6,057 research outputs found
Combating barriers to inclusive design – Evaluation of an inclusive design toolkit
This research is based on a number of studies of barriers to inclusive design [1-4], in particular the authors ’ own investigation of drivers for, and barriers to, inclusive design within the UK consumer product industry [4], where two mail surveys were conducted: one with 177 industrial design consultancies, and the other with 152 consumer produc
The investigation of the flow about general fuselage shapes at high angles of attack
Water tunnel visualization of the flow about bodies at high angles of attack was done. Wind tunnel tests on a series of models with non-circular cross sections are reported
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Designers and manufacturers’ perspectives on inclusive/universal design
Inclusive design in the U.K. and its U.S. counterpart, universal design, present opportunities and challenges to industry. In order to encourage manufacturers and design companies to adopt more inclusive design practices, the research has been carried out to gain an understanding of why and how companies adopt inclusive design practices, what are the barriers when implementing them and what are the key strategies for facilitating inclusive/universal design in an industrial context.
Based on interviews with a number of U.K. design consultancies and an investigation among manufacturers in the U.S., a comparison between U.K. consultant designers and U.S. consumer product manufacturers’ perspectives on inclusive/universal design was made. It was found that designers are reluctant to sacrifice the aesthetics of the brand to design for inclusion, but nevertheless would like to have practical tools to help them develop more inclusive solutions. For manufacturers, the key motivation for such practices is that of government regulation and legislation requiring the accessibility of products and services
The investigation of flow instabilities on a rotating disk with curvature in the radial direction
The major objective is to explore any visible differences of the flow field with wall curvature of the test body, including possible interaction between Taylor-Gortler instabilities present along concave walls and the inflexional instabilities investigated here. An experimental study was conducted with emphasis placed on making visual observations and recording photographically the flow instabilities present under three different rotating bodies: a flat disk, a concave paraboloid, and a convex paraboloid. The data collected for the three test bodies lead to the conclusion that the wall curvature of the concave and convex paraboloids did not alter the observed flow field significantly from that observed on the flat disk
Long wavelength optical coherence tomography for painted objects
Optical Coherence Tomography has been successfully applied to the imaging of painted objects in recent years. However, a significant limitation is the low penetration depth of OCT in paint because of the high opacity of paint due to either scattering or absorption. It has been shown that the optimum spectral window for OCT imaging of paint layers is around 2.2ÎĽm in wavelength. In this paper, we demonstrate a 1950nm OCT for imaging painted objects using a superfluorescent fiber source at low power
Locally extracting scalar, vector and tensor modes in cosmological perturbation theory
Cosmological perturbation theory relies on the decomposition of perturbations
into so-called scalar, vector and tensor modes. This decomposition is non-local
and depends on unknowable boundary conditions. The non-locality is particularly
important at second- and higher-order because perturbative modes are sourced by
products of lower-oder modes, which must be integrated over all space in order
to isolate each mode. However, given a trace-free rank-2 tensor, a locally
defined scalar mode may be trivially derived by taking two divergences, which
knocks out the vector and tensor degrees of freedom. A similar local
differential operation will return a pure vector mode. This means that scalar
and vector degrees of freedom have local descriptions. The corresponding local
extraction of the tensor mode is unknown however. We give it here. The
operators we define are useful for defining gauge-invariant quantities at
second-order. We perform much of our analysis using an index-free
`vector-calculus' approach which makes manipulating tensor equations
considerably simpler.Comment: 13 pages. Final version to appear in CQ
High resolution fourier domain optical coherence tomography at 2 microns for painted objects
Optical Coherence Tomography has been successfully applied to the non-invasive imaging of subsurface microstructure of a variety of materials from biological tissues to painted objects of art. One of the limitations of the technique is the low depth of penetration due to the strong scattering and absorption in the material. Previous studies found that for paint materials, the optimum window for large depth of penetration is around 2.2 microns. This is also true for many other materials with low water content. We have previously demonstrated OCT systems in this wavelength regime for imaging with improved depth of penetration. In this paper, we present an improved 2 micron high resolution Fourier domain OCT system using a broadband supercontinuum source. The system achieved a depth resolution of 9 microns in air (or 6 microns in paint or any polymer)
Ultra-broadband wavelength-swept Tm-doped fiber laser using wavelength-combined gain stages
A wavelength-swept thulium-doped fiber laser system employing two parallel cavities with two different fiber gain stages is reported. The fiber gain stages were tailored to provide emission in complementary bands with external wavelength-dependent feedback cavities sharing a common rotating polygon mirror for wavelength scanning. The wavelength-swept laser outputs from the fiber gain elements were spectrally combined by means of a dichroic mirror and yielded over 500 mW of output with a scanning range from ~1740 nm to ~2070 nm for a scanning frequency of ~340 Hz
Randomized Extended Kaczmarz for Solving Least-Squares
We present a randomized iterative algorithm that exponentially converges in
expectation to the minimum Euclidean norm least squares solution of a given
linear system of equations. The expected number of arithmetic operations
required to obtain an estimate of given accuracy is proportional to the square
condition number of the system multiplied by the number of non-zeros entries of
the input matrix. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the randomized
Kaczmarz method that was analyzed by Strohmer and Vershynin.Comment: 19 Pages, 5 figures; code is available at
https://github.com/zouzias/RE
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