Miniature, High Efficiency Transducers For Use IN Ultrasonic Flow Meters

This thesis is concerned with the development of a new type of miniature, high efficiency transducer for use in ultrasonic flow meters. The proposed transducer consists of a thin plate of a suitable piezoelectric material on which an inter-digital transducer is fabricated for the generation and detection of plate acoustic waves. When immersed in a fluid medium, this device can convert energy from plate acoustic waves (PAWs) into bulk acoustic waves (BAWs) and vice versa. It is shown that this mode coupling principle can be used to realize efficient transducers for use in ultrasonic flow meters. This transducer can be mounted flush with the walls of the pipe through which fluid is flowing, resulting in minimal disturbance of fluid flow. A prototype flow cell using these transducers has been designed and fabricated. The characteristics of this device have been measured over water flow rates varying from 0 to 7.5 liters per minute and found to be in good agreement with theory. Another attractive property of the new transducers is that they can be used to realize remotely read, passive, wireless flow meters. Details of methods that can be used to develop this wireless capability are described. The research carried out in this thesis has applications in several other areas such as ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE), noncontact or air coupled ultrasonics, and for developing wireless capability in a variety of other acoustic wave sensors

A global reference database of crowdsourced cropland data collected using the Geo-Wiki platform

A global reference data set on cropland was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign using the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool. The campaign lasted three weeks, with over 80 participants from around the world reviewing almost 36,000 sample units, focussing on cropland identification. For quality assessment purposes, two additional data sets are provided. The first is a control set of 1,793 sample locations validated by students trained in satellite image interpretation. This data set was used to assess the quality of the crowd as the campaign progressed. The second data set contains 60 expert validations for additional evaluation of the quality of the contributions. All data sets are split into two parts: the first part shows all areas classified as cropland and the second part shows cropland average per location and user. After further processing, the data presented here might be suitable to validate and compare medium and high resolution cropland maps generated using remote sensing. These could also be used to train classification algorithms for developing new maps of land cover and cropland extent

A global reference database of crowdsourced cropland data collected using the Geo-Wiki platform

A global reference dataset on cropland was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign using the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool. The campaign lasted three weeks, with over 80 participants from around the world reviewing almost 36,000 sample units, focussing on cropland identification. For quality assessment purposes, two additional data sets are provided. The first is a control set of 1793 sample locations validated by students trained in satellite image interpretation. This dataset was used to assess the quality of the crowd as the campaign progressed. The second dataset contains 60 expert validations for additional evaluation of contributions quality. All data sets are split into two parts: the first part shows all areas classified as cropland and the second part shows cropland average per location and user. The results of the cropland validation campaign can be used to validate and compare medium and high resolution cropland maps that have been generated using remote sensing. These can also be used to train classification algorithms for developing new maps of land cover and cropland extent.JRC.D.5-Food Securit