TSTL: the template scripting testing language

International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer - A test harness, in automated test generation, defines the set of valid tests for a system, as well as their correctness properties....     

Smart-MEMS based inertial measurement units: gyro-free approach to improve the grade

Microsystem Technologies - Inertial measurement units (IMU) are essentially a combination of acceleration and rotation rate sensors, generating position and attitude information. For tactical and...     

Experimental and thermal analysis of energy efficient novel design wet cooling towers

Waste heat is generally dissipated from process water to atmospheric air in cooling towers. In the present study, a novel design is used to extract more amount of heat without any additional energy input by incorporating secondary ambient air in an induced draft wet cooling tower. In addition, more fresh air is induced in the tower from the rain zone, which increases the effectiveness at any value of the water to air flow rate (L/G ratio). Moreover, tower characteristics, range, and evaporation loss were also increased due to the novel design. It is noteworthy that secondary fresh air increases effectiveness, heat rejection, and tower characteristics by 10.12%, 19.65%, and 26.11%, respectively, and decreases approach by 16.32% at 0.55 L/G ratio, 44°C inlet water temperature, 29.7°C dry bulb temperature, and 18.4°C inlet air wet bulb temperature.     

Blade‐resolved simulations of a model wind turbine: effect of temporal convergence

Simulations of a model wind turbine at various tip‐speed‐ratios were carried out using Tenasi, a node‐centered, finite volume unstructured flow solver. The simulations included the tunnel walls, tower, nacelle, hub and the blades. The effect of temporal convergence on the predicted thrust and power coefficients is evaluated and guidelines for best practices are established. The results presented here are for tip‐speed‐ratios of 3, 6 and 10, with 6 being the design point. All simulations were carried out at a freestream velocity of 10 m s^?1 with an incoming boundary layer present and the wind turbine RPM was varied to achieve the desired tip‐speed‐ratio. The performance of three turbulence models is evaluated. The models include a one‐equation model (Spalart–Allmaras), a two‐equation model (Menter SST) and the DES version of the Menter SST. Turbine performance as well as wake data at various locations is compared to experiment. All the turbulence models performed well in terms of predicting power and thrust coefficients. The DES model was significantly better than the other two turbulence models for predicting the mean and fluctuating components of the velocity in the wake. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RFID-enabled item-level product information revelation

We consider a homogeneous product market and the incentive for oligopolists to share item-level product information with their customers. Enabled by Radio Frequency Identification technology, each firm has the option to record and reveal item-level information of a proportion of its products. We consider a two-stage game where each firm first decides its production plan and then determines its level of information revelation. With a constant clearance discount rate, we derive pure strategy equilibria that are subgame perfect and demonstrate that complete information sharing is the unique Nash equilibrium for the game when the common demand is volatile and that no information revelation is the unique Nash equilibrium when demand is not volatile. Furthermore, we show that the Nash equilibrium is the same with a decreasing clearance discount rate and that neither complete information revelation nor zero information revelation is consistent with an equilibrium with an increasing discount rate. Results are similar in a duopoly non-homogeneous product market scenario.     

Thermodynamic models for vapor-liquid equilibria of nitrogen + oxygen + carbon dioxide at low temperatures

For the design and optimization of CO₂ recovery from alcoholic fermentation processes by distillation, models for vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) are needed. Two such thermodynamic models, the Peng-Robinson equation of state (EOS) and a model based on Henry’s law constants, are proposed for the ternary mixture N₂ + O₂ + CO₂. Pure substance parameters of the Peng-Robinson EOS are taken from the literature, whereas the binary parameters of the Van der Waals one-fluid mixing rule are adjusted to experimental binary VLE data. The Peng-Robinson EOS describes both binary and ternary experimental data well, except at high pressures approaching the critical region. A molecular model is validated by simulation using binary and ternary experimental VLE data. On the basis of this model, the Henry’s law constants of N₂ and O₂ in CO₂ are predicted by molecular simulation. An easy-to-use thermodynamic model, based on those Henry’s law constants, is developed to reliably describe the VLE in the CO₂-rich region.     

Study of the microbial diversity and antimicrobial properties of Irish edible brown seaweeds

Brown Irish edible seaweeds, Himanthalia elongata, Laminaria sachharina and Laminaria digitata, were evaluated for the microbiota in raw and heat processed form. Raw seaweeds showed complete absence of aerobic mesophiles, halophiles, yeasts and molds. However, heating at 85 °C for 15 min resulted in spore germination. Bacterial counts as high as 10⁷ were observed for aerobic mesophiles and halophiles. Heating above 95 °C for 15 min resulted in complete inactivation of surface microflora. Bacteria belonging to Bacillaceae, Paenibacillaceae, Moraxellaceae and Enterobacteriaceae family were identified by 16S rRNA sequencing. In vitro antimicrobial activity of the methanolic extracts of the seaweed on food pathogenic and food spoilage bacteria were also evaluated. The seaweeds in their raw state had almost 100% inhibition against Listeria monocytogenes; 98% and 93% inhibition was achieved against Pseudomonas aeruginosa by H. elongata and L. saccharina extracts, respectively. Heating the seaweeds resulted in the reduction of antimicrobial activity as compared to raw. The effect was more pronounced against Gram negative bacteria.     

Diffusion Behavior of Zn During Reflow of Sn-9Zn Solder on Ni/Cu Substrate

Reflow behavior of Sn-Zn solder on Ni/Cu substrate was investigated in an infrared (IR) reflow furnace using different heating rates from 180 °C/min to 36 °C/min. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDX) studies of the reflowed samples showed increased diffusion of Zn from the solder to the intermetallic compound (IMC) layer with a decrease in heating rate. Higher interfacial activity and affinity of the Zn in the formation of the IMC with the lowering of the heating rate were further demonstrated by electron probe microanalyzer (EPMA) results. The Zn diffusion behavior was related to its higher reactivity and smaller size in comparison with Sn, phase separation during heating, and affinity of Zn to form Ni-Sn-Zn and Ni-Zn intermetallic compounds.     

Automatic content-based retrieval and semantic classification of video content

The problem of video classification can be viewed as discovering the signature patterns in the elemental features of a video class. In order to solve this problem, a large and diverse set of video features is proposed in this paper. The contributions of the paper further lie in dealing with high-dimensionality induced by the feature space and in presenting an algorithm based on two-phase grid searching for automatic parameter selection for support vector machine (SVM). The framework thus is directed to bridge the gap between low-level features and semantic video classes. The experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art learning tools on more than 5000 video segments show the effectiveness of our approach.