, 1.87 and 1.40 under dry slope for the three configurations, respectively. However, under partly saturated conditions, the optimised slope would have a factor of safety 1.16. Furthermore, the generalised Hoek–Brown criterion generated lower factors of safety than the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion. The difference is related to an overestimation of the shear strength parameters by the linear Mohr–Coulomb criterion under low confining stresses compared with the non-linear Hoek–Brown.
Description:
Manufacturing industries are facing tough competition due to increasing raw material cost and depleting natural resources. There is great pressure on the industry to produce environmental friendly products using environmental friendly processes. To address these issues modern manufacturing industries are focusing on sustainable manufacturing. To develop more sustainable societies, industries need to better understand how to respond to environmental, economic and social challenges. This paper proposed some framework and tools that accelerate the transition towards a sustainable system. The developed framework will be beneficial for sustainability assessment comparing different plans alongside material properties, ultimately helping the manufacturing industries to reduce the carbon emissions and material waste, besides improving energy efficiency. It is expected that this would be highly beneficial for determination of environmental impact of a process at early design stages. Therefore, it would greatly help the manufacturing industries for selection of process plan based on sustainable indices. Overall objective of this paper would have good impact on reducing air emissions and protecting environment. We expect this work to contribute to the development of a standard reference methodology to help further sustainability in the manufacturing sector.
Description:
Manufacturing industries are facing tough competition due to increasing raw material cost and depleting natural resources. There is great pressure on the industry to produce environmental friendly products using environmental friendly processes. To address these issues modern manufacturing industries are focusing on sustainable manufacturing. To develop more sustainable societies, industries need to better understand how to respond to environmental, economic and social challenges. This paper proposed some framework and tools that accelerate the transition towards a sustainable system. The developed framework will be beneficial for sustainability assessment comparing different plans alongside material properties, ultimately helping the manufacturing industries to reduce the carbon emissions and material waste, besides improving energy efficiency. It is expected that this would be highly beneficial for determination of environmental impact of a process at early design stages. Therefore, it would greatly help the manufacturing industries for selection of process plan based on sustainable indices. Overall objective of this paper would have good impact on reducing air emissions and protecting environment. We expect this work to contribute to the development of a standard reference methodology to help further sustainability in the manufacturing sector.
Description:
Airborne LiDAR data have advantages over passive remote sensing data in detailed description of vertical forest structure. LiDAR-derived information can potentially be used to solve such problems as forest type classification and forest boundary determination. Forest boundaries were usually represented as sharp lines that attempt to distinguish areas with different forest types. In reality, however, forest boundaries are rarely sharp or crisp, especially in the forest area with multiple canopy layers where species compositions change gradually. Fuzzy analysis offers great potential for characterising the transition zones and determining realistic forest boundaries. This study developed ways of using fuzzy analysis of airborne LiDAR data for determining rainforest boundaries. LiDAR variables were derived and used to define and calculate membership function values for both rainforest and non-rainforest. The confusion index values were then derived to illustrate the transition zones. Finally, the rainforest boundaries were successfully determined in the study area. The results demonstrated the success of proposed method for rainforest boundary determination.
Description:
We consider the problem of security in wireless multicasting for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay-aided system. The network suffers from a group of adaptive eavesdroppers who can act as both simple eavesdroppers and hostile jammers. This paper formulates the impact of friendly jammers to improve secured communication. We derived the expressions for secrecy multicast capacities considering the absence and presence of friendly jammers. The best relay for transmission is chosen from a group of relays that aids to achieve the maximum secrecy capacity while the best jammer is selected based on competitive interference price. Numerical results show that the achievable secrecy multicast capacity increases significantly in the presence of jammer to nullify the effect of adversaries. Results under different scenarios of varying jamming and relay powers demonstrate the efficacy of friendly jammers in providing physical layer security.
Description:
We consider the problem of security in wireless multicasting for a
Description:
Kernel descriptors have been proven to outperform existing histogram based local descriptors as such descriptors are extracted from the match kernels which measure similarities between image patches using different pixel attributes (gradient, colour or LBP pattern). The extraction of kernel descriptors does not require coarse quantization of pixel attributes. Instead, each pixel equally participates in matching between two image patches. In this paper, by leveraging the kernel properties, we propose a unique approach which simultaneously increases the effectiveness and efficiency of the existing kernel descriptors. Specifically, this is done by improving the similarity measure between two different patches in terms of any pixel attribute. The proposed kernel descriptors are more discriminant, take less time to be extracted and have much lower dimensions. Our experiments on Scene Categories and Caltech 101 databases show that our proposed approach outperforms the existing kernel descriptors.
Description:
This paper presents a novel signal processing approach for computing thickness of ferromagnetic cast iron material, widely employed in older infrastructure such as water mains or bridges. Measurements are gathered from a Pulsed Eddy Current (PEC) based sensor placed on top of the material, with unknown lift-off, as commonly used during non-destructive testing (NDT). The approach takes advantage of an analytical logarithmic model proposed in the literature for the decaying voltage induced at the PEC sensor pick-up coil. An increasingly more accurate and robust algorithm is proven here by means of an Adaptive Least Square Fitting Line (ALSFL) recursive strategy, suitable to recognize the most linear part of the sensor's logarithmic output voltage for subsequent gradient computation, from which thickness is then derived. Moreover, efficiency is also gained as processing can be carried out on only one decaying voltage signal, unlike averaging over multiple measurements as is usually done in the literature. Importantly, the new signal processing methodology demonstrates highest accuracies at the lower thicknesses, a circumstance most relevant to NDT evaluation. Experiments that verify the proposed method in real-world thickness assessment of cast iron material are presented and compared with current practices, showing promising results.
Description:
Tamura features are based on human visual perception and have huge potential in image representation. Conventional Tamura features only work on homogeneous texture images and perform poor on generic images. Therefore, many researchers attempt to improve Tamura features and most of the improvements are based on histogram based representation. Kernel descriptors have been shown to outperform existing histogram based local features as such descriptors do not require coarse quantization of pixel attributes. Instead, in kernel descriptor framework, each pixel equally participates in matching between two image patches. In this paper, we propose a set of kernel descriptors that are based on Tamura features. Additionally, the proposed descriptors are invariant to local rotations. Experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the conventional Tamura features significantly.