Use of structural adhesive joints in construction applications

The Research Group of Materials Performance works in the development of structural adhesive joints and their performance in service in collaboration with some adhesive manufacturer companies. It is sought to increase the number of adhesive manufacturer companies to work with, as well as to find construction companies interested in the application of this technology.Contrato Programa de Comercialización e Internacionalización. Sistema Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica. (Comunidad de Madrid; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Use of paints in construction applications

The Research Group of Materials Performance works in collaboration with some paint manufacturer and paint applier companies. It is sought to open the scope of this activity through tests that include and link activities of both sectors. This improvement will widen the application areas to construction companies.Contrato Programa de Comercialización e Internacionalización. Sistema Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica. (Comunidad de Madrid; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Orthogonal Polynomials on the Unit Ball and Fourth-Order Partial Differential Equations

The purpose of this work is to analyse a family of mutually orthogonal polynomials on the unit ball with respect to an inner product which includes an additional term on the sphere. First, we will get connection formulas relating classical multivariate orthogonal polynomials on the ball with our family of orthogonal polynomials. Then, using the representation of these polynomials in terms of spherical harmonics, algebraic and differential properties will be deduced

A Bridge over Troubled Water: The Role of the British Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) in Facilitating Labour-Management Consultation in Public Sector Transformation

The aim of this paper is to examine the changing role of the state in a more market-driven system of industrial relations, specifically in terms of the new roles that are being developed with regard to mediation, advisory and arbitration services. It focuses empirically on the role played by the British Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) in facilitating the modernisation of public sector employment relations. We show how ACAS has played a ‘benchmarking’ role that assists the development of more strategic forms of decision-making and co-operation in employment relations change, and identify the challenges of developing such an approach in the context of the shift towards a more decentralised and market-oriented system of public service delivery. In conclusion we assert that there is a new ‘advisory and benchmarking’ state evolving based on a soft-market view of industrial relations, and that this mitigates (but is also in tension with) the harder market view within the state concerned with transforming the public sector

Information transmission around block trades on the Spanish stock market

Current fmancial research is placing increasing attention on the effects of large transactions, or Block Trades (BT), on the fmancial markets. In order to analyze whether BT transmit information, we assume that information can be better reflected by changes in asset true value, proxied by the midpoint of bid-ask best quotes, instead of transactions prices or returns. Moreover, following market microstructure literature, we also look at changes in relative spread and in their adverse selection component. The Madrid Stock Exchange offers us a particularly appropriate testing ground for examining these issues, since this topic has not been facilitated as in other markets till 1998. We analyze 195 BT, classified according with trading volume, the side of the market initiating the BT (buyer, seller or indeterminate initiated), its type (inside the spread, sweeping or not classified) and if they change or not the asset true value. The main result of the paper is that it seems that there is BT information transmission when we look at adverse selection spread component in the different subsample classification, but there is no significant permanent effect in returns. We also observe changes in liquidity around BTs but the effect is related with temporary spread component

Sample-Parallel Execution of EBCOT in Fast Mode

JPEG 2000’s most computationally expensive building block is the Embedded Block Coder with Optimized Truncation (EBCOT). This paper evaluates how encoders targeting a parallel architecture such as a GPU can increase their throughput in use cases where very high data rates are used. The compression efficiency in the less significant bit-planes is then often poor and it is beneficial to enable the Selective Arithmetic Coding Bypass style (fast mode) in order to trade a small loss in compression efficiency for a reduction of the computational complexity. More importantly, this style exposes a more finely grained parallelism that can be exploited to execute the raw coding passes, including bit-stuffing, in a sample-parallel fashion. For a latency- or memory critical application that encodes one frame at a time, EBCOT’s tier-1 is sped up between 1.1x and 2.4x compared to an optimized GPU-based implementation. When a low GPU occupancy has already been addressed by encoding multiple frames in parallel, the throughput can still be improved by 5% for high-entropy images and 27% for low-entropy images. Best results are obtained when enabling the fast mode after the fourth significant bit-plane. For most of the test images the compression rate is within 1% of the original

Energy efficiency improvement through MPC-based peripherals management for an industrial process test-bench

High energy costs evince the growing need for energy efficiency in industrial companies. This paper presents a solution at the industrial machine level to obtain efficient energy consumption. Therefore, a controller inspired by the well-known model predictive control (MPC) strategy was developed for the management of peripheral devices. The validation of the control requires a test-bench to emulate the energy consumption of a manufacturing machine. The test-bench has four devices, two used to emulate the periodic and fixed energy consumption of the manufacturing process and two as peripherals, subject to rules associated with the process. Consequently, a subspace identification (SI) was employed to identify energy models to simulate the behavior of the device. As a final step, a performance comparison between a rule-based control (RBC) and the proposed predictive-like controller revealed the remarkable energy savings. The MPC results show an energy saving of around 3% with respect to RBC as well as an instant maximum energy consumption reduction of 8%, approximately.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version