Parameter identification and state estimation for linear systems

Parameter identification and state estimation for linear system

Effect of equivalent salt deposit density on flashover voltage of contaminated insulator energized by HVDC

In Malaysia, the demand for electric power is increasing day by day due to more consumption of power in the industrial sector. Recently, the high voltage DC transmission lines are under construction near the coastal environments for transmitting the power to the all states of Malaysia. Therefore, there is a concern about the reliability of these systems especially under adverse environmental conditions due to sea salt spray contamination. This reliability of this contaminated insulator can be improved through its performance studies. For this performance study, an analytical expression between flashover voltage and ESDD of the contaminated insulator has been proposed using Dimensional Analysis technique. The results obtained from the analytical expression are compared with the experimental results and in close agreement are foun

The Key Criteria in Deciding to Tender for Construction Projects

Planning for a construction project is a formidable task which involves a huge investment with multiple stakeholders such as clients, consultants, and contractors. A tender is a submission of a technical, administrative, and contractual material made by a potential contractor in response to an invitation to tender by the project client. Established contractors normally realise the importance of doing initial research before committing themselves to enter the tender. Normally, tender pre-qualification is a strict process. A low-quality tender submitted due to problems such as insufficient time and incomplete tender documents normally lead to tender rejection by the client. Thus, this research aimed to provide a strategy to help the contractors in deciding whether they should or should not submit a tender at the initial tendering decision phase. The literature review was focused on the key factors identified in influencing the decision-making process and in the final part, the initial conceptual model was establishe

Experimental Stand for Investigations of Insulator Degradation and Electrode Erosion in High-current Breaker

An experimental stand for studies of electric arc, electrode erosion and insulator degradation processes in high-current circuit breakers and some preliminary experimental data is described. The setup includes a discharge chamber, a capacitive energy storage with capacitance of 0.11 F, voltage up to 10 kV, and all necessary diagnostic techniques. The stand is designed for modeling current pulse with amplitude of 3–150 kA and duration of the first half period of 1.0–3.0  ms during the process of disconnecting the ring and the pin contacts. The arc is cooled by transverse gas blowing at pressure in the chamber of 0.5–3 MPa. Acquired experimental data can be used for verification of the modelling results of the heat transfer processes in the discharge chamber. At the stand, advanced composite materials based on carbon and iron-copper pseudoalloy are studied

UNC-Emory Infant Atlases for Macaque Brain Image Analysis: Postnatal Brain Development through 12 Months

Computational anatomical atlases have shown to be of immense value in neuroimaging as they provide age appropriate reference spaces alongside ancillary anatomical information for automated analysis such as subcortical structural definitions, cortical parcellations or white fiber tract regions. Standard workflows in neuroimaging necessitate such atlases to be appropriately selected for the subject population of interest. This is especially of importance in early postnatal brain development, where rapid changes in brain shape and appearance render neuroimaging workflows sensitive to the appropriate atlas choice. We present here a set of novel computation atlases for structural MRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging as crucial resource for the analysis of MRI data from non-human primate rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) data in early postnatal brain development. Forty socially-housed infant macaques were scanned longitudinally at ages 2 weeks, 3, 6, and 12 months in order to create cross-sectional structural and DTI atlases via unbiased atlas building at each of these ages. Probabilistic spatial prior definitions for the major tissue classes were trained on each atlas with expert manual segmentations. In this article we present the development and use of these atlases with publicly available tools, as well as the atlases themselves, which are publicly disseminated to the scientific community

The challenges of the expanded availability of genomic information: an agenda-setting paper

Rapid advances in microarray and sequencing technologies are making genotyping and genome sequencing more affordable and readily available. There is an expectation that genomic sequencing technologies improve personalized diagnosis and personalized drug therapy. Concurrently, provision of direct-to-consumer genetic testing by commercial providers has enabled individuals’ direct access to their genomic data. The expanded availability of genomic data is perceived as influencing the relationship between the various parties involved including healthcare professionals, researchers, patients, individuals, families, industry, and government. This results in a need to revisit their roles and responsibilities. In a 1-day agenda-setting meeting organized by the COST Action IS1303 “Citizen’s Health through public-private Initiatives: Public health, Market and Ethical perspectives,” participants discussed the main challenges associated with the expanded availability of genomic information, with a specific focus on public-private partnerships, and provided an outline from which to discuss in detail the identified challenges. This paper summarizes the points raised at this meeting in five main parts and highlights the key cross-cutting themes. In light of the increasing availability of genomic information, it is expected that this paper will provide timely direction for future research and policy making in this area.Funding Deborah Mascalzoni is supported under Grant Agreement number 305444. Álvaro Mendes is supported by the FCT—The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/88647/2012. Isabelle Budin-Ljøsne receives support from the National Research and Innovation Platform for Personalized Cancer Medicine funded by The Research Council of Norway (NFR BIOTEK2021/ES495029) and Biobank Norway funded by The Research Council of Norway—grant number 245464. Heidi Carmen Howard is partly supported by supported by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science under grant M13-0260:1), the Biobanking and Molecular Resource Infrastructure of Sweden (BBMRI.se) and the BBMRI-ERIC. Brígida Riso is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the PhD grant SFRH/BD/100779/2014. Heidi Beate Bentzen receives support from the project Legal Regulation of Information Processing relating to Personalized Cancer Medicine funded by The Research Council of Norway BIOTEK2021/238999

The origin of large molecules in primordial autocatalytic reaction networks

Large molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids are crucial for life, yet their primordial origin remains a major puzzle. The production of large molecules, as we know it today, requires good catalysts, and the only good catalysts we know that can accomplish this task consist of large molecules. Thus the origin of large molecules is a chicken and egg problem in chemistry. Here we present a mechanism, based on autocatalytic sets (ACSs), that is a possible solution to this problem. We discuss a mathematical model describing the population dynamics of molecules in a stylized but prebiotically plausible chemistry. Large molecules can be produced in this chemistry by the coalescing of smaller ones, with the smallest molecules, the `food set', being buffered. Some of the reactions can be catalyzed by molecules within the chemistry with varying catalytic strengths. Normally the concentrations of large molecules in such a scenario are very small, diminishing exponentially with their size. ACSs, if present in the catalytic network, can focus the resources of the system into a sparse set of molecules. ACSs can produce a bistability in the population dynamics and, in particular, steady states wherein the ACS molecules dominate the population. However to reach these steady states from initial conditions that contain only the food set typically requires very large catalytic strengths, growing exponentially with the size of the catalyst molecule. We present a solution to this problem by studying `nested ACSs', a structure in which a small ACS is connected to a larger one and reinforces it. We show that when the network contains a cascade of nested ACSs with the catalytic strengths of molecules increasing gradually with their size (e.g., as a power law), a sparse subset of molecules including some very large molecules can come to dominate the system.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figures including supporting informatio