Intertek (Canada)

Recent increases in extreme weather conditions have created impacts, such as flooding, which are causing an increased need in resiliency for foundation systems. Bridge scour has been identified as the leading cause of bridge failures worldwide. Studies show significant structural and economic consequences of climate-driven flowing. In many cases, the effects of this increased resiliency come in the form of substructures becoming more expensive due to deeper design scour depths, changes away from locally common foundation types, and/or more complex construction concerns. The first case study is a roadway on the border of Nebraska and Iowa that flooded during intense storms in Spring 2019 which led to an extended road closure requiring a 2-h traffic detour. Ultimately, the flooding and concerns for future extreme events led this roadway to be replaced with a 1,097-ft-long bridge founded on driven piles in fall 2021. The second and third case studies are bridges that the design depth of scour was increased by approximately 2 ft when design criteria changed from a 100-year flood to a 200-year flood to reflect the higher frequency of extreme storm events. In both cases, due to load demands and the soil/rock stratigraphy within the creek channel, driven piles would not provide adequate lateral resistance, requiring a change to foundation type to drilled shafts, a foundation type not commonly used by the Iowa DOT.

Advancements in diagnostic technologies for the evaluation of infectious disease complaints in the outpatient setting have improved the speed and accuracy of pathogen detection and created the opportunity for higher accuracy in treatment planning. The benefits of these advanced diagnostics insights can be optimized when coupled with robust shared decision-making between the patient and clinician during the clinical encounter. This manuscript describes the process for the integration of results from molecular testing for respiratory tract infection into a shared decision-making framework. It also explores how this synergy may lead to improved patient outcomes, enhanced health care delivery, and more collaborative care, while enhancing diagnosis and treatment of respiratory infections in various clinical settings.

Abstract The ASME B31.1-2024 Power Piping Code (Code) para. 102.2.4 [1] provides an allowance regarding operating above the design temperature and internal pressure for short time periods. The concept of allowing occasional operation for short periods of time at higher than the design pressure or temperature has been in the Code since 1967. The 1967 Code para. 102.2.4 limitations were based on engineering judgment that can now be quantitatively evaluated for the additional creep life consumption. The Code states that the pressure or temperature or both may exceed the design values if the computed circumferential pressure stress does not exceed the maximum allowable stress from Mandatory Appendix A for the coincident temperature by: (A) 15% if the event duration occurs for no more than 8 hours at any one time and not more than 800 hours per year, or (B) 20% if the event duration occurs for no more than 1 hour at any one time and not more than 80 hours per year. In 2019 it was estimated that using para. 102.2.4 Allowance A or B for 11 materials operating in the creep range over 10 operating years resulted in increased creep life consumption in the range of 0.0% to 6.4% [2]. The proposed revision to para. 102.2.4 in this study will align the increased creep life consumption for the same 11 materials to a similar range of 1% to 6%. This study provides a technical basis for a possible revision to para. 102.2.4 considering the additional creep life consumption for 11 materials operating in the creep range. The materials considered in this paper are: 1. Low carbon steel 2. 1.25Cr 0.5Mo 3. 2.25Cr 1Mo 4. 9Cr 1 Mo V 5. Type 304 SS 6. Type 316 SS 7. Type 316L SS 8. Type 321 SS 9. Type 321H SS 10. Type 347 SS, and 11. Type 347H SS If operated within the limits of proposed Equation 1 for 10 years (80,000 operating hours), the methodology resulted in an estimated range of 1% to 6% increased creep life consumption compared to the piping system operating at the design temperature and design pressure during the 10 years. In addition, the proposed methodology may be used to evaluate operations slightly above the design temperature and design pressure during each year.

We introduce a fully convolutional transformer for speech emotion recognition with application to automotive systems. The proposed architecture is composed of convolutional channel expansion, multi‐head attention and feed‐forward layers. We employ a trainable emotion query to better capture the characteristics of different emotions. In addition, we consider channel attention to better enable real‐time processing. Experiments show that the proposed method provides better performance than the benchmark algorithms.

In Virtual Reality (VR), existing hand-scale passive interaction techniques are unsuitable for continuous large-scale renders: room-scale proxies lack portability, and wearable robotic arms are energy-intensive and induce friction. This paper presents a technique for providing wall haptics in VR which supports portable, passive, and large-scale user interactions. We propose a potential solution, PantographHaptics, a technique which uses the scaling properties of a pantograph to passively render two-degree-of-freedom body-scale surfaces to overcome the limitations present in existing methods. We demonstrate PantographHaptics through two prototypes: HapticLever, a grounded system, and Feedbackpack, a wearable device. We evaluate these prototypes with technical and user evaluations. Our 9-participant first study compares HapticLever against traditional haptic modalities, while our 7-participant second study verifies Feedbackpack's usability and interaction fidelity.

Abstract In 2013, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (now Canadian Nuclear Laboratories) experimentally measured the damping of a straight tube with a variety of tube supports to examine low-frequency damping. These tests were motivated by the discovery of severe tube damage caused by in-plane fluidelastic instability (FEI) in the U-bend regions of new replacement recirculating steam generators (SG). The measurements were intended to assess the applicability of existing design guidelines for estimating the support-related damping of a tube. In the tests, the damping ratios of a single steam generator tube were measured using both log-decrement and power-based methods. Noncontacting excitation and position-sensing techniques were employed to improve accuracy. Initial baseline tests explored configurations with no support and drilled-hole supports of different hole sizes, and these results were compared with previously published work. Subsequent tests were performed to measure damping of tube vibration parallel to flat-bar supports. Most of the tests were performed with the tube fully submerged in still water. The tests examined the effects of fluid (water or air), natural frequency, gap width, preload, and vibration normal to the bars. This paper describes the test apparatus, methods, and analysis techniques. A summary of the results is presented. The initial baseline results showed that the damping ratios measured without any supports and with a drilled-hole support were consistent with previously published data. However, the subsequent measurements showed that, contrary to a published design guideline, the anti-vibration bars resulted in no significant additional viscous or squeeze-film damping when the vibration was parallel to the bars. On the other hand, the results did show that anti-vibration bars could introduce significant in-plane Coulomb-type damping if there was sufficient tube-to-support preload or impacting.

PT. Intertek Utama Services merupakan perusahaan yang menyediakan jasa pengujian produk dan komoditi serta pelayanan sertifikasi terbesar di dunia. Perusahaan yang bergerak di bidang jasa pengujian memiliki beberapa divisi dan cabang (site) dan juga memiliki satu tempat penyimpanan bahan baku yang nantinya akan disimpan dalam satu gudang. Dalam pengamatan yang dilakukan di gudang PT. Intertek Utama Services,memiliki permasalahan dalam penyimpanan dan penyusunan bahan baku material yang masih belum teratur atau bercampur dan juga menyimpan barang pada space kosong yang tersedia tanda memperhatikan apakah barang itu sama atau tidak. Sehingga hal ini menghambat alur aktivitas digudang sampai menyebabkan operator gudang sering mengalami kesulitan dalam mengambil dan menyimpan barang dan akan menghambat waktu proses pengiriman.Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah dedicated storage. tata letak gudang PT. Intertek Utama Services yang memberikan perbaikan dengan jarak tempuh yang paling kecil adalah tata letak Dedicated Storage. ukuran luas gudang = 840 m2, panjang = 25 m, lebar 24 m Hasil penerapan dalam usulan perbaikan dengan metode dedicate storage menghasilkan penyelesaian masalah antara lain, Throughput (Aktivitas) dengan total 74, Space Requirement (slot) 11 slot.Tata letak ini jika dibandingkan dengan tata letak awal menghasilkan penurunan jarak tempuh sebesar 24,6%, penurunan luas lantai terpakai untuk penyimpanan sebesar 531,36%, peningkatan kapasitas sebesar 15%, peningkatan fleksibilitas sebesar 27,27%, dan peningkatan produktivitas sebesar 11%.