A stochastic model for localized disturbances and its applications

A stochastic model for local disturbances, particularly for a temporal harmonic with random modulations in amplitude and/or phase, is proposed in this paper. Results for the second moment responses of a linear single-degree-of-freedom system to this type of stochastic loading demonstrate a significant change in response characteristics due to a small uncertainty. A local phenomenon may last much longer and resonance may be smeared to a broad range. Integrated with wavelet transform, the proposed approach may be used to model a random process with non-stationary frequency content. Especially, it can be effectively used for Monte Carlo simulation to generate large size of samples that have similar characteristics in time and frequency domains as a pre-selected mother sample has. The technique has a great potential for the case where uncertainty study is warranted but the available samples are limited.     

Profiling Voids Embedded in a Slab by a Non-Linear Model

In this paper, by applying a non linear model for the electromagnetic inverse scattering, a technique for the dielectric profiling of a planarly layered medium is investigated and applied to void localization and diagnostics inside a homogeneous lossless slab (one-dimensional geometry). Data are collected under plane wave multifrequency normal incidence. Suitable finite dimensional representations for the unknown functions are introduced and their influence on the model is discussed. The resulting functional equation is solved by the method of weighted residuals and the solution algorithm amounts to minimizing a non quadratic function, where particular attention is devoted to reduce the occurrence of local minima. Finally, the inversion algorithm is validated by applications to both simulated and experimental data.     

Final Drying of Whole Milk Powder in Vibrated-Fluidized Beds

Vibro-fluidized beds are widely used in drying sticky powders and agglomerated materials as milk powder. Using a vibro-fluidized laboratory scale dryer, this work is aiming at analyzing preliminarily the effect of its operational variables on the drying kinetics and characteristics of whole milk powder. The full-factorial design technique with three replications at the central point has been employed to generate data and correlations to quantify the effect of inlet air temperature, air flow rate, and vibration bed amplitude on the drying curves and the milk powder properties related to its faster reconstitution in water (as tapped density, Hausner cohesion ratio, agglomerate size distribution, and internal pore concentration). Results obtained are analyzed and discussed to identify the adequate operation condition for final drying whole milk powder in vibro-fluidized beds, assuring a high product quality.     

XPS studies of directly fluorinated HDPE: problems and solutions

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) applied to the study of fluorinated polymer surfaces presents several problems related both to peak assignment and to degradation. In this work, we analyse extensively the question of XPS peak assignments in this kind of surfaces. We conclude that in this kind of surfaces using binding energy differences between fluorine and carbon is better than using absolute binding energies. Also a useful relation between fluorine photoelectron energy vs. polymer composition expressed through the atomic ratio fluorine/carbon (F/C) was found. A protocol for data treatment is proposed and applied to a XPS study of the degradation induced by X-ray on high-density polyethylene surfaces modified by direct fluorination. Results obtained for the degradation, namely the atomic ratio F/C obtained by two different methods, combined with angle resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (ARXPS) were used to study the fluorine concentration profile in depth, producing self-consistent results.     

The Effect of Reagents on Ultrafine Iron Ore Vacuum Filtration

Continuous vacuum filters normally carry out the final removal of water from iron ore products. The objective of this investigation is to check the possibility of enhancing the industrial performance of a horizontal belt filter by adding one flocculant and two surfactants to the filtration feed slurry. The mineral sample came from the Iron Quadrangle (State of Minas Gerais, Brazil). X-ray diffraction showed a predominance of hematite and small amounts of quartz and goethite. The filtration tests were performed at laboratory scale using a modified Büchner funnel apparatus, which was connected to a scale/computer system. The results indicated: a) the best filtration condition was achieved near the zero charge condition; b) cake moisture, cake porosity, cake formation time and the specific cake resistance were pronouncedly influenced by the flocculant addition; and c) surfactants tested were not able to significantly reduce the cake moisture.     

Effects of load modeling in security constrained OPF studies

Results of computational experiments carried out on an adaptation of the AEP/IEEE 30 bus test system are reported. Some selected buses were modeled using an exponential type of load model. Three cases are considered. In the first case it is assumed that the specified load at modeled buses is obtained with unity voltage. In the second case it is assumed that the transformer taps have been adjusted to give all industrial-type consumers one per unit at the low-voltage panel when the high-side voltage corresponds to the standard optimal power flow (OPF) solution. The third case differs from the second in that the specified power demand is assumed to take place when the high-side voltages correspond to the intact case of the standard security constrained OPF solution. It is concluded that a decrease in fuel cost can be obtained in some instances when load models are incorporated in security constrained OPF studies during contingencies only. In situations where a decrease in fuel cost is obtained in this manner, the magnitude of decrease depends on the total percentage of load fed by fixed tap transformers and the sensitivity of these loads to modeling     

Protecting against key-exposure: strongly key-insulated encryption with optimal threshold

Key-insulated encryption schemes use a combination of key splitting and key evolution to protect against key exposure. Existing schemes, however scale poorly, having cost proportional to the number t of time periods that may be compromised by the adversary, and thus are practical only for small values of t. Yet in practice t might be large. This paper presents a strongly key-insulated encryption scheme with optimal threshold. In our scheme, t need not be known in advance and can be as large as one less than the total number of periods, yet the cost of the scheme is not impacted. This brings key-insulated encryption closer to practice. Our scheme is based on the Boneh-Franklin identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme [9], and exploits algebraic properties of the latter. Another contribution of this paper is to show that (not strongly) key-insulated encryption with optimal threshold and allowing random-access key updates (which our scheme and all others known allow) is equivalent to a restricted form of IBE. This means that the connection between key-insulated encryption and IBE is not accidental. Supported in part by NSF grants CCR-0098123, ANR-0129617 and CCR-0208842, and by an IBM Faculty Partnership Development Award. Supported in part by an NSF graduate fellowship.     

Renewable energy systems: A societal and technological platform

Today, the analysis of renewable energy places the emphasis on the technological and economic attributes with social and environmental impact assessment providing for a rather static, narrow frame of analysis. The participation and response of social actors and other stakeholders is usually of a traditional type, with consultation documents and public meetings, collection of complaints and suggestion schemes. This often encourages parochialism and an over-concentration on relatively trivial issues. It is, therefore, imperative to establish a new participatory planning platform to incorporate the wider socio-economic aspects of renewable energy systems and to provide for an operational analytical decomposition of them. In this work the issue of decomposition analysis is clarified, and a new agenda for the societal and technological decomposition analysis of renewable energy systems is developed. A case study is disclosed to present the relevance of the established platform for integrated (renewable) energy systems planning. Innovative aspects comprise of the simultaneous inclusion of decision analysis and social acceptance methods and tools in concert with the related public participation techniques.     

Performance analysis of concurrency control using locking withdeferred blocking

The concurrency control (CC) method employed can be critical to the performance of transaction processing systems. Conventional locking suffers from the blocking phenomenon, where waiting transactions continue to hold locks and block other transactions from progressing. In a high data contention environment, as an increasing number of transactions wait, a larger number of lock requests get blocked and fewer lock requests can get through. The proposed scheme reduces the blocking probability by deferring the blocking behavior of transactions to the later stages of their execution. By properly balancing the blocking and abort effects, the proposed scheme can lead to better performance than either the conventional locking or the optimistic concurrency control (OCC) schemes at all data and resource contention levels. We consider both static and dynamic approaches to determine when to switch from the nonblocking phase to the blocking phase. An analytical model is developed to estimate the performance of this scheme and determine the optimal operating or switching point. The accuracy of the analytic model is validated through a detailed simulation     

Taking advantage of collective knowledge in emergency response systems

When large groups work on a theme, they have the potential to produce a lot of useful knowledge, regardless of whether they are acting in a coordinated manner or individually. Spontaneously generated information has received much attention in recent years, as organizations and businesses discover the power of crowds. New technologies, such as blogs, Twitter, wikis, photo sharing, collaborative tagging and social networking sites, enable the creation and dissemination of content in a relatively simple way. As a result, the aggregate body of knowledge is growing at an accelerated rate. Many organizations are looking for ways to harness this power, which is being called collective intelligence. Research has shown that it is possible to obtain high quality results from collectively produced work.In this paper, we consider the domain of emergency response. Research has shown that individuals respond quickly and massively to emergencies, and that they try to help with the situation. Thus, it seems like a logical step to attempt to harness collective knowledge for emergency management. Disaster relief groups and field command frequently suffer from lack of up to date information, which may be critical in a rapidly evolving situation. Some of this information could be generated by the crowd at large, enabling more effective response to the situation. In this paper, we discuss the possibilities for the introduction of collective knowledge in disaster relief and present architecture and examples of how this could be accomplished.