Monitoring Support for Water Distribution Systems based on Pressure Sensor Data

Water Resources Management - The increasing age and deterioration of drinking water mains is causing an increasing frequency of pipe bursts. Not only are pipe repairs costly, bursts might also lead...     

Burst Detection by Water Demand Nowcasting Based on Exogenous Sensors

Bursts of drinking water pipes not only cause loss of drinking water, but also damage below and above ground infrastructure. Short-term water demand forecasting is a valuable tool in burst detection, as deviations between the forecast and actual water demand may indicate a new burst. Many of burst detection methods struggle with false positives due to non-seasonal water consumption as a result of e.g. environmental, economic or demographic exogenous influences, such as weather, holidays, festivities or pandemics. Finding a robust alternative that reduces the false positive rate of burst detection and does not rely on data from exogenous processes is essential. We present such a burst detection method, based on Bayesian ridge regression and Random Sample Consensus. Our exogenous nowcasting method relies on signals of all nearby flow and pressure sensors in the distribution net with the aim to reduce the false positive rate. The method requires neither data of exogenous processes, nor extensive historical data, but only requires one week of historical data per flow/pressure sensor. The exogenous nowcasting method is compared with a common water demand forecasting method for burst detection and shows sufficiently higher Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiencies of 82.7% - 90.6% compared to 57.9% - 77.7%, respectively. These efficiency ranges indicate a more accurate water demand prediction, resulting in more precise burst detection.

     

Estimation of Rock Aggregates Quality Using Analyses of Drill Cuttings

There is a need for an effective method to estimate the quality of crushed rock aggregates and its usability in the early stages of project planning, e.g., for road and railway constructions and quarry prospecting. The proposed method is based on mineralogical and petrographic analyses of drill cuttings and analysis of the coarse fraction to estimate the homogeneity/heterogeneity of the bedrock. The geological analyses are followed by an estimation of the rock materials’ mechanical properties and their potential technical usability. Development and practical applicability (field and laboratory) of the method have been performed and correlated to three road projects from regions of different geological and climatic zones in Sweden. The study confirms the capability of the proposed method as a surveying tool.     

A heuristic to manage perishable inventory with batch ordering,positive lead-times,and time-varying demand

So far the literature on inventory control for perishable products has mainly focused on (near-) optimal replenishment policies for a stylized environment, assuming no lead-time, no lot-sizing, stationary demand, a first in first out withdrawal policy and/or product life time equal to two periods. This literature has given fundamental insight in the behavior and the complexity of inventory systems for perishable products. In practice, many grocery retailers have recently automated the inventory replenishment for non-perishable products. They recognize they may need a different replenishment logic for perishable products, which takes into account e.g. the age of the inventory in the system. Due to new information technologies like RFID, it now also becomes more economically feasible to register this type of information. This paper suggests a replenishment policy for perishable products which takes into account the age of inventories and which requires only very simple calculations. It will be shown that in an environment, which contains important features of the real-life retail environment, this new policy leads to substantial cost reductions compared with a base policy that does not take into account the age of inventories.     

Univariate statistical analysis of environmental (compositional) data: Problems and possibilities

For almost 30 years it has been known that compositional (closed) data have special geometrical properties. In environmental sciences, where the concentration of chemical elements in different sample materials is investigated, almost all datasets are compositional. In general, compositional data are parts of a whole which only give relative information. Data that sum up to a constant, e.g. 100 wt.%, 1,000,000 mg/kg are the best known example. It is widely neglected that the “closure” characteristic remains even if only one of all possible elements is measured, it is an inherent property of compositional data. No variable is free to vary independent of all the others.Existing transformations to “open” closed data are seldom applied. They are more complicated than a log transformation and the relationship to the original data unit is lost. Results obtained when using classical statistical techniques for data analysis appeared reasonable and the possible consequences of working with closed data were rarely questioned. Here the simple univariate case of data analysis is investigated. It can be demonstrated that data closure must be overcome prior to calculating even simple statistical measures like mean or standard deviation or plotting graphs of the data distribution, e.g. a histogram. Some measures like the standard deviation (or the variance) make no statistical sense with closed data and all statistical tests building on the standard deviation (or variance) will thus provide erroneous results if used with the original data.     

Relationship between mass transport and the quality of cured hide

The advantages of mathematical simulations of the process of cured hide desalination are presented. Full three‐dimensional model is presented and then its one‐dimensional and a two‐dimensional special cases are considered and compared. In the case of one‐dimensional approximation, the solution can be obtained in an analytic form, while for the two‐dimensional case only numerical solution is available. A possible occurrence of a concentration shock is modelled, and a method of its prevention is proposed to reduce losses in the hide substance. The predictions of the mathematical model are then compared with experimental data and found to be in good agreement.     

Spectroscopic investigation of structure in octarellin (a de novo protein designed to adopt the {alpha}/{beta}-barred packing)

We present here a spectroscopic structural characterizationof octarellin, a recently reported de novo protein modelledon /ß-barrel proteins [K. Go raj, A.Renard and J.A.Martial(1990) Protein Engng, 3, 259–266]. Infrared and Ramanspectra analyses of octarellin‘s secondary structure revealthe expected percentage of -helices (30%) and a higher ß-sheetcontent (40%) than predicted from the design. When the Ramanspectra obtained with octarellin and native triosephosphateisomerase (a natural /ß-barrel) are compared, similarpercentages of secondary structures are found. Thermal denaturationof octarellin monitored by CD confirms that its secondary structuresare quite stable, whereas its native-like tertiary fold is not.Tyrosine residues, predicted to be partially hidden from solvent,are actually exposed as revealed by Raman and UV absorptionspectra. We conclude that the attempted /ß-barrelconformation in octarellin may be loosely packed. The criteriaused to design octarellin are discussed and improvements suggested.     

Modified technique of automatic and automated tuning of thermal-engineering process controllers

A technique of automatic optimization of tuning parameters of the closed-loop automatic control system in the course of operation of the latter is presented. This technique is based on the use of a new correlation for calculating tuning parameters of controllers from the coefficients of a transfer function of the object to be controlled. Simple analytical dependences are given that do not require large computer capacities and can easily be incorporated into a microprocessor-based controller, which in this case is converted into a self-tuning device.