Cumulative impact assessment on air quality from multiple open pit mines

Both open pit mine and smelter projects can have significant impacts on a variety of environmental resources. Among these, air quality of the surroundings is a key issue. Additionally, the environmental assessment of projects demands integrated approach taking in account all pollution sources. Therefore, specific focus has been put on the methodology for assessing impacts on air quality. This paper proposes an integrated index of environmental impact aiming to quantify the air quality impact of industrial operations around an urban area, in case of scarcity of in situ acquired data. This proposed pollution index is demonstrated by a case study conducted in the municipality of Congonhas, Brazil, in which contributions of five open pit mines and two smelters were studied. To achieve the pollution index, the wind rose and distances from the centroids of effective areas to the urban nucleus itself were considered, taking into account the wind projection areas from windward impacting sources on the leeward impacted urban site. The proposed index also includes the squared wind speed (proportional to the kinetic energy transferred in uplifting dust from ground surface). The method proposed is considered suitable for impact assignment for each one of the air pollution sources in the neighborhood of studied area. Some fluid dynamic aspects of airborne particulate matter are also studied by proposing a new equation for threshold saltation speed.     

The robust vehicle routing problem with time windows

This paper addresses the robust vehicle routing problem with time windows. We are motivated by a problem that arises in maritime transportation where delays are frequent and should be taken into account. Our model only allows routes that are feasible for all values of the travel times in a predetermined uncertainty polytope, which yields a robust optimization problem. We propose two new formulations for the robust problem, each based on a different robust approach. The first formulation extends the well-known resource inequalities formulation by employing adjustable robust optimization. We propose two techniques, which, using the structure of the problem, allow to reduce significantly the number of extreme points of the uncertainty polytope. The second formulation generalizes a path inequalities formulation to the uncertain context. The uncertainty appears implicitly in this formulation, so that we develop a new cutting plane technique for robust combinatorial optimization problems with complicated constraints. In particular, efficient separation procedures are discussed. We compare the two formulations on a test bed composed of maritime transportation instances. These results show that the solution times are similar for both formulations while being significantly faster than the solutions times of a layered formulation recently proposed for the problem.     

Multiple biological sequence alignment in heterogeneous multicore clusters with user-selectable task allocation policies

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is an important problem in Bioinformatics that aims to align more than two sequences in order to emphasize similarity regions. This problem is known to be NP-Hard, so heuristic methods are used to solve it. DIALIGN-TX is an iterative heuristic method for MSA that generates alignments by concatenating ungapped regions with high similarity. Usually, the first phase of MSA algorithms is parallelized by distributing several independent tasks among the nodes. Even though heterogeneous multicore clusters are becoming very common nowadays, very few task allocation policies were proposed for this type of architecture. This paper proposes an MPI/OpenMP master/slave parallel strategy to run DIALIGN-TX in heterogeneous multicore clusters, with several allocation policies. We show that an appropriate choice of the master node has great impact on the overall system performance. Also, the results obtained in a heterogeneous multicore cluster composed of 4 nodes (30 cores), with real sequence sets show that the execution time can be drastically reduced when the appropriate allocation policy is used.     

Analysis of Tsai calibration method using two- and three-dimensional calibration objects

Camera calibration is a fundamental process for both photogrammetric and computer vision. Since the arrival of the direct linear transformation method and its later revisions, new methods have been developed by several authors, such as: Tsai, Heikkilä and Zhang. Most of these have been based on the pinhole model, including distortion correction. Some of these methods, such as Tsai method, allow the use of two different techniques for determining calibration parameters: a non-coplanar calibration technique using three-dimensional (3D) calibration objects, and a coplanar technique that uses two-dimensional (2D) calibration objects. The calibration performed by observing a 3D calibration object has good accuracy, and produces very efficient results; however, the calibration object must be accurate enough and requires an elaborate configuration. In contrast, the use of 2D calibration objects yields less accurate results, is much more flexible, and does not require complex calibration objects that are costly to produce. This article compares these two different calibration procedures from the perspective of stereo measurement. Particular attention was focused on the accuracy of the calculated camera parameters, the reconstruction error in the computer image coordinates and in the world coordinate system and advanced image-processing techniques for subpixel detection during the comparison. The purpose of this work is to establish a basis and selection criteria for choosing one of these techniques for camera calibration, according to the accuracy required in each of the many applications using photogrammetric vision: robot calibration methods, trajectory generation algorithms, articulated measuring arm calibration, and photogrammetric systems.     

In situ validation of MERIS marine reflectance off the southwest Iberian Peninsula: assessment of vicarious adjustment and corrections for near-land adjacency

Water-leaving reflectance (ρ_w) data from the European Space Agency ocean colour sensor Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) was validated with in situ ρ_w between October 2008 and November 2011, off Sagres on the southwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The study area is exceptional, since Stations A, B, and C at 2, 10, and 18 km offshore are in optically deep waters at approximately 40, 100, and 160 m, respectively. These stations showed consistently similar bio-optical properties, characteristic of Case 1 waters, enabling the evaluation of adjacency effects independent of the usual co-varying inputs of coastal waters. Using the third reprocessing of MERIS with the standard MEGS 8.1 processor, four different combinations of procedures were tested to improve the calibration between MERIS products and in situ data. These combinations included no vicarious adjustment (NoVIC), vicarious adjustment (VIC), and, for mitigating the effects of land adjacency on MERIS ρ_w, the improved contrast between ocean and land (ICOL) processor (version 2.7.4) and VIC + ICOL. Out of approximately 130 potential matchups for each station, 38–77%, 74–86%, and 88–90% were achieved at Stations A, B, and C, respectively, depending on which of the four combinations were used. Analyses of ρ_w comparing these various procedures, including statistics, scatter plots, histograms, and MERIS full-resolution images, showed that the VIC procedure compared with NoVIC produced minimal changes to the calibration. For example, at the oceanic Station C, the regression slope was closer to unity at all wavelengths with NoVIC compared to VIC, whereas, with the exception of wavelengths 412 and 443 nm, the intercept, mean ratio (MR), absolute percentage difference (APD), and relative percentage difference (RPD) were better with NoVIC. The differences for MR and APD indicate that there was marginal improvement for these two bands with VIC, and an over-adjustment with RPD. ICOL also showed inconsistent results for improving the retrieval of the near-shore conditions, but under some conditions, such as ρ_w at wavelength 560 nm, the improvement was striking. VIC + ICOL showed results intermediate between those of VIC and ICOL implemented separately. In relation to other validation sites, the offshore Station C at Sagres had much in common with the Mediterranean deep water, BOUSSOLE buoy, although the matchup statistics between MERIS ρ_w and in situ ρ_w were much better for Sagres than for BOUSSOLE. Strikingly, the matchup statistics for ρ_w at Sagres were very similar to those for the Acqua Alta Oceanographic Tower (AAOT), where the AAOT showed more scatter at 412 nm, probably because of the atmospheric correction where the aerosol optical thickness is higher at the AAOT. Conversely, Sagres showed much greater scatter at 665 nm in the red as the values were generally close to the limits of detection owing to the clearer waters at Sagres compared to the more turbid waters at the AAOT.     

Customer order management in service oriented holonic manufacturing

One of the most important problems when considering the design of manufacturing systems based on SOA paradigms is the integration of shop floor devices in the business processes at the enterprise level. This paper presents the design and implementation of the Customer Order Management (COM) module based on SOA architecture in the context of holonic manufacturing systems. The COM module is integrating with SOA enabled shop floor devices using industry standards. The implementation leverages a multi agent system suited for industrial applications integrated in a SOA environment capable of dynamic BPEL workflow generation and execution. The prototype consists in a SCA application for core COM module functionality and an extension for NetLogo MAS platform for SOA integration. The COM module interacts with the MES layer using real time events handled by the BPEL process implementation in the execution stage. A web based portal frontend for the COM module has been developed to allow real time tracking of customer orders, providing data about product batch execution and individual progress of each product on the production line.     

Influence of post-curing temperature on the structure,properties, and adhesion of vinyl ester adhesive

Vinyl ester (VE) resins are widely used as thermoset adhesives in structural joints and composites, but complete curing under environmental conditions is not produced. The existing literature dealing with the effect of post-curing on the structure, viscoelastic, mechanical, and adhesion properties of VE resin is scarce. Therefore, in this study, VE resin was subjected to different post-curing temperatures (50–140 °C) for one hour, and the changes in structure and properties were assessed. The degree of cross-linking of the VE resin depended on the post-curing temperature and cure started to be completed above 100 °C, a temperature close to the glass transition temperature (115 °C) of the completely cross-linked polymer. Furthermore, gel formation in VE resin was evidenced for post-curing temperature below 100 °C. In order to fully cross-link the VE resin, post-curing at 140 °C for one hour was necessary, and it was evidenced by an increase in the glass transition temperature and in the mechanical properties; an increase in adhesion to cold rolled steel was obtained although the shear strength was lower than in the joint produced with the non-post-cured VE resin.     

Gender-based emotional stereotyping.

Previous research documents that mental health professionals' attitudes reflect the general public's stereotype of women as hyperemotional. This article reports the results of 6 studies exploring the existence of a complementary stereotype of men as hypoemotional. As predicted, counselors and college students consistently stereotyped men as hypoemotional (all ps?p?     

Influence of pH cycling and mechanical loading on the resin-dentin microtensile bond strength

The durability of adhesive interfaces is still a problem in adhesive restorations in dentistry. Laboratorial ageing methods have been proposed to predict the performance of materials, but they still require standardization. The objective of this study was to evaluate the resin-dentin microtensile bond strength of composite restorations subjected to pH cycling and different levels of mechanical loading. Resin blocks were built over a flat superficial dentin of bovine incisors (n = 40), using a three-step adhesive system. Half of the specimens were submitted to 10 cycles of pH cycling, followed by mechanical loading (0, 500,000; 1,000,000; 2,000,000 cycles – 98 N, 4 Hz). The other half was directly subjected to mechanical loading. After ageing, all groups were subjected to a microtensile bond test. Data were analyzed using two-way ANOVA and Tukey’s test (α = 0.05). The frequency of the early de-bonding was compared using the Chi-square test (α = 0.05). The statistical analysis revealed that the cross-product interaction ‘pH cycling’ vs. ‘number of mechanical loading cycles’ (p = 0.72) as well as the main factor ‘pH cycling’ (p = 0.49) was not statistically significant, and they were not able to reduce the resin–dentin bond strength values. Regarding the number of mechanical loading cycles, the groups subjected to 2,000,000 cycles showed lower bond strength values than the others (p = 0.003). The frequency of debonded specimens increased with mechanical loading. Therefore, it can be concluded that in this restorative model, at least 2,000,000 mechanical cycles are need to decrease the microtensile strength and simulate the ageing of the interface.