How Can Speech Recognisers Help Applied Research in the Civil Engineering, Transport and Related Industries

BACKGROUND Speech recognition technology is rapidly advancing to the point here it can be usefully applied in a wide range of mtexts. For applications within the SERC Environment Committee's area of interest -civil engineering; construction; building; transport; water resources there are a number of kinds of recording situation in which one needs to keep one's eyes on the situation being studied; or in which the recording conditions (eg moving around with instruments) are unfavourable. The limitations of conventional pen and paper recording for these situations are obvious; and the limitations of hand-held data capture devices are also becoming apparent. Speech is therefore an easier medium to use; and a tape recorder a convenient means of recording the observations. For well defined recording tasks; speech recognisers might be a helpful way of transcribing the record. This seminar was convened to enable those who are potentially interested in such an application of information technology to hear of the latest developnents and assessments of the suitability of the technology

El aporte de la ergonomía cognitiva perceptual en la comunicación de los productos.

La ergonomía cognitiva consiste en el análisis de la relación que existe entre una persona y un artefacto cognitivo, ya sea un objeto, un producto, un soporte comunicacional, etc., y el modo en que interactúan entre sí. Esta relación condiciona la percepción que adoptan los usuarios al momento de entrar en contacto con algún tipo de producto y desear tenerlo y utilizarlo. En este artículo se expondrá una síntesis de los principales conceptos asociados a esta disciplina científica a través de la recopilación de antecedentes recogidos por Roscoe, Norman, Cañas y Waern, Sanders y MacCormick, Mercovich, Bonsiepe, Wilbur Schramm. El objetivo de este trabajo es evidenciar cuáles son los conceptos relevantes en la ergonomía cognitiva y cómo se aplican en el uso y desarrollo de los objetos y/o productos con el fin de que puedan ser utilizados para análisis, discusiones y apoyo a otros textos

Analytical integration of stress field and tangent material moduli over concrete cross-sections

This paper presents a novel stress field and tangent material moduli integration procedure over a cross-section of a biaxially loaded concrete beam. The procedure assumes a sufficiently simple analytical form of the constitutive law of concrete, the polygonal shape of the boundary of the simply- or multi-connected cross-section and the monotonically increasing loading. The area integrals are transformed into the boundary integrals and then integrated analytically. The computational efficiency of the procedure is analyzed by comparing it with respect to the number of floating-point operations needed in various numerical integration-based methods. It is found that the procedure is not only exact, but also computationally effective. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Research Unit VolImpact: Revisiting the volcanic impact on atmosphere and climate – preparations for the next big volcanic eruption

This paper provides an overview of the scientific background and the research objectives of the Research Unit “VolImpact” (Revisiting the volcanic impact on atmosphere and climate – preparations for the next big volcanic eruption, FOR 2820). VolImpact was recently funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and started in spring 2019. The main goal of the research unit is to improve our understanding of how the climate system responds to volcanic eruptions. Such an ambitious program is well beyond the capabilities of a single research group, as it requires expertise from complementary disciplines including aerosol microphysical modelling, cloud physics, climate modelling, global observations of trace gas species, clouds and stratospheric aerosols. The research goals will be achieved by building on important recent advances in modelling and measurement capabilities. Examples of the advances in the observations include the now daily near-global observations of multi-spectral aerosol extinction from the limb-scatter instruments OSIRIS, SCIAMACHY and OMPS-LP. In addition, the recently launched SAGE III/ISS and upcoming satellite missions EarthCARE and ALTIUS will provide high resolution observations of aerosols and clouds. Recent improvements in modeling capabilities within the framework of the ICON model family now enable simulations at spatial resolutions fine enough to investigate details of the evolution and dynamics of the volcanic eruptive plume using the large-eddy resolving version, up to volcanic impacts on larger-scale circulation systems in the general circulation model version. When combined with state-of-the-art aerosol and cloud microphysical models, these approaches offer the opportunity to link eruptions directly to their climate forcing. These advances will be exploited in VolImpact to study the effects of volcanic eruptions consistently over the full range of spatial and temporal scales involved, addressing the initial development of explosive eruption plumes (project VolPlume), the variation of stratospheric aerosol particle size and radiative forcing caused by volcanic eruptions (VolARC), the response of clouds (VolCloud), the effects of volcanic eruptions on atmospheric dynamics (VolDyn), as well as their climate impact (VolClim)

Biogeochemical Changes During Bio-cementation Mediated by Stimulated and Augmented Ureolytic Microorganisms.

Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP) is a bio-mediated cementation process that can improve the engineering properties of granular soils through the precipitation of calcite. The process is made possible by soil microorganisms containing urease enzymes, which hydrolyze urea and enable carbonate ions to become available for precipitation. While most researchers have injected non-native ureolytic bacteria to complete bio-cementation, enrichment of native ureolytic microorganisms may enable reductions in process treatment costs and environmental impacts. In this study, a large-scale bio-cementation experiment involving two 1.7-meter diameter tanks and a complementary soil column experiment were performed to investigate biogeochemical differences between bio-cementation mediated by either native or augmented (Sporosarcina pasteurii) ureolytic microorganisms. Although post-treatment distributions of calcite and engineering properties were similar between approaches, the results of this study suggest that significant differences in ureolysis rates and related precipitation rates between native and augmented microbial communities may influence the temporal progression and spatial distribution of bio-cementation, solution biogeochemical changes, and precipitate microstructure. The role of urea hydrolysis in enabling calcite precipitation through sustained super-saturation following treatment injections is explored

Effects of construction and staged filling of reservoirs on the environment and ecology

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Structural behavior and design of large steel silos

2001-2002 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Dam-Break Wave on a Single Building Situated Downstream

Dam-break flow may cause severe damages on land and population locateddownstream due to flush flooding. In addition to the complexity inherent in dam break flow,existence of buildings changes the rapidly varying flow pattern downstream making theproblem more complex. The way the buildings are oriented and clustered has a great influenceon water depths and velocities of the dam-break flow. To understand the phenomena better, inthis study, the flow around a single building located vertically and excentred with respect tothe main flow direction are investigated experimentally and numerically. The wavepropagation and its interaction with the building was observed using high speed camera andobtained results were compared with FLOW-3D numerical model which uses 3D RANSequations utilizing k - turbulence model. The results were in good agreement

Molecular and nanostructural mechanisms of deformation, strength and toughness of spider silk fibrils

Spider silk is one of the strongest, most extensible and toughest biological materials known, exceeding the properties of many engineered materials including steel. Silks feature a hierarchical architecture where highly organized, densely H-bonded beta-sheet nanocrystals are arranged within a semi-amorphous protein matrix consisting of 31-helices and beta-turn protein structures. By using a bottom-up molecular-based mesoscale model that bridges the scales from Angstroms to hundreds of nanometers, here we show that the specific combination of a crystalline phase and a semi-amorphous matrix is crucial for the unique properties of silks. Specifically, our results reveal that the superior mechanical properties of spider silk can be explained solely by structural effects, where the geometric confinement of beta-sheet nanocrystals combined with highly extensible semi-amorphous domains with a large hidden length is the key to reach great strength and great toughness, despite the dominance of mechanically inferior chemical interactions such as H-bonding. Our model directly shows that semi-amorphous regions unravel first when silk is being stretched, leading to the large extensibility of silk. Conversely, the large-deformation mechanical properties and ultimate tensile strength of silk is controlled by the strength of beta-sheet nanocrystals, which is directly related to their size, where small beta-sheet nanocrystals are crucial to reach outstanding levels of strength and toughness. Our model agrees well with observations in recent experiments, where it was shown that a significant change in the strength and toughness can be achieved solely by tuning the size of beta-sheet nanocrystals. Our findings unveil the material design strategy that enables silks to achieve superior material performance despite simple and inferior constituents, resulting in a new paradigm in materials design where enhanced functionality is not achieved using complex building blocks, but rather through the utilization of simple repetitive constitutive elements arranged in hierarchical structures