Experimental study of oscillating SD8020 foil for propulsion

The thrust producing performance and efficiency of an SD8020 oscillating foil with a symmetrical saw-tooth angle of attack pitching profile was studied through force and torque measurements, as well as dye flow visualization, in the water tunnel at low Reynolds number of 13,000-16,000. The propulsive efficiency and thrust coefficient of the pitching foil were determined as a function of the Strouhal number, pitch amplitude and angular frequency. A propulsive efficiency of 30% was obtained experimentally at low Strouhal numbers. The flow visualization has revealed different wake patterns at various Strouhal numbers and can be classified into three regimes – a drag wake, a transition wake and a thrust wake. The drag wake consists of a combination of a regular Kármán street and an array of ‘primary’ stop-start vortices, whereas the thrust wake consists of a reverse Kármán vortex street, commonly observed in swimming fish. The transition wake regime, which occurs at approximately 0.2 < St < 0.5, is interpreted as a momentum balanced wake, where the thrust developed by the foil approximately balances its produced drag. This wake was observed to either consist of an inclined vortex street, or a paired vortex pattern. Based on the force and efficiency data collected, increasing pitch amplitude and angular frequency was associated with a decrease in propulsive efficiency and an increase in thrust forces produced. A high efficiency value of 0.3, accompanied by a thrust coefficient of order one is found at a low pitch amplitude of 10°, angular frequency of 0.79 rad/s and Strouhal number of 0.05. This presented the best conditions for thrust production observed at low Strouhal and Reynolds numbers

Mobile phone dependence, social support and impulsivity in Chinese university students

This study examined the frequency of mobile phone dependence in Chinese university students and explored its association with social support and impulsivity. Altogether, 909 university students were consecutively recruited from a large university in China. Mobile phone use, mobile phone dependence, impulsivity, and social support were measured with standardized instruments. The frequency of possible mobile phone use and mobile phone dependence was 78.3% and 7.4%, respectively. Multinomial logistic regression analyses revealed that compared with no mobile phone dependence, possible mobile phone dependence was significantly associated with being male (p = 0.04, OR = 0.7, 95% CI: 0.4–0.98), excessive mobile phone use (p \u3c 0.001, OR = 1.2, 95% CI: 1.09–1.2), and impulsivity (p \u3c 0.001, OR = 1.05, 95% CI: 1.03–1.06), while mobile phone dependence was associated with length of weekly phone use (p = 0.01, OR = 2.5, 95% CI: 1.2–5.0), excessive mobile phone use (p \u3c 0.001, OR = 1.3, 95% CI: 1.2–1.4), and impulsivity (p \u3c 0.001, OR = 1.08, 95% CI: 1.05–1.1). The frequency of possible mobile phone dependence and mobile phone dependence was high in this sample of Chinese university students. A significant positive association with impulsivity was found, but not with social support

Lifecycle Impacts of the Financial and Economic Crisis on Household Optimal Consumption, Portfolio Choice, and Labor Supply

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion in turn produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and reduced labor earnings, which reduced contributions to Social Security and private pensions. Our research asks which types of individuals were most affected by these dual financial and economic shocks, and it also explores how people may react by changing their consumption, saving and investment, work and retirement, and annuitization decisions. We do so with a realistically calibrated lifecycle framework allowing for time-varying investment opportunities and countercyclical risky labor income dynamics. We show that households near retirement will reduce both short- and long-term consumption, boost work effort, and defer retirement. Younger cohorts will initially reduce their work hours, consumption, saving, and equity exposure; later in life, they will have to work more, retire later, consume less, invest more in stocks, and save more.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87952/1/wp246.pd

EEG emotion recognition using reduced channel wavelet entropy and average wavelet coefficient features with normal Mutual Information method

© 2017 IEEE. Recognizing emotion from EEG signals is a complicated task that requires complex features and a substantial number of EEG channels. Simple algorithms to analyse the feature and reduce the EEG channel number will give an indispensable advantages. Therefore, this study explores a combination of wavelet entropy and average wavelet coefficient (WEAVE) as a potential EEG-emotion feature to classify valence and arousal emotions with the advantage of the ability to identify the occurrence of a pattern while at the same time identify the shape of a pattern in EEG emotion signal. The complexity of the feature was reduced using the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) method to obtain a reduced number of channels. Classification with the WEAVE feature achieved 76.8% accuracy for valence and 74.3% for arousal emotion, respectively. The analysis with NMI shows that the WEAVE feature has linear characteristics and offers possibilities to reduce the EEG channels to a certain number. Further analysis also reveals that detection of valence emotion with reduced EEG channels has a different combination of EEG channels compared to arousal emotion