Numerical study of elliptical cracks in cylinders with a thickness transition

The paper deals with elliptical cracks in a cylinder with a thickness transition. This structure is an assembly of two cylinders of thickness t and t₂ (t<t₂). In the transition zone, the thickness varies linearly. The purpose is to check whether tabulated data used for SIF calculations in a cylinder of uniform thickness t can be used for the cylinder with a thickness transition. A comparative study is made on the effect of a crack in a cylinder with a thickness transition and in a uniform thickness cylinder. Loads considered are pure tensile stress and bending moment. A numerical analysis was performed considering elastic behaviour at the crack tip. A crack mesh was designed and validated for 3D models. The results show that SIF calculations in the transition assuming a uniform thickness cylinder are conservative but not precise. The comparative study shows that the cylinder with a thickness transition is more vulnerable to a defect.     

意大利移动市场考察报告

截至2002年4月底,意大利的移动通信用户数已超过5200万,普及率高达88%,用户规模仅次于德国,是欧洲第二大移动通信市场。目前,意大利共有4家GSM移动运营商:TIM,OmnitelVodafone,Wind和Blu,分别占有市场份额的46.7%、34.4%、15.3%和3.6%。意大利的运营商早在1998年就开始了移动互联网业务的市场培育工作,现在,移动互联网业务收入在意大利各运营商的总业务收入中已经占到10%～15%的比例。意大利的3G牌照是通过拍卖的方式颁发,OmnitelVodafone,TIM,Wind,IPSE2000,Wind,和H3G五家运营商获得了3G执照。ReportofStudyTouro     

Adaptive quality of service‐based routing approaches: development of neuro‐dynamic state‐dependent reinforcement learning algorithms

In this paper, we propose two adaptive routing algorithms based on reinforcement learning. In the first algorithm, we have used a neural network to approximate the reinforcement signal, allowing the learner to take into account various parameters such as local queue size, for distance estimation. Moreover, each router uses an online learning module to optimize the path in terms of average packet delivery time, by taking into account the waiting queue states of neighbouring routers. In the second algorithm, the exploration of paths is limited to N‐best non‐loop paths in terms of hops number (number of routers in a path), leading to a substantial reduction of convergence time. The performances of the proposed algorithms are evaluated experimentally with OPNET simulator for different levels of traffic's load and compared with standard shortest‐path and Q‐routing algorithms. Our approach proves superior to classical algorithms and is able to route efficiently even when the network load varies in an irregular manner. We also tested our approach on a large network topology to proof its scalability and adaptability. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integration of GPU Computing in a Software Radio Environment

This article studies the integration of Graphics Processing Units in a Software Defined Radio environment. Two main solutions are considered, based on two levels of granularity for the parallelization. First, a fine grain parallelism solution, which is an extension of the existing solutions but adapted to operations of large computational complexity, is proposed. Second, an original solution based on coarse grain approach allowing better usage of the computing resources and easier parallelism extraction is described. For both solutions, scheduling and communication design as well as implementation are given, along with integration in the environment. Both solutions have been implemented and compared on different operations types and on multi-operations sequences. It is clearly shown that using the second solution can provide performance improvement, while the first one is not adapted to SDR applications.     

A comparison framework for breathing motion estimation methods from 4-D imaging

Motion estimation is an important issue in radiation therapy of moving organs. In particular, motion estimates from 4-D imaging can be used to compute the distribution of an absorbed dose during the therapeutic irradiation. We propose a strategy and criteria incorporating spatiotemporal information to evaluate the accuracy of model-based methods capturing breathing motion from 4-D CT images. This evaluation relies on the identification and tracking of landmarks on the 4-D CT images by medical experts. Three different experts selected more than 500 landmarks within 4-D CT images of lungs for three patients. Landmark tracking was performed at four instants of the expiration phase. Two metrics are proposed to evaluate the tracking performance of motion-estimation models. The first metric cumulates over the four instants the errors on landmark location. The second metric integrates the error over a time interval according to an a priori breathing model for the landmark spatiotemporal trajectory. This latter metric better takes into account the dynamics of the motion. A second aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of considering several phases of the respiratory cycle as compared to using only the extreme phases (end-inspiration and end-expiration). The accuracy of three motion estimation models (two image registration-based methods and a biomechanical method) is compared through the proposed metrics and statistical tools. This paper points out the interest of taking into account more frames for reliably tracking the respiratory motion.     

Joint Estimation of Location and Scatter in Complex Elliptically Symmetric Distributions

The joint estimation of the location vector and the shape matrix of a set of independent and identically Complex Elliptically Symmetric (CES) distributed observations is investigated from both the theoretical and computational viewpoints. This joint estimation problem is framed in the original context of semiparametric models allowing us to handle the (generally unknown) density generator as an infinite-dimensional nuisance parameter. In the first part of the paper, a computationally efficient and memory saving implementation of the robust and semiparmaetric efficient R-estimator for shape matrices is derived. Building upon this result, in the second part, a joint estimator, relying on the Tyler’s M-estimator of location and on the R-estimator of shape matrix, is proposed and its Mean Squared Error (MSE) performance compared with the Semiparametric Cramér-Rao Bound (SCRB).

     

Onde de frange pour une discontinuité de courbure

The fringe wave is defined, following the physical theory of diffraction, as the difference between the total field and the field radiated by the physical optics currents. This concept is generalised to the case of the discontinuity in the curvature. It is necessary, to get a finite result for normal incidence, to define the fringe wave as the difference between the total field and the field radiated by the two first terms of the current given by the Luneburg-Kline development. Explicit formulas are given, for the perfectly conducting and for the impedance boundary condition cases.     

Ultrasound elastography based on multiscale estimations of regularized displacement fields

Elasticity imaging is based on the measurements of local tissue deformation. The approach to ultrasound elasticity imaging presented in this paper relies on the estimation of dense displacement fields by a coarse-to-fine minimization of an energy function that combines constraints of conservation of echo amplitude and displacement field continuity. The multiscale optimization scheme presents several characteristics aimed at improving and accelerating the convergence of the minimization process. This includes the nonregularized initialization at the coarsest resolution and the use of adaptive configuration spaces. Parameters of the energy model and optimization were adjusted using data obtained from a tissue-like phantom material. Elasticity images from normal in vivo breast tissue were subsequently obtained with these parameters. Introducing a smoothness constraint into motion field estimation helped solve ambiguities due to incoherent motion, leading to elastograms less degraded by decorrelation noise than the ones obtained from correlation-based techniques.