Energy expenditure of acutely ill hospitalised patients

Objective  

To measure energy expenditure of acutely ill elderly patients in hospital and following discharge in the community.     

Kinetics of sintering of unsupported platinum catalyst in nitrogen,oxygen and hydrogen atmospheres

The sintering of platinum black catalyst in different atmospheres, namely, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen was studied in the temperature range 300-600 °C. The rate of sintering was found to differ in different atmospheres; it is the least in oxygen, whereas in nitrogen the sintering seems to be much facilitated and in hydrogen the rapid de-activation becomes much more pronounced. Analysis of the kinetic results showed that the sintering process follows the first order equation in nitrogen and in vacuo, and follows the second order equation in oxygen and hydrogen atmospheres. The activation energy of the sintering process, calculated from the Arrhenius equation, was found to be 2.9, 3.7 and 13 k cal/mol in hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen respectively, as obtained from the activity measurements, and 3, 3.5 and 12.5 respectively, as obtained from the surface measurements. An interpretation was given for the high activation energy of sintering in nitrogen in view of compound formation on the surface.     

3D face verification across pose based on euler rotation and tensors

In this paper, we propose a new approach for 3D face verification based on tensor representation. Face challenges, such as illumination, expression and pose, are modeled as a multilinear algebra problem where facial images are represented as high order tensors. Particularly, to account for head pose variations, several pose scans are generated from a single depth image using Euler transformation. Multi-bloc local phase quantization (MB-LPQ) histogram features are extracted from depth face images and arranged as a third order tensor. The dimensionality of the tensor is reduced based on the higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD). HOSVD projects the input tensor in a new subspace in which the dimension of each tensor mode is reduced. To discriminate faces of different persons, we utilize the Enhanced Fisher Model (EFM). Experimental evaluations on CASIA-3D database, which contains large head pose variations, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. A verification rate of 98.60% is obtained.     

Preserving architectural decisions through architectural patterns

Architectural decisions have emerged as a means to maintain the quality of the architecture during its evolution. One of the most important decisions made by architects are those about the design approach such as the use of patterns or styles in the architecture. The structural nature of this type of decisions give them the potential to be controlled systematically. In the literature, there are some works on the automation of architectural decision violation checking. In this paper we show that these works do not allow to detect all possible architectural decision violations. To solve this problem we propose an approach which: (i) describes architectural patterns that hold the architectural decision definition, (ii) integrates architectural decisions into an architectural model and, (iii) automates the architectural decision conformance checking. The approach is implemented using Eclipse modeling framework and its accompanying technologies. Starting from well-known architectural patterns, we show that we can formalize all those related to the structural aspect. Through two evaluations, we show that our approach can be adapted to different architecture paradigms and allows to detect more violations comparing to the existing approaches.     

Real-time path planning for long-term information gathering with an aerial glider

Autonomous thermal soaring offers an opportunity to extend the flight duration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this work, we introduce the informative soaring problem, where a gliding UAV performs an information gathering mission while simultaneously replenishing energy from known thermal energy sources. We pose this problem in a way that combines convex optimisation with graph search and present four path planning algorithms with complementary characteristics. Using a target-search task as a motivating example, finite-horizon and Monte Carlo tree search methods are shown to be appropriate for situations with little prior knowledge, but suffer from either myopic planning or high computation cost in more complex scenarios. These issues are addressed by two novel tree search algorithms based on creating clusters that associate high uncertainty regions with nearby thermals. The cluster subproblems are solved independently to generate local plans, which are then linked together. Numerical simulations show that these methods find high-quality nonmyopic plans quickly. The more promising cluster-based method, which uses dynamic programming to compute a total ordering over clusters, is demonstrated in hardware tests on a UAV. Fifteen-minute plans are generated in less than four seconds, facilitating online replanning when simulated thermals are added or removed in-flight.     

Performance Improvement of Various Types of Induction-based Wind Farms Using Center-node Unified Power Flow Controller

In this paper, we propose the use of center-node unified power flow controller (C-UPFC) for improving the performance of different types of wind farms and mitigating their negative impacts on the grid. C-UPFC is considered one of the modernist members on Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS). C-stocktickerUPFC has the ability to control several system parameters; the active and reactive power at both ends of the interconnected transmission line and the voltage at the midpoint. Three different induction-based wind farms are considered; 1) Squirrel Cage Induction Generator (SCIG), 2) Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG), and 3) a combination of SCIG and DFIG turbines, i.e., Combined Wind Farm (CWF). C-stocktickerUPFC is comprehensively modelled for the first time in MATLAB Simulink, then the performance of the three wind farms is assessed with and without this device during three phase faults. Probabilistic voltage stability index (Probabilistic VSI) is used to measure the stability of the studied systems. In addition, the performance of three wind farms integrated with C-UPFC is compared with their performance when they integrated with Static synchronous compensators (STATCOM). The results show that C-UPFC has the ability to enhance the performance of wind farms during the three phase fault. C-UPFC is capable to remain the connection between SCIG wind farm and the interconnected grid during the fault. The voltage of CWF is greatly enhanced in the case of using C-UPFC. C-UPFC also improves the output powers of DFIG and CWF, especially after fault clearance.     

Shape based appearance model for kernel tracking

This paper investigates kernel based tracking using shape information. A kernel based tracker typically models an object with a primitive geometric shape, and then estimates the object state by fitting the kernel such that the appearance model is optimized. Most of the appearance models in kernel based tracking utilize the textural information within the kernel, although a few of them also make use of the gradient information along the kernel boundary. Interestingly, shape information of a general form has never been fully exploited in kernel tracking, despite the fact that shape has been widely used in silhouette tracking at the cost of intensive computation. In this paper, we propose an original way to incorporate shape knowledge into the appearance model of kernel based trackers while preserving their computational advantage versus silhouette based trackers. Experimental results demonstrate that kernel tracking is strongly improved by exploiting the proposed shape cue through comparisons to both kernel and silhouette trackers.     

Hardened alite pastes of various porosities. I. Degree of hydration,compressive strength and total porosity

The alite used in this investigation was synthesised from the stoichiometric mixture at 1550°C. The hardened alite pastes were made using initial water/alite ratios of 0.20, 0.30, 0.45 and 0.60. Degree of hydration, compressive strength and total porosity were estimated at various hydration time intervals of 0.5 h, 2 h, 6 h, 1 day, 3 days, 7 days and 28 days. A meaningful relation between compressive strength and water/alite ratio was established at constant values of degree of hydration, total porosity and Powers' gel-space ratio.     

Hardened slag–cement pastes of various porosities. II. Water and nitrogen adsorption

Specific surface areas and pore structure studies were carried out on hardened slag-cement pastes. Water and nitrogen adsorption isotherms were measured, and the derived parameters were critically compared. Nitrogen areas and total pore volumes were found to be much smaller than water values. For water vapour adsorption, the specific surface areas derived from the adsorption branches are found to be lower than those derived from the resorption isotherms. Some evidence is presented in this paper that the surface area values derived along the adsorption branches are underestimated values, and that the resorption values might be considered to be nearer to the actual areas of the various pastes. Calculations of the hydraulic radii refute the hypothesis that the areas inaccessible to nitrogen are interlayer areas.