Electrical impedance as a technique for civil engineer structures surveillance : considerations on the galvanic insulation of samples

Since Electric Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) has been widely used to determine physical properties of materials, it becomes necessary to evaluate different error contributions. In this work, it is studied the effect of the current leakage due to the lack of galvanic insulation from sample to ground, which could distort the results. In order to known the effects of ground coupling, an electric equivalent model is developed to distinguish between the contribution of the sample impedance and the stray impedance one. Model values agree with measured ones.Peer Reviewe

Viscoelastic behavior of a polyester resin concrete reinforced with nonmetallic bars under bending loads

This paper deals with the study of a highly durable polyester polymer concrete reinforced with glass fibre reinforced polymer rebars. The paper describes the properties of this specific concrete, which were tested using different experimental techniques such as porosimetry, scanning electron microscopy and petrography. Likewise, characterisation in a macro-scale was carried out to define the mechanical properties of the material (modulus of elasticity, stress-strain curve, ultimate strength and bond). Based on the latter properties, the paper presents a relatively simple method to estimate the ultimate bearing capacity of beams under bending load. The calculation method has been verified by testing beams and full-scale elements. At the end, and due to the viscoelastic nature of the polymer, several considerations will be made in order identify safety factors dependent on the loads nature: permanent loads (deferred deformations) and live loads.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

José Romero Fernández de Landa: un ingeniero de marina en el siglo XVIII

Serie: Monografías, núm. 59Esta obra está basada en la investigación realizada por el autor para la redacción de su Tesis Doctoral, sobre la figura de José Romero Fernández de Landa y la construcción naval militar española al finalizar el siglo XVIII.Versión electrónica de: Juan-García Aguado, José M. de (1998). José Romero Fernández de Landa: un ingeniero de marina en el siglo XVIII. A Coruña. Universidade da Coruña, Servizo de Publicacións. ISBN: 84-89694-66-4[Resumen] A lo largo del siglo XVIII, la Corona española desarrolló un plan para dotar a la Armada, creada el año 1714, de una organización y una infraestructura material y logística cuya finalidad era instrumentalizar una política de protección a las colonias ultramarinas y al tráfico comercial con la metrópoli. La construcción de navíos de guerra y su mantenimiento en condiciones operativas adecuadas fue una de las prioridades de esta política. José Romero Fernández de Landa fue ingeniero de Marina desde la etapa fundacional de este Cuerpo patentado en el que llegó a alcanzar la responsabilidad de Ingeniero General

Cloud media video encoding:review and challenges

In recent years, Internet traffic patterns have been changing. Most of the traffic demand by end users is multimedia, in particular, video streaming accounts for over 53%. This demand has led to improved network infrastructures and computing architectures to meet the challenges of delivering these multimedia services while maintaining an adequate quality of experience. Focusing on the preparation and adequacy of multimedia content for broadcasting, Cloud and Edge Computing infrastructures have been and will be crucial to offer high and ultra-high definition multimedia content in live, real-time, or video-on-demand scenarios. For these reasons, this review paper presents a detailed study of research papers related to encoding and transcoding techniques in cloud computing environments. It begins by discussing the evolution of streaming and the importance of the encoding process, with a focus on the latest streaming methods and codecs. Then, it examines the role of cloud systems in multimedia environments and provides details on the cloud infrastructure for media scenarios. After doing a systematic literature review, we have been able to find 49 valid papers that meet the requirements specified in the research questions. Each paper has been analyzed and classified according to several criteria, besides to inspect their relevance. To conclude this review, we have identified and elaborated on several challenges and open research issues associated with the development of video codecs optimized for diverse factors within both cloud and edge architectures. Additionally, we have discussed emerging challenges in designing new cloud/edge architectures aimed at more efficient delivery of media traffic. This involves investigating ways to improve the overall performance, reliability, and resource utilization of architectures that support the transmission of multimedia content over both cloud and edge computing environments ensuring a good quality of experience for the final user

GSaaS: A service to cloudify and schedule GPUs

Cloud technology is an attractive infrastructure solution that provides customers with an almost unlimited on-demand computational capacity using a pay-per-use approach, and allows data centers to increase their energy and economic savings by adopting a virtualized resource sharing model. However, resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs), have not been fully adapted to this model. Although, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is becoming more and more popular, cloud providers lack of flexibility to manage accelerators, because of the extended use of peripheral component interconnect (PCI) passthrough techniques to attach GPUs to virtual machines (VMs). For this reason, we design, develop, and evaluate a service that provides a complete management of cloudified GPUs (cGPUs) in public cloud platforms. Our solution enables an effective, anonymous, and transparent access from VMs to cGPUs that are previously scheduled and assigned by a full resource manager, taking into account new GPU selection policies and new working modes based on the locality of the physical accelerators and the exclusivity when accessing them. This easy-to-adopt tool improves the resource availability through different cGPUs configurations for end-users, whilst cloud providers are able to achieve a better utilization of their infrastructures and offer more competitive services. Scalability results in a real cloud environment demonstrate that our solution introduces a virtually null overhead in the deployment of VMs. Besides, performance experiments reveal that GPU-enabled clusters based on cloud infrastructures can benefit from our proposal not only exploiting better the accelerators, but also serving more jobs requests per unit of time

Assessment of fibre content and 3D profile in cylindrical SFRC specimens

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1617/s11527-014-0521-2The inductive method from Torrents et al. (Mater Struct 45(10):1577–1592, 2012, 1) is used to assess the fibre content and orientation in steel fibre reinforced concrete. Despite several advantages, the method presents limitations. On one hand, it was conceived for cubic specimens, which complicates its application in existing structures given the difficulty to obtain cubic cores. On the other hand, it only shows the fibre orientation in the three axes perpendicular to the faces of the specimen, being impossible to derive the orientation in other directions with these results. Moreover, it only gives average values without providing any information on the scatter or probabilistic distribution of the fibre orientation—a parameter that may be essential to for design and to explain differences in the behaviour of concretes apparently with the same average fibre distribution. The objective of this paper is to propose an assessment of the fibre content and orientation profile using the inductive method and cylindrical specimens. First, a modification of the method is proposed. Then, new equations are deducted to generalize the test to samples with different shapes and to assess the anisotropy level as well as the directions with the maximum and the minimum fibre contribution. An extensive experimental program and FEM simulations are performed to validate and determine the accuracy of the formulation developed. The results show that the execution of only one additional measurement per specimen is enough to determine the fibre probabilistic profile in all in-plane directions with a high accuracy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Biodiesel at the Crossroads: A Critical Review

The delay in the energy transition, focused in the replacement of fossil diesel with biodiesel, is mainly caused by the need of reducing the costs associated to the transesterification reaction of vegetable oils with methanol. This reaction, on an industrial scale, presents several problems associated with the glycerol generated during the process. The costs to eliminate this glycerol have to be added to the implicit cost of using seed oil as raw material. Recently, several alternative methods to convert vegetable oils into high quality diesel fuels, which avoid the glycerol generation, are being under development, such as Gliperol, DMC-Biod, or Ecodiesel. Besides, there are renewable diesel fuels known as “green diesel”, obtained by several catalytic processes (cracking or pyrolysis, hydrodeoxygenation and hydrotreating) of vegetable oils and which exhibit a lot of similarities with fossil fuels. Likewise, it has also been addressed as a novel strategy, the use of straight vegetable oils in blends with various plant-based sources such as alcohols, vegetable oils, and several organic compounds that are renewable and biodegradable. These plant-based sources are capable of achieving the effective reduction of the viscosity of the blends, allowing their use in combustion ignition engines. The aim of this review is to evaluate the real possibilities that conventional biodiesel has in order to success as the main biofuel for the energy transition, as well as the use of alternative biofuels that can take part in the energy transition in a successful way

El valor de los metadatos para las estaciones de recuperación de recursos del agua

Los metadatos hacen referencia a información descriptiva (como ubicación del sensor, unidad de medida, rango de medida, fecha de calibración, fecha de limpieza, si ocurrió algún evento como episodio de lluvia/fallo operativo/vertido tóxico ) que es esencial para convertir los grandes volúmenes de datos que se recogen actualmente en las instalaciones de tratamiento de agua y que están sin procesar en información y recursos útiles. Con el avance de la digitalización en el sector del agua, es fundamental evitar los cementerios de datos y, por otro lado, utilizar los datos almacenados para resolver problemas actuales y futuros. Este artículo se centra en el papel crucial que tienen los metadatos para responder a desafíos futuros y posiblemente impredecibles. El objetivo de este documento es presentar el 'reto de los metadatos' y destacar la necesidad de tener en cuenta los metadatos cuando se recoge información como parte de las buenas prácticas de digitalización. Metadata refers to descriptive information (such as sensor location, measurement unit, measurement range, calibration date, cleaning date, if any event occurred such as rain event/operating failure/toxic spill, ) essential to convert large volumes of raw data that are currently collected at water treatment facilities into useful information and resources. With the advance of digitalization in the water sector, it is fundamental to avoid data graveyards and, on the other hand, using collected data to address current and future problems. This paper focuses on the crucial role that metadata has in responding to future and possibly unpredictable challenges. The aim of this document is to present the 'metadata challenge' and to highlight the need to consider metadata when collecting information as part of good digitalization practices

Interaction of 8 He with 208Pb at near-barrier energies: 4 He and 6 He production

Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness-FPA-2010-22131-CO2-01 (FINURA) y FPA2013-47327-C2-1-RMinistry of Science and Higher Education of Poland-N202 033637National Science Centre of Poland-2013/08/M/ST2/00257 (LEA-COPIGAL) y 2014/14/M/ST2/00738 (COPIN-INFN Collaboration)European Science Foundation-EUI2009-04163432 (EUROGENESIS