314 research outputs found
Method for a structured identification of suitable safety and securing systems for Level Crossings
Safety and securing systems for level crossing have a long life time. Once a system reaches a life time when it is no longer conform to applicable regulations, it has to be modernized or replaced. The planner of the level crossing system alongside the road and railroad has to adapt the system to various local conditions and rules. He has to choose a suitable system by the use of his individual expert knowledge. The decisions he made are often hard to understand or to trace for the operating company. This paper presents a structured method, which was developed as a basis for the decision making. It helps to trace the decisions of the engineer and even enables the engineer to identify a suitable level crossing system
Design and Prove of Concept of an Innovative Active Fluid Suspension System
The content of this work is the presentation of the prototype of a new active suspension
system with an active air spring. As being part of the Collaborative Research Unit SFB805
âControl of Uncertainties in Load-Carrying Structures in Mechanical Engineeringâ, funded by
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG, the presented active air suspension strut is the
first result of the attempt to implement the following requirements to an active suspension
system:
⢠Harshness and wear: Reduced coulomb friction, i.e. no dynamic seal.
⢠Reduced complexity
⢠Plug and drive solution: Connected to the electrical power infrastructure of the
vehicle.
⢠Vehicle and customer application by software and not by hardware adaption.
These requirements were defined at the very beginning of the project to address
uncertainties in the life cycle of the product and the market needs.
The basic concept of the active suspension strut is the dynamic alteration of the load carrying
area. This load carrying area is the area A of a roller bellows and defined by A:=F/(p-pâ).
F denotes the resulting force of the strut, p the absolute gas pressure and pâ the ambient
pressure. The alteration of this load carrying area is realized by a mechanical power
transmission, from a rotational movement to four radial translated piston segments. Due to
the radial movement of the piston segments, the load carrying area increases and so does
finally the axial compression force F.
The prototype presented in this paper serves as a demonstrator to prove the concept of the
shiftable piston segments. This prototype is designed to gather information about the static
and dynamic behavior of the roller bellows. Measurements show the feasibility of the concept
and the interrelationship between the piston diameter and the resulting compression force
An active suspension with reduced complexity
This paper introduces a new active hydro pneumatic suspension system (HFD) and examines
the dynamic behavior of the system. The HFD is developed at the Technische Universität
Darmstadt within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 805, supported by Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Unlike other active suspension systems, this system is
characterized by a reduced complexity. This reduced complexity is succeeded by the integration
of the actuator inside the system. Hence, pumps, hoses, filters or tanks can be omitted. Thereby
a control of uncertainties is intended by the reduction of components fraught with uncertainty. In
addition to this research focus the design of the HFD leads to new functions like active vibration
control, stiffness control and the separation of hardware and function. The latter one means that
it is possible to adapt the HFD to varying customer demands (such as sport or comfort set up)
without any modifications of the hardware
A low-cost parallel implementation of direct numerical simulation of wall turbulence
A numerical method for the direct numerical simulation of incompressible wall
turbulence in rectangular and cylindrical geometries is presented. The
distinctive feature resides in its design being targeted towards an efficient
distributed-memory parallel computing on commodity hardware. The adopted
discretization is spectral in the two homogeneous directions; fourth-order
accurate, compact finite-difference schemes over a variable-spacing mesh in the
wall-normal direction are key to our parallel implementation. The parallel
algorithm is designed in such a way as to minimize data exchange among the
computing machines, and in particular to avoid taking a global transpose of the
data during the pseudo-spectral evaluation of the non-linear terms. The
computing machines can then be connected to each other through low-cost network
devices. The code is optimized for memory requirements, which can moreover be
subdivided among the computing nodes. The layout of a simple, dedicated and
optimized computing system based on commodity hardware is described. The
performance of the numerical method on this computing system is evaluated and
compared with that of other codes described in the literature, as well as with
that of the same code implementing a commonly employed strategy for the
pseudo-spectral calculation.Comment: To be published in J. Comp. Physic
GenomeRNAi: a database for cell-based RNAi phenotypes
RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged as a powerful tool to generate loss-of-function phenotypes in a variety of organisms. Combined with the sequence information of almost completely annotated genomes, RNAi technologies have opened new avenues to conduct systematic genetic screens for every annotated gene in the genome. As increasing large datasets of RNAi-induced phenotypes become available, an important challenge remains the systematic integration and annotation of functional information. Genome-wide RNAi screens have been performed both in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila for a variety of phenotypes and several RNAi libraries have become available to assess phenotypes for almost every gene in the genome. These screens were performed using different types of assays from visible phenotypes to focused transcriptional readouts and provide a rich data source for functional annotation across different species. The GenomeRNAi database provides access to published RNAi phenotypes obtained from cell-based screens and maps them to their genomic locus, including possible non-specific regions. The database also gives access to sequence information of RNAi probes used in various screens. It can be searched by phenotype, by gene, by RNAi probe or by sequence and is accessible a
The importance of radiological controls of anastomoses after upper gastrointestinal tract surgery - a retrospective cohort study
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>This study was designed to analyze whether routine radiological controls of anastomoses in the upper gastrointestinal tract an early detection of anastomotic leaks.</p> <p>Patients and Methods</p> <p>135 patients who underwent upper gastrointestinal tract surgery were retrospectively analyzed. Patients in the first group (n = 55) underwent routine radiological control of the anastomoses. In the second group (n = 80) the radiological control was only performed in case of clinical symptoms or signs of anastomotic leaks.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The incidence of anastomotic leaks in the patients seen by us was 5.2%, equivalent to 7 of 135 patients In Group 1 leaks were seen in 4 of 55 patients (7,2%) in group 2 leaks were seen in 3 of 80 (3,8%). The radiological control of the anastomoses with contrast swallow showed the leakage in two cases. Twice the results were false negative. The sensitivity of computed tomography was 100%.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Routine radiological control of anastomoses with contrast swallow only has low sensitivity. This procedure should not be performed routinely any more.</p> <p>The radiological control should be used in cases with signs of anastomotic leakage or with postoperatively impaired gastrointestinal passage.</p
Computing Nearly Singular Solutions Using Pseudo-Spectral Methods
In this paper, we investigate the performance of pseudo-spectral methods in
computing nearly singular solutions of fluid dynamics equations. We consider
two different ways of removing the aliasing errors in a pseudo-spectral method.
The first one is the traditional 2/3 dealiasing rule. The second one is a high
(36th) order Fourier smoothing which keeps a significant portion of the Fourier
modes beyond the 2/3 cut-off point in the Fourier spectrum for the 2/3
dealiasing method. Both the 1D Burgers equation and the 3D incompressible Euler
equations are considered. We demonstrate that the pseudo-spectral method with
the high order Fourier smoothing gives a much better performance than the
pseudo-spectral method with the 2/3 dealiasing rule. Moreover, we show that the
high order Fourier smoothing method captures about more effective
Fourier modes in each dimension than the 2/3 dealiasing method. For the 3D
Euler equations, the gain in the effective Fourier codes for the high order
Fourier smoothing method can be as large as 20% over the 2/3 dealiasing method.
Another interesting observation is that the error produced by the high order
Fourier smoothing method is highly localized near the region where the solution
is most singular, while the 2/3 dealiasing method tends to produce oscillations
in the entire domain. The high order Fourier smoothing method is also found be
very stable dynamically. No high frequency instability has been observed.Comment: 26 pages, 23 figure
Optimizing of preoperative computed tomography for diagnosis in patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background and Objective</p> <p>This study evaluates whether Computer Tomography is an effective procedure for preoperative staging of patients with Peritoneal Carcinomatosis.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>A sample of 37 patients was analyzed with contrast enhanced abdominal Computer Tomography, followed by surgical staging. All Computer Tomography scans were evaluated 3 times by 2 radiologists with one radiologist reviewing 2 times. The efficacy of Computer Tomography was evaluated using the Spearman correlation coefficient. Correlations were analyzed by abdominopelvic region to assess results of the Peritoneal Carcinomatosis Index (PCI) aggregating the 13 regions. Surgical findings were compared to radiological findings.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Results indicate high correlations between the surgical and radiological Peritoneal Carcinomatosis Indices. Analyses of the intra-class correlation between the first and second reading of one radiologist suggest high intra-observer reliability. Correlations by abdominopelvic region show higher values in the upper and middle regions and relatively lower values in the lower regions and the small bowel (correlation coefficients range between 0.418 and 0.726, p < 0.010; sensitivities range between 50% and 96%; and specificities range between 62% and 100%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Computer Tomography represents an effective procedure in the preoperative staging of patients with PC. However, results by abdominopelvic region show lower correlation, therefore suggest lower efficacy. These results are supported by analyses of sensitivity and accuracy by lesion size. This suggests that Computer Tomography is an effective procedure for pre-operative staging but less for determining a tumor's accurate extent.</p
py4DSTEM: a software package for multimodal analysis of four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy datasets
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) allows for imaging,
diffraction, and spectroscopy of materials on length scales ranging from
microns to atoms. By using a high-speed, direct electron detector, it is now
possible to record a full 2D image of the diffracted electron beam at each
probe position, typically a 2D grid of probe positions. These 4D-STEM datasets
are rich in information, including signatures of the local structure,
orientation, deformation, electromagnetic fields and other sample-dependent
properties. However, extracting this information requires complex analysis
pipelines, from data wrangling to calibration to analysis to visualization, all
while maintaining robustness against imaging distortions and artifacts. In this
paper, we present py4DSTEM, an analysis toolkit for measuring material
properties from 4D-STEM datasets, written in the Python language and released
with an open source license. We describe the algorithmic steps for dataset
calibration and various 4D-STEM property measurements in detail, and present
results from several experimental datasets. We have also implemented a simple
and universal file format appropriate for electron microscopy data in py4DSTEM,
which uses the open source HDF5 standard. We hope this tool will benefit the
research community, helps to move the developing standards for data and
computational methods in electron microscopy, and invite the community to
contribute to this ongoing, fully open-source project
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