Application of large scale PIV in river surface turbulence measurements and water depth estimation

Large-Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV) has emerged as a reliable technology to measure river surface flow velocity distribution and can be applied to estimate river discharge. Fewer studies have explored the capability of surface turbulence measurements using LSPIV. In this paper, LSPIV is applied to evaluate statistics of surface turbulence of a natural river. Turbulence measurements including velocity fluctuation, velocity spectra and the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) are validated by comparing with those measured by an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV). Traditionally, estimation of stream discharge through LSPIV needs a secondary measurement to determine river bathymetry and water depth. A new method is presented here to demonstrate that for a fully developed and channel-controlled flow, the cross section geometry can be estimated from the combined measurements of surface mean velocity and the dissipation rate, following the Manning-Strickler formula. Therefore, river discharge can be estimated with LSPIV along with a calibrated Manning's roughness, without additional bathymetry survey. The proposed new method is applied to measure discharge in Milwaukee River (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.), which agreed well with data obtained from a nearby streamgage station.     

Multi-Level Fusion Net for hand pose estimation in hand-object interaction

This work is about solving a challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand pose when a hand interacts with an unknown object. Compared to isolated single hand pose estimation, occlusion and interference induced by the manipulated object and the clutter background bring more difficulties for this task. Our proposed Multi-Level Fusion Net focuses on extracting more effective features to overcome these disadvantages by multi-level fusion design with a new end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework. It takes cropped RGBD data from a single RGBD camera at free viewpoint as input without requiring additional hand–object pre-segmentation and object or hand pre-modeling. Through extensive evaluations on public hand–object interaction dataset, we demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.     

Decomposition and replacement: Spatial knowledge distillation for monocular depth estimation

Knowledge distillation has become a key technique for making smart and light-weight networks through model compression and transfer learning. Unlike previous methods that applied knowledge distillation to the classification task, we propose to exploit the decomposition-and-replacement based distillation scheme for depth estimation from a single RGB color image. To do this, Laplacian pyramid-based knowledge distillation is firstly presented in this paper. The key idea of the proposed method is to transfer the rich knowledge of the scene depth, which is well encoded through the teacher network, to the student network in a structured way by decomposing it into the global context and local details. This is fairly desirable for the student network to restore the depth layout more accurately with limited resources. Moreover, we also propose a new guidance concept for knowledge distillation, so-called ReplaceBlock, which replaces blocks randomly selected in the decoded feature of the student network with those of the teacher network. Our ReplaceBlock gives a smoothing effect in learning the feature distribution of the teacher network by considering the spatial contiguity in the feature space. This process is also helpful to clearly restore the depth layout without the significant computational cost. Based on various experimental results on benchmark datasets, the effectiveness of our distillation scheme for monocular depth estimation is demonstrated in details. The code and model are publicly available at : https://github.com/tjqansthd/Lap_Rep_KD_Depth.     

Meeting the challenge of water sustainability: The role of process systems engineering

This white paper is the result of discussions during the FIPSE-4 conference ( http://fi-in-pse.org ) in June 2018. It aims to highlight open problems and provide directions for future research in the area of water with emphasis on its agricultural usages. Some of the open problems discussed are: (a) the use of ecosystems as unit operations to understand their role in providing freshwater and in cleaning polluted water; (b) consideration of interactions and independencies between flows of water and other resources, such as food, energy, materials, ecosystem services, and environmental emissions; (c) challenges in modeling, sensing, and closed-loop control in precision irrigation. In particular, the development of agro-hydrological models that balance computing speed versus solution details and accuracy: (d) The use of state and parameter estimation approaches, through field measurements, to obtain soil moisture levels accurately; and (e) decision support systems to administer water and nutrient needs for optimum yields of agricultural products.     

Estimation of maximum available capacity of lithium-ion battery based on multi-view features extracted from reconstructed charging curve

A new method is developed in the paper to estimate the maximum available capacity which is an important basis for indicating the State of Health (SOH) of lithium-ion batteries. Firstly, a data reconstruction approach is proposed to pre-process the acquired data to suppress the influence of measurement noise and reduce the negative impact on estimation precision when measuring equipment adopts different sampling frequencies. Then, the variation trend of the incremental capacity curve obtained based on the reconstructed data with the battery aging is analyzed, and a health indicator (HI) including multi-view features is put forward to characterize the battery degradation more comprehensively. The multi-view features are coming from the capacity increment curve versus voltage and time, including the maximum value of the capacity increment curve, the voltage corresponding to the maximum value, other values surrounding the maximum value and so on. Finally, Support Vector Regression is used to establish a model between the extracted HI and the maximum available capacity, and two types of open source data are used to verify the performance. The experimental results show that the data reconstruction method and multi-view health indicator proposed in the paper can obtain high precision estimation results.     

基于集员未知输入观测器的风力机桨距执行器故障诊断

风力机一般放置在恶劣的环境中,其桨距执行器极易出现故障。文中针对一类含有未知但有界干扰和噪声的风力机系统的桨距执行器故障问题,设计了集员未知输入观测器对桨距的执行器故障进行检测并分离。采用气动机理和现代辨识原理建立风力机系统模型,通过优化未知输入观测器设计对系统中的干扰解耦,基于中心对称多胞体估计不考虑故障时残差的区间包络,并将其作为残差估计的上下动态阈值,实现状态估计。在上述基础上提出了利用一组集员未知输入观测器进行故障诊断的策略。仿真结果表明,在实验过程中,文中所设计的集员未知输入观测器准确地诊断出了风力机桨距执行器的3阶和5阶线性系统在发生突变故障和缓慢时变故障的时间和位置,证明了所提故障诊断策略的有效性。     

Scheduler-based state estimation over multiple channels networks

We investigate the remote state estimation problem for networked systems over parallel noise-free communication channels. Due to limited network capabilities in practical network environments, communication schedulers are implemented at the transmit side of each subchannel to promote resource efficiency. Specifically, the processed signals are transmitted only when it is necessary to provide the real-time measurements to the remote estimator. The recursive approximate minimum mean-square error estimator is established to restore the state vector of a target plant by utilizing the scheduled transmission signals. All the information coming from the individual subchannels, even if no measurement is sent, will contribute to improve the estimation performance in an analytical form. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the main results.     

SiC单晶片切割力建模与自适应控制

Si C单晶因优良的物理和机械性能而大量用于大功率器件和IC行业。但由于材料的高硬度和高脆性,使其加工过程变得很困难。为此,分析了Si C单晶片切割过程,建立切割过程模型,通过F检验法进行系统阶次辨识,采用遗忘因子递推最小二乘算法在线估计模型参数,建立进给量与切割力的差分方程,设计基于最小方差自校正的切割力控制器,并进行实验验证。结果表明:控制器能够很好的跟踪不同信号,具有良好的鲁棒性,提高了Si C单晶片的加工效率和表面质量。     

Sampling procedure in a willow plantation for estimation of moisture content

Heating value and fuel quality of wood is closely connected to moisture content. In this work the variation of moisture content (MC) of short rotation coppice (SRC) willow shoots is described for five clones during one harvesting season. Subsequently an appropriate sampling procedure minimising labour costs and sampling uncertainty is proposed, where the MC of a single stem section with the length of 10–50 cm corresponds to the mean shoot moisture content (MSMC) with a bias of maximum 11 g kg⁻¹. This bias can be reduced by selecting the stem section according to the particular clone. The average difference in MSMC between the largest and smallest shoot in a stump was 31 g kg⁻¹. This variation is only marginally smaller than the variation found in MC between stumps. The MC of individual stem sections may vary as much as 190 g kg⁻¹ in one shoot. Variation in whole shoot moisture content was primarily influenced by the shoot diameter, but in addition significant effects of clone and shoot age were found.