Solar stills for production of distilled water

Solar stills have been designed to produce water for use in teaching and research laboratories. Various designs and configurations have been constructed and tested over the past 10 years. The original double-surfaced cascade stills (stills A and B) were constructed in aluminium and were rather expensive. Later models termed Series D and E were of galvanised mild steel with stainless steel distillate drains and safety overflow drains. These galvanised steel units suffered from severe corrosion after a few years of operation. The latest design series F, is built in aluminium with stainless steel distillate drains and automatic feed valves. All of the stills produce very pure distilled water (conductance ～1.5 × 10^?6 Ω^?1 cm^?1; pH 6.8–7.4) at a cost which is below that of conventional electrically heated stills.     

A Generalized Relationship for Determination of Tensile Strength of Fine-Grained Soils from Shrinkage Characteristics

Tensile strength of fine-grained soils has been extensively investigated by earlier researchers and several methodologies have been evolved for its determination. However, either most of these methods are not valid/applicable for a wide range of moisture contents or they involve tedious sample/specimen preparation. In this context, the methodology of determining tensile strength by employing thin films, which is available in the literature, has been found to be quite handy and useful. It has been observed that a unique relationship exists among the tensile strength, moisture content, and shrinkage characteristics of fine-grained soils. This methodology is appreciable due to its applicability to a wide range of moisture contents, comparable ease of sample preparation and testing, and the obtained results lack generalization. Exhaustive tests were conducted on fine-grained soils of entirely different characteristics and generalized relationships have been proposed between the percentage linear shrinkage, tensile strength, and moisture content (defined as liquid to solid ratio). Based on a critical analysis of the results available in the literature, the efficiency of such relationships for determination of tensile strength of fine-grained soils has been demonstrated. In the authors’ opinion, such relationships would be quite useful for determining tensile strength of fine-grained soils from their linear shrinkage, which can easily be measured in a conventional geotechnical engineering laboratory.     

英国国家电网公司在电力系统状态估计器及安全分析方面的经验

本文叙述了由安装在英国国家电网公司新国调中心的新型能量管理系统所提供的实时网络分析的应用，并介绍了第一年的运行经验．对经常出现的某些状态估计问题的解决方法和作者所作的尝试的结论进行了讨论，以对安全估计器的结果与现有的离线研究方法的结果进行比较．文章还对应用实时网络分析时遇到的一些原始缺陷的观察结果和在短时段及较长时段内解决这些问题的方法进行了讨论．     

A unified scheme for adaptive stroke-based rendering

This paper presents a comprehensive scheme for automatically generating a broad class of artistic illustrations from photographs. Using strokes as the major building blocks, our system optimizes the stroke attributes subject to the desired rendering style. The stroke attributes are computed adaptively to enable importance-based control of the abstraction level at each pixel. We propose a novel outline detection and refinement paradigm called edge painting to construct an outline map, and from which to derive the pixel-wise importance. We also introduce an adaptive bilateral filter to adaptively guide the curved stroke directions based on the importance map. Given the outline, importance, and direction maps, the system creates the illustration via selecting the representative colors, setting the style parameters, and optimizing the stroke attributes based on simulated annealing. The experimental results show that our scheme facilitates automatic production of artistic illustrations in a wide range of rendering styles.