Impacts of wind forcing on sea level variations in the East China Sea: Local and remote effects

The regional sea level variation in the East China Sea (ECS) was influenced not only by local factors but also by remote wind from adjoining ocean with the oceanic connectivity influenced by upper-ocean circulation. The satellite altimeter observations showed that from 1993 to 2008, the inter-annual sea level variation in the ECS was negatively related to the strength of Kuroshio. To investigate the relative role of local and remote wind, two sensitive experiments were carried out using the POP model. Model experiments revealed that wind-induced redistributions of water played a significant role in the sea level variation of the ECS. The seasonal variations were induced by both local winds and remote Pacific wind stress with approximately equal contribution. However, on the inter-annual sea level variations, the remote wind forcing over the North Pacific could contribute substantially more than that of local wind which modulated sea level immediately. Remote wind influenced the China Sea in forms of changing of wind stress curl and ocean currents, which influenced the intensity of the Kuroshio, especially during El Nino episodes. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Understanding large plastic deformation of SiC nanowires at room temperature

Tensile behaviors of SiC [111] nanowires with various possible microstructures have been investigated by molecular-dynamics simulations. The results show that the large plastic deformation in these nanowires is induced by the anti-parallel sliding of 3C grains along an ultra- thin intergranular amorphous film parallel to the (11¯1) plane and inclined at an angle of 19.47◦ with respect to the nanowire axis. The resulting large plastic deformation of SiC nanowires at room temperature is attributed to the stretching, breaking and re-forming of Si–C bonds in the intergranular amorphous film, which is also evident from the sawtooth jumps in the stress-strain response

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Back to a Water City - search for a sustainable living typology in the new developed area of Huzhou City

The Central Urban Area in Huzhou used to have many beautiful water cities. Now, due to the urban development, the relationship between water and city has completely changed, water becomes a big threat for pollution and flood. According to City Plan 2020, another big urban expansion will take place to connect the existing centralities into a whole urban region. Admittedly, the new urban expansion will improve the living condition of local villagers, but also sacrifice many important qualities. My project tries to add the sustainable qualities and traditional values into the widely used middle-rise typology, and develop a new model of new urban expansion in Huzhou City, which will generate good water quality, big flood storage capacity, and lively urban life around water with thriving water culture. I will use three strategies and develop the approach from regional structure to the detailed design on neighborhood in order to see the possibilities on different scale. Finally I will have an evaluation on the possible achievement of my project on the assumptiion that the typology I develop is widely used in the whole region.Urban ClimateUrbanismArchitectur

Computational design of heat resistant steels with evolving and time-independent strengthening factors

Alloy design by the traditional trial and error approach is known to be a time consuming and a highly cost procedure, especially for the design of heat resistant steel where the feedback time is intrinsically long. The significant developments in computational simulation techniques in the last decades have made a theory-guided computational alloy design possible. Such a computational approach can substantially decrease the development time costs. In this thesis a computational alloy design approach coupling thermodynamics, kinetics and a genetic algorithm has been developed to design the non-corroding ferritic, martensitic and austenitic heat resistant steels for use at a high service temperature. In the design of heat resistant steels, the evolution of the microstructure and hence properties, depends on service time and temperature and should be considered carefully. For heat resistant steels deriving part of their high strength on precipitates the coarsening of the precipitates at high temperature is considered as the most important factor and this process features highly in the design. Novel steel compositions (involving typically 9 alloying elements) and associated key heat treatment parameters are considered and optimised. The calculated optimal compositions are unlikely to be perfect and free of experimental problems but form an excellent start to initiate experimental development programs and to substantially shorten the development time of new high performance steel grades.Aerospace Structure and MaterialsAerospace Engineerin

Alloy by design: A materials genome approach to advanced high strength stainless steels for low and high temperature applications

We report a computational 'alloy by design' approach which can significantly accelerate the design process and substantially reduce the development costs. This approach allows simultaneously optimization of alloy composition and heat treatment parameters based on the integration of thermodynamic, thermo-kinetics and a genetic algorithm optimization route. Novel steel compositions and associated key heat treatment parameters are identified so as to realize the target microstructure for applications either at the room temperature (ultra-high strength maraging stainless steel) or at high temperatures (creep resistant steels). Solid solution strengthening and precipitation hardening are the two strengthening mechanisms employed to improve the strength of designed steels. Either one of them or their combination is optimized in the four steel families considered. Each model is validated by analyzing the strengthening contributions in existing steels and by experimental characterization of prototype alloys. Very good agreement between experimental performance and model predictions is found. All newly designed alloys are predicted to outperform existing high end reference grades.Aerospace Structures & MaterialsAerospace Engineerin

Efficient Nonlinear Actuator Fault Reconstruction System

Control & Simulatio

DisQ: Disentangling Quantitative MRI Mapping of the Heart

Quantitative MRI (qMRI) of the heart has become an important clinical tool for examining myocardial tissue properties. Because heart is a moving object, it is usually imaged with electrocardiogram and respiratory gating during acquisition, to “freeze” its motion. In reality, gating is more-often-than-not imperfect given the heart rate variability and nonideal breath-hold. qMRI of the heart, consequently, is characteristic of varying image contrast as well as residual motion, the latter compromising the quality of quantitative mapping. Motion correction is an important step prior to parametric mapping, however, a long-standing difficulty for registering the dynamic sequence is that the contrast across frames varies wildly: depending on the acquisition scheme some frames can have extremely poor contrast, which fails both traditional optimization-based and modern learning-based registration methods. In this work, we propose a novel framework named DisQ, which Disentangles Quantitative mapping sequences into the latent space of contrast and anatomy, fully unsupervised. The disentangled latent spaces serve for the purpose of generating a series of images with identical contrast, which enables easy and accurate registration of all frames. We applied our DisQ method to the modified Look-Locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) sequence, and demonstrated improved performance of T1 mapping. In addition, we showed the possibility of generating a dynamic series of baseline images with exactly the same shape, strictly registered and perfectly “frozen". Our proposed DisQ methodology readily extends to other types of cardiac qMRI such as T2 mapping and perfusion.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.ImPhys/Medical Imagin

Stability Analysis for Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Control

As a sensor-based control approach, the Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) method has been successfully applied on various aerospace systems and shown desirable robust performance to aerodynamic model uncertainties. However, its previous derivations based on the so-called time scale separation principle is not mathematically rigorous. There alsolack of stability and robustness analysis for INDI. Therefore, this paper reformulated the INDI control law without using the time scale separation principle and generalized it to not necessarily relative-degree-one problems, with consideration of the internal dynamics. Besides, the stability of the closed-loop system in the presence of external disturbances is analyzed usingLyapunov methods and nonlinear system perturbation theory. Moreover, the robustness of the closed-loop system against regular and singular perturbations is analyzed. Finally, the reformulated INDI control law and main conclusions are verified by a rigid aircraft gust load alleviation problem.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Control & Simulatio

Framework for Simultaneous Sensor and Actuator Fault-Tolerant Flight Control

Control & Simulatio