Spring-in behavior of curved composites manufactured by Flexible Injection

This paper investigates the manufacturing distortion of curved composite parts manufactured by a new Liquid Composite Molding (LCM) process called Flexible Injection (FI). This technique uses a deformable tool to speed up the fabrication but may generate manufacturing defects when strongly curved shapes are processed. The goal of the study is to evaluate the impact of such heterogeneities on the dimensional stability of the product. Curved components were first manufactured with varying processing conditions to achieve a wide range of layup quality. The shape stability of the samples was then recorded as a function of temperature to measure the thermoelastic component of distortion and experimental results were compared with predictions made by two modeling techniques. Under certain conditions, manufacturing defects can significantly affect the distortion behavior. This suggests that a robust preforming procedure is of primary importance to produce curved parts by Flexible Injection with a high level of repeatability.     

Geometry modeling in cellular network planning

To design a cellular radio network (GSM, UMTS, WiFi …) it is indispensable today to use a radio planning software. In current commercialized tools, radio network planning is based on a numerical evaluation of a set of radio metrics, directly linked to quality of service notion, such as interference, throughput, coverage, capacity … The network configurations produced by such tools are generally faced with the human expert judgment who attaches great importance to the organizational aspects such as cells size and the topology. In other words, all those concepts related to the visual cells shape and geometry. In this article we emphasize the simplicity and the strength by which the geometrical concepts helps to bring out good network properties which are not taken into account by conventional radio criteria. On one hand, well-formed cells lead to reduce the number of handover calls, and to form transition zones between cells allowing proper completion of the handover procedure. On the other hand, cell geometry optimization produce performing network schemes in which the frequencies reuse (frequencies planning in GSM, WiFi) is simplified. We describe in this paper an original and practical modeling of the cellular geometry criteria granting the integration of this concept into the automatic planning process of mobile radio networks. The relevance of this criterion is assessed on three different levels. On a local level, we first establish the correlation between the geometric criteria and the improvement of point-by-point radio quality indicators. We secondly show geometry impact on radio frequency planning and the improving of the handover zones. Finally we analyze the impact of geometric criterion on improving indoor positioning systems.     

Bitter sweet: How sustainable is bio-ethanol production in Brazil?

While biofuels have currently been regarded as a good alternative for fossil fuels, there remain many debates on their impacts on human and environment. This paper tried to shed light on bio-ethanol in Brazil as one of the main producers and exporters in the world. The main question was to understand “how sustainable is bio-ethanol production in Brazil?” To answer, the political motives of producing bio-ethanol followed by its ecological and socio-economic impacts were discussed. The paper concluded that although bio-ethanol production in Brazil seems environmentally friendly, it might socio-economically be hazardous.     

Predictive control of Timed Event Graphs with specifications defined by P-time Event Graphs

The aim of this paper is the predictive control of Timed Event Graphs with specifications defined by P-time Event Graphs. We propose a fixed-point approach which leads to a pseudo-polynomial algorithm. As the performance of the algorithm is crucial in on-line control, we highlight an important case where the resolution of this first algorithm is efficient. The second technique is a space controller on a horizon leading to a strongly polynomial algorithm.     

Experimental study of paddy drying in a vortex chamber

The intensification of interfacial mass, heat, and momentum transfer makes vortex chambers potentially interesting for the efficient drying of paddy, allowing shorter drying times and/or more compact equipment. The presence of a shell introduces particular challenges. Intraparticle diffusion limitations are strong and may reduce the advantage from intensified interfacial mass and heat transfer and the efficiency of air usage. Furthermore, high shear and normal stresses in the fast rotating particle bed may cause damage to the paddy shell, posing problems for transport and storage. With these specific aspects in mind, the use of vortex chambers for paddy drying is experimentally evaluated.     

Computing the lowest equilibrium pose of a cable-suspended rigid body

We solve the problem of finding the lowest stable-equilibrium pose of a rigid body subjected to gravity and suspended in space by an arbitrary number of cables. Besides representing a contribution to fundamental rigid-body mechanics, this solution finds application in two areas of robotics research: underconstrained cable-driven parallel robots and cooperative towing. The proposed approach consists in globally minimizing the rigid-body potential energy. This is done by applying a branch-and-bound algorithm over the group of rotations, which is partitioned into boxes in the space of Euler-Rodrigues parameters. The lower bound on the objective is obtained through a semidefinite relaxation of the optimization problem, whereas the upper bound is obtained by solving the same problem for a fixed orientation. The resulting algorithm is applied to several examples drawn from the literature. The reported Matlab implementation converges to the lowest stable equilibrium pose generally in a few seconds for cable-robot applications. Interestingly, the proposed method is only mildly sensitive to the number of suspending cables, which is shown by solving an example with 1000 cables in two hours.