Reactive silica transport in fractured porous media: Analytical solution for a single fracture

A general analytical solution is derived by using the Laplace transformation to describe transient reactive silica transport in a conceptualized 2-D system involving a single fracture embedded in an impervious host rock matrix. This solution differs from previous analyses in that it takes into account both hydrodynamic dispersion and advection of silica transport along the fracture, and hence takes the form of an infinite integral. Several illustrative calculations are undertaken to confirm that neglecting the dispersion term may lead to erroneous silica distribution along the fracture and within the host matrix, and the error becomes severe with a smaller rate of fluid flow in the fracture. The longitudinal dispersion is negligible only at steady state or when the flow rate in the fracture is higher. The analytical solution can serve as a benchmark to validate numerical models that simulate reactive mass transport in fractured porous media.     

Mathematical modelling and finite element simulation of smart tubular composites

This paper presents a mathematical modelling and numerical simulation method for three-dimensional smart tubular 1(0)-3 composites based on a representative composite volume (RCV) approach. For the problems we consider, numerical results show that the maximum mechanical displacement varies linearly with the applied electrical potential and grows nonlinearly with increasing the RCV height. Further, we observe that decreasing the distance between the inner and outer radii results in increasing the maximum displacement. This refers to composites with large Young’s modulus of the polymer phase, whereas for “soft” polymers (i.e. for Young’s modulus of the polymers of order less than GPa) no particular ‘rule’ is evident, in which case the Poisson’s ratio is the most important parameter.     

混凝土湿热耦合模拟分析程序软件的开发与应用

为了利用计算机技术时混凝土湿热耦合传输及变形进行数值模拟分析,并在实际工程结构变形预测中有效应用,根据提出的基于Visual Basic调用Matlab及ANSYS的软件开发策略,通过混合编程开发了混凝土湿热耦合数值模拟计算程序软件(CTMSoft).利用CTMSofl对实际工程结构中混凝土的湿热传输及变形进行了数值模拟,模拟分析结果与现场实际试验及结构监测结果一致,证实该方法和程序软件是正确有效的.     

A stochastic model for thermal transport of nanofluid in porous media: Derivation and applications

In this paper, a stochastic thermal transport model is developed for nanofluid flowing through porous media. This model incorporates the influences of nanoparticle migration on convective heat transfer of the colloidal solution. We show that Lévy flight movement patterns of nanoparticles result in the derived model using fractional derivative for the diffusion term. The new thermal transport model is then applied to the mixed convective problem which is solved using finite difference method. Numerical results show that the smaller values of Lévy index $\gamma$ lead to larger Nusselt numbers, thus the occurrence of long jumps for nanoparticles increases the heat transport of nanofluids. The effects of other involved physical parameters are also presented and discussed.     

Combined Lattice Boltzmann and phase-field simulations for incompressible fluid flow in porous media

A Lattice-Boltzmann method for incompressible fluid flow is coupled with the dynamic equations of a phase-field model for multiple order parameters. The combined model approach is applied to computationally evaluate the permeability in porous media. At the boundaries between the solid and fluid phases of the porous microstructure, we employ a smooth formulation of a bounce-back condition related to the diffuse profile of the interfaces. We present simulations of fluid flow in both, static porous media with stationary non-moving interfaces and microstructures performing a dynamic evolution of the phase and grain boundaries. For the latter case, we demonstrate applications to dissolving grain structures with partial melt inclusions and computationally analyse the temporal evolution of the microporosity under wetting conditions at the melt-grain boundaries. In any development state of the material, the Darcy number and the hydraulic conductivity of the porous medium are evaluated for various types of fluid.     

Sensitivity of spectral reflectance to variation in live fuel moisture content at leaf and canopy level

Wildland fires burn large areas of the earth's land surface annually, causing significant environmental damage and danger to human health. In order to mitigate the effects, and to better manage the incidence of such fires, fire behaviour models are used to predict, among other things, the likelihood of ignition, the rate of spread, and the intensity and duration of burning. A key input parameter to these models is the amount of water in the vegetation, described as the fuel moisture content (FMC). A number of studies have shown that vegetation indices (VI) calculated from red and NIR reflectances may be used to map spatial and temporal variation in FMC in a range of fire-prone environments, with varying degrees of success. Strong empirical relationships may be established between VI and FMC over grasslands, yet over shrublands and forests, the relationships are weaker. If FMC is to be estimated with greater accuracy and consistency than is currently achieved, it is necessary to fully understand the relative contribution that spatial and temporal variation in the various biophysical and geometrical variables make to reflectance variability at the leaf and canopy level.This paper uses a modelling approach to investigate the sensitivity of reflectance data at leaf and canopy level to variation in the biophysical variables that are used to compute FMC. At the leaf level, the results show that the sensitivity of reflectance to variation in leaf water and dry matter content, used to compute FMC, is greatest in the SWIR and NIR, respectively. Variation in FMC has no effect in the visible wavelengths. At the canopy level, the results show that the sensitivity of reflectance to variation in leaf water and dry matter content is heavily dependent upon the type of model used and the range of variation over which the variables are tested. In the longer wavelengths of the SWIR, the competing influence of variable leaf area index, fractional vegetation cover, and solar zenith angle is shown to be greater than that at the shorter wavelengths of the SWIR and NIR. Empirical relationships between the normalised difference water index (NDWI) and FMC are shown to be weaker than that with canopy water content. However, when the range of the variables under study is more limited, useful empirical relationships between FMC and remotely sensed VI may be established.     

Linking ecological information and radiative transfer models to estimate fuel moisture content in the Mediterranean region of Spain: Solving the ill-posed inverse problem

Live fuel moisture content (FMC) is a key factor required to evaluate fire risk and its operative and accurate estimation is essential for allocating pre-fire resources as a part of fire prevention. This paper presents an operative and accurate procedure to estimate FMC though MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectrometer) data and simulation models. The new aspects of the method are its consideration of several ecological criteria to parameterize the models and consistently avoid simulating unrealistic spectra which might produce indetermination (ill-posed) problems when inverting the model. The methodology was operatively applicable to 12 shrubland plots located in different provinces of the Mediterranean region of Spain and tested with field data collected in those areas. The results showed that the proposed method efficiently tracks changes of FMC with average errors around 15%. However the model under-estimates FMC values higher than 135.68% since those situations were not included in the simulation scheme and the inversion precision is also dependent on an accurate estimation of LAI. These limitations will be overcome in future work mainly by including spectral signatures of vegetation with FMC values higher than 135.68% in the simulations, and by exploring new methods for LAI retrieval. Further efforts will also be devoted to extend this approach to other ecosystems.     

ASCAT soil wetness index validation through in situ and modeled soil moisture data in central Italy

Reliable measurements of soil moisture at global scale might greatly improve many practical issues in hydrology, meteorology, climatology or agriculture such as water management, quantitative precipitation forecasting, irrigation scheduling, etc. Remote sensing offers the unique capability to monitor soil moisture over large areas but, nowadays, the spatio-temporal resolution and accuracy required for some hydrological applications (e.g., flood forecasting in medium to large basins) have still to be met. The Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) onboard the Metop satellite (VV polarization, C-band at 5.255 GHz), based on a large extent on the heritage of the ERS scatterometer, provides a soil moisture product available at a coarse spatial resolution (25 km and 50 km) and at a nearly daily time step. This study evaluates the accuracy of the new 25 km ASCAT derived saturation degree product by using in situ observations and the outcomes of a soil water balance model for three sites located in an inland region of central Italy. The comparison is carried out for a 2-year period (2007-2008) and three products derived from ASCAT: the surface saturation degree, m_s, the exponentially filtered soil wetness index, SWI, and its linear transformation, SWI*, matching the range of variability of ground data. Overall, the performance of the three products is found to be quite good with correlation coefficients higher than 0.92 and 0.80 when the SWI is compared with in situ and simulated saturation degree, respectively. Considering SWI*, the root mean square error is less than 0.035 m³/m³ and 0.042 m³/m³ for in situ and simulated saturation degree, respectively. More notably, when the m_s product is compared with modeled data at 3 cm depth, this index is found able to accurately reproduce the temporal pattern of the simulated saturation degree in terms of both timing and entity of its variations also at fine temporal scale. The daily temporal resolution and the reliability obtained with the ASCAT derived saturation degree products represent the preliminary step for its effective use in operational rainfall-runoff modeling.     

Watershed scale temporal and spatial stability of soil moisture and its role in validating satellite estimates

Watershed scale soil moisture estimates are necessary to validate current remote sensing products, such as those from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR). Unfortunately, remote sensing technology does not currently resolve the land surface at a scale that is easily observed with ground measurements. One approach to validation is to use existing soil moisture measurement networks and scale these point observations up to the resolution of remote sensing footprints. As part of the Soil Moisture Experiment 2002 (SMEX02), one such soil moisture gaging system in the Walnut Creek Watershed, Iowa, provided robust estimates of the soil moisture average for a watershed throughout the summer of 2002. Twelve in situ soil moisture probes were installed across the watershed. These probes recorded soil moisture at a depth of 5 cm from June 29, 2002 to August 19, 2002. The sampling sites were analyzed for temporal and spatial stability by several measures including mean relative difference, Spearman rank, and correlation coefficient analysis. Representative point measurements were used to estimate the watershed scale (∼25 km) soil moisture average and shown to be accurate indicators with low variance and bias of the watershed scale soil moisture distribution. This work establishes the validity of this approach to provide watershed scale soil moisture estimates in this study region for the purposes of satellite validation with estimation errors as small as 3%. Also, the potential sources of error in this type of analysis are explored. This study is a first step in the implementation of large-scale soil moisture validation using existing networks such as the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) and several Agricultural Research Service watersheds as a basis for calibrating satellite soil moisture products, for networks design, and designing field experiments.     

Visualization and quantification of water movement in porous cement-based materials by real time thermal neutron radiography:Theoretical analysis and experimental study

Water movement in porous cement-based materials is of great importance when studying their deterioration processes and durability.Many traditional methods based on mass changes,electricity or nuclear magnetic resonances are available for studying water transport in cement-based materials.In this research,an advanced technique i.e.thermal neutron radiography was utilized to achieve visualization and quantification of time dependent water movement including water penetration and moisture vapor in porous cemen...     

Structure-based object representation and classification in mobile robotics through a Microsoft Kinect

A new approach enabling a mobile robot to recognize and classify furniture-like objects composed of assembled parts using a Microsoft Kinect is presented. Starting from considerations about the structure of furniture-like objects, i.e., objects which can play a role in the course of a mobile robot mission, the 3D point cloud returned by the Kinect is first segmented into a set of “almost convex” clusters. Objects are then represented by means of a graph expressing mutual relationships between such clusters. Off-line, snapshots of the same object taken from different positions are processed and merged, in order to produce multiple-view models that are used to populate a database. On-line, as soon as a new object is observed, a run-time window of subsequent snapshots is used to search for a correspondence in the database.Experiments validating the approach with a set of objects (i.e., chairs, tables, but also other robots) are reported and discussed in detail.     

Estimating bedload transport rates in a gravel-bed river using seismic impact plates: Model development and application

A data-driven, uncertainty-bound estimation technique for bedload transport rates is developed based on passive sensing devices. The model converts sediment samples to a mass in transit for each instantaneous discharge according to impacts detected and a Monte Carlo simulation of the load determined at random from the particle size distribution. Using impact count data autogenically produces a supply-limited, location-specific and high-resolution time-series of bedload rates, while the probabilistic approach inherently accommodates the stochastic nature of bedload transport. Application to the River Avon (Devon, U.K.) provides cross-sectional bedload rate estimates within the bounds of experimental data and calibrated to observed field behaviour. This new procedure offers an alternative ‘class’ of bedload estimation to existing approaches and has the potential for wide-ranging applications in river management and restoration, while contributing to the integration of ‘big data’ into a progressive agenda for hydrogeomorphology research.     

Three-dimensional model of radionuclide dispersion in estuaries and shelf seas

The 3-D model THREETOX was developed for the assessment of contamination in coastal seas and inland water bodies. It includes a high resolution numerical hydrodynamic submodel, a dynamic–thermodynamic ice submodel, and submodels for suspended sediment and pollution transport. The results of two case studies are described. The first case concerns a 2-year simulation of the Chernobyl radionuclide contamination of the Dnieper–Bug estuary to validate the model. In the second case study, simulations were performed for the assessment of the consequences of the possible release of radionuclides from scuttled reactors and containers with liquid radioactive wastes in the Novaya Zemlya fjords and the East Novaya Zemlya Trough of the Kara Sea. The simulated results demonstrated the capability of the THREETOX model to describe a wide spatial and temporal range of radionuclide transport processes in the ocean.     

Domain decomposition and multigrid solvers for flow simulation in porous media on distributed memory parallel processors

Realistic simulations of fluid flow in oil reservoirs have been proven to be computationally intensive. In this work, techniques for solving large sparse systems of linear equations that arise in simulating these processes are developed for parallel computers such as INTEL hypercubes iPSC/2 and iPSC/860. This solver is based on a combined multigrid and domain decomposition approach. The Algorithm uses line corrections solved using a multigrid method, line Jacobi and block incomplete domain decomposition as an overall preconditioner for a conjugate gradient-like acceleration method, ORTHOMIN (k). This is shown to be a factor of ten times faster on a 32-processor hypercube compared to widely used sequential solvers. Three test problems are used to validate the results which include implicit wells and faults: The first is based on highly heterogeneous two-phase flow, the second on the SPE Third Comparative Solution and the third on real production compositional data.     

核电站泄漏监测系统湿度取样时间优化研究

对第三代原子能反应堆核电站泄漏监测系统取样过程进行研究.介绍了当前核电站泄漏监测的现状,对各类泄漏监测方法的原理进行了调查.研究过程采用数值模拟方法,对湿度测量过程中的湿蒸汽取样机理进行研究.湿度取样测量方法相比其他方法,动态特性较差,测量结果显示存在滞后性.研究表明:泄漏监测系统当前采用的湿空气取样时间还有一定的优化...     

有机余辉材料的类别及其在生物分析成像中的研究进展

有机余辉材料是一类具有余辉特性的光学材料,可在光照结束后进行长时间发光,从而延长成像时间,并提高成像灵敏度。有机余辉材料凭借其灵活的可设计性与良好的生物相容性已被广泛应用于生物分析成像中。此外,余辉成像由于不需要实时激发光源,因而可有效消除生物组织自身荧光信号的干扰。因此,余辉成像在活体成像信背比和分析灵敏度方面具有明显的优势。基于此,作者综述了近年来有机余辉材料的最新进展,对已报道的有机余辉材料在生物分析和余辉成像中的医学应用进行了总结,讨论了有机余辉材料在分子构建及临床成像中的应用前景及存在的挑战。     

分拣扫描设备不规则物料分类自动控制方法研究

为了提高分拣扫描设备不规则物料的分类能力,提出基于粒子群进化寻优的分拣扫描设备不规则物料分类自动控制方法。构建不规则物料分类自动控制的图像扫描模型,采用网格分类方法对扫描的不规则物料图像大数据进行自适应分类,在邻域内采用超像素特征分解方法进行不规则物料分拣扫描图像区域融合滤波处理,进行不规则物料分拣扫描图像的颜色分量合并和模板匹配,挖掘不规则物料扫描图像的边缘轮廓特征量,根据不规则物料的边缘轮廓特征扫描结果进行大数据信息融合和分类,采用粒子群寻优算法,根据不规则物料的边缘轮廓特征量,更新粒子群中每个粒子的空间位置,进行不规则物料分拣过程中的外观匹配,实现对不规则物料分拣扫描分类的自动控制。仿真结果表明,采用该方法进行分拣扫描设备不规则物料分类自动控制的收敛性较好,分类结果准确可靠,提高了不规则物料分拣的效率。     

高速列车弓网故障响应研究

弓网系统是牵引供电系统中重要组成部分,受电弓与接触线之间良好的动态性能是列车平稳受流的重要前提.由于列车速度的提高,弓网间耦合振动加剧,并直接导致弓网故障的发生.基于受电弓及接触网的结构动力学特性,建立了弓网垂向耦合振动系统模型,对弓网系统中受电弓连接件松动、接触线磨损、定位器失效等情况下的接触力响应进行了动力学仿真及分析,初步从动力学角度进行分类,为弓网接触力测控以及故障诊断打下基础.     

神经网络在船舶轮机训练器实时仿真建模中的应用研究

文运用反向传播 (BP)神经网络理论 ,设计了一个仿真 10 5单缸柴油机示功图的BP网络模型 ,并对之进行了讨论和研究 ,说明该神经网络模型不但可以满足船舶轮机仿真训练器的精度要求 ,并且还可以保证轮机仿真过程的实时性 ,从而提出了船舶轮机训练器实时仿真建模的又一种有效的方法