Influence of the composition of the binder and the carbonation on the zeta potential values of hardened cementitious materials

Electroosmotic experiments have been carried out on eight different mixes of hardened cementitious matrixes including concrete, mortar and pastes, different types of binders, carbonated and non-carbonated specimens and different test conditions. From these trials, the zeta potential values have been determined and the optimum experimental parameters and devices have been established. In addition, the influence of the composition of the binder on the zeta potential has been quantified indicating that higher amounts of Al₂O₃ in the binder lead to higher positive values of zeta potential, while the SiO₂ acts just on the opposite side. This has been explained in terms of the different i.e.p. (isoelectric point) for both oxides. Concerning the influence of carbonation, it increases the absolute value of the zeta potential toward more negative values; this behaviour has been attributed to the influence of the specifically adsorbed Ca²⁺ in the negative sites of the surface in the non-carbonated samples.     

Static output feedback control via PDE boundary and ODE measurements in linear cascaded ODE–beam systems

This paper addresses the problem of feedback control design for a class of linear cascaded ordinary differential equation (ODE)–partial differential equation (PDE) systems via a boundary interconnection, where the ODE system is linear time-invariant and the PDE system is described by an Euler–Bernoulli beam (EBB) equation with variable coefficients. The objective of this paper is to design a static output feedback (SOF) controller via EBB boundary and ODE measurements such that the resulting closed-loop cascaded system is exponentially stable. The Lyapunov’s direct method is employed to derive the stabilization condition for the cascaded ODE–beam system, which is provided in terms of a set of bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs). Furthermore, in order to compute the gain matrices of SOF controllers, a two-step procedure is presented to solve the BMI feasibility problem via the existing linear matrix inequality (LMI) optimization techniques. Finally, the numerical simulation is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.     

Decentralized observers with consensus filters for distributed discrete-time linear systems

This paper presents a decentralized observer with a consensus filter for the state observation of discrete-time linear distributed systems. Each agent in the distributed system has an observer with a model of the plant that utilizes the set of locally available measurements, which may not make the full plant state detectable. This lack of detectability is overcome by utilizing a consensus filter that blends the state estimate of each agent with its neighbors’ estimates. It is proven that the state estimates of the proposed observer exponentially converge to the actual plant states under arbitrarily changing, but connected, communication and pseudo-connected sensing graph topologies. Except these connectivity properties, full knowledge of the sensing and communication graphs is not needed at the design time. As a byproduct, we obtained a result on the location of eigenvalues, i.e., the spectrum, of the Laplacian for a family of graphs with self-loops.     

结合矩阵分解的混合型社会化推荐算法

推荐系统是用来解决当今时代信息过载的重要工具。随着在线社交网络的出现和普及,一些基于网络推荐算法研究的出现,已经引起研究者的广泛关注。信任是社会网络中的重要信息之一,通常用来改进基于社交网络的推荐系统,然而,大多数信任感知的推荐系统忽略了用户有不同行为偏好在不同的兴趣域;本文不仅考虑了用户间特定域信任网络,并且结合推荐项目之间特征属性信息,提出了一种新型社会化推荐算法(H-PMF)。实验表明,H-PMF算法在评分误差和推荐精度上都取得了更好的效果。     

Dynamics of fluid circulation in coupled free and heterogeneous porous domains

Fluid flow in coupled free and porous domain, particularly when the porous medium is heterogeneous, is encountered in many hydro-environmental conditions, e.g., leakage from underground pipe, combined groundwater lake-subsurface interactions. One of the most difficult problems in the study of coupled flow behaviour has been the development of a universally applicable modelling scheme for combining the flow regimes. This is because the free/porous interfacial properties (e.g., shear-stress; velocity slip) that govern the coupled flow behaviour are difficult to determine experimentally under hydro-environmental conditions. On the other hand, the implications of various forms of heterogeneity in the porous media properties can be very different on the fluid-flow behaviour. Difficulties may also arise in direct coupling of the model equations that govern the fluid flow in the individual regions (e.g., Navier-Stokes for free-flow region and the Darcy's equation for the porous flow region). Consequently, models of coupled free and porous flow for hydro-environmental conditions are not very well developed at the moment. While there are some indications that fluids in coupled free and porous domains may circulate (i.e., development of flow cells), there is a lack of appropriate 3D analysis on how heterogeneities in porous media may affect such flow patterns. In this paper, we aim to analyse how porous media heterogeneity affects the dynamics of flow circulation in the porous side of a coupled free and porous domain. For this purpose, we analyse flow patterns in several model domains made up of two porous layers with differing permeabilities. The governing model equations are discretised and solved using the standard finite volume method on a staggered cell-centred mesh. The temporal discretisation is done using the explicit method. An in-house graphical user interface (GUI) has been created specifically to aid in the visualisation of otherwise complex flow patterns. The GUI contains many post-processing options and provides a comprehensive tool for the analysis of hydrodynamics and contaminant motion (not discussed in this paper) in coupled free and porous flow domains. This GUI is described in this paper briefly. The effects of altering the aspect ratio (i.e., multi-scale) of the domain on the coupled flow pattern have also been discussed.     

自适应天线匹配低频RFID读写器设计

在工业现场、野外甚至水中,RFID读写器天线电特性参数将发生改变,导致阻抗不匹配和发射功率大幅下降,最终降低RFID读写器读写范围和效率。为了解决这个问题,构建了一个自适应天线匹配RFID读写器系统,该系统在基本读写器系统上增加了自适应电容匹配矩阵、正弦波均方根检测和模/数转换器。该系统通过依次配置电容矩阵,扫描天线发射信号幅度,检测出最佳匹配电容,实现天线阻抗的最佳匹配。通过实验表明,在一定范围内该系统能够实现自动的阻抗匹配,获取最大发射功率。     

Personalized identification of abdominal wall hernia meshes on computed tomography

An abdominal wall hernia is a protrusion of the intestine through an opening or area of weakness in the abdominal wall. Correct pre-operative identification of abdominal wall hernia meshes could help surgeons adjust the surgical plan to meet the expected difficulty and morbidity of operating through or removing the previous mesh. First, we present herein for the first time the application of image analysis for automated identification of hernia meshes. Second, we discuss the novel development of a new entropy-based image texture feature using geostatistics and indicator kriging. Third, we seek to enhance the hernia mesh identification by combining the new texture feature with the gray-level co-occurrence matrix feature of the image. The two features can characterize complementary information of anatomic details of the abdominal hernia wall and its mesh on computed tomography. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed study. The new computational tool has potential for personalized mesh identification which can assist surgeons in the diagnosis and repair of complex abdominal wall hernias.     

A virtual actuator and sensor approach for fault tolerant control of LPV systems

In this paper, a fault tolerant control (FTC) strategy using virtual actuators and sensors for linear parameter varying (LPV) systems is proposed. The main idea of this FTC method, initially developed for LTI systems, is to reconfigure the control loop such that the nominal controller could still be used without need of retuning it. The plant with the faulty actuator/sensor is modified adding the virtual actuator/sensor block that masks the actuator/sensor fault. The suggested technique is an active FTC strategy that reconfigures the virtual actuator/sensor on-line taking into account faults and operating point changes. The stability of the reconfigured control loop is guaranteed if the faulty plant is stabilizable/detectable. The LPV virtual actuator/sensor is designed using polytopic LPV techniques and linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). A two-tank system simulator is used to assess the performance of the proposed method. In particular, it is shown that the application of the proposed technique results in an improvement, in terms of performance, with respect to the LTI counterpart.     

压缩感知中高斯矩阵的优化研究

为了优化高斯矩阵,对部分哈达玛矩阵与高斯矩阵的统计学参数作了对比分析,确定了导致部分哈达玛矩阵信号重构能力好的主要因素,并提出了高斯矩阵优化算法.验证了优化算法对不同规模高斯矩阵的通用性和有效性,确定了优化矩阵对各种稀疏信号重构算法的适用性.最后对优化矩阵的性能作了初步的理论和实验分析,优化矩阵的信号重构能力可达到、甚至超过哈达玛矩阵.研究成果为测量矩阵的分析、设计和优化提供了新的思路和方法.