Geological Engineering,Civil Engineering,Traffic and Transportation Engineering Electrical capacitance volume tomography for measurement soil water infiltration in vessel experiments简

Electrical capacitance volume tomography （ECVT） is a recently-developed technique for real-time, non-invasive 3D monitoring of processes involving materials with strong contrasts in dielectric permittivity. This work is first application of the method to visualization of water flow in soil. We describe the principles behind the method, and then demonstrate its use with a simple laboratory infiltration experiment. 32 ECVT sensors were installed on the sides of an empty PVC column. Water was poured into the column at a constant rate, and ECVT data were collected every second. The column was then packed with dry sand and again supplied with water at a constant rate with data collected every second. Data were analyzed to give bulk average water contents, which proved consistent with the water supply rates. Data were also analyzed to give 3D images （216 voxels） allowing visualization of the water distribution during the experiments. Result of this work shows that water infiltration into the soil, wall flow, progress of the unstable wetting front and the final water distribution are clearly visible.     

Determination of stability constants of mercury(II) by garlic organosulfur ligands with differential pulse voltammetry

Journal of Applied Electrochemistry - In this work, interactions of mercury with di allyl disulfide (DADS), dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), and diallyl sulfide (DAS) were studied by differential pulse...     

UV-shielding by a polyurethane/f-Oil fly ash-CeO2 protective coating

A waste material called oil fly ash (OFA) was acid-functionalized, yielding f-OFA-COOH, which was then reacted with cerium oxide (CeO₂) to make CeO₂-functionalized OFA, or f-OFA-CeO₂. Pristine OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ were used to make waterborne polyurethane (WBPU) dispersions, referred to as WBPU/OFA and WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂, respectively, with defined OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ content. All the dispersions were applied to mild steel as organic coatings to evaluate their protective properties, such as their hydrophobicity, adhesive strength and UV-shielding resistance. These protective properties varied based on the OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ content. The highest water contact angle, minimum water swelling and maximum adhesive strength were found using WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂-20 coating (using 2.00 wt% f-OFA-CeO₂), which also showed the maximum ultraviolet (UV) absorption via UV–vis spectroscopy analysis. This UV shielding result also matched field test results, as that coating was found to exhibit the lowest UV degradation near a marine atmosphere, as shown by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis. The least affected hydrophobicity was also recorded for the sample with the WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂-20 coating.     

Performance evaluation of endrills

This paper evaluates the performance of a relatively new type of drill called an endrill which is a cross between a drill and an endmill. Investigations into the effects of its cutting conditions on the drilling forces, surface finish, drill wear and hole oversize were carried out. It was found that endrills produced better quality holes than conventional twist drills, better surface finish and less oversize of the holes. Hence, with proper feed, speed and flow rate of the pressurized flushing coolant, a good finish of about R_a = 1 μm can be attained without reaming. Thus, the productivity of finished holes can be remarkably improved. Compared to twist drills, lower torque and thrust were observed which yielded improved tool life and reduced power consumption. No “walking phenomenon” was observed when this kind of drill was used and the amount of hole oversize was found to average about 0.7% of the drill diameter as compared to 1.6% when twist drills were used. Finally, general equations for the drill torque and thrust were derived from the experimental results.     

Investigation into the evolution of corrosion product layer (CPL) of 1018 C-steel exposed to multiphase environment using FIB and EIS techniques

This communication reports into the effects of flow, fluid composition and the effectiveness of imidazoline inhibitors on the evolution and distribution of corrosion products on 1018 C-steel exposed to CO₂ corrosion. Focused ion beam technique was used to measure the thickness of the corrosion product layer (CPL), in contrast to the conventional techniques used to observe the cross-section of specimens. Morphological analysis using scanning electron microscopy revealed topographical variations on the surface with the change in the multiphase environment. The CPL was found to be more porous in nature with the presence of oil in the multiphase environment. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was also used in the present study to measure the corrosion rates and was subsequently correlated to the CPL evolution for 1018 C-steel in multiphase environment.     

Investigation of micro-EDM material removal characteristics using single RC-pulse discharges

Similar to EDM, in micro-EDM, intense heat is generated between the workpiece and tool electrode by the discharge through a dielectric medium to result in the formation of a microcrater that is much smaller in size. In this study, a single-spark generator has been developed to study the erosion characteristics from the microcrater size. Using a simple heat transfer model, the efficiency at different discharge condition is also deduced. It is found that at lower-energy (<50 μJ) discharges, the energy required to remove the unit volume of material, defined as the specific energy, is found to be much less than that at higher-energy discharges. Additionally, the ratio of the standard deviation to the measured microcrater size is found to be lower at lower discharge energy, indicating greater consistency in shape and size when the discharge occurs at lower energy. The fundamental erosion mechanism of material is discussed by considering melting and evaporation phenomena using theoretical modeling. The average efficiency of erosion, when estimated to be due primarily to melting or evaporation alone, is found to be up to an order of magnitude higher at lower-energy discharges than that at higher-energy discharges.     

Crack initiation in relation to the tool edge radius and cutting conditions in nanoscale cutting of silicon

In cutting of brittle materials, experimentally it was observed that there is a ductile–brittle transition when the undeformed chip thickness is increased from smaller to larger than the tool cutting edge radius of the zero rake angle. However, how the crack is initiated in the ductile–brittle mode transition as the undeformed chip thickness is increased from smaller to larger than the tool cutting edge radius has not been fully understood. In this study, the crack initiation in the ductile–brittle mode transition as the undeformed chip thickness is increased from smaller to larger than the tool cutting edge radius has been simulated using the Molecular Dynamics (MD) method on nanoscale cutting of monocrystalline silicon with a non-zero edge radius tool, from which, for the first time, a peak deformation zone in the chip formation zone has been found in the transition from ductile mode to brittle mode cutting. The results show that as the undeformed chip thickness is larger than the cutting edge radius, in the chip formation zone there is a peak deformation depth in association with the connecting point of tool edge arc and the rake face, and there is a crack initiation zone in the undeformed workpiece next to the peak deformation zone, in which the material is tensile stressed and the tensile stress is perpendicular to the direction from the connecting point to the peak. As the undeformed chip thickness is smaller than the cutting edge radius, there is no deformation peak in the chip formation zone, and thus there is no crack initiation zone formed in the undeformed workpiece. This finding explains well the ductile–brittle transition as the undeformed chip thickness increases from smaller to larger than the tool cutting edge radius.     

Optimized unequal error protection of embedded video bitstream using adaptive-hierarchical QAM

In this paper, a reliable video communication system using adaptive Hierarchical QAM (HQAM) is designed to provide optimized unequal error protection (UEP) to embedded video bitstreams. Based on the relative importance of bits, video bitstream is partitioned into two priorities, namely High Priority (HP) and Low Priority (LP) substreams. Then, the optimal value of modulation (or hierarchical) parameter (α) of HQAM, which controls the relative error protection of these substreams, is selected from a pre-designed look-up table. The proposed system adapts itself by adapting the optimal α according to the varying channel condition, without changing the modulation level. This is in contrast to conventional WiMAX and LTE systems, in which dynamic switching among multiple modulations is used to adapt the varying channel conditions. This paper proposes HQAM with adaptive α as an alternative to the multiple modulation schemes. Moreover, for fixed average transmission power, receiver demodulates symbols without the knowledge of α. In order to further improve the video quality and to reduce the effects of erroneously received LP bits, the proposed system uses another level of adaptation, in which received LP bits are adaptively considered or discarded, before decoding the video, depending on the channel conditions (or optimized α). Simulation results show that proposed system can achieve significant improvement in the video quality compared to QAM based EEP scheme and non-adaptive HQAM.     

Robust face recognition against expressions and partial occlusions

Facial features under variant-expressions and partial occlusions could have degrading effect on overall face recognition performance. As a solution, we suggest that the contribution of these features on final classification should be determined. In order to represent facial features contribution according to their variations, we propose a feature selection process that describes facial features as local independent component analysis(ICA) features. These local features are acquired using locally lateral subspace(LLS) strategy.Then, through linear discriminant analysis(LDA) we investigate the intraclass and interclass representation of each local ICA feature and express each feature s contribution via a weighting process. Using these weights, we define the contribution of each feature at local classifier level. In order to recognize faces under single sample constraint, we implement LLS strategy on locally linear embedding(LLE) along with the proposed feature selection. Additionally, we highlight the efficiency of the implementation of LLS strategy. The overall accuracy achieved by our approach on datasets with different facial expressions and partial occlusions such as AR, JAFFE,FERET and CK+ is 90.70%. We present together in this paper survey results on face recognition performance and physiological feature selection performed by human subjects.     

Employing both gender and emotion cues to enhance speaker identification performance in emotional talking environments

Speaker recognition performance in emotional talking environments is not as high as it is in neutral talking environments. This work focuses on proposing, implementing, and evaluating a new approach to enhance the performance in emotional talking environments. The new proposed approach is based on identifying the unknown speaker using both his/her gender and emotion cues. Both Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Suprasegmental Hidden Markov Models (SPHMMs) have been used as classifiers in this work. This approach has been tested on our collected emotional speech database which is composed of six emotions. The results of this work show that speaker identification performance based on using both gender and emotion cues is higher than that based on using gender cues only, emotion cues only, and neither gender nor emotion cues by 7.22 %, 4.45 %, and 19.56 %, respectively. This work also shows that the optimum speaker identification performance takes place when the classifiers are completely biased towards suprasegmental models and no impact of acoustic models in the emotional talking environments. The achieved average speaker identification performance based on the new proposed approach falls within 2.35 % of that obtained in subjective evaluation by human judges.