Experimental Wear Modelling of Lifeboat Slipway Launches

It is necessary to use an inclined slipway to launch lifeboats in locations where there is no natural harbour. Slipway stations consist of an initial roller section followed by an inclined keelway, the lifeboat is released from the top of the slipway and proceeds under its own weight into the water. Contact is between the lifeboat keel and a lined, greased keelway and this that determines the friction along the slipway. This paper describes a bench test methodology to investigate this contact. The selection of a modified TE57 reciprocating tribometer and design of a modified pin on plate arrangement is discussed. A test schedule for both the original nickel/chromium coated steel lining and the new low-friction jute fibre/phenolic resin composite lining is developed to accurately reflect real world conditions including environmental contamination such as seawater or wind-blown sand. Environmentally conscious lubricants including water and bio-greases are investigated and compared for their effects in reducing slipway panel friction and wear. Experimental data is collected to establish wear mechanisms, wear volumes and friction characteristics for a range of lubricants and environmental contaminants for the two most common lifeboat keelway lining materials. Implications of this research for future lifeboat slipway design are discussed

An effective strategy of real-time vision-based control for a Stewart platform

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksA Stewart platform is a kind of parallel robot which can be used for a wide variety of technological and industrial applications. In this paper, a Stewart platform designed and assembled at the Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya (UPC) by our research group is presented. The main objective is to overcome the enormous difficulties that arise when a real-time vision-based control of a fast moving object placed on these mechanisms is required. In addition, a description of its geometric characteristics, the calibration process, together with an illustrative experiment to demonstrate the good behavior of the platform is given.Postprint (author's final draft

Localization over complex-analytic groupoids and conformal renormalization

We present a higher index theorem for a certain class of etale one-dimensional complex-analytic groupoids. The novelty is the use of the local anomaly formula established in a previous paper, which represents the bivariant Chern character of a quasihomomorphism as the chiral anomaly associated to a renormalized non-commutative chiral field theory. In the present situation the geometry is non-metric and the corresponding field theory can be renormalized in a purely conformal way, by exploiting the complex-analytic structure of the groupoid only. The index formula is automatically localized at the automorphism subset of the groupoid and involves a cap-product with the sum of two different cyclic cocycles over the groupoid algebra. The first cocycle is a trace involving a generalization of the Lefschetz numbers to higher-order fixed points. The second cocycle is a non-commutative Todd class, constructed from the modular automorphism group of the algebra.Comment: 38 pages. v2: some inconsistencies with the use of pseudogroups have been fixe

ORCIDs in the ETD submission process

Poster presented at Open Repositories 2016 in Dublin, IrelandIn early spring of 2015 the University of Texas at Austin added an option for graduate students to claim and add an ORCID to their ETD submission. At the time, we weren’t prepared to publicize the option but we want to make it available for anyone to use. We intended to provide education and outreach at some point in the future. In the summer of 2015, library staff noticed that many submissions were coming through Vireo with an ORCID included. An initial look at the data revealed approximately 29% of students had chosen to include an ORCID. This was quite a surprise, so in an effort to better understand how many students were choosing this option, we decided to investigate the use of ORCID for all 2015 submissions. A complete assessment of ORCID will be done once all the December 2015 submissions are finished being processed in late February. We intend to look at total numbers, numbers by department, and by degree level (masters vs doctoral). We will present our findings along with plans for integration of ORCID with our DSpace repository, and a discussion of marketing efforts to increase the use of ORCID.UT Librarie

Ecological comparison of the risks of mother-to-child transmission and clinical manifestations of congenital toxoplasmosis according to prenatal treatment protocol

We compared the relative risks of mother-to-child transmission of Toxoplasma gondii and clinical manifestations due to congenital toxoplasmosis associated with intensive prenatal treatment in Lyon and Austria, short term treatment in 51% of Dutch women, and no treatment in Danish women. For each cohort, relative risks were standardized for gestation at seroconversion. In total, 856 mother–child pairs were studied: 549 in Lyon, 133 in Austria, 123 in Denmark and 51 in The Netherlands. The relative risk for mother-to-child transmission compared to Lyon was 1·24 (95% CI: 0·88, 1·59) in Austria; 0·59 (0·41, 0·81) in Denmark; and 0·65 (0·37, 1·01) in The Netherlands. Relative risks for clinical manifestations compared with Lyon (adjusted for follow-up to age 3 years) were: Austria 0·19 (0·04, 0·51); Denmark 0·60 (0·13, 1·08); and The Netherlands 1·46 (0·51, 2·72). There was no clear evidence that the risk of transmission or of clinical manifestations was lowest in centres with the most intensive prenatal treatment

Outreach Outcomes and Batch Processing Tools for IR Deposited Faculty Work

Poster presented at the Association of College & Research Libraries 2017 Conference in Baltimore, MD.UT Librarie

Identifying Food Insecurity in a Rural Vermont Primary Care Setting

Recent years have shown an emergence of interest in social determinants of health by healthcare providers, community leaders, and social service organizations alike. Among the social determinants of health, food insecurity has been associated with higher incidences of chronic disease and poor health outcomes as compared to rates among individuals not screening positive for food insecurity. This project aims to compare the effectiveness of screening patients for food insecurity via formal paper questionnaires versus the traditional approach of an open patient-provider dialog guided by provider intuition in identifying food insecure individuals in a primary care setting.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1623/thumbnail.jp