Coal-oil mixture from a synthetic oil obtained by hydroliquefaction of a South African coal

A coal-oil mixture (COM) was prepared from a South African coal and a synthetic oil derived from the same coal by hydroliquefaction. The settling and rheological properties of this mixture were compared with those of a mixture of the same coal with fuel oil. The synthetic oil mixture showed greater settling stability, comparable with that of a commercial COM containing additives. The increased stability may be related to polar compounds present in the oil and on the coal surface.     

Kinetic modelling of textural changes in ready-to-eat breakfast cereals during soaking in semi-skimmed milk

Summary Ready‐to‐eat breakfast cereals immersed in milk undergo undesirable changes in texture because of sudden moisture uptake. The textural changes are ascribable to a plasticizing effect of water, which modifies the mechanical strength of products by softening the starch/protein matrix. In this work, some textural parameters of different cereal flakes were derived from the force–displacement curves monitored during 300 s of immersion in milk. Hardness loss, deformability increment and changes in the force–displacement curve profile were calculated and plotted against soaking time. The application of a sugar coating process to a model cereal flake increased the initial product hardness and improved the preservation of the textural parameters during immersion. The Peleg model closely fitted the experimental data, with regression coefficients from 0.967 to 0.999.     

Sensitivity analysis of the rice model WARM in Europe: Exploring the effects of different locations,climates and methods of analysis on model sensitivity to crop parameters

Sensitivity analysis studies how the variation in model outputs can be due to different sources of variation. This issue is addressed, in this study, as an application of sensitivity analysis techniques to a crop model in the Mediterranean region. In particular, an application of Morris and Sobol' sensitivity analysis methods to the rice model WARM is presented. The output considered is aboveground biomass at maturity, simulated at five rice districts of different countries (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) for years characterized by low, intermediate, and high continentality. The total effect index of Sobol' (that accounts for the total contribution to the output variation due a given parameter) and two Morris indices (mean μ and standard deviation σ of the ratios output changes/parameter variations) were used as sensitivity metrics. Radiation use efficiency (RUE), optimum temperature (T_opt), and leaf area index at emergence (LAI_ini) ranked in most of the combinations site × year as first, second and third most relevant parameters. Exceptions were observed, depending on the sensitivity method (e.g. LAI_ini resulted not relevant by the Morris method), or site-continentality pattern (e.g. with intermediate continentality in Spain, LAI_ini and T_opt were second and third ranked; with low continentality in Portugal, RUE was outranked by T_opt). Low σ values associated with the most relevant parameters indicated limited parameter interactions. The importance of sensitivity analyses by exploring site × climate combinations is discussed as pre-requisite to evaluate either novel crop-modelling approaches or the application of known modelling solutions to conditions not explored previously. The need of developing tools for sensitivity analysis within the modelling environment is also emphasized.     

Pool Evolution: A Parallel Pattern for Evolutionary and Symbolic Computing

We introduce a new parallel pattern derived from a specific application domain and show how it turns out to have application beyond its domain of origin. The pool evolution pattern models the parallel evolution of a population subject to mutations and evolving in such a way that a given fitness function is optimized. The pattern has been demonstrated to be suitable for capturing and modeling the parallel patterns underpinning various evolutionary algorithms, as well as other parallel patterns typical of symbolic computation. In this paper we introduce the pattern, we discuss its implementation on modern multi/many core architectures and finally present experimental results obtained with FastFlow and Erlang implementations to assess its feasibility and scalability.     

Modeling and control of an airbrake electro‐hydraulic smart actuator

In this paper, an accurate model of an airbrake electro‐hydraulic smart actuator is obtained by physical considerations, and then different control strategies (variable‐gain proportional control, PT₁ control with switching integrator, and second order sub‐optimal sliding mode control) are proposed and analyzed. This application is innovative in the avionic field, and is one of the first attempts to realize a fly‐by‐wire system for airbrakes, oriented to its immediate employment and installation on current aircraft. The project was carried on with the participation of the Italian Ministry of Defense, and was commissioned to MAG, a leading provider of integrated systems and aviation services for aerospace. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Experimental and numerical analysis of heat transfer and airflow on an interactive building facade

The envelope of a building is mainly responsible for its energy demand. Different kinds of double skin facades (DSFs) are nowadays used as a building envelope to reduce the energy demand and improve aesthetical view of buildings. Although DSF are already extensively used, their thermal performance is not well understood. This study presents a decoupling method capable to evaluate thermal performances and analyze fluid phenomena in a DSF. The solar radiation effects were evaluated with an analytical model and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were used to evaluate complex flow and thermal effect on a commercial DSF. With the decoupling approach to account for the effects of solar radiation and flow, the numerical results obtained by the CFD approach agree well with the experimental data collected on a full scale test room with a ventilated DSF. The method can be used to establish a database to develop a tool for DSF design.     

A theoretical model for the automatic generation of tag clouds

This paper presents a new approach to information retrieval from non-structured attributes in databases, which involves the processing of text attributes. To make retrieval more effective, frequent text sequences are extracted and mathematically represented as intermediate forms which permit a clearer and more precise definition of operations on texts. These intermediate forms appear to users in the form of tag clouds to facilitate content identification, exploration, and querying. In this sense, tag cloud visualization is a simple, user-friendly visual interface to data. This paper proposes a theoretical model for the representation of frequent text sequences and their operations as well as a general procedure for generating tag clouds from text attributes in databases. The tag clouds thus obtained were compared with conventional tag clouds composed of single terms. Our study showed that automatically generated multi-term tag clouds provide better results than mono-term tag clouds.