Metal membranes are the thin circular plates. For transducers and pressure transmitters, it is assumed that the membrane is loaded with uniform load over the entire surface. In case that the membrane is stiffened over the edge, then it is called a diaphragm. In general, the membranes are divided into flat and corrugated. Corrugated diaphragms can resist much higher pressure than flat diaphragms and they are used mainly in the low pressure area. In contact with various aggressive fluids, mebranes are most commonly made of high alloy austenitic steel, which have high corrosion resistance, have good spring properties and they are stable at diferent temperatures. The deflection analyses of corrugated diaphragms are very important in sensitivity of transducers/transmitters. The application of corrugated diaphragms gives possibility to control sensitivity of thin diaphragms by geometrical parameters. In this paper numerical and experimental structural analysis of a thin corrugated diaphragm 19 mm diameter, with variable material thickness and corrugation number is presented. Experimental tests are conducted on a corrugated stainless steel (AISI 316) diaphragm. The measured deflections are compared with numerical results in ANSYS software package. The results showed small deviations between numerical and experimental data, which is very important for further diaphragm application of measurement instruments.

Wind measurement from shipborne anemometer is susceptible to the airflow distortion due to ship hull and superstructure. The measurement bias needs to be minimized with regard to various meteorological and navigation applications. To address this problem, this study illustrates the feasibility to correct the measurement bias due to airflow distortion by applying Least Squares Support Vector Machine with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO-LSSVM) method. The airflow field around hull and superstructure of an experimental ship is simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. And then the nonlinear relationship between the airflow through conventional anemometer mounting sites on the main mast and the airflow through the reference point above bridge is implicitly obtained using the PSO-LSSVM regression. The dataset of relative wind observation taken during a sea trial is used to validate the effectiveness of this method. The results show that the established model efficiently eliminates most of the speed bias and reduces half of the direction bias of the mean relative wind, which indicates this method could be extended to estimate the undisturbed freestream on the open sea surface.

Studies in sentiment analysis and opinion mining have examined how different features are effective in polarity classification by making use of positive, negative or neutral values. However, the identification of extreme opinions (most negative and most positive opinions) have overlooked in spite of their wide significance in many applications. In our study, we will combine empirical features (e.g. bag of words, word embeddings, polarity lexicons, and set of textual features) so as to identify extreme opinions and provide a comprehensive analysis of the relative importance of each set of features using hotel reviews.

The warm period has always been of special interest as far as the rainfall systems and their predictability are concerned. The weather incident, not seasonally common, that took place during July 16 and 17, 2017 was a particular synoptic system case not only due to its structure, spatial and temporal evolution, but also due to the intensity and seriousness of the phenomena. The purpose of this case study is to analyze the synoptic environment of the particular system using troposphere's upper and lower maps that are daily available in Hellenic National Meteorological Service’s database by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the real-time weather data, in conjunction with the corresponding images from the Eumetsat satellites.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is concerned with the recognition of previously unseen classes. It relies on additional semantic knowledge for which a mapping can be learned with training examples of seen classes. While classical ZSL considers the recognition performance on unseen classes only, generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) aims at maximizing performance on both seen and unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a new process for training and evaluation in the GZSL setting; this process addresses the gap in performance between samples from unseen and seen classes by penalizing the latter, and enables to select hyper-parameters well-suited to the GZSL task. It can be applied to any existing ZSL approach and leads to a significant performance boost: the experimental evaluation shows that GZSL performance, averaged over eight state-of-the-art methods, is improved from 28.5 to 42.2 on CUB and from 28.2 to 57.1 on AwA2.

The products covered by the common name polyurea were first developed and marketed in the United States in the 1980’s In the first period polyurea was used as a protective coating of polyurethane foam used for thermal insulation of roofs, and in the 1990s many other uses were quickly disseminated. In Europe this technology appeared in the second half of the nineties and the market for polyurea applications started to develop very dynamically in the recent years. Polyurea coatings, due to their extremely versatile physical properties such as watertightness, extremely high wear resistance, resistance to chemical and mechanical stresses, high elasticity and stretchability as well as resistance to freeze-thaw cycles, are increasingly popular, and more and more frequently used in the broadly understood construction. As a rule, the growing demand for technology fosters its development and enhances the knowledge of those who use it, so that it is used for its intended purpose, while maintaining security and enforcement procedures. However, in the absence of such knowledge, misconceptions about the use of polyurea spray coating technologies are emerging, both at the design stage and during the execution phase.

Virtual surgery simulation provides a safe, cost-effective and a repeatable alternative to traditional surgical training methods. The simulation is expected to not only simulate the graphical changes in the surgery, but also to provide a haptic response via a force feedback device. The objective of this study is to develop a virtual bone drilling simulation system and focus on the key issues that limit surgical simulations like the virtual bone drilling of spine surgery. A voxel-based bone model is developed and the algorithms (based on the model) are presented in this work. To provide operators with a realistic environment, dual thread technology is used for graphic and haptic rendering of the virtual bone drilling simulation. Such a surgical simulation system can be very helpful in surgical training.

Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) exploring possibility to build a coal-fired power plant at the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. With the growing awareness of potential challenges that may arise in the future power plants as a result of climate change, TNB has appointed a team which encompasses of Energy Ventures Division (EV), TNB and Tenaga Nasional Berhad Research (TNBR) to conduct Climate Change Impact Assessment to the Proposed Coal Fired Power Plant at the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. This study are to provide guideline on how climate change impacts assessment can be carried out, investigate potential climate change threats to be considered in the design of a coal-fired power plant. Potential sites siting for the proposed coal fired plant were assessed whilst literature review on global and local climate change prediction and projection was conducted. Only 3 sites had fulfilled the criteria for a coal fired power plant which only 1 was selected as the Pilot Site (JG5) for this Study. The study had concluded that the climate change had significant impact to the proposed coal-fired power plant. The climate change threats are sea level rise, increase intensity of rainfall and extreme wind to the associated coal-fired power plant design i.e. coal import and handling facilities, shore and flood protection which based A1B scenario outlined in the SRES Storyline of AR4. 

Chemical looping syngas production is a two-step syngas fuel production process that produces CO and H2. The process is composed of two fluidized bed reactors (oxidation reaction and reduction reactor), oxygen carriers (metal oxides) circulating between the two reactors. A comprehensive model is developed to simulate the chemical looping water and carbon dioxide splitting in a dual fluidized bed reactors interconnected with redox cycling between these two reactors through metal oxides (non-stoichiometric ceria). An extensive FORTRAN subroutine is developed and hooked into Aspen plus V8.8 to appropriately model the complexities of the bubbling fluidized bed reactor including the reaction kinetics. The model developed has been validated for its hydrodynamics and kinetics level and individual correlation was quantified for its validity. The reduction reactor is supplied with the solar energy that temperature above 1300oC is varied up to 1550oC. The heat to attain this high temperature is achieved with solar beam down tower. The oxidation reactor is supplied with a mixture of CO2 and H2O with different mixture composition combining 60% and remaining N2. The oxidation reactor temperature is varied between 700-1000oC to identify the maximum efficiency achieved. It is found that the maximum efficiency achieved is 67% corresponds to highest temperature difference between the reactors.

Rock-Filled Concrete (RFC) is an innovative mass concrete technology. To date, RFC technology has been used to build a great number of gravity dams and arch dams. Since it was invented in 2003, many experimental and numerical research works have been conducted. During the construction process of RFC, an assembly of large rocks with more than 300 mm in grain size, called rockfill, can be cemented with a high-performance self-compacting concrete (HSCC). The RFC technology combines the advantages of masonry and concrete, in that it decreases cement consumption, lowers temperature rise of cement hydration, and reduces shrinkage of concrete. This paper aims at acquainting readers with a timely review of state-of-the-art research on RFC technology, including (1) workability of HSCC and compactness of RFC, (2) thermal and mechanical properties of RFC, (3) structures of an RFC dam and (4) construction and quality control measurements.