Direct Linear System Identification Method for Multistory Three-dimensional Building Structure with General Eccentricity

Background MALDI-TOF analysis after a short incubation time of positive blood culture is currently one of the most widely used methods for rapidly identifying microorganisms. This method can identify most pathogenic bacteria within 4 to 6 h after blood culture. This experiment aims to use direct identification for MALDI-TOF analysis, which can shorten the identification time of bacteria and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods. Method We collected from January 2022 to December 2022, a total of 295 bottles of a single infection. After pretreatment methods such as removing cells and high-speed centrifugation to collect bacteria, carry out direct identification by MALDI-TOF then culture for 5 h for short incubation time method. The culture medium was continued incubated for 18–20 h, to confirm the final identification results of the strains and compare the identification accuracy of direct identification and short incubation time methods. Definition: confidence score cut-off values > = 1.7 of direct identification method. Result The identification rate of score > = 1.7 were 67%(199/295). Gram-negative bacilli were identified in 89%, followed by anaerobes in 60% and Gram-positive species in 56%. The yeast could not be identified either by the short incubation time method or the direct identification method. The short incubation time method identified 90% of Gram-negative bacilli, followed by 79% of Gram-positive bacteria and 7% of anaerobic bacteria. The rapid identification of anaerobic bacteria was significantly better than the identification results of the short incubation time method (60%:7%) (P value = 0.01). In addition, the results can be obtained within one hour by direct identification, which can save at least 5-fold times required for the short incubation time method of about 5 h, although the effect is slightly worse than short incubation time method (67 %:76%). Especially for Gram-negative bacilli, there is no statistically significant difference between direct identification and short incubation time methods; it proves that direct identification method can indeed replace short incubation time method. Conclusion Patients with septic shock who were treated with antibiotics within one hour had an 80% chance of survival; however, for every hour of delay within six hours of onset, the survival rate decreased by 7.6%. Compared with the short incubation time method, the direct identification method can report the correct strain to clinician 5-fold times earlier. This rapid, simplified extraction direct identification method is cost-effective, time-saving, and easy to use. The SSC sepsis guidelines in 2016 pointed out that extending the course of antibiotic treatment not only has no additional benefits but also is prone to drug resistance, resulting in side effects of antibiotics. Therefore, the direct identification method can significantly improve the optimal utilization of antibiotics for effective targeted treatment and reduce mortality, especially for the identification of anaerobic bacteria, which can provide faster identification results. Therefore, it is recommended that clinical laboratories include a direct identification method for routine identification of blood culture, and if they cannot be identified, they can be supplemented by a short incubation time method, to shorten the time of blood culture identification and effectively improve the treatment of bloodstream infections.

The correct estimation of building energy consumptions is assuming an always increasing importance, and a detailed reproduction of building structures, with all the single components involved, is necessary to achieve this aim. In addition, the current ecological development tries to limit the use of natural raw materials as building components, in favor of alternative (waste) materials, which ensure significant advantages from the economic, energetic and environmental point of views. In this work, dynamic heat and vapor transport in a typical three-dimensional (3D) building structure, involving different types of environmental-friendly concrete mixtures, have been simulated by using finite elements. In particular, the authors propose to substitute part of the aggregates with plastic waste and to use a fly ash based geopolymeric binder for the production of low conductivity concrete, to be employed in eco-efficient buildings. Concrete produced with natural limestone aggregates has been considered as the reference benchmark. The whole characterization of the different types of concrete tested in the present work has been obtained through laboratory experiments. The structure taken into account in the simulations is a 3D thermal bridge, typical of building envelopes. The thermal and hygrometric transient behavior of this structure, employing plastic waste in different percentages and geopolymer concrete, has been analyzed by the authors.

Extracting damage information of buildings after an earthquake is crucial for emergency rescue and loss assessment. Low-altitude remote sensing by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for emergency rescue has unique advantages. In this study, we establish a remote sensing information-extraction method that combines ultramicro oblique UAV and infrared thermal imaging technology to automatically detect the structural damage of buildings and cracks in external walls. The method consists of four parts: (1) 3D live-action modeling and building structure analysis based on ultramicro oblique images; (2) extraction of damage information of buildings; (3) detection of cracks in walls based on infrared thermal imaging; and (4) integration of detection systems for information of earthquake-damaged buildings. First, a 3D live-action building model is constructed. A multi-view structure image for segmentation can be obtained based on this method. Second, a method of extracting information on damage to building structures using a 3D live-action building model as the geographic reference is proposed. Damage information of the internal structure of the building can be obtained based on this method. Third, based on analyzing the temperature field distribution on the exterior walls of earthquake-damaged buildings, an automatic method of detecting cracks in the walls by using infrared thermal imaging is proposed. Finally, the damage information detection and assessment system is researched and developed, and the system is integrated. Taking earthquake search-and-rescue simulation as an example, the effectiveness of this method is verified. The damage distribution in the internal structure and external walls of buildings in this area is obtained with an accuracy of 78%.

The simplification of three‐dimensional (3D) building models to improve rendering efficiency has gained widespread attention. To maintain the model's overall appearance features while increasing the simplification rate, we propose a novel 3D building simplification method that considers both the model mesh and building structure. The method divides a 3D building into a primary structure and subsidiary structures. It then organizes these structures using StructureTree, a multi‐way tree. The structures are organized according to the dependency relationships between building structures. When simplifying a building, the decision whether to simplify the mesh or remove the subsidiary structure in the leaf node of the StructureTree depends on the volume change caused by the edge collapse and the visual saliency of the removed structure. The experimental results show that our method exhibits a better simplification effect than the traditional simplification method, and the proposed method can achieve a high simplification rate while maintaining the simplification quality. Furthermore, the results of some spatial analyses based on the highly simplified building model are consistent with those of the original model.

Three-dimensional (3D) building structures are vital to understanding urban dynamics. Monocular remote sensing imagery is a cost-effective data source for large-scale building height retrieval when compared to LiDAR data and multi-view imagery. Existing methods learn building footprints and height maps per pixel via either a multi-task network or two separate networks, however, failing to consider the information of neighboring pixels that belong to the identical building. Therefore, we propose learning a novel representation for 3D buildings, namely 3D centripetal shifts, a unified representation of individual building instances. Our method is termed as 3DCentripetalNet and learns the 3D centripetal shift representation that incorporates planar and vertical structures of buildings. Afterward, a decoupling module is devised to learn building corner points. Finally, a 3D modeling module is designed to retrieve building height from the learned 3D centripetal shift map and corner points. We investigate the proposed 3DCentripetalNet on two datasets with different spatial resolutions, i.e., the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset (9 cm/pixel) and the Urban 3D dataset (50 cm/pixel). Experimental results suggest that 3DCentripetalNet is able to preserve sharp building boundaries, largely alleviate false detections, and significantly outperform other competitors. Thus, we believe that 3DCentripetalNet is a robust solution for the task of building height retrieval from monocular imagery.

As prevalent infrastructures in cities, buildings play a vital role in urban hydroclimate simulation with their effects being parameterized through their 3D morphology. In order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of 3D building morphology distribution, significant efforts have been devoted to the generation of global-scale 3D building morphology datasets. However, existing works typically produce such information at a coarse resolution (around 1000 m) using either machine-learning-based regression with medium-resolution open-source satellite images or simple empirical rules with high-resolution but restricted satellite images, which limits their effectiveness in providing accurate and refined mappings for public usage and academic research. Considering this bottleneck, this work establishes a practical solution leveraging open-source Sentinel-1/2 imagery with cloud computing infrastructures and deep-learning-based models to create a dataset named GLAMOUR, which estimates the average building height and footprint at a resolution of 100 m across global urbanized areas. Based on the results of accuracy assessment in 18 cities worldwide, the GLAMOUR dataset achieves the median root mean square errors of 7.5 m for building height and 0.14 for building footprint estimation, with corresponding standard deviations of 4.0 m and 0.02, achieving better overall performance compared to existing datasets with similar spatial coverage. As a publicly accessible and reproducible dataset, GLAMOUR exemplifies the workflow of annual global monitoring of 3D building structures in urbanized areas and offers rasterized 3D building structures on 100 m grids for the year 2020 in GeoTiff format, which can be seamlessly integrated with open-source GIS software and urban hydroclimate models. With the help of GLAMOUR, researchers and policymakers can easily derive refined building-related physical parameters such as surface roughness and zero-plane displacement for urban hydroclimate simulation in their desired areas worldwide. It will facilitate a global-scale assessment of urban hydroclimate disaster risks, paving the way for holistic climate adaptation strategies.

Direct identification of bovine mastitis pathogens by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry in pre-incubated milk

Piezoelectric elements (PEMs) are used in a variety of applications. In this paper, we developed a full analytical model and a simple system identification (SI) method of a piezoelectric actuator, which includes piezostack elements and a three-stage amplification mechanism. The model was derived separately for each unit of the system. Next, the units were combined, while taking into account their coupling. The hysteresis phenomenon, which is significant in piezoelectric materials, is described extensively. The theoretical model was verified in a laboratory setup. This setup includes a piezoelectric actuator, measuring devices and an acquisition system. The measured results were compared to the theoretical results. Some of the most well-known forms of system identification are shown briefly, while a new and simple algorithm is described systematically and verified by the model. The main advantage of this work is to provide a solid background and domain knowledge of modelling and system identification methods for further investigations in the field of piezoelectric actuators. Due to their simplicity, both the model and the system identification method can be easily modified in order to be applied to other PEMs or other amplification mechanism methods. The main novelty of this work lies in applying a simple system identification algorithm while using the system-level approach for piezoelectric actuators. Lastly, this review work is concluded and some recommendations for researchers working in this area are presented.

Sharing of Temporary Structures: Formalization and Planning Application

This article is devoted to the study of the legal nature and essence of such an object of civil rights as a temporary structure for entrepreneurial activity (hereinafter referred to as the Temporary Structure). The issue of the legal nature of the temporary structure and its legal regime is relevant in today’s conditions, since the current legislation does not clearly define its legal status, including as an object of civil rights, which in turn creates legal uncertainty in the field of regulation of legal relations on the use of temporary structures. Therefore, special attention is paid to the clarification of the essence of the concept of Temporary Construction as an object of real legal relations through the prism of the current legislation on the basis of practical activity and scientific validity. The article analyzes the norms of the Civil Code of Ukraine, the Law of Ukraine «On Regulation of Urban Planning Activities», the Procedure for the Placement of Temporary Structures for Entrepreneurial Activity, which determine the concept and features of Temporary Structures, the procedure for their placement in cases determined by the current legislation of Ukraine, as well as the features and limits of the exercise of property rights in relation to the latter. Special attention was paid to the characteristic features of the Temporary Structure and the attribution of the latter to the relevant category of things in civil law. The author focuses on the importance of establishing the legal status of the Temporary Structure as an object of property rights. During the study, it was found that the Temporary Structure belongs to the category of things in civil law and acts as a specific object of law of both private and joint ownership. Based on the analysis of the norms of the current legislation, sources of scientific legal literature, and judicial practice, conclusions were made that allow us to consider that the Temporary Structure is a movable thing and a specific object of property rights. The specificity of this object lies in the fact that it has the characteristics of an object of ownership, but the latter does not have a clearly defined title owner. It was also concluded that the legal regime of the Temporary Structure today requires careful attention from the legislator, and therefore the only tool for improving the latter is a clear consolidation at the legislative level of the legal status of the Temporary Structure and the determination of its title owner, which will make it possible to unconditionally consider the Temporary Structure as an object of property rights and provide an effective mechanism for protecting the rights of their owners, as participants in civil legal relations.

This paper characterizes the extensive research activities conducted in the Earthquake Engineering Laboratory of University of Nevada, Reno, in the field of dynamic monitoring and system identification of three 1/3-scale two-span bridges. The first part of the study briefly presents the verification of target-tracking Digital Image Correlation (DIC) results as compared to conventional sensors, e.g. string potentiometers and triaxial accelerometers from one of the three bridge tests. Structural system identification is presented in the second part for the other two bridges with focus on determining structural model parameters based on the DIC measured response data. All bridges were tested under bidirectional earthquake loading using the multiple shake table array. However, the system identification used data collected from the white noise runs before and after the seismic tests. A quasi-linear response of the system was assumed because of the low intensity white noise base excitation, and the modal parameters were estimated accordingly. Using the structural vibration data recorded by target-tracking DIC at various locations on the bridges, five system identification methods were applied to analyze the modal parameters of the tested bridges. The results were used to estimate the frequency, damping ratio, and mode shapes, of the bridges in two states. The initial state is before seismic testing and the end state is the damaged state after the completion of the seismic tests. The results show that the applied methods provide a reasonable estimate of the natural frequency and damping ratio of the bridge systems in the original and damaged states.

Summary Identifiability of parameters in structural system identification (SSI) is of primary importance in any SSI method. It depends on the number and the location of the measurements, which is linked with sensor configuration. In this paper, under the framework of SSI by observability method (OM), the number of necessary measurements to identify all parameters of structural system was clarified first. Then, an example was solved step by step to show the lacking constraints among unknowns in SSI by OM. In a frame example, it was found that no measurement set having as many measurements as the number of unknowns was able to identify all parameters. To further understand this phenomenon, the observability of a simply supported beam was analyzed in an exhaustive way using 252 possible measurement sets. Three quarters of these sets were not able to identify all the parameters. In order to solve this issue, for the very first time, SSI by constrained observability method (COM), which appends the nonlinear constraints to SSI by OM, was proposed. With SSI by COM applied, the observability of the structural parameters with respect to the 252 sets was greatly improved. Finally, the efficacy of SSI by COM was verified by a 13-story frame building.

BackgroundRapid and accurate microbial identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) are essential for timely use of appropriate antimicrobial agents for bloodstream infection. To shorten the time for isolating colonies from the positive blood culture, various preparation methods for direct identification using matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry (MALDI‐TOF MS) system were developed. Here, we evaluated the SepsiPrep kit (ASTA Corp.) for direct identification of microorganisms and AST from positive blood cultures using MicroIDSys Elite MALDI‐TOF MS system (ASTA Corp.) and VITEK‐2 system (bioMérieux).MethodsFor direct identification, a total of 124 prospective monomicrobial positive blood culture bottles were included. For direct identification, the pellet was prepared by centrifugation and washing twice. For direct AST, the pellet was suspended in 0.45% saline and adjusted to McFarland 0.5. The results from the direct identification and AST using MicroIDSys Elite and VITEK‐2 system were compared to those from the conventional method performed with pure colony subcultured on agar plate.ResultsCompared to the conventional method using pure colony, correct direct identification rate was 96.5% and 98.5% for 57 gram‐positive isolates and 67 gram‐negative isolates, respectively. For direct AST, among the 55 gram‐positive isolates, the categorical agreement (CA) for staphylococci, streptococci, and enterococci was 96.7%, 98.4%, and 94.1%, respectively. For 66 gram‐negative isolates, the CA for Enterobacterales and non‐fermentative gram‐negative rods was 99.0% and 96.6%, respectively.ConclusionsThe SepsiPrep kit was easy to use combined with MicroIDSys Elite and VITEK‐2 system and also, the correct identification and AST rate were very high.

The exact information of seismic excitation and structural state is a prerequisite for structural seismic safety assessment and vibration control. When the seismic excitation to a structure is not measured, the seismic excitation can be identified as an inversed problem from measured structural responses. Although some relevant approaches have been developed, there are certain limitations or drawbacks in the existing approaches. To circumvent these problems, two generalized algorithms are proposed for the identification of seismic ground excitation to multi-story and tall buildings, respectively. When the seismic ground excitation to a structure is not measured, the data measured by a structural health monitoring system are structural absolute responses. So the structural motion equation in the absolute coordinate system is derived, in which the unknown seismic ground excitation is treated as unknown external force acting on the structure. First, the identification of unknown seismic excitations to multi-story building structures is studied. A generalized Kalman filtering under unknown input is proposed for the identification of structural state and unknown seismic excitation without the observation of structural absolute acceleration responses at the location of unknown external force. The derivation of the proposed generalized Kalman filtering under unknown input is based on the classical Kalman filter, but is more general than the existing identification approaches based on Kalman filter with unknown input in the deployments of accelerometers in the building structure. Then, it is extended to explore the identification of unknown seismic excitations to tall building structures. To avoid substructural identification from the top to bottom in a sequential manner, the motion equation in absolute coordinate system is reduced by modal expansion. Moreover, instead of the identification of unknown modal forces in previous approaches, the seismic excitation is directly identified without increasing the number of unknown forces. To demonstrate the proposed algorithms, numerical examples of identifying seismic excitations to a 6-story shear building and an 18-story tall building are investigated.

Cellular operators often design their cellular infra- structures for outdoor coverage not paying much attention to in-building coverage as part of the necessary grade of service, they must meet. One of the reasons is that operators tend to act when customer complaints rise, leading to customer migration to other operators, with a consequence of threatening annual profit returns. Another reason is the lack of quality research in signal degradation through different building structures and their utilization in modeling. We propose a new comprehensive standard for in-building penetration loss for most building structure classes in Palestine and vast areas in the Middle East. The model incorporates penetration loss of twelve types of different external wall classes and two types of internal walls that represent over 90 % of building structures in the country. The twelve types are different and widespread stone and concrete building structures.