Net energy analysis of district solar heating with seasonal heat storage

A net energy analysis of district solar heating using seasonal heat storage has been performed. The use of seasonal heat storage is of great importance in northern latitudes when the solar contribution is to be increased. Different system alternatives were considered. Net energy ratios for the most favourable options were found to be between 3 and 5.     

Survival and movement of enterovirus in connection with land disposal of sludges

Coxsackievirus and tritiated water were added to municipal sludges which were placed on lysimeters containing sandy soil or clay soil. It took 23 weeks during a normal Danish winter to inactivate virus from an initial 10⁶tcid₅₀/g sludge to a not demonstrable level. Irrespective of sludge and soil type no virus was demonstrated in the leachate water. The rainfall during December–May was 300 mm.     

Ameritech's usability laboratory: from prototype to final design

. Ameritech's human factors organization was established in 1989, and from the beginning its charter assumed that user-centred design, iterative usability testing, and beginning-to-end involvement in the product-system development cycle would be central to its work. This article describes the laboratory resources that were created to support the organization. It identifies the needs of the human factors professionals using the lab that served as requirements for the design of the resources, and the interim lab that was built where implementation approaches to some of these requirements were tested and refined. It describes the final laboratory, as well as three different kinds of portable labs. The laboratory is a critical corporate resource, and while it continues to evolve as it is used, it has already demonstrated its value to the human factors organization it serves.     

A general and flexible method of problem definition in structural optimization systems

This paper describes the implementation of a general and flexible method of formulating problems of mathematical programming in structural optimization systems. The method enables the formulation and solution of problems involving scalar, integral, min/max, max/min and possibly non-differentiable user defined functions in any conceivable mix. The mathematical formulation is based on the bound formulation, and the implementation specific details involve a parser capable of interpreting and performing symbolic differentiation of the user defined functions.     

Selecting informative data for developing peptide-MHC binding predictors using a query by committee approach

Strategies for selecting informative data points for training prediction algorithms are important, particularly when data points are difficult and costly to obtain. A Query by Committee (QBC) training strategy for selecting new data points uses the disagreement between a committee of different algorithms to suggest new data points, which most rationally complement existing data, that is, they are the most informative data points. In order to evaluate this QBC approach on a real-world problem, we compared strategies for selecting new data points. We trained neural network algorithms to obtain methods to predict the binding affinity of peptides binding to the MHC class I molecule, HLA-A2. We show that the QBC strategy leads to a higher performance than a baseline strategy where new data points are selected at random from a pool of available data. Most peptides bind HLA-A2 with a low affinity, and as expected using a strategy of selecting peptides that are predicted to have high binding affinities also lead to more accurate predictors than the base line strategy. The QBC value is shown to correlate with the measured binding affinity. This demonstrates that the different predictors can easily learn if a peptide will fail to bind, but often conflict in predicting if a peptide binds. Using a carefully constructed computational setup, we demonstrate that selecting peptides with a high QBC performs better than low QBC peptides independently from binding affinity. When predictors are trained on a very limited set of data they cannot be expected to disagree in a meaningful way and we find a data limit below which the QBC strategy fails. Finally, it should be noted that data selection strategies similar to those used here might be of use in other settings in which generation of more data is a costly process.     

Material interpolation schemes for unified topology and multi-material optimization

This paper presents two multi-material interpolation schemes as direct generalizations of the well-known SIMP and RAMP material interpolation schemes originally developed for isotropic mixtures of two isotropic material phases. The new interpolation schemes provide generally applicable interpolation schemes between an arbitrary number of pre-defined materials with given (anisotropic) properties. The method relies on a large number of sparse linear constraints to enforce the selection of at most one material in each design subdomain. Topology and multi-material optimization is formulated within a unified parametrization.     

Outage probability analysis for superposition coded symmetric relaying

Superposition coded symmetric relaying is a bandwidth-efficient cooperative scheme where each source node simultaneously transmits both its own local packet and relay packet that originated at its partner by adding the modulated local and relay signals in Euclidean space. This paper investigates the power allocation and outage probability of a superposition coded symmetric relaying system with finite-constellation signaling. We first derive the mutual information (MI) metrics for the system. The derived MI metrics consist of two parts: one represents the MI conveyed by the modulated signal corresponding to its own data, and the other represents the MI conveyed by the modulated signal corresponding to its partner’s data. Using MI based effective signal-to-noise ratio mapping technique, we attain expressions for the outage probability. Furthermore, we discuss power allocation policies that minimize the outage probability. Simulation results are presented to verify the correctness of the outage probability analysis and the benefits of the power allocation.