An analysis of contributing mining factors in coal workers' pneumoconiosis prevalence in the United States coal mines,1986-2018

In the United States,an unexpected and severe increase in coal miners' lung diseases in the late 1990s prompted researchers to investigate the causes of the dis...     

Texture classification using windowed Fourier filters

We define a distance between textures for texture classification from texture features based on windowed Fourier filters. The definition of the distance relies on an interpretation of our texture attributes in terms of spectral density when the texture can be considered as a Gaussian random field. The distance between textures is then defined as a symmetrized Kullback distance which is a simple function of the attributes and does not require any normalization. An experimental analysis using Gabor filters, and in particular a comparison to quadratic distances, shows the efficiency and robustness of the method     

Fabrication of a highly selective and sensitive Gd(III)-PVC membrane sensor based on N-(2-pyridyl)-N′-(4-nitrophenyl)thiourea

In this work we report the development of a highly selective and sensitive Gd(III) membrane based on N-(2-pyridyl)-N′-(4-nitrophenyl)thiourea (PyTu4NO₂) as an excellent neutral ion carrier. The Gd(III) sensor exhibits a Nernstian slope of 19.95 ± 0.3 mV per decade over the concentration range of 3.0 × 10⁻⁷ to 1.0 × 10⁻¹ M, and a detection limit of 3.0 × 10⁻⁷ M of Gd(III) ions. The potentiometric response of the sensor is independent of the solution pH in the range of 4.0–9.0. It manifests advantages of low detection limit, fast response time (10 s), and most significantly, very good selectivity with respect to a number of lanthanide ions (La, Ce, Sm, and Eu ions). It can be used at least for a period of 8 weeks without any significant divergences in its potential response. To assess its analytical applicability the proposed Gd(III) sensor was successfully applied as an indicator electrode in the titration of Gd(III) ion solutions with EDTA and for the determination of the fluoride ion in two mouth wash preparations. It was also used for the direct monitoring of Gd(III) ions in binary mixtures.     

Providing power reserve for secondary grid frequency regulation of offshore wind farms through yaw control

The ability to significantly contribute to the frequency regulation and provide valuable ancillary services to the transmission system operator (TSO) is one of the present wind farm (WF) challenges, due to the limitations of wind speed forecasting and insufficient power reserve in certain operating conditions notably. In this work, the feasibility of WFs to participate in frequency restoration reserve (FRR) through yaw control is assessed. To this end, a distributed yaw optimization method is developed to evaluate the power gain achieved by yaw redirection based on wind turbine cooperation and compared with a greedy approach. The method relies on a static wake model whose parameters are estimated in a systematic way from simulation data generated with FAST.Farm. Through a case study based on a scaled version of the Belgian Mermaid offshore WF, it is demonstrated that the requirements of the TSO are fulfilled both in terms of response time and level of power reserve for most wind directions. The assessment is limited to wind speeds below the rated speed of the considered wind turbines.     

Feature fusion based on joint sparse representations and wavelets for multiview classification

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Feature-level-based fusion has attracted much interest. Generally, a dataset can be created in different views, features, or modalities. To improve the...