A New Research Infrastructure for Investigating Flow Hydraulics and Process Equipment at Critical Fluid Properties

An optimized equipment design for natural gas processing and liquefaction plants becomes increasingly difficult with changing process conditions: Particularly low values of surface tension create rising challenges on the design of phase separators and column internals. The TERESA test rig at HZDR was designed to allow the investigation of multiphase thermohydraulics and phase separator performance under critical fluid properties in industrial dimensions. A versatile pipe test section is available in DN200 and equipment internals may be tested in a sectional DN300/DN500 test separator. The applied test fluid shows a high vapor-liquid density difference between 1470 and 940 kg m⁻³, viscosity as low as 0.12 mm²s⁻¹, and surface tension down to 1.3 mN m⁻¹. Volumetric liquid and vapor flow rates may be varied up to 9 and 530 m³h⁻¹ in the test rig, respectively.     

Online Bi-Objective Scheduling for IaaS Clouds Ensuring Quality of Service

This paper focuses on a bi-objective experimental evaluation of online scheduling in the Infrastructure as a Service model of Cloud computing regarding income and power consumption objectives. In this model, customers have the choice between different service levels. Each service level is associated with a price per unit of job execution time, and a slack factor that determines the maximal time span to deliver the requested amount of computing resources. The system, via the scheduling algorithms, is responsible to guarantee the corresponding quality of service for all accepted jobs. Since we do not consider any optimistic scheduling approach, a job cannot be accepted if its service guarantee will not be observed assuming that all accepted jobs receive the requested resources. In this article, we analyze several scheduling algorithms with different cloud configurations and workloads, considering the maximization of the provider income and minimization of the total power consumption of a schedule. We distinguish algorithms depending on the type and amount of information they require: knowledge free, energy-aware, and speed-aware. First, to provide effective guidance in choosing a good strategy, we present a joint analysis of two conflicting goals based on the degradation in performance. The study addresses the behavior of each strategy under each metric. We assess the performance of different scheduling algorithms by determining a set of non-dominated solutions that approximate the Pareto optimal set. We use a set coverage metric to compare the scheduling algorithms in terms of Pareto dominance. We claim that a rather simple scheduling approach can provide the best energy and income trade-offs. This scheduling algorithm performs well in different scenarios with a variety of workloads and cloud configurations.     

Are My Neighbours Ageing Yet? Local Dimensions of Demographic Change in German Cities

Among the highly developed countries, demographic ageing is particularly advanced in Germany. Accentuated by migration, there is great regional variation in the progress of demographic change. Within urban areas, residential neighbourhoods differ considerably in their demographic composition and perspectives. Based on municipal data, this paper examines regional variability in the diversity and pace of neighbourhood-level ageing. Focusing on the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation in North Rhine-Westphalia, the analysis outlines at what pace ageing proceeds in a variety of neighbourhoods, which attract no constant influx of working-age migrants. After decades of suburbanisation, in the period from 1998 to 2008 regional migration concentrated on the central districts of large cities. More profoundly in the most prosperous cities growing in population than in other cities, childless working-age adults separate from other age groups and family types in selected central city quarters. The findings suggest that spatial differentials in ageing are likely to affect future location decisions and, thereby, regional and local prosperity.     

Versioning XML-based office documents

The ability to reliably merge independent updates of a document is a crucial prerequisite to efficient collaboration in office work. However, merge support for common office document standards like OpenDocument or OfficeOpenXML is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present a consistent versioning model for XML documents in general including merge support. This is achieved by using context-aware fingerprints that identify edit operations and allow for a conflict detection. We show how to extract tracked changes from office documents and map them on our delta model. Experimental results indicate that our fingerprinting technique is efficient and reliable.     

Shaping stable periodic motions of inertia wheel pendulum: theory and experiment

We consider an underactuated two‐link robot called the inertia wheel pendulum. The system consists of a free planar rotational pendulum and a symmetric disk attached to its end, which is directly controlled by a DC‐motor. The goal is to create stable oscillations of the pendulum, which is not directly actuated. We exploit a recently proposed feedback‐control design strategy based on motion planning via virtual holonomic constraints. This strategy is shown to be useful for design of regulators for achieving orbitally exponentially stable oscillatory motions. The main contribution is a step‐by‐step procedure on how to achieve oscillations with pre‐specified amplitude from a given range and an arbitrary independently chosen period. The theoretical results are verified via experiments with a real hardware setup. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Information fusion in the immune system

Biologically-inspired methods such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks are proving useful in the field of information fusion. Artificial immune systems (AISs) are a biologically-inspired approach which take inspiration from the biological immune system. Interestingly, recent research has shown how AISs which use multi-level information sources as input data can be used to build effective algorithms for realtime computer intrusion detection. This research is based on biological information fusion mechanisms used by the human immune system and as such might be of interest to the information fusion community. The aim of this paper is to present a summary of some of the biological information fusion mechanisms seen in the human immune system, and of how these mechanisms have been implemented as AISs.     

Metaphors and Context-Aware Information Access

Metaphors are often used to provide the user with a mental model to ease the use of computers. An example of such a metaphor is the commonly used “Desktop Metaphor”. Metaphors also can be used to ease context-aware information access for the users of mobile information systems. In this paper we present a taxonomy that allows the categorisation of such metaphors. Furthermore, we give an overview of existing metaphors and their implementations. After introducing some new metaphors we conclude our considerations with a classification of new and existing metaphors using our taxonomy.     

Experimental automobile-pedestrian injuries

Fifteen fresh cadaver impacts were conducted in simulation of pedestrian-automobile accidents. The test sled configuration simulated an automobile bumper and hood in "standard" and "nosedive" situations as well as "hard" and "soft" impact surfaces. Instrumentation and film demonstrated large axial compression forces in the struck leg and considerable angular velocity of the torso in all modes. Dissection revealed primary injury at the impact site at low velocities with added remote injury at high velocities. Fracture of the lateral tibial plateau was most common. Lowering the bumper height offered the greatest protection against injury at moderate impact velocities.