APACS: a system for the automatic analysis and classification of conceptual patterns

Many existing inductive learning systems have been developed under the assumption that the learning tasks are performed in a noise-free environment. To cope with most real-world problems, it is important that a learning system be equipped with the capability to handle uncertainty. In this paper, we first identify the various sources of uncertainty that may be encountered in a noisy problem domain. Next, we present a method for the efficient acquisition of classification rules from training instances which may contain inconsistent, incorrect, or missing information. This algorithm consists of three phases: ( i ) the detection of inherent patterns in a set of noisy training data; ( ii ) the construction of classification rules based on these patterns; and ( iii ) the use of these rules to predict the class membership of an object. The method has been implemented in a system known as APACS (automatic pattern analysis and classification system). This system has been tested using both real-life and simulated data, and its performance is found to be superior to many existing systems in terms of efficiency and classification accuracy. Being able to handle uncertainty in the learning process, the proposed algorithm can be employed for applications in real-world problem domains involving noisy data.     

Timoshenko精确法在悬臂梁适应性分析中的应用

利用有限元、小网格及其他数字技术求解端部加载悬臂梁的挠度及应力,这种方法证明了自适应程序的能力。但是在许多情况下,并没有符合这种精确求解方法的边界条件,因此影响了自适应程序的有效性。事实上,作为一个探索性的问题,这种精确解并不适用于自适应程序,因为完全精确的网格都是相同的。本文对此问题进行了讨论,强调了由于边界条件不匹配精确解而产生的一些错误,用一种更符合实际的悬臂梁模型与之做了对比;同时还讨论了程序的有效性。     

A critical review of ash slagging mechanisms and viscosity measurement for low-rank coal and bio-slags

Gasification or combustion of coal and biomass is the most important form of power generation today. However, the use of coal/biomass at high temperatures has an inherent problem related to the ash generated. The formation of ash leads to a problematic phenomenon called slagging. Slagging is the accumulation of molten ash on the walls of the furnace, gasifier, or boiler and is detrimental as it reduces the heat transfer rate, and the combustion/gasification rate of unburnt carbon, causes mechanical failure, high-temperature corrosion and on occasions, superheater explosions. To improve the gasifier/combustor facility, it is very important to understand the key ash properties, slag characteristics, viscosity and critical viscosity temperature. This paper reviews the content, compositions, and melting characteristics of ashes in differently ranked coal and biomass, and discusses the formation mechanism, characteristics, and structure of slag. In particular, this paper focuses on low-rank coal and biomass that have been receiving increased attention recently. Besides, it reviews the available methodologies and formulae for slag viscosity measurement/prediction and summarizes the current limitations and potential applications. Moreover, it discusses the slagging behavior of different ranks of coal and biomass by examining the applicability of the current viscosity measurement methods to these fuels, and the viscosity prediction models and factors that affect the slag viscosity. This review shows that the existing viscosity models and slagging indices can only satisfactorily predict the viscosity and slagging propensity of high-rank coals but cannot predict the slagging propensity and slag viscosity of low-rank coal, and especially biomass ashes, even if they are limited to a particular composition only. Thus, there is a critical need for the development of an index, or a model or even a measurement method, which can predict/measure the slagging propensity and slag viscosity correctly for all low-rank coal and biomass ashes.     

High Manganese and Aluminum Steels for the Military and Transportation Industry

Lightweight advanced high strength steels (AHSS) with aluminum contents between 4 and 12 weight percent have been the subject of intense interest in the last decade because of an excellent combination of high strain rate toughness coupled with up to a 17% reduction in density. Fully austenitic cast steels with a nominal composition of Fe-30%Mn-9%Al-0.9%C are almost 15% less dense than quenched and tempered Cr-Mo steels (SAE 4130) with equivalent strengths and dynamic fracture toughness. This article serves as a review of the tensile and high-strain-rate fracture properties associated mainly with silicon additions to this base composition. In the solution-treated condition, cast steels have high work-hardening rates with elongations up to 64%, room-temperature Charpy V-notch (CVN) impact energies up to 200 J, and dynamic fracture toughness over 700 kJ/m². Silicon additions in the range of 0.59–1.56% Si have no significant effect on the mechanical properties of solution-treated steels but increased the tensile strength and hardness during aging. For steels aged at 530°C to an average hardness of 310 Brinell hardness number, HBW, increasing the amount of silicon from 1.07% to 1.56% decreased the room temperature CVN breaking energy from 92 J to 68 J and the dynamic fracture toughness from 376 kJ/m² to 265 kJ/m². Notch toughness is a strong function of phosphorus content, decreasing the solution-treated CVN impact toughness from 200 J in a 0.006% P steel to 28 J in a 0.07% P steel. For age-hardened steels with 1% Si, increasing levels of phosphorus from 0.001% to 0.043% decreased the dynamic fracture toughness from 376 kJ/m² to 100 kJ/m².     

Supplementation of 1% L-glutamine to milk replacer does not overcome the growth depression in calves caused by soy protein concentrate

Glutamine, an important fuel and biosynthetic precursor in intestinal epithelial cells, helps maintain intestinal integrity and function when supplemented to the diet of many species. The hypothesis tested here was that glutamine supplementation would overcome the decreased average daily gain (ADG) and altered intestinal morphology caused by milk replacer containing soy protein concentrate (SPC). Holstein calves (9 male and 1 freemartin female per treatment) were assigned to diets of 1) all-milk-protein (from whey proteins) milk replacer, 2) milk replacer with 60% milk protein replacement from SPC, and 3) SPC milk replacer as in diet 2 plus 1% (dry basis) l-glutamine. Milk replacers were reconstituted to 12.5% solids and were fed at 10% of body weight from d 3 to 10 of age, and at 12% of body weight (adjusted weekly) from d 10 through 4 wk of age. No dry feed (starter) was fed, but water was freely available. Glutamine was added at each feeding to reconstituted milk replacer. Five calves from each treatment were slaughtered at the end of wk 4 for measurements of intestinal morphology. The ADG was greater for calves fed the all-milk control than for those fed SPC; glutamine did not improve ADG (0.344, 0.281, and 0.282 kg/d for diets 1 to 3, respectively). Intake of protein was adequate for all groups and did not explain the lower growth for calves fed SPC. Villus height and crypt depth did not differ among treatments in the duodenum. In the jejunum, villus height (713, 506, and 464 μm, for diets 1 to 3, respectively) and crypt depth (300, 209, and 229 μm, respectively) were greater for calves fed all milk protein than for either SPC group. In the ileum, villus height was greater for calves fed all milk than for either soy group (532, 458, and 456 μm), whereas crypt depth tended to be greater (352, 301, and 383 μm for diets 1 to 3, respectively), and the villus to crypt ratio was lower for calves supplemented with glutamine than for those fed SPC alone. Urea N concentration in plasma was greater for calves supplemented with glutamine than for those fed SPC alone, indicating that glutamine was at least partially catabolized. Supplemental l-glutamine did not improve growth or intestinal morphology of calves fed milk replacer containing SPC.     

Behavior of EPS geofoam in stress-controlled cyclic uniaxial tests

During recent years, increasing consideration has been given to the compressible inclusion function of EPS geofoam, which makes this cellular geosynthetic an ideal material for reducing the static and seismic lateral earth pressures against rigid non-yielding retaining structures. Although the behavior of EPS geofoam under monotonic loading conditions has been extensively studied using laboratory triaxial compression tests, little research has been done until present on the cyclic stress–strain behavior of this material that is essential for optimizing and improving the seismic buffer function of EPS geofoam in geotechnical earthquake engineering applications. In this context, the present paper summarizes the results of a laboratory study based on stress-controlled cyclic uniaxial tests on EPS samples with various initial (static) deviator stresses. The experimental results indicate a somewhat different dynamic response of geofoam compared to the currently published relationships obtained from strain-controlled cyclic tests. Data from stress-controlled cyclic uniaxial tests show a logarithmic decrease in the damping ratio of EPS geofoam with increasing axial strain amplitude. Furthermore, for cyclic axial strain amplitudes greater than about 0.87–1.0%, the material exhibited a visco-elasto-plastic behavior associated with the occurrence of permanent plastic strains at the end of the cyclic tests.     

Self-assembly routes towards creating superconducting and magnetic arrays

Using self-assembly from colloidal suspensions of polystyrene latex spheres we prepared well-ordered templates. By electrochemical deposition of magnetic and superconducting metals in the pores of such templates highly ordered magnetic and superconducting anti-dot nano-structures with 3D architectures were created. Further developments of this template preparation method allow us to obtain dot arrays and even more complicated structures. In magnetic anti-dot arrays we observe a large increase in coercive field produced by nanoscale (50–1000nm) holes. We also find the coercive field to demonstrate an oscillatory dependence on film thickness. In magnetic dot arrays we have explored the genesis of 3D magnetic vortices and determined the critical dot size. Superconducting Pb anti-dot arrays show pronounced Little-Parks oscillations in T_c and matching effects in magnetization and magnetic susceptibility. The spherical shape of the holes results in significantly reduced pinning strength as compared to standard lithographic samples. Our results demonstrate that self-assembly template methods are emerging as a viable, low cost route to prepare sub-micron structures.     

QPSchur: A dual, active-set, Schur-complement method for large-scale and structured convex quadratic programming

We describe an active-set, dual-feasible Schur-complement method for quadratic programming (QP) with positive definite Hessians. The formulation of the QP being solved is general and flexible, and is appropriate for many different application areas. Moreover, the specialized structure of the QP is abstracted away behind a fixed KKT matrix called K_o and other problem matrices, which naturally leads to an object-oriented software implementation. Updates to the working set of active inequality constraints are facilitated using a dense Schur complement, which we expect to remain small. Here, the dual Schur complement method requires the projected Hessian to be positive definite for every working set considered by the algorithm. Therefore, this method is not appropriate for all QPs. While the Schur complement approach to linear algebra is very flexible with respect to allowing exploitation of problem structure, it is not as numerically stable as approaches using a QR factorization. However, we show that the use of fixed-precision iterative refinement helps to dramatically improve the numerical stability of this Schur complement algorithm. The use of the object-oriented QP solver implementation is demonstrated on two different application areas with specializations in each area; large-scale model predictive control (MPC) and reduced-space successive quadratic programming (with several different representations for the reduced Hessian). These results demonstrate that the QP solver can exploit application-specific structure in a computationally efficient and fairly robust manner as compared to other QP solver implementations.     

A pilot study of the efficacy of residuum lodges for managing sediment delivery to impoundment reservoirs

Residuum lodges comprise small dams constructed on feeder streams immediately before they enter a reservoir, behind which ponds form, where sediment is deposited. Despite their construction on many impoundment reservoirs (IRE) and catchwaters, little research has previously investigated their efficacy at removing sediments from feeder streams. The current pilot study has, therefore, been carried out at an IRE supplying Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK, where a residuum lodge was recently cleaned out. Sediment concentrations reaching the reservoir were reduced by up to 42% although no certain impacts were noted on the other water quality variables that were measured. Moreover, it was found that the clearance operation did not result in the release of excessive quantities of sediment into the reservoir. It was estimated that the cleared residuum lodge would take 12 years to refill. A survey of other residuum lodges in the Yorkshire region showed there to be considerable differences in their remaining capacities.