Efficient fall activity recognition by combining shape and motion features

Computational Visual Media - This paper presents a vision-based system for recognizing when elderly adults fall. A fall is characterized by shape deformation and high motion. We represent shape...     

Experimental investigation of the hydraulic characteristics of a counter flow wet cooling tower

Thermal and nuclear electric power plants as well as several industrial processes invariably discharge considerable energy to their surrounding by heat transfer. Although water drawn from a nearby river or lake can be employed to carry away this energy, cooling towers offer an excellent alternative particularly in locations where sufficient cooling water cannot be easily obtained from natural sources or where concern for the environment imposes some limits on the temperature at which cooling water can be returned to the surrounding. This paper concerns an experimental investigation of the hydraulic characteristics of a counter flow wet cooling tower. The tower contains a “VGA.” (Vertical Grid Apparatus) type packing which is 0.42 m high and consists of four (04) galvanised sheets having a zigzag form, between which are disposed three (03) metallic vertical grids in parallel with a cross sectional test area of 0.15 m × 0.148 m. The present investigation is focused mainly on the effect of the air and water flow rates on the hydraulic characteristics of the cooling tower, for different inlet water temperatures. The two hydrodynamic operating regimes which were observed during the air/water contact operation within the tower, namely the Pellicular Regime (PR) and the Bubble and Dispersion Regime (BDR) have enabled to distinguish two different states of pressure drop characteristics. The first regime is characterized by low pressure drop values, while in the second regime, the pressure drop values are relatively much higher than those observed in the first one. The dependence between the pressure drop characteristics and the combined heat and mass transport (air–water) through the packing inside the cooling tower is also highlighted. The obtained results indicate that this type of tower possesses relatively good hydraulic characteristics. This leads to the saving of energy.     

Thermal conductivity of nanofluids: Effect of Brownian motion of nanoparticles

The model of Xuan et al. (2003) for the thermal conductivity of nanofluids in which Brownian motion effect is added to the classical Maxwell's equation is discussed. The model is revised. Also, a different model is given and found to yield the same expression for the effective thermal conductivity after amending Xuan et al.'s model. The findings do not support the claim that Brownian motion of nanoparticles has a significant impact on thermal conductivity. Also, nanoparticles clustering is found to have a very minor effect on the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids; however, the analysis may not be appropriate to draw conclusions about the impact of clustering. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 2368–2369, 2015     

Numerical study of radiative heat transfer effects on a complex configuration of rack storage fire

This work describes the application and the performance of a new radiation model in CFD calculations for the simulation of thermal radiation transfer effects on a fire scenario. A 3D Cartesian coordinates radiative heat transfer procedure based on coupling of the FTn finite volume method (FTnFVM) with the bounded high-order resolution CLAM scheme is developed. The narrow-band based weighted-sum-of-gray-gases (NB-WSGG) model is applied to take account of nongray effects by CO₂, H₂O and soot. To treat irregular boundaries, the present model used the blocked-off-region procedure. This radiation code is implemented in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a Computational-Fluid-Dynamics-based fire model, where a the combustion is represented by means of the mixture fraction with a single step chemical reaction model and the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used to model the dissipative processes. Computational results with and without radiation effects are compared against available experimental data and quasi-steady state law correlations of in-rack storage fire, which consists a complex configuration of double tri-wall corrugated paper cartons placed onto a wood pallet. Sensibility analyses of spatial and angular grids demonstrate the improvements due to the FTnFVM and to the CLAM scheme in the configuration studied. Results show that the simulations of the flame height, the gas temperature and the gas velocity are strongly influenced by thermal radiation. Overall, simulations predicted closer profiles to the experimental results only when the nongray-sooting radiation model was incorporated and an over-prediction of the gas temperature and the flame height is found when radiation is neglected. A sensibility analysis has shown that the flame characteristics are strongly affected by the soot yield.     

On Formal Modeling and Validation of Wireless Sensor Network Protocols

Formal verification is becoming more and more important in the field of wireless networks (WSN). The general purpose formal method called Event-B is the latest incarnation of the B Method: it is a proof based approach with a formal notation and refinement technique for modeling and verifying systems. Refinement enables implementation level features to be proven correct with respect to an abstract specification of the system. This paper proposes an initial attempt to model and verify consistency and correctness of a WSN operation in its different layers. Several formal models are introduced for this type of networks. In the first time, coloured Petri net are used to elaborate network layer models, then each one will be detailed by an Event-B formalism, while proofs are carried out using the RODIN platform which is an integrated development framework for Event-B.

     

Utilization of polyethylene terephthalate waste as a carbon filler in polypropylene matrix: Investigation of mechanical,rheological, and thermal properties

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste was converted into carbon and the feasibility of utilizing it as a reinforcing filler material in a polypropylene (PP) matrix was investigated. The carbon produced by the pyrolysis of waste PET at 900°C in nitrogen atmosphere contains high carbon content (>70 wt%). PP/carbon composites were produced by melt blending process at varying loading concentrations. Scanning electron microscopy images at the fractured surface revealed that the carbon filler has better compatibility with the PP matrix. The mechanical, thermal, and rheological properties and surface morphology of the prepared composites were studied. The thermogravimetric analysis studies showed that the thermal stability of the PP/carbon composites was enhanced from 300 to 370°C with 20 wt% of carbon. At lower angular frequency (0.01 rad/s), the storage modulus (G′) of PP was 0.27 Pa and those of PP with 10 and 20 wt% carbon was 4.06 and 7.25 Pa, respectively. Among the PP/carbon composite prepared, PP with 5 wt% carbon showed the highest tensile strength of 38 MPa, greater than that of neat PP (35 MPa). The tensile modulus was enhanced from 0.9 to 1.2 GPa when the carbon content was increased from 0 to 20 wt%.     

On the role of particles distribution on damage and fatigue mechanisms

Damage and fatigue properties of steel grades are often related to particles shape and chemical composition. To understand the role of particles on damage and fatigue mechanisms numerical modelling at the microscale level can be helpful. It is shown here how forging can induce an oriented microstructure (grain flow orientation) that induces anisotropic damage and fatigue behaviour. Then a microstructure builder (DIGIMICRO) is presented to illustrate how it is possible to create a realistic microstructure in an elementary volume. Computations performed within this heterogeneous elementary volume can be used to understand the anisotropy induced by particles shape and orientation.     

Class‐based weighted fair queueing: validation and comparison by trace‐driven simulation

World‐wide web as well as proxy servers rely for their scheduling on services provided by the underlying operating system. In practice, this means that some form of first‐come‐first‐served (FCFS) scheduling is utilized. Although FCFS is a reasonable scheduling strategy for job sequences that do not show much variance, for the world‐wide web it has been shown that the requested‐object sizes do exhibit heavy tails. Under these circumstances, job scheduling on the basis of shortest‐job first (SJF) or shortest remaining processing time (SRPT) has been shown to minimize the total average waiting time. However, these methods have the disadvantage of potential job starvation. In order to avoid the problems of both FCFS and SJF we present in this paper a new scheduling approach called class‐based interleaving weighted fair queueing (CI‐WFQ). This scheduling approach exploits the specific characteristics of the job stream being served, that is, the distribution of the sizes of the objects being requested, to set its parameters such that good mean response times are obtained and starvation does not occur. In that sense, the new scheduling strategy can be made adaptive to the characteristics of the job stream being served. In this paper we compare the new scheduling approach (using trace‐driven simulations) to FCFS, SJF and the recently introduced α‐scheduling, and show that CI‐WFQ combines very good performance (as far as mean and variance of response time and blocking probability are concerned) with a scheduling complexity almost as low as for FCFS (and hence, lower than for SJF and α‐scheduling). The use of trace‐driven simulation is essential, since the special properties of the arrival process makes analytical solutions very difficult to achieve. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.