A risk approach to the management of boiler tube thinning

A large set of industrial thickness inspection data covering four boiler units of a power station over a period of five years was made available to the authors. The measurements were made in regions of the boiler where corrosion/erosion was the major cause of failure of the boiler tubes. There were over 40,000 separately measured data points in the data and all were collected with some care and expense.In the development of maintenance strategies for equipment, this type of data is typical of the data that must be collected and assessed. This data thus represents an opportunity to evaluate the ability to generate a useful risk approach to the management of the tubing.An important example of a risk-based approach is the American Petroleum Institute (API) Risk Based Inspection (“RBI”), API 581. A variety of problems were encountered applying this to boiler tubes. The problems include irrelevant API 581 corrosion rate tables, lack of information on how to analyse inspection data, difficulty of dealing with multiple inspection categories and lack of suitable direction for programming inspection intervals.     

Organochlorine Contaminants of Wintering Ducks Foraging on Detroit River Sediments

Organochlorine analysis was performed on carcasses of 13 diving ducks from a 1981 wintering population that foraged on contaminated sediments in the lower Detroit River. Mean total PCB concentrations were 10 mg/kg for seven lesser scaups (Aythya affinis), 11 mg/kg for three greater scaups (A. marila), and 7.6 mg/kg for three goldeneyes (Bucephala clangula). Highest mean levels of other residues were measured for hexachlorobenzene (1.7 mg/kg) in goldeneyes, and transnonachlor (0.33 mg/kg) and 4,4’-DDE (1.3 mg/kg) in greater scaup. Quantitative analysis of 72 PCB congeners also was applied to water, seston, sediment, benthie oligochaetes, and carp from the same site. Principal congeners in most of the samples included some of the more toxic and persistent PCBs. Results of a multivariate analysis indicated that ratios of more conservative to less conservative PCBs did not vary significantly among ducks (α = .05), but differed from those in carp, oligochaetes, and sediment. For the February through March period of fat mobilization, concentrations of total PCB in lipid were inversely correlated with percent lipid (r = 0.76) in ducks. The percentage of conservative PCBs increased slightly. The distribution and partitioning of organochlorines, including toxic PCB congeners, varied considerably within this water column-sediment-fauna ecosystem. Estimates of toxic exposure based on total PCB values may be unreliable.     

Some spatial equilibria in facility investment under uncertain demand

This paper describes the spatial distribution of customer demand, supply of customer services and facility investment, as the outcome of a three-level game-like interaction between customers (e.g., shoppers), suppliers (e.g., retailers) and developers (e.g., landlords). Treating both the suppliers and developers at each centre as competitors, oligopolistic equilibria of the Nash-Stackelberg type are developed, and conditions for their existence and uniqueness established. Uncertain customer demand is specified in probabilistic terms, representing the suppliers' perception of expected customer behaviour.     

Stand and deliver

Poor service provision within the global software services industryis contributing to a profound rethink in many firms that offerinformation and technology services. Recent press reports suggestthat all but a few software providers are willing to committhe organisation and its resources to high volume high riskservice provision.     

A Sketch-Based Interface for Clothing Virtual Characters

This interactive system for garment creation determines a garment's shape and how the character wears it based on a user-drawn sketch. The system then uses distances between the 2D garment silhouette and the character model to infer remaining distance variations in 3D     

Nanoindentation mapping of mechanical properties of cement paste and natural rocks

This paper reports a study to assess nanoindentation mapping of mechanical properties of cement paste and natural rocks. Initial work seems to show that mechanical property mapping by nanoindentation is feasible and can be related to microscopic information. Further work is however required on the effect of indent size and spacing. Such a testing technique can be very useful for materials with different phases to study the intrinsic properties of each component, and also the interaction and properties of the interfacial regions of different phases. The values of Young's modulus and hardness of the individual mineral phases were also determined by statistically analysing a large number of experimental data.     

All the Way Through: Testing for Authorship in Different Frequency Strata

This article describes the operation of two new tests of authorshipand offers some results. Both tests rely on controlled contrastsof word-frequency and both exclude the very common words, whichhave been put to such good use in recent years. One test treatsof words used with some consistency by a target-author but moresporadically by others. The second treats of words used sporadicallyby the target-author but not by most others. (The inclusionof words that some other authors use avoids the strict constraintthat has impoverished this form of evidence.) In suitable cases,both tests prove very accurate. The fact that evidence of authorshipcan be detected in these three distinct frequency-strata helpsto explain why such tests should work at all and so encouragesthe development of even better ones.