A Study on the Integration of a High-Speed Flywheel as an Energy Storage Device in Hybrid Vehicles

The last couple of decades have seen the rise of the hybrid electric vehicle as a compromise between the outstanding specific energy of petrol fuels and its low-cost technology, and the zero tail-gate emissions of the electric vehicle. Despite this, considerable reductions in cost and further increases in fuel economy are needed for their widespread adoption. An alternative low-cost energy storage technology for vehicles is the high-speed flywheel. The flywheel has important limitations that exclude it from being used as a primary energy source for vehicles, but its power characteristics and low-cost materials make it a powerful complement to a vehicle's primary propulsion system. This thesis presents an analysis on the integration of a high-speed flywheel for use as a secondary energy storage device in hybrid vehicles. Unlike other energy storage technologies, the energy content of the flywheel has a direct impact on the velocity of transmission. This presents an important challenge, as it means that the flywheel must be able to rotate at a speed independent of the vehicle's velocity and therefore it must be coupled via a variable speed transmission. This thesis presents some practical ways in which to accomplish this in conventional road vehicles, namely with the use of a variator, a planetary gear set or with the use of a power-split continuously variable transmission. Fundamental analyses on the kinematic behaviour of these transmissions particularly as they pertain to flywheel powertrains are presented. Computer simulations were carried out to compare the performance of various transmissions, and the models developed are presented as well. Finally the thesis also contains an investigation on the driving and road conditions that have the most beneficial effect on hybrid vehicle performance, with a particular emphasis on the effect that the road topography has on fuel economy and the significance of this

Do It Like a Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements to Train Sentence Encoders and Assess Their Sensitivity to Syntactic Structure

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn specific syntactic rules. I generate artificial ungrammatical sentences via two methods. First by randomly pulling words following the n-gram distribution of a corpus of real sentences (I call these Word salads). Second, by corrupting sentences from a real corpus by altering them (changing verbal or adjectival agreement or removing the main verb). We then train models with an encoder using word embeddings and long short term memory (LSTMs) to discriminate between real sentences and ungrammatical sentences. We show that word salads can be distinguished by the model well for low order n-grams but that the model does not generalize well for higher orders. Furthermore, the word salads do not help the model in recognizing corrupted sentences. We then test the contributions of pre-trained word embeddings, deep LSTM and bidirectional LSTM. We find that the biggest contribution is adding pre-trained word embeddings. We also find that additional layers contribute differently to the performance of unidirectional and bidirectional models and that deeper models have more performance variability across training runs

Thinking Adaptive: Towards a Behaviours Virtual

In this paper we name some of the advantages of virtual laboratories; and propose that a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory should be useful for both biologists and AI researchers, offering a new perspective for understanding adaptive behaviour. We present our development of a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory, which at this stage is focused in action selection, and show some experiments to illustrate the properties of our proposal, which can be accessed via Internet

Pinochet’s Chile shows that repression can spell the end for dictators

Human rights violations committed by Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile contributed to the electoral defeat that led to his downfall. Surprisingly, this happened without changing citizens’ political alignment, write María Angélica Bautista, Felipe González, Luis Martínez, Pablo Muñoz, and Mounu Prem

Does higher education reduce mortality? Evidence from a natural experiment

We provide new evidence on the causal eect of education on health. Our empirical strategy exploits the reduction in access to college experienced by individuals reaching college age shortly after the 1973 military coup in Chile, which led to a sharp downward kink in enrollment for the aected cohorts. Using data from the vital statistics for the period 1994-2017, we document an upward kink in the age-adjusted yearly mortality rate for these cohorts, a pattern that we also observe in matched individual-level records for hospitalized patients. Leveraging the downward kink in college enrollment, we estimate a negative eect of college on mortality, which is larger for men, but also sizable for women. Aected individuals have worse labor market outcomes, lower income, and are more likely to be enrolled in the public health system. They also report lower consumption of health services, which suggests that economic disadvantage and limited access to care plausibly contribute to the eect of education on health

Cysteine-proteases and cystatins from barley: molecular and functional characterization in housekeeping and defense processes

Plant cysteine-proteases (CysProt) represent a well-characterized type of proteolytic enzymes that fulfill tightly regulated physiological functions (senescence and seed germination among others) and defense roles. This article is focused on the group of papain-proteases C1A (family C1, clan CA) and their inhibitors, phytocystatins (PhyCys). In particular, the protease–inhibitor interaction and their mutual participation in specific pathways throughout the plant's life are reviewed. C1A CysProt and PhyCys have been molecularly characterized, and comparative sequence analyses have identified consensus functional motifs. A correlation can be established between the number of identified CysProt and PhyCys in angiosperms. Thus, evolutionary forces may have determined a control role of cystatins on both endogenous and pest-exogenous proteases in these species. Tagging the proteases and inhibitors with fluorescence proteins revealed common patterns of subcellular localization in the endoplasmic reticulum–Golgi network in transiently transformed onion epidermal cells. Further in vivo interactions were demonstrated by bimolecular fluorescent complementation, suggesting their participation in the same physiological processes

The active RS CVn-type system SZ Pictoris

We study the short-term variability and long-term variability of the spectroscopic binary SZ Pictoris, a southern RS CVn-type system. We used mid-resolution Echelle spectra obtained at Complejo Astronómico El Leoncito spanning 18 yr, and the photometric data from the All Sky Automated Survey data base (V band) and from the Optical Robotic Observatory (BVRI bands) for similar time lapses. We separated the composite spectra into those corresponding to both components, and we were able to determine accurate orbital parameters, in particular an orbital period of 4.95 d. We also observed a photometric modulation with half the orbital period, due to the ellipticity of the stars. We also found cyclic activity with a period of ∼2030 d, both in the photometry and in the Ca II flux of the secondary star of the system.Fil: Martinez, Cristian Israel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Gonzalez, Jorge Federico. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Buccino, Andrea Paola. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Ibañez Bustos, Romina Valeria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Mauas, Pablo Jacobo David. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; Argentin