OPAH a model for optimal design of multipurpose small hydropower plants

The investment in small hydropower plants requires the analysis of hydrological, technical, operational, budgetary, economical and financial aspects. The analysis of each possible configuration demands the joint action of several technicians, consuming substantial time and money. During initial design of the project, simplified procedures are usually adopted which may compromise the quality of the base configuration.In this paper we will present a global overview of the OPAH model, which was developed to surpass these limitations. This global model performs the optimization of project configuration. This model uses non-linear programming optimization to analyze the multipurpose operation of the hydropower plant. It uses a numeric simulation model of unsteady flow under pressure to analyze the hydraulic circuit. It uses an economical and financial simulation model that takes in to account the project risk associated to hydrologic and market variability, the financial capacity of the investor and the fiscal aspects.     

Improved Repeatability of Pulsed Field Magnetometry Measurements Through Peltier Effect Temperature Control of Measurement Coils

Pulsed Field Magnetometers (PFMs) offer a method for high speed full loop characterisation of hard magnetic materials. As there is no dependency on iron to close a circuit, the repeatability of the technique is good. By utilising Peltier effect techniques to control the temperature of the measurement coil systems employed in a Pulsed Field Magnetometer, the level of repeatability of measurements can be significantly improved.     

Using spectral method as an approximation for solving hyperbolic PDEs

We demonstrate an application of the spectral method as a numerical approximation for solving hyperbolic PDEs. In this method a finite basis is used for approximating the solutions. In particular, we demonstrate a set of such solutions for cases which would be otherwise almost impossible to solve by the more routine methods such as the Finite Difference Method. Eigenvalue problems are included in the class of PDEs that are solvable by this method. Although any complete orthonormal basis can be used, we discuss two particularly interesting bases: the Fourier basis and the quantum oscillator eigenfunction basis. We compare and discuss the relative advantages of each of these two bases.     

New Paradigm of Data-Driven Smart Customisation through Digital Twin

Big data is one of the most important resources for the promotion of smart customisation. With access to data from multiple sources, manufacturers can provide on-demand and customised products. However, existing research of smart customisation has focused on data generated from the physical world, not virtual models. As physical data is constrained by what has already occurred, it is limited in the identification of new areas to improve customer satisfaction. A new technology called digital twin aims to achieve this integration of physical and virtual entities. Incorporation of digital twin into the paradigm of existing data-driven smart customisation will make the process more responsive, adaptable and predictive. This paper presents a new framework of data-driven smart customisation augmented by digital twin. The new framework aims to facilitate improved collaboration of all stakeholders in the customisation process. A case study of the elevator industry illustrates the efficacy of the proposed framework.     

LearningADD: Machine learning based acoustic defect detection in factory automation

Defect inspection of glass bottles in the beverage industrial is of significance to prevent unexpected losses caused by the damage of bottles during manufacturing and transporting. The commonly used manual methods suffer from inefficiency, excessive space consumption, and beverage wastes after filling. To replace the manual operations in the pre-filling detection with improved efficiency and reduced costs, this paper proposes a machine learning based Acoustic Defect Detection (LearningADD) system. Moreover, to realize scalable deployment on edge and cloud computing platforms, deployment strategies especially partitioning and allocation of functionalities need to be compared and optimized under realistic constraints such as latency, complexity, and capacity of the platforms. In particular, to distinguish the defects in glass bottles efficiently, the improved Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is employed to extend the extracted feature sets, and then Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (SFLA) based feature selection is applied to optimize the feature sets. Five deployment strategies are quantitatively compared to optimize real-time performances based on the constraints measured from a real edge and cloud environment. The LearningADD algorithms are validated by the datasets from a real-life beverage factory, and the F-measure of the system reaches 98.48 %. The proposed deployment strategies are verified by experiments on private cloud platforms, which shows that the Distributed Heavy Edge deployment outperforms other strategies, benefited from the parallel computing and edge computing, where the Defect Detection Time for one bottle is less than 2.061 s in 99 % probability.     

An online multiple object tracker based on structure keeper net

We propose a novel online multiple object tracker taking structure information into account. State-of-the-art multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches commonly focus on discriminative appearance features, while neglect in different levels structure information and the core of data association. Addressing this, we design a new tracker fully exploiting structure information and encoding such information into the cost function of the graph matching model. Firstly, a new measurement is proposed to compare the structure similarity of two graphs whose nodes are equal. With this measurement, we define a complete matching which performs association in high efficiency. Secondly, for incomplete matching scenarios, a structure keeper net (SKnet) is designed to adaptively establish the graph for matching. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on benchmarks including MOT2015 and MOT17. The results demonstrate the competitiveness and practicability of our tracker.

     

A steel surface defect inspection approach towards smart industrial monitoring

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing - With the advance in Industry 4.0, smart industrial monitoring has been proposed to timely discover faults and defects in industrial processes. Steel is widely...