Use of gamma rays in the inspection of steel wire ropes in suspension bridges

Regularity visual inspections are performed on steel wire ropes of suspension bridges. However, because the steel wire ropes were coated with plastic materials, inspectors could not visually detect the deterioration conditions of the ropes. In this paper, radiation tests and electromagnetic testing were compared. The gamma rays used in the radiation tests were employed to develop two assessment techniques, namely the exposure time formula and sensitivity assessment of steel wire ropes. Actual tests showed that such techniques can be adopted to evaluate the defects of steel wire ropes and help engineers improve the safety of suspension bridges.     

Text plagiarism classification using syntax based linguistic features

The proposed work models document level text plagiarism detection as a binary classification problem, where the task is to distinguish a given suspicious-source document pair as plagiarized or non-plagiarized. The objective is to explore the potency of syntax based linguistic features extracted using shallow natural language processing techniques for plagiarism classification task. Shallow syntactic features, viz., part of speech tags and chunks are utilized after effective pre-processing and filtrations for pruning the irrelevant information. The work further proposes the modelling of this classification phase as an intermediate stage, which will be post candidate source retrieval and before exhaustive passage level detections. A two-phase feature selection approach is proposed, which improves the effectiveness of classification by selecting appropriate set of features as the input to machine learning based classifiers. The proposed approach is evaluated on smaller and larger test conditions using the corpus of plagiarized short answers (PSA) and plagiarism instances collected from PAN corpus respectively. Under both the test conditions, performances are evaluated using general as well as advanced classification metrics. Another main contribution of the current work is the analysis of dependencies and impact of the extracted features, upon the type and complexity of plagiarism imposed in the documents. The proposed results are compared with the two state-of-the-art approaches and they outperform the baseline approaches significantly. This in turn reflects the cogency of syntactic linguistic features in document level plagiarism classification, especially for the instances close to manual or real plagiarism scenarios.     

Video quality and system resources: Scheduling two opponents

In this article we present three key ideas which together form a flexible framework for maximizing user-perceived quality under given resources with modern video codecs (H.264). First, we present a method to predict resource usage for video decoding online. For this, we develop and discuss a video decoder model using key metadata from the video stream. Second, we explain a light-weight method for providing replacement content for a given region of a frame. We use this method for online adaptation. Third, we select a metric modeled after human image perception which we extend to quantify the consequences of available online adaptation decisions. Together, these three parts allow us, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, to maximize user-perceived quality in video playback under given resource constraints.     

Composition of mismatched web services in distributed service oriented design activities

The composition of heterogeneous web services is a key aspect of usability and applicability of web services in different application domains such as business applications, healthcare, and e-government. Current research has developed different techniques to achieve effective composition of web services. Unfortunately, they fail to ensure a perfect match in the composition of web services. This paper investigates the composition of web services and how to effectively employ web services in the design activities. Objectives of this work are twofold. Firstly, to proposes a new technique that assists users to resolve a mismatch in the composition of web services. Secondly, to implement, validate, and evaluate the proposed technique within the context of design activities thus establishing a workbench called Service Oriented Design Activities (SODA). SODA provides a web-based design infrastructure that allows loosely coupled design teams to collaborate on different services, and to enable them to resolve any mismatch between heterogeneous design services. Other anticipated advantages include interoperability of design services, improving designer capabilities, and the reduction of product development time.     

Study on thermal stability and bifurcation analysis of FCC carbon nanotube-based nanolattice as hydrogen storage materials

The thermal stability and bifurcation of a kind of carbon nanotube-based face-centered cubic (FCC) nanolattice as hydrogen storage materials are studied in this article. The dynamical model of a FCC nanolattice subjected to thermal disturbance is developed where its nonlinear stiffness is considered. The system's resonance frequency is given by the developed L-P method, and the effects of different terms on the resonance frequency are discussed. The system's abundant dynamic behaviours are revealed, which include Hopf bifurcation, limit cycle bifurcation and high-order limit cycle bifurcation in stochastic sense. Analysis results show that the FCC nanolattice's reliability and the first-passage time are almost unaffected by the outside disturbance, and the nanolattice's structures maybe play a main role in the stability and reliability.     

Enhanced hydrogen sorption properties of MgH2 when doped with mechanically alloyed amorphous Zr0·67Ni0.33 particles

In the present study, the effect of amorphous Zr_0·67Ni_0.33 additive containing nano-ZrO₂ on the hydrogen sorption kinetics and thermodynamics of Mg/MgH₂ was investigated. The amorphous Zr_0·67Ni_0.33 particles prepared by mechanical alloying of stoichiometric elements were introduced into MgH₂ powder through high-energy milling to produce a MgH₂/Zr_0·67Ni_0.33 composite. Structural and morphological analyses revealed that the nanostructuring effect of the ZrO₂ containing amorphous Zr_0·67Ni_0.33 has led to significant grain-size refinement of MgH₂ to the nanometric scale. As a result, the MgH₂/Zr_0·67Ni_0.33 composite demonstrates enhanced hydrogenation and dehydrogenation kinetics (4.0 wt%/50 s/250 °C and 5.0 wt%/4 min/325 °C, respectively). Meantime, substantially lowered enthalpies (−63.40 and 67.06 kJ/mol H₂ obtained through pressure-composition-isotherm measurements) and reduced desorption temperature (~270 °C) were observed in the composite as compared to the pure MgH₂, possibly due to the dissolution of Ni into MgH₂ lattice during ball milling.     

Model for the quantitative description of the kinetics of hardening of portland cements

A new mathematical form of a cement model is introduced for the prediction of concrete strengths obtained at various curing temperatures from the properties of the cement used. This model considers the hydrations of C₃S and C₂S as first order reactions in which the C₃A acts as catalyst. Not only does this model reproduce the strengths of various portland cements, but also it provides quantitative information about several important characteristics of the kinetics of hydration as a function of curing temperature. These characteristics are: the time of beginning of the hardening; rates of hardening; the time when the diffusion control of hydration starts; how much this strength is; and, the final strength potential of various portland cements.It is shown that the new model is well supported by experimentally obtained strength results.     

Performance optimization of hybrid hydrogen fuel cell-electric vehicles in real driving cycles

In this research study, a fuel cell-electric hybrid car is studied. This car includes an electric motor that is connected to a fuel cell and a complex which includes a battery pack and an Ultracapacitor. The assessment of this hybrid vehicle is conducted by using various driving cycles such as FTP-75 driving cycle, NEDC driving cycle and SFTP-SC03 driving cycle. Battery state of charge (SoC) and hydrogen fuel consumption are the effective parameters influencing the vehicle performance. For analysing the performance of this vehicle, an innovative computational model is considered. In this innovative computational model, an accurate control strategy is considered in order to control the power demand, staying the battery packs and the Ultracapacitor state of charge in a limited domain. Results show that in NEDC driving cycle, by means of using Ultracapacitor in this model, 3.3% reduction in fuel consumption and 20.2% decrease in the difference between initial and final State of Charge (SoC) in battery pack can be achieved. In addition, a robust regenerative braking control strategy is used in order to recover some parts of the wasted energy in braking driving modes.     

HIES: Cases for hydrogen energy and I-Energy

With the increasing demand for electricity, more and more fossil fuels are used to generate electricity which leads to energy shortage and environmental pollution. Therefore, using Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) and developing sustainable smart grid have become a common global priority: Since RESs, like solar and wind energy, are inherently unstable, hydrogen energy, as a completely clean new energy, has received widespread attention: I-Energy, which combines information and energy, is a new research direction in smart grid. Furthermore, the household electricity usage accounts for 41% of the total power consumption. Therefore, Household Intelligent Electricity System (HIES), combining hydrogen energy and i-Energy, becomes smart solutions. In this paper, we review the scientific literature for hydrogen energy and i-Energy on HIES, including recognition of electricity appliances, establishment of power consumption model, human activity analysis, smart interactive terminal, home energy management system, distributed power supply and district coordinated power utilization. Finally, we summarize the challenges and give the solutions concerning HIES, and this work can give a useful reference to new energy used model and environment protection.