A case study of regional catchment water quality modelling to identify pollution control requirements.

There are four ecologically important river catchments that contain candidate Special Areas of Conservation (cSACs) under the Habitats Directive in the Lake District National Park located in the North of England. These are the rivers Ehen, Kent, Derwent and Eden. For each cSAC, there are defined ecological criteria that include water quality targets to protect the designated species. Stretches of the riverine cSACs in each catchment are failing to meet these and other water quality targets. The Environment Agency commissioned a study of each catchment to provide the underpinning scientific knowledge to allow it to deliver its statutory obligations under the Habitats Directive. SIMCAT river water quality models were produced and used to predict the water quality impacts resulting from a number of water quality planning scenarios aimed at achieving full compliance with the Habitats Directive and other national and EEC water quality targets. The results indicated that further controls on effluent discharges will allow the majority of targets to be met but other sources of pollution will also need to be controlled. The outcome of the study also recognised that water quality improvements alone will not necessarily produce the required improvement to the ecological interest features in each cSAC.     

Thermal storage efficiencies of two solar saltless water ponds

A comparative study between two types of solar ponds is presented. The first type has its free surface covered by a thin layer of transparent paraffin oil. The second type is covered by transparent glass floating devices. Each device disposes an air-vacuum chamber. The free water surface between these devices is covered by transparent paraffin oil also. The thermal storage efficiency of each pond is estimated during two time periods: between sunrise and sunset and from midnight to midnight. The calculated efficiency between sunrise and sunset corresponds to the average transmittance–absorptance product. This is estimated using linear regression and also a maximum likelihood identification technique. The behavior of the system was studied by solving numerically the heat transfer equations of the system. Also an ARMAX (AutoRegressivie Moving Average with eXogenous signal) model allowing the assessment of its performance was presented. This efficiency is larger for the first pond during the sunrise to sunset period and smaller when calculated from midnight to midnight. Thus, the first type of pond could be preferred for a use just after the sunset of the same day, while the second for use after one or more days of heat storage.     

Linearity stablized fiber-optic thermometer using pseudo-heterodyne phase detection

A temperature sensor using a fiber-optic Fabry-Perot interferometer is described. A pseudo-heterodyne detection scheme is adopted to read the light phase difference in the Fabry-Perot interference output. A higher harmonic components comparison method is used to stabilize the system and to increase detection linearity. This system realizes not only highly sensitive temperature sensing with good linearity and minimal adjusting error, but also application to the sensing of other physical quantities such as vibrations. Additionally, the signal-to-noise ratio and distortion of the detected signal are investigated as functions of fiber end reflectivity. These results will be useful in designing a high performance fiber-optic Fabry-Perot thermometer.     

Inference of message sequence charts

Software designers draw message sequence charts for early modeling of the individual behaviors they expect from the concurrent system under design. Can they be sure that precisely the behaviors they have described are realizable by some implementation of the components of the concurrent system? If so, can we automatically synthesize concurrent state machines realizing the given MSCs? If, on the other hand, other unspecified and possibly unwanted scenarios are "implied" by their MSCs, can the software designer be automatically warned and provided the implied MSCs? In this paper, we provide a framework in which all these questions are answered positively. We first describe the formal framework within which one can derive implied MSCs and then provide polynomial-time algorithms for implication, realizability, and synthesis.     

Some perspectives on the analysis and control of complementarity systems

This paper is devoted to presenting controllability and stabilizability issues associated to a class of nonsmooth dynamical systems, namely complementarity dynamical systems. The main existing results are summarized, and some possible research directions are provided. Convex analysis and complementarity problems are claimed to be the main analysis tools for control related studies. This paper mainly focuses on mechanical applications.