Decisin support system for risk assessment and management of floods

The objective of the RAMFLOOD project is to develop and validate a new decision support system (DSS) for the risk assessment and management of emergency scenarios due to severe floods. The DSS combines environmental and geo-physical data from earth observation, with advanced computer simulation and graphical visualisation methods and artificial intelligence techniques, for generating knowledge contributing to the risk prevention of floods and the design of effective response actions maximising the safety of infrastructures and human life

Plunge pool pressures due to a falling rectangular jet

This Technical Note presents the results of a large set of laboratory tests and tries to determine the conditions that ensure the existence of a water cushion that is not expelled by the impingement of a nappe (effective cushion). Second, values of mean dynamic pressures at the stagnation point of nonsymmetric plunge pools downstream of arch dams are assessed

Dynamic tests and adaptive control of a bottoming organic Rankine cycle of IC engine using swash-plate expander

This paper deals with the experimental testing of a bottoming Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) integrate in a 2 l turbocharged gasoline engine using ethanol as working fluid. The main components of the cycle are a boiler, a condenser, a pump and a swash-plate expander. Both steady and transient tests were performed in three engine operating points to understand the behavior and inertia of the system. Pressure-Volume diagram during these transients were presented and analyzed. Operating parameters of the expander, such as expander speed and boiler power, were shifted. The objective of these tests is to understand the inertia of the system and to have a robust control in all the possible transient tests. New European Driving Cycle was tested with and without the expander because it is supposed to represent the typical usage of a car in Europe. It was used to validate the control of the ORC in realistic dynamic conditions of the engine. The importance of each parameter was analyzed by fixing all the parameters, changing each time one specific value. The main result of this paper is that using a slightly simple and robust control based on adaptive PIDs, the two dynamic effects of an ORC could be taken into account, i.e. high inertia effects (boiler and condenser) and low inertia effects (pump and volumetric expander).This work is part of a research project called "Evaluation of bottoming cycles in IC engines to recover waste heat energies" funded by a National Project of the Spanish Government with reference TRA2013-46408-R. The authors thank also to Raul Lujan and Rafael Carrascosa for their contribution in the testing process. Authors want to acknowledge the "Apoyo para la investigacion y Desarrollo (PAID)" grant for doctoral studies (FPI S2 2015 1067).Torregrosa, AJ.; Galindo, J.; Dolz Ruiz, V.; Royo-Pascual, L.; Haller, R.; Melis, J. (2016). Dynamic tests and adaptive control of a bottoming organic Rankine cycle of IC engine using swash-plate expander. Energy Conversion and Management. 126:168-176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2016.07.078S16817612

Changes in nutrient balance, methane emissions, physiologic biomarkers, and production performance in goats fed different forage-to-concentrate ratios during lactation

[EN] The objective was to determine the effect forage-to-concentrate (F:C) ratio and stage of lactation on methane emissions, digestibility, nutrient balance, lactation performance, and metabolic responses in lactating goats. Twenty Murciano-Granadina dairy goats were used in an experiment divided into 3 periods: early (30 d), mid (100 d), and late (170 d) lactation. All goats were fed a diet with 35:65 F:C (FCL) during early-lactation. Then, 1 group (n = 10 goats) remained on FCL through mid- and late-lactation while the other group (n = 10 goats) was fed a diet with 50:50 F:C at mid-lactation (FCM) and 65:35 (FCH) at late lactation. A greater proportion of concentrate in the diet was associated with greater overall intake and digestibility (P < 0.05). Energy balance was negative in early-lactation (-77 kJ/kg of BW0.75, on average) and positive for FCL at mid- and late-lactation (13 and 35 kJ/kg of BW0.75, respectively). Goats fed FCM and FCH maintained negative energy balance throughout lactation. Plasma concentrations of non-esterified fatty acids at mid-lactation were greater for FCM than FCL (680 mEq/L), and at late-lactation concentrations were greater for FCH and FCL (856 mEq/L). A similar response was detected for plasma beta-hydroxybutyrate. Methane emission was greater (P < 0.05) for FCM than FCH (1.7 g CH4/d). This study demonstrated that differences in F:C across stages of lactation lead to distinct metabolic responses at the level of the rumen and tissues.This study was supported by LIFE Project, European Commission (ref. LIFE2016/CCM/ES/000088 LOW CARBON FEED).Fernández Martínez, CJ.; Hernández, A.; Gomis-Tena Dolz, J.; Loor, JJ. (2021). Changes in nutrient balance, methane emissions, physiologic biomarkers, and production performance in goats fed different forage-to-concentrate ratios during lactation. Journal of Animal Science. 99(7):1-13. https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skab114S11399

A Pipeline for the QR Update in Digital Signal Processing

[EN] The input and output signals of a digital signal processing system can often be represented by a rectangular matrix as it is the case of the beamformer algorithm, a very useful particular algorithm that allows extraction of the original input signal once it is cleaned from noise and room reverberation. We use a version of this algorithm in which the system matrix must be factorized to solve a least squares problem. The matrix changes periodically according to the input signal sampled; therefore, the factorization needs to be recalculated as fast as possible. In this paper, we propose to use parallelism through a pipeline pattern. With our pipeline, some partial computations are advanced so that the final time required to update the factorization is highly reducedThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under MINECO and FEDER projects TIN2014-53495-R and TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R.Dolz, MF.; Alventosa, FJ.; Alonso-Jordá, P.; Vidal Maciá, AM. (2019). A Pipeline for the QR Update in Digital Signal Processing. Computational and Mathematical Methods. 1:1-13. https://doi.org/10.1002/cmm4.1022S113

Max-Fusion U-Net for Multi-Modal Pathology Segmentation with Attention and Dynamic Resampling

Automatic segmentation of multi-sequence (multi-modal) cardiac MR (CMR) images plays a significant role in diagnosis and management for a variety of cardiac diseases. However, the performance of relevant algorithms is significantly affected by the proper fusion of the multi-modal information. Furthermore, particular diseases, such as myocardial infarction, display irregular shapes on images and occupy small regions at random locations. These facts make pathology segmentation of multi-modal CMR images a challenging task. In this paper, we present the Max-Fusion U-Net that achieves improved pathology segmentation performance given aligned multi-modal images of LGE, T2-weighted, and bSSFP modalities. Specifically, modality-specific features are extracted by dedicated encoders. Then they are fused with the pixel-wise maximum operator. Together with the corresponding encoding features, these representations are propagated to decoding layers with U-Net skip-connections. Furthermore, a spatial-attention module is applied in the last decoding layer to encourage the network to focus on those small semantically meaningful pathological regions that trigger relatively high responses by the network neurons. We also use a simple image patch extraction strategy to dynamically resample training examples with varying spacial and batch sizes. With limited GPU memory, this strategy reduces the imbalance of classes and forces the model to focus on regions around the interested pathology. It further improves segmentation accuracy and reduces the mis-classification of pathology. We evaluate our methods using the Myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining the multi-sequence CMR dataset which involves three modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model which outperforms the related baselines.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, conference pape

Limb salvage in bone sarcomas in patients younger than age 10. A 20-year experience.

The authors present their experience over the last 20 years in limb salvage procedures of a consecutive series of 40 children under 10 years of age (range 2-10 years) with bone sarcomas. Nineteen were osteogenic sarcomas and 21 were Ewing sarcomas. Only one case, located in the distal phalanx of the toe, was treated by straightforward amputation. Intercalary allografts and Canadell's technique were used to preserve joints whenever possible, and prosthesis or osteoarticular allografts were used when the joint surface was involved. Survival rate in this series was 75%. There were four local recurrences. At the last follow-up (mean 11.2 years, range 5-19 years postop), 90% of the patients preserved their limbs. Eighty percent of the authors' results were excellent or good according to the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society Scale. Limb salvage is a real possibility even in young children with bone sarcomas. The age of the patient itself is not a contraindication for limb salvage