2,910 research outputs found
Tensile force monitoring on large winch-assist forwarders operating in British Columbia
The forest industry around the world is facing common challenges in accessing wood fiber on steep terrain. Fully mechanized harvesting systems based on specialized machines, such as winch-assist forwarders, have been specifically developed for improving the harvesting perfor- mances in steep grounds. While the mechanization process is recognized as a safety benefit, the use of cables for supporting the machine traction needs a proper investigation. Only a few studies have analyzed the cable tensile forces of winch-assist forwarders during real operations, and none of them focused on large machines normally used in North America. Consequently, a preliminary study focused on tensile force analysis of large winch-assist forwarders was conducted in three sites in the interior of British Columbia during the fall of 2017. The results report that in 86% of the cycles, the maximum working load of the cable was less than one-third of the minimum breaking load. The tensile force analysis showed an expected pattern of minimum tensile forces while the forwarders were traveling or unloading on the road site and high tensile forces when operating on steep trails, loading or traveling. Further analysis found that the maximum cycle tensile forces occurred most frequently when the machines were moving uphill, independently of whether they were empty or loaded. While the forwarders were operating on the trails, slope, travel direction, and distance of the machines from the anchor resulted statistically significant and able to account for 49% of tensile force variability. However, in the same conditions, the operator settings accounted for 77% of the tensile force variability, suggesting the human factor as the main variable in cable tensile force behavior during winch-assist operations
Quantum Monte Carlo for large chemical systems: Implementing efficient strategies for petascale platforms and beyond
Various strategies to implement efficiently QMC simulations for large
chemical systems are presented. These include: i.) the introduction of an
efficient algorithm to calculate the computationally expensive Slater matrices.
This novel scheme is based on the use of the highly localized character of
atomic Gaussian basis functions (not the molecular orbitals as usually done),
ii.) the possibility of keeping the memory footprint minimal, iii.) the
important enhancement of single-core performance when efficient optimization
tools are employed, and iv.) the definition of a universal, dynamic,
fault-tolerant, and load-balanced computational framework adapted to all kinds
of computational platforms (massively parallel machines, clusters, or
distributed grids). These strategies have been implemented in the QMC=Chem code
developed at Toulouse and illustrated with numerical applications on small
peptides of increasing sizes (158, 434, 1056 and 1731 electrons). Using 10k-80k
computing cores of the Curie machine (GENCI-TGCC-CEA, France) QMC=Chem has been
shown to be capable of running at the petascale level, thus demonstrating that
for this machine a large part of the peak performance can be achieved.
Implementation of large-scale QMC simulations for future exascale platforms
with a comparable level of efficiency is expected to be feasible
CO2 Emission Reduction in Freight Transports How to Stimulate Environmental Friendly Behaviour?
In the European Union (EU) and in Germany the transport sector is the only sector with increasing CO2 emissions (in the EU by about 32 % and in Germany by about 1 % since 1990). Especially in road freight and air transport a further strong increase is forecasted. In the transport sector this might be impeded by avoiding transport (accepting a lower economic growth), shifting modes or in optimizing logistics. Especially the second is mentioned to be an adequate solution to meet the increasing demand for transportation and reducing CO2 emissions simulatneously. It is often stated, that combined transport (mainly truck-train-truck) might be a very CO2 efficient mode. In this article a Logit-Model (based on a survey of 500 German forwarders) is used to determine mode shift potentials of hauliers. The main factors of influence depending on the service provision of the transport modes are frequency of combined transport services, speed, and costs. For an estimation of the corresponding impact on the mode shift and thus potentials of CO2 emission reductions two policy instruments are empirically tested: a further increase of the performance-based heavy vehicle fee (LSVA-Maut) and a hypothetical speeding up of the average speed in freight rail transport to 80 km per hour. Although the modal shift is rather high in the last policy simulation, the impact on CO2 emissions is still small. --Freight Transports,CO2 Emissions,Mode Shift,Combined Transport
Low Power, Low Delay: Opportunistic Routing meets Duty Cycling
Traditionally, routing in wireless sensor networks consists of
two steps: First, the routing protocol selects a next hop,
and, second, the MAC protocol waits for the intended destination
to wake up and receive the data. This design makes
it difficult to adapt to link dynamics and introduces delays
while waiting for the next hop to wake up.
In this paper we introduce ORW, a practical opportunistic
routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. In a dutycycled
setting, packets are addressed to sets of potential receivers
and forwarded by the neighbor that wakes up first
and successfully receives the packet. This reduces delay and
energy consumption by utilizing all neighbors as potential
forwarders. Furthermore, this increases resilience to wireless
link dynamics by exploiting spatial diversity. Our results
show that ORW reduces radio duty-cycles on average
by 50% (up to 90% on individual nodes) and delays by 30%
to 90% when compared to the state of the art
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