The usefulness and application of fuzzy logic and fuzzy AHP in the materials finishing industry

It is suggested that fuzzy logic could occupy a more prominent role in the materials finishing industry. Whilst a number of applications have already been made to control finishing processes and help with decision making, there is clearly scope for extending the use of fuzzy logic in the industry. After surveying some of these applications, the background to fuzzy logic is described and its set theory explained. Finally, the steps involved in selecting an environmentally acceptable metal cleaning agent from possible alternatives using a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) are described in detail. As illustration, two different sets of selection criteria ranking are considered for choosing (i) the best solvent for cleaning equipment to be used in oxygen service and (ii) for cleaning metal parts prior to further finishing treatment. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article to be published by Taylor & Francis in Transactions of the IMF It will be available online:https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ytim20/curren

Thermoelectric temperature control system for the pushbroom microwave radiometer (PBMR)

A closed loop thermoelectric temperature control system is developed for stabilizing sensitive RF integrated circuits within a microwave radiometer to an accuracy of + or - 0.1 C over a range of ambient conditions from -20 C to +45 C. The dual mode (heating and cooling) control concept utilizes partial thermal isolation of the RF units from an instrument deck which is thermally controlled by thermoelectric coolers and thin film heaters. The temperature control concept is simulated with a thermal analyzer program (MITAS) which consists of 37 nodes and 61 conductors. A full scale thermal mockup is tested in the laboratory at temperatures of 0 C, 21 C, and 45 C to confirm the validity of the control concept. A flight radiometer and temperature control system is successfully flight tested on the NASA Skyvan aircraft

How They Celebrated The Fourth In Sheepscot Village: Seventy-Five Years Ago, Thursday, July 4, 1901

This is a poem written by Lawrence Averill which captures his memories of the Fourth of July 1901, when he was a small boy

A Riverside Village at The Turn of The Century

This entry is a poem written by Lawrence Averill depicting a nostalgic scene in Wiscasset, Maine during his boyhood in 1900

Overlooked examples of cloud self-organization at the mesoscale

Stratocumulus clouds are common in the tropical and subtropical marine boundary layer, and understanding these clouds is important due to their significant impact on the earth's radiation budget. Observations show that the marine boundary layer contains complex, but poorly understood processes, which, from time to time, result in the observable self-organization of cloud structures at scales ranging from a few to a few thousand kilometers. Such shallow convective cloud features, typically observed as hexagonal cells, are known generally as mesoscale cellular convection (MCC). Actinoform clouds are rarer, but visually more striking forms of MCC, which possess a radial structure. Because mesoscale cloud features are typically too large to be observed from the ground, observations of hexagonal cells historically date only to the beginning of satellite meteorology. Examples of actinoform clouds were shown in the venerable “Picture of the Month” series in Monthly Weather Review in the early 1960s, but these clouds were generally forgotten as research focused on hexagonal cells. Recent high-resolution satellite images have, in a sense, “rediscovered” actinoform clouds, and they appear to be much more prevalent than had been previously suspected. We show a number of examples of actinoform clouds from a variety of locations worldwide. In addition, we have conducted a detailed case study of an actinoform cloud system using data from the Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), including analysis of cloud heights, radiative properties, and the time-evolution of the cloud system. We also examine earlier theories regarding actinoform clouds in light of the new satellite data