72,377 research outputs found
Development of an ontology supporting failure analysis of surface safety valves used in Oil & Gas applications
Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.The project describes how to apply Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in the form of a Failure Mode Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) on hydraulically actuated Surface Safety Valves (SSVs) of Xmas trees in oil and gas applications, in order to be able to predict the occurrence of failures and implement preventive measures such as Condition and Performance Monitoring (CPM) to improve the life-span of a valve and decrease maintenance downtime. In the oil and gas industry, valves account for 52% of failures in the system. If these failures happen unexpectedly it can cause a lot of problems. Downtime of the oil well quickly becomes an expensive problem, unscheduled maintenance takes a lot of extra time and the lead-time for replacement parts can be up to 6 months. This is why being able to predict these failures beforehand is something that can bring a lot of benefits to a company. To determine the best course of action to take in order to be able to predict failures, a FMECA report is created. This is an analysis where all possible failures of all components are catalogued and given a Risk Priority Number (RPN), which has three variables: severity, detectability and occurrence. Each of these is given a rating between 0 and 10 and then the variables are multiplied with each other, resulting in the RPN. The components with an RPN above an acceptable risk level are then further investigated to see how to be able to detect them beforehand and how to mitigate the risk that they pose. Applying FMECA to the SSV mean breaking the system down into its components and determining the function, dependency and possible failures. To this end, the SSV is broken up into three sub-systems: the valve, the actuator and the hydraulic system. The hydraulic system is the sub-system of the SSV responsible for containing, transporting and pressurizing of the hydraulic fluid and in turn, the actuator. It also contains all the safety features, such as pressure pilots, and a trip system in case a problem is detected in the oil line.
The actuator is, as the name implies, the sub-system which opens and closes the valve. It is made up of a number of parts such as a cylinder, a piston and a spring. These parts are interconnected in a number of ways to allow the actuator to successfully perform its function.
The valve is the actual part of the system which interacts with the oil line by opening and closing. Like the actuator, this sub-system is broken down into a number of parts which work together to perform its function.
After breaking down and defining each subsystem on a functional level, a model was created using a functional block diagram. Each component also allows for the defining of dependencies and interactions between the different components and a failure diagram for each component. This model integrates the three sub-systems back into one, creating a complete picture of the entire system which can then be used to determine the effects of different failures in components to the rest of the system.
With this model completed we created a comprehensive FMECA report and test the different possible CPM solutions to mitigate the largest risks
Pairing correlations beyond the mean field
We discuss dynamical pairing correlations in the context of configuration
mixing of projected self-consistent mean-field states, and the origin of a
divergence that might appear when such calculations are done using an energy
functional in the spirit of a naive generalized density functional theory.Comment: Proceedings of the XIII Nuclear Physics Workshop ``Maria and Pierre
Curie'' on ``Pairing and beyond - 50 years of the BCS model'', held at
Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, September 27 - October 1, 2006. Int. J. Mod. Phys.
E, in prin
Efficient collective swimming by harnessing vortices through deep reinforcement learning
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow-fields replete with
mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling
behaviour has been associated with evolutionary advantages including collective
energy savings. How fish harvest energy from their complex fluid environment
and the underlying physical mechanisms governing energy-extraction during
collective swimming, is still unknown. Here we show that fish can improve their
sustained propulsive efficiency by actively following, and judiciously
intercepting, vortices in the wake of other swimmers. This swimming strategy
leads to collective energy-savings and is revealed through the first ever
combination of deep reinforcement learning with high-fidelity flow simulations.
We find that a `smart-swimmer' can adapt its position and body deformation to
synchronise with the momentum of the oncoming vortices, improving its average
swimming-efficiency at no cost to the leader. The results show that fish may
harvest energy deposited in vortices produced by their peers, and support the
conjecture that swimming in formation is energetically advantageous. Moreover,
this study demonstrates that deep reinforcement learning can produce navigation
algorithms for complex flow-fields, with promising implications for energy
savings in autonomous robotic swarms.Comment: 26 pages, 14 figure
Variational Autoencoders for Deforming 3D Mesh Models
3D geometric contents are becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, we
study the problem of analyzing deforming 3D meshes using deep neural networks.
Deforming 3D meshes are flexible to represent 3D animation sequences as well as
collections of objects of the same category, allowing diverse shapes with
large-scale non-linear deformations. We propose a novel framework which we call
mesh variational autoencoders (mesh VAE), to explore the probabilistic latent
space of 3D surfaces. The framework is easy to train, and requires very few
training examples. We also propose an extended model which allows flexibly
adjusting the significance of different latent variables by altering the prior
distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our general framework is
able to learn a reasonable representation for a collection of deformable
shapes, and produce competitive results for a variety of applications,
including shape generation, shape interpolation, shape space embedding and
shape exploration, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 201
A new automated workflow for 3D character creation based on 3D scanned data
In this paper we present a new workflow allowing the creation of 3D characters in an automated way that does not require the expertise of an animator. This workflow is based of the acquisition of real human data captured by 3D body scanners, which is them processed to generate firstly animatable body meshes, secondly skinned body meshes and finally textured 3D garments
The Nucleon-Nucleon Potential in the Chromo-Dielectric Soliton Model: Statics
We study the N-N interaction in the framework of the chromo-dielectric
soliton model. Here, the long-range parts of the nonabelian gluon
self-interactions are assumed to give rise to a color-dielectric function which
is parameterized in terms of an effective scalar background field. The
six-quark system is confined in a deformed mean field through an effective
non-linear interaction between the quarks and the scalar field. The CDM is
covariant, respects chiral invariance, leads to absolute color confinement and
is free of the spurious long range Van der Waals forces which trouble
non-relativistic investigations employing a confining potential. Six-quark
molecular-type configurations are generated as a function of deformation and
their energies are evaluated in a coupled channel analysis. By using molecular
states instead of cluster model wave functions, all important six-quark
configurations are properly taken into account. The corresponding Hamiltonian
includes the effective interaction between the quarks and the scalar background
field and quark-quark interactions generated through one gluon exchange treated
in Coulomb gauge. When evaluating the gluonic propagators, the inhomogeneity
and deformation of the dielectric medium are taken into account. Results for
the adiabatic nucleon-nucleon potential are presented, and the various
contributions are discussed. Finally, an outlook is given on how, in the next
stage of our investigation, the dynamical effects will be incorporated by
employing the generator coordinate method.Comment: 43 pages, REVTeX file followed by 11 uuencoded PostScript figures,
DOE/ER/40427-02-N9
Relativistic Nuclear Energy Density Functionals: Mean-Field and Beyond
Relativistic energy density functionals (EDF) have become a standard tool for
nuclear structure calculations, providing a complete and accurate, global
description of nuclear ground states and collective excitations. Guided by the
medium dependence of the microscopic nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter,
semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of
state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of
arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at
the nucleon drip-lines. REDF-based structure models have also been developed
that go beyond the static mean-field approximation, and include collective
correlations related to the restoration of broken symmetries and to
fluctuations of collective variables. These models are employed in analyses of
structure phenomena related to shell evolution, including detailed predictions
of excitation spectra and electromagnetic transition rates.Comment: To be published in Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physic
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