Field Investigation of Soil Heave by a Large Diameter Chilled Gas Pipeline Experiment, Fairbanks, Alaska

A large scale 105-m-long, 0.9-m-diam chilled pipeline experiment was conducted to assess the response of a production pipeline that transits between unfrozen (seasonally frozen) and permafrost soils in discontinuous permafrost regions. Thermal and heave characteristics of the experiment for a three-year monitoring period are reported. In response to the chilled pipeline, the progressive cooling patterns within the permafrost and unfrozen soils were different, resulting in the development of a thermal boundary at the transition zone between the two thermally different soils. The absolute maximum movement of pipeline was 0.197 m near the thermal boundary, resulting in a differential heave of 0.148 m. Three distinct heave phases were identified within the unfrozen soil. Phase 1 of the first 200 days related to penetration and heave above the groundwater table and was characterized by heave rates between 0.211 and 0.237 mm/day. Phase 2 resulted in increased ice segregation due to interaction of the freez-ing front with the groundwater table. This phase lasted from approximately day200 to day 500 and corresponded to a heave rate from 0.206 to 0.313 mm/day. Phase 3 was characterized by a further decrease in the heave rate to about 0.081 mm/day and lasted from approximately day 500 to day 1,056.     

VS‐CONTROL WITH TIME‐VARYING SLIDING SECTOR — DESIGN AND APPLICATION TO PENDULUM —

In general, a Variable Structure (VS) system is designed with a sliding mode. Recently a sliding sector, designed by an algebraic Riccati equation, has been proposed to replace the sliding mode for chattering‐free VS controllers. In this paper we extend the design algorithm for the sliding sector to a time‐varying sliding sector. The time‐varying sliding sector is defined by functions dependent on both state and time, hence time‐varying uncertainty can be considered. The VS controller is designed to stabilize an uncertain system, quadratically. The design procedure for real systems is introduced via an implementation to the control of “Furuta pendulum”. To enhance the stability it is necessary to compensate the time‐varying nonlinear static friction of the actuator adequately, hence this problem is a good example to demonstrate the performance of the proposed VS control method. In the experiment, it will be shown that the VS control with the time‐varying sliding sector is superior to an orthodox chattering‐free VS control.     

Dynamic Power Integrity Control of ATE for Eliminating Overkills and Underkills in Device Testing

This paper proposes a power integrity control technique for dynamically controlling power supply voltage fluctuations for a device under test (DUT), and demonstrates its effectiveness for eliminating the overkills/underkills due to the difference of power supply impedance between an automatic test equipment (ATE) and a practical operating environment of the DUT. The proposed method injects compensation currents into the power supply nodes on the ATE system in a feed-forward manner such that the ATE power supply waveform matches with the one on the customer’s operating environment of the DUT. A method for calculating the compensation current is also described. Experimental results show that the proposed method can emulate the power supply voltage waveform under a customer’s operating condition and eliminate 95 % of overkills/underkills in the maximum operating frequency testing with 105 real silicon devices. Limitations and applications of the proposed method are also discussed.     

Estimating the creep behavior of polycarbonate with changes in temperature and aging time

Thermoplastic resins are typically used without any kind of physical aging treatment. For such materials, creep behavior and physical aging, which depend on time and temperature, occur simultaneously. The effects of these processes are evident after quenching and are recorded in the material as a thermal history. This history strongly influences mechanical properties and creep behavior in particular. Thus, a more thorough understanding of the physical aging process is desirable. We examined the creep deformation of polycarbonate (PC) to reveal the effects of physical aging on creep behavior. The effects were dependent on both time and temperature. The relationship between physical aging and creep behavior exemplified superposition principles with regard to time and both pre-test aging time and pre-test aging temperature. The superposition principles allowed the calculation of creep deformations at a given temperature; the calculated results were corroborated by experimental data.     

Energy Savings through Microwave Selective Heating of Pd/AC Catalyst Particulates in a Fixed‐Bed Reactor

Microwave radiation is a novel energy source to drive chemical reactions. In conventional reactors, however, the heat created either escapes through uninsulated reactor walls, or the microwave radiation is attenuated by insulated walls. Here, microwave selective heating of Pd catalyst particles supported on activated carbon particulates was examined in a fixed‐bed reactor using a novel vacuum‐filled Dewar‐like double‐walled continuous‐flow reactor. This reactor was developed toward energy savings in performing such organic reactions as the transformation of the hydride methyl cyclohexane to toluene.     

Acidic property of BEA zeolite synthesized by seed-directed method

The acidic property of a BEA zeolite prepared by a seed-directed synthesis (SDS) method without organic structure directing agent (OSDA) was analyzed by a method of ammonia infrared/mass spectroscopic temperature-programmed desorption. The number of Brønsted acid sites on the SDS-BEA zeolite was larger than that on a conventional BEA zeolite synthesized from using OSDA. The enthalpy of ammonia desorption, distributed mainly in a range between 115 and 145 kJ mol^?1, was in agreement with the acid strength region generated by isomorphous substitution of Si⁴⁺ by Al³⁺ in the BEA framework. These observations confirm that the microstructure around the incorporated Al in the SDS-BEA zeolite was equivalent to that in the conventional one.     

Efficient action recognition via local position offset of 3D skeletal body joints

To accurately recognize human actions in less computational time is one important aspect for practical usage. This paper presents an efficient framework for recognizing actions by a RGB-D camera. The novel action patterns in the framework are extracted via computing position offset of 3D skeletal body joints locally in the temporal extent of video. Action recognition is then performed by assembling these offset vectors using a bag-of-words framework and also by considering the spatial independence of body joints. We conducted extensive experiments on two benchmarking datasets: UCF dataset and MSRC-12 dataset, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework 1) is very fast to extract action patterns and very simple in implementation; and 2) can achieve a comparable or a better performance in recognition accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.