Static Torsion Testing and Modeling of a Variable Thickness Hybrid Composite Bull Gear

Torsional strength of a variable thickness hybrid gear web was measured by performing static testing on the part in a large torsion test frame. The outer rim of the hybrid gear web was fixed to the bottom of the test frame and loading was applied to the web through a shaft. The test setup included the installation of digital image correlation (DIC) systems to obtain deformation and strain measurements from the surfaces of the hybrid gear web and the mechanical test equipment to ensure reliability of the test. The results indicated that the variable thickness hybrid gear web achieved approximately twice the torsional strength compared to that of previous hybrid gear designs. The DIC analysis showed significantly more straining of the loading shaft than the actual test article. Additionally, the results demonstrated the importance and affect that the metallic, lobed interlock features had on the principal strain and out-of-plane displacement fields. The analysis revealed that the fixed outer rim was in fact rotating and a rigid body motion compensation (RBMC) function was computed to determine the actual rotation of the hub and composite web relative to the outer rim. Modeling simulations were performed for the variable thickness hybrid gear web and correlated well with the RBMC rotational deformation seen in the DIC analysis. In addition to benchmarking the load capacity of the hybrid gear web, measuring its strength is useful information to define the parameters needed for dynamic, endurance, and other testing of the part

Renovation-Year Forage Quality of Grass Pastures Sod-Drilled With Kura Clover

Including legumes can enhance yield, quality, and animal performance potential of grass pastures. Kura clover is an exceptionally winter hardy forage legume with high forage quality (Taylor & Smith, 1998). However, its seedling vigor is poor. Herbicide sod suppression prior to sod drilling enabled kura clover to establish in the north central USA and eastern Canada (Cuomo et al., 2001; Laberge et al., 2005), but its percentage of renovation-year forage yield was less than for sod-seeded red or white clover. The objective of this study was to determine the influence of herbicide suppression and clover species on renovation-year forage quality of grass pastures sod-drilled with Kura clover versus red or white clover

Une mesure basée sur le marché comme mécanisme mondial de gestion des émissions de gaz à effet de serre de l'aviation civile internationale

Les changements climatiques sont plus que jamais expliqués et détaillés par les recherches scientifiques. Malgré tout, les négociations climatiques et les mesures internationales semblent avancer à une vitesse inférieure à ce que leurs rapports scientifiques recommandent. Il existe, cependant, plusieurs initiatives telles que les marchés du carbone qui, sans être mondiaux, émergent partout dans le monde. Ceux-ci ont peut-être le potentiel de produire une pression suffisante sur les émetteurs de CO[indice inférieur 2] afin de diminuer l’amplitude de la crise climatique qui guette l’humanité. Les marchés du carbone en activité sont régionaux, étatiques ou internationaux, mais il y aura très probablement, dans les prochaines années, un premier marché du carbone mondial et celui-ci sera sectoriel. En effet, le secteur de l’aviation civile internationale par le biais de l’Organisation de l’aviation civile internationale (OACI), projette de mettre en place un mécanisme de marché d’ici 2020. Dès 2005, l'encadrement des émissions de l'aviation civile internationale est étudié par la Commission européenne et l'étude aboutit à une décision officielle en 2008. Ainsi, a-t-elle décidé, dès le début de l’année 2013, de taxer, par le système communautaire d’échange de quotas d’émission européen tous les vols en provenance et au départ de destinations internationales traversant l’Union européenne. La décision de l'Union européenne a probablement précipité les négociations au sein de l’OACI, car elle a provoqué un véritable conflit diplomatique. En effet, de nombreux pays ont montré un désaccord certain avec cette mesure. Depuis, l’Union européenne a reporté l’ajout de l’aviation civile internationale dans son marché du carbone afin de diminuer les tensions en vue de la 38e Assemblée de l’OACI qui a eu lieu à la fin de 2013 et qui a abouti à la décision importante de mettre en place une mesure basée sur le marché pour 2020. Cependant, plusieurs désaccords ont émergé des négociations. Ainsi, dans ce mémoire, nous présenterons l’état de la situation et répondrons aux questions suivantes : quelles sont les dissensions au sein de l’OACI sur l’élaboration d’une mesure basée sur le marché et comment peuvent-elles être atténuées

Hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions across primary care models in Ontario, Canada

The study analyzes the relationship between the risk of a hospitalization for an ambulatory care sensitive condition (ACSC), and the primary care payment and the organizational model used by the patient (fee-for-service, enhanced fee-for-service, blended capitation, blended capitation with interdisciplinary teams).The study used linked patient-level health administrative databases and census data housed at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Ontario. Since the province provides universal health care, the data capture all patients in Ontario, Canada's most populous province, with about 13 million inhabitants. All Ontario patients diagnosed with an ACSC prior to April 1, 2012, who had at least one visit with a physician between April 1, 2012, and March 31. 2013, were included in the study (n=1,710,310). Each patient was assigned to the primary care model of his/her physician. The different models were categorized as Fee-forService (FFS), enhanced-FFS, blended capitation, and interdisciplinary team. A logistic regression was used to model the risk of having an ACSC hospitalization during the one-year observation period. Adjustments were made for patient characteristics (age, sex, health status, and socio-economic status) and for the geographic location of the practice. Using patients belonging to FFS models as the reference group, the risk of an ACSC hospitalization was higher for patients belonging to the blended-capitation model using interdisciplinary teams (Adjusted Odds Ratio [AOR] = 1.06, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.00-1.12) and lower for enhancedFFS (AOR = 0.78, CI= 0.74-0.82) and blended capitation patients (AOR = 0.91, CI= 0.86-0.96). Using patients with hypertension as the reference group, the odds of an ACSC hospitalization were much higher for patients with any other ACSC and increased with patients' morbidity. The risk was lower for patients of higher socio-economic status (AOR=0.63, CI=0.60-0.67) in the highest neighborhood income quintile

Exact solutions for a mean-field Abelian sandpile

We introduce a model for a sandpile, with N sites, critical height N and each site connected to every other site. It is thus a mean-field model in the spin-glass sense. We find an exact solution for the steady state probability distribution of avalanche sizes, and discuss its asymptotics for large N.Comment: 10 pages, LaTe

Scheduling optimization of parallel linear algebra algorithms using Supervised Learning

Linear algebra algorithms are used widely in a variety of domains, e.g machine learning, numerical physics and video games graphics. For all these applications, loop-level parallelism is required to achieve high performance. However, finding the optimal way to schedule the workload between threads is a non-trivial problem because it depends on the structure of the algorithm being parallelized and the hardware the executable is run on. In the realm of Asynchronous Many Task runtime systems, a key aspect of the scheduling problem is predicting the proper chunk-size, where the chunk-size is defined as the number of iterations of a for-loop assigned to a thread as one task. In this paper, we study the applications of supervised learning models to predict the chunk-size which yields maximum performance on multiple parallel linear algebra operations using the HPX backend of Blaze's linear algebra library. More precisely, we generate our training and tests sets by measuring performance of the application with different chunk-sizes for multiple linear algebra operations; vector-addition, matrix-vector-multiplication, matrix-matrix addition and matrix-matrix-multiplication. We compare the use of logistic regression, neural networks and decision trees with a newly developed decision tree based model in order to predict the optimal value for chunk-size. Our results show that classical decision trees and our custom decision tree model are able to forecast a chunk-size which results in good performance for the linear algebra operations.Comment: Accepted at HPCML1

Evaluation of a Variable Thickness Hybrid Composite Bull Gear

For several years, NASA Glenn Research Center and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have been investigating hybrid (composite/steel) gear technology for use in vertical lift drive systems. The hybrid gear concept replaces the structural portion of a gear between the shaft and the gear rim with a lightweight carbon fiber composite, in an effort to reduce the overall weight of a gear and increase the drive system power density. Past research includes both small-scale and large-scale hybrid gear concepts, all of which have a constant composite thickness throughout. The design described in this paper is of a variable thickness, such that the composite is thickest at the inner diameter and this thickness is gradually reduced toward the outer diameter. The resulting "stair stepped" design stems from dropping plies of the braided carbon fiber prepreg composite fabric gradually with increased radius. Additionally, the interlock pattern at the inner metallic adapter was adjusted slightly from previous designs to obtain a better stress distribution on the inner metallic adapter. The manufactured variable thickness web was tested both in static torsion tests and operationally in a relevant gearbox environment. The results of these experiments will be presented and compared to a baseline steel configuration