Ultrasonic tomographic velocimeter for visualization of axial flow fields in pipes

An ultrasonic tomographic velocimeter to provide quantitative images of axial flow fields in pipes is developed and presented in this work. To detect the flow in various directions and positions, a novel transducer configuration strategy is proposed. All-in-one transducers are mounted in two sectional planes of the pipe. In each plane, N transducers are equally spaced along the circumference. Overlapped propagation paths are introduced by the configuration strategy, and the influence of the vortex flow can be eliminated theoretically by averaging the line velocities of the overlapped paths. To achieve a fast detection speed, the projection data is collected via an electrical scan in a fan-beam mode. After rearrangement and interpolation of the projection data, the parallel beam filtered back projection (FBP) algorithm is implemented to reconstruct the axial flow field. Numerical simulations with the theoretical velocity profiles were performed. The compensation method for the vortex flow is proved to be effective and necessary, and the number of transducers required for reconstruction of common flow profiles was estimated. Accordingly, an ultrasonic tomographic velocimeter consisting of 2×12 transducers was fabricated. Experiments were conducted in the straight pipe and downstream of a single bend pipe and compared with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation results. As demonstrated, the ultrasonic tomographic velocimeter was capable of visualizing both symmetric and asymmetric axial flow fields with high reliability.     

嵌入式实时操作系统内核混合代码的自动化验证框架

"如何构造高可信的软件系统"已成为学术界和工业界的研究热点.操作系统内核作为软件系统的基础组件，它的安全可靠是构造高可信软件系统的重要环节.为了确保操作系统内核的安全可靠，将形式化方法引入到操作系统内核验证中，提出了一个自动化验证操作系统内核的框架.该验证框架包括：（1）分别对C语言程序和混合语言程序（C语言和汇编语言）进行验证；（2）在混合语言程序验证中，为汇编程序建立抽象模型，并将C语言程序和抽象模型粘合形成基于C语言验证工具可接收的验证模型；（3）从规范中提取性质，基于该自动验证工具，对性质完成自动验证；（4）该框架不限于特定的硬件架构.成功地运用该验证框架对两种不同硬件平台的嵌入式实时操作系统内核μC/OS-II进行了验证.结果显示：利用该框架在对两个不同的硬件平台上内核验证时，框架的可重复利用率很高，高达到88%，虽然其抽象模型需要根据不同的硬件平台进行重构.在对基于这两种平台的操作系统内核验证中，分别发现了10~12处缺陷.其中，在ARM平台上两处与硬件相关的问题被发现.实验表明，该方法对不同硬件平台的同一个操作系统分析验证具有一定的通用性.     

A new decomposition based evolutionary algorithm with uniform designs for many-objective optimization

For many-objective optimization problems, how to get a set of solutions with good convergence and diversity is a difficult and challenging work. In this paper, a new decomposition based evolutionary algorithm with uniform designs is proposed to achieve the goal. The proposed algorithm adopts the uniform design method to set the weight vectors which are uniformly distributed over the design space, and the size of the weight vectors neither increases nonlinearly with the number of objectives nor considers a formulaic setting. A crossover operator based on the uniform design method is constructed to enhance the search capacity of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, in order to improve the convergence performance of the algorithm, a sub-population strategy is used to optimize each sub-problem. Comparing with some efficient state-of-the-art algorithms, e.g., NSGAII-CE, MOEA/D and HypE, on six benchmark functions, the proposed algorithm is able to find a set of solutions with better diversity and convergence.     

A novel intelligent approach for yaw position forecasting in wind energy systems

Yaw control systems orientate the rotor of a wind turbine into the wind direction, optimize the wind power generated by wind turbines and alleviate the mechanical stresses on a wind turbine. Regarding the advantages of yaw control systems, a k-nearest neighbor classifier (k-NN) has been developed in order to forecast the yaw position parameter at 10-min intervals in this study. Air temperature, atmosphere pressure, wind direction, wind speed, rotor speed and wind power parameters are used in 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6-dimensional input spaces. The forecasting model using Manhattan distance metric for k = 3 uncovered the most accurate performance for atmosphere pressure, wind direction, wind speed and rotor speed inputs. However, the forecasting model using Euclidean distance metric for k = 1 brought out the most inconsistent results for atmosphere pressure and wind speed inputs. As a result of multi-tupled analyses, many feasible inferences were achieved for yaw position control systems. In addition, the yaw position forecasting model developed was compared with the persistence model and it surpassed the persistence model significantly in terms of the improvement percent.     

Polyaniline-based networks combined with Fe3O4 hollow spheres and carbon balls for excellent electromagnetic wave absorption

Polyaniline (PANI)-based networks combined with Fe₃O₄ hollow spheres and carbon balls (FCP) for improved electromagnetic wave (EMW) absorption were investigated using an easy-to-industrialize solvothermal and physical method. Hollow structure Fe₃O₄ spheres with a lower density than that of the common solid sphere were prepared. As a thin and light magnetic material, Fe₃O₄ hollow spheres generate magnetic loss, carbon balls and PANI networks generate dielectric loss. The magnetic and conductive parts play appropriate roles in achieving complementarity in the EMW absorption. The relatively high specific surface area introduced by PANI networks promotes interfacial polarization and further supports dielectric loss. In conclusion, the above reasons provide multiple attenuation mechanisms. Samples FCP1 (?65.109 dB, at 12.800 GHz, 1.966 mm, from 5.6 to 18.0 GHz) and FCP2 (?61.033 dB, at 8.480 GHz, 3.328 mm, from 4.3 to 18.0 GHz) demonstrated a wide bandwidth, a small thickness, a minimum reflection loss (R_L), and a low loading ratio (25%) in paraffin-based composites. Specifically, their loading ration of 25% is much lower than the loading ratio of conventional materials (usually 50% and above). In addition, the bandwidth is excessively wide, above 12 GHz, possessing good absorption performance in continuous intervals with different thicknesses. Such excellent characteristics have rarely been reported in literature.     

Novel core-shell-like Ni-supported hierarchical beta zeolite catalysts on bioethanol steam reforming

Hierarchical-Beta zeolites have been hydrothermally synthesized by adding a new gemini organic surfactant. The used gemini surfactant play the role of a “pore-forming agents” on the mesoscale, on the same time, providing alkaline environment for the system. With this hierarchical Beta zeolite as the core support, we successfully prepared a shell layer of Ni-containing (22 wt%) petal-like core-shell-like catalyst and applied it to bioethanol steam reforming. At the reaction temperature of 350 °C–550 °C, the conversion rate of ethanol and the selectivity of hydrogen were always above 85% and 70%. After reaction of 100 h on stream at 400 °C, there were not obvious inactivation could be observed on NiNPs/OH-MBeta catalyst.     

Stick-Breaking Dependent Beta Processes with Variational Inference

Neural Processing Letters - The beta processes (BP) is a powerful nonparametric tool in feature learning, which is often used as the prior of Bernoulli process for choosing features from a feature...