Insulating safety analysis of the hot-line sweeping robot

This paper presents a method of calculating the insulating safety distances for hot-line working robots at high voltage when dielectric is adulterated with conducts. Also, finite element method is adopted to calculate the electric field strength to find whether it is beyond the critical. The above methods have been applied to analyze the insulating safety of the robot for hot-line sweeping post insulators in a 220 KV substation. They have also been testified by experimentations.     

Stress analysis of pin-loaded woven-glass fiber reinforced epoxy laminate conveying chain components

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of various loading conditions on the stress of a pin-loaded woven-glass fiber reinforced epoxy laminate conveying chain component. A numerical and experimental study was carried out to determine the stress distribution of composite conveying chain components used to convey loads. For the experimental study, an apparatus was developed to simulate chain components in real motion. Two different working conditions of the chain component were investigated. The first condition represents the movement of the chain components without loading. In the second condition, the chain component touches and moves the load. The commercial finite element package ANSYS was used to perform the numerical analysis using a three dimensional eight-noded layered structural solid elements. Chain tensile forces were loaded through pins and chosen as 250, 500, 750, 1000 and 1250 N for the two conditions of chain components. Experimental and numerical studies were compared and discussed for two conditions and five different tensile forces. A good agreement between experimental results and numerical predictions is obtained.     

Simulation of macroscopic material behavior for uniaxial fiber-matrix composites, using a DAE-approach

The macroscopic deformation behavior of a fiber-reinforced aluminum-boron composite is investigated. Different periodic and random arrangements of the microstructure are considered with macroscopic hardening behavior due to the evolution of plastic zones on the microscale being taken into account.

For the solution of the initial boundary value problem, a non-standard algorithm is applied. It consists of the direct solution of the whole set of equations, treating all variables as global quantities. Together with a higher order time integration method (BDF2), an automatic step size control is used in the FEM calculations.     

Modelling and experimental investigation of devolatilizing wood in a fluidized bed combustor

A two-dimensional model is developed for the determination of devolatilization time and char yield of cylindrical wood particles in a bubbling fluidized bed combustor. By using the concept of shape factor, the model is extended to particles of cuboid shape. The model prediction of the devolatilization time agrees with the measured data (present and those reported in the literature) for cylindrical and cuboidal shaped particles within ±20% while the char yield is predicted within ±17%. Influence of some important parameters namely, thermal diffusivity, external heat transfer coefficient and shrinkage, on the devolatilization time and char yield are studied. Thermal diffusivity shows noticeable influence on devolatilization time. The external heat transfer coefficient shows little influence beyond a value of 300 W/(m² K). However particle shrinkage shows negligible effect on the devolatilization time but has a significant influence on the char yield.     

FEM model of the ohmic resistance of IP-SOFCs

In the present work, the ohmic resistance of an integrated planar-SOFC (IP-SOFC) has been evaluated by developing a model whose equations have been solved numerically through an FEM method. The model allows to estimate the distribution of voltage and current density in the cell. A comparison between simulated and experimental data of area specific resistance is reported, which shows satisfactory agreement. The mathematical model has also been used to carry out some parametric studies for optimisation purposes. Indeed, a reduction in cell pitch length and an increase in electrode thickness are predicted to lead to a reduction in ohmic losses in IP-SOFCs.     

Influence of Membrane Stresses on Postbuckling of Rectangular Plates Using a Nonlinear Elastic 3-D Cosserat Brick Element

This paper has two main objectives. The first is to examine the influence of membrane stresses on postbuckled deformations of nonlinear elastic isotropic rectangular plates. The second is to further examine the accuracy of a new 3-D Cosserat eight noded brick element (Nadler and Rubin in Int J Solids Struct 40: 4585–4614, 2003) which was developed within the context of the theory of a Cosserat point. The equations of the Cosserat element include both material and geometric nonlinearities. A number of example problems are considered which examine predictions of the Cosserat element for beams and plates and comparison has been made with results from the commercial codes ANSYS and ADINA. Also, the approximate nonlinear postbuckling solution described in Timoshenko and Gere (Theory of elastic stability, Mc Graw-Hill, New York) is shown to be more limited than originally expected. These results suggest that the Cosserat element is robust, can perform well under extreme conditions and is capable of modeling combinations of three-dimensional bodies with attached thin structures.     

Semi-supervised model adaptation for statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation systems are usually trained on large amounts of bilingual text (used to learn a translation model), and also large amounts of monolingual text in the target language (used to train a language model). In this article we explore the use of semi-supervised model adaptation methods for the effective use of monolingual data from the source language in order to improve translation quality. We propose several algorithms with this aim, and present the strengths and weaknesses of each one. We present detailed experimental evaluations on the French–English EuroParl data set and on data from the NIST Chinese–English large-data track. We show a significant improvement in translation quality on both tasks.     

虚拟企业模型并行仿真研究

随着各种全新的制造理念,特别是虚拟企业的出现,企业模型的规模不断扩大,使目前存在的大多数企业模型仿真系统的效率大大下降。该文针对此问题,通过深入分析虚拟企业模型结构,并在已有的构件化企业建模体系CEMS及其仿真系统的基础上,结合异步仿真技术和多线程技术提出了一种分层式企业模型仿真体系结构,为虚拟企业模型的快速高效的仿真提供了一种有效的方法。     

Nodally exact Ritz discretizations of 1D diffusion–absorption and Helmholtz equations by variational FIC and modified equation methods

This article presents the first application of the Finite Calculus (FIC) in a Ritz-FEM variational framework. FIC provides a steplength parametrization of mesh dimensions, which is used to modify the shape functions. This approach is applied to the FEM discretization of the steady-state, one-dimensional, diffusion–absorption and Helmholtz equations. Parametrized linear shape functions are directly inserted into a FIC functional. The resulting Ritz-FIC equations are symmetric and carry a element-level free parameter coming from the function modification process. Both constant- and variable-coefficient cases are studied. It is shown that the parameter can be used to produce nodally exact solutions for the constant coefficient case. The optimal value is found by matching the finite-order modified differential equation (FOMoDE) of the Ritz-FIC equations with the original field equation. The inclusion of the Ritz-FIC models in the context of templates is examined. This inclusion shows that there is an infinite number of nodally exact models for the constant coefficient case. The ingredients of these methods (FIC, Ritz, MoDE and templates) can be extended to multiple dimensions