Cyclic distillation technology – a mini‐review

Process intensification in distillation systems has received much attention during past decades, with the aim of increasing both energy and separation efficiency. Various techniques, such as internal heat‐integrated distillation, membrane distillation, rotating packed bed, dividing‐wall columns and reactive distillation were studied and reported in the literature. All these techniques employ the conventional continuous counter‐current contact of vapor and liquid phases. Cyclic distillation technology is based on an alternative operating mode using separate phase movement which leads to key practical advantages in both chemical and biochemical processes. This article provides a mini‐review of cyclic distillation technology. The topics covered include the working principle, design and control methods, main benefits and limitations as well as current industrial applications. Cyclic distillation can be rather easily implemented in existing columns by simply changing the internals and the operating mode, thus bringing new life to old distillation towers by significantly increasing the column throughput, reducing the energy requirements and offering better separation performance. © 2016 Society of Chemical Industry     

Further results on the disturbance response of a double integrator controlled by a saturating linear static state feedback

In this paper, we study the response to external disturbances of a double integrator with a saturating feedback. For a class of disturbances that have bounded integrals over all intervals, we show that a linear static feedback law can always be designed to ensure boundedness of the states. Moreover, boundedness can be preserved if the disturbance is biased by a small DC signal. In the special case that the disturbance is made up of a finite number of sinusoids and a small bias, any linear static feedback ensures boundedness of the states. These results are an extension of previous results by Wen, Roy, and Saberi (2008).     

Shaping stable periodic motions of inertia wheel pendulum: theory and experiment

We consider an underactuated two‐link robot called the inertia wheel pendulum. The system consists of a free planar rotational pendulum and a symmetric disk attached to its end, which is directly controlled by a DC‐motor. The goal is to create stable oscillations of the pendulum, which is not directly actuated. We exploit a recently proposed feedback‐control design strategy based on motion planning via virtual holonomic constraints. This strategy is shown to be useful for design of regulators for achieving orbitally exponentially stable oscillatory motions. The main contribution is a step‐by‐step procedure on how to achieve oscillations with pre‐specified amplitude from a given range and an arbitrary independently chosen period. The theoretical results are verified via experiments with a real hardware setup. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Inverse filtering and deconvolution

This paper studies the so‐called inverse filtering and deconvolution problem from different angles. To start with, both exact and almost deconvolution problems are formulated, and the necessary and sufficient conditions for their solvability are investigated. Exact and almost deconvolution problems seek filters that can estimate the unknown inputs of the given plant or system either exactly or almostly whatever may be the unintended or disturbance inputs such as measurement noise, external disturbances, and model uncertainties that act on the system. As such they require strong solvability conditions. To alleviate this, several optimal and suboptimal deconvolution problems are formulated and studied. These problems seek filters that can estimate the unknown inputs of the given system either exactly, almostly or optimally in the absence of unintended (disturbance) inputs, and on the other hand, in the presence of unintended (disturbance) inputs, they seek that the influence of such disturbances on the estimation error be as small as possible in a certain norm (H₂ or H_∞) sense. Both continuous‐ and discrete‐time systems are considered. For discrete‐time systems, the counter parts of all the above problems when an ??‐step delay in estimation is present are introduced and studied. Next, we focus on the exact and almost deconvolution but this time when the uncertainties in plant dynamics can be structurally modeled by a Δ‐block as a feedback element to the nominally known plant dynamics. This is done either in the presence or absence of external disturbances. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance control for interconnection of identical systems: Application to PLL network design

In this paper, the problem of the control law design for interconnected identical systems ensuring the global stability and the global performance properties is under consideration. Inspired by the decentralized control law design methodology using the dissipativity input–output approach, the problem is reduced to the problem of satisfying two conditions: (i) the condition on the interconnection and (ii) the condition on the local subsystem dynamics. Both problems are efficiently solved applying a (quasi‐) convex LMI optimization and standard H_∞ synthesis. The proposed design methodology is applied to the control law design of a synchronous PLL network. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Output regulation of discrete‐time linear plants subject to state and input constraints

Discrete‐time output regulation of linear systems with state and/or input constraints on magnitude is considered. Structural properties of linear plants are identified under which the so‐called constrained semi‐global and global output regulation problems are solvable. As in the case of continuous‐time systems, an important aspect of our development is a taxonomy of constraints showing a clear relationship between the constraint types and the output regulation results. Solvability conditions are developed for semi‐global and global output regulation problems. Appropriate regulators are constructed for problems that are solvable. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A geostatistical algorithm to reproduce lateral gradual facies transitions: Description and implementation

Valid representations of geological heterogeneity are fundamental inputs for quantitative models used in managing subsurface activities. Consequently, the simulation of realistic facies distributions is a significant aim. Realistic facies distributions are typically obtained by pixel-based, object-based or process-based methods. This work presents a pixel-based geostatistical algorithm suitable for reproducing lateral gradual facies transitions (LGFT) between two adjacent sedimentary bodies. Lateral contact (i.e. interfingering) between distinct depositional facies is a widespread geometric relationship that occurs at different scales in any depositional system. The algorithm is based on the truncation of the sum of a linear expectation trend and a random Gaussian field, and can be conditioned to well data. The implementation introduced herein also includes subroutines to clean and geometrically characterize the obtained LGFT. The cleaned sedimentary body transition provides a more appropriate and realistic facies distribution for some depositional settings. The geometric measures of the LGFT yield an intuitive measure of the morphology of the sedimentary body boundary, which can be compared to analogue data. An example of a LGFT obtained by the algorithm presented herein is also flow simulated, quantitatively demonstrating the importance of realistically reproducing them in subsurface models, if further flow-related accurate predictions are to be made.     

Surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRi) as an alternative technique for rapid and quantitative screening of small molecules, useful in drug discovery

Surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRi) is a label free technology for biomolecular interaction, which gives access to binding kinetic parameters from real time acquisition. It offers the possibility to test in a single run a large number of interactions, allowing rapid identification of the most suitable compounds toward a given biological entity. Until now, this technique has proven to be relevant for interaction between relatively large molecules (protein, antibodies, DNA) but has not been challenged yet for the screening of small molecules that can be of interested in the field of drug discovery. As a proof a principle, we have used SPRi to screen for interaction of several small molecules, referred to as G4-ligands on G-quadruplex DNA. This technology allowed to easy discrimination of the binding properties of four G4-ligands on quadruplex DNA models.     

Impact of a satellite-derived leaf area index monthly climatology in a global numerical weather prediction model

The leaf area index (LAI), defined as the one-sided green leaf area per unit ground area, is used in many numerical weather prediction (NWP) models as an indicator of the vegetation development state, which is of paramount importance to characterize land evaporation, photosynthesis, and carbon-uptake processes. LAI is often simply represented by lookup tables, dependent on the vegetation type and seasons. However, global LAI datasets derived from remote sensing observations have more recently become available. These products are based on sensors such as the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) or the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), onboard polar orbiting satellites that can cover the entire globe within typically 3 days and with a spatial resolution of the order of 1 km.

We examine the meteorological impact of satellite-derived LAI products on near-surface air temperature and humidity, which comes both from the stomatal transpiration of leaves and from the intercepted water on the surface of leaves, re-evaporating into the atmosphere.

Two distinct monthly LAI climatology datasets derived respectively from AVHRR and MODIS sensors are tested. A set of forecasts and data assimilation experiments with the integrated forecasting system of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts is performed with the monthly LAI climatology datasets as opposed to a vegetation-dependent constant LAI. The monthly LAI is shown to improve the forecasts of near-surface (screen-level) air temperature and relative humidity through its effect on evapotranspiration, with the largest impact obtained over needleleaf forests, crops, and grassland. At longer time-scales, the introduction of the monthly LAI is shown to have a positive impact on the model climate particularly during the boreal spring, where the LAI climatology has a large seasonal cycle.     

Performance of atmospheric and topographic correction methods on Landsat imagery in mountain areas

An effective removal of atmospheric and topographic effects on remote-sensing imagery is an essential preprocessing step for mapping land cover accurately in mountain areas. Various techniques that remove these effects have been proposed and consist of specific combinations of an atmospheric and a topographic correction (TC) method. However, it is possible to generate a wide range of new combined correction methods by applying alternative combinations of atmospheric and TC methods. At present, a systematic overview of the statistical performance and data input requirement of preprocessing techniques is missing. In order to assess the individual and combined impacts of atmospheric and TC methods, 15 permutations of two atmospheric and/or four TC methods were evaluated statistically and compared to the uncorrected imagery. Furthermore, results of the integrated ATCOR3 method were included. This evaluation was performed in a study area in the Romanian Carpathian mountains. Results showed that the combination of a transmittance-based atmospheric correction (AC), which corrects the effects of Rayleigh scattering and water-vapour absorption, and a pixel-based C or Minnaert TC, which account for diffuse sky irradiance, reduced the image distortions most efficiently. Overall results indicated that TC had a larger impact than AC and there was a trade-off between the statistical performance of preprocessing techniques and their data requirement. However, the normalized difference vegetation index analysis indicated that atmospheric methods resulted in a larger impact on the spectral information in bands 3 and 4.