Investigating the effectiveness of different forms of mineral resources governance in meeting the objectives of the UK petroleum fiscal regime

After 40 years of oil investments, the UK is now a mature oil province. During these 40 years or so, the UK Government has changed the type of governance it uses to manage its petroleum resources. This paper introduces the theoretical background to two models of mineral resource governance: the so-called proprietorial and nonproprietorial regimes. It investigates the adoption of these two models by the UK Government and their effect on the overall tax take from the UK`s petroleum resources. The analysis tracks the changes in the UK petroleum taxation system since establishment up until 2010. It assesses how these tax changes have affected the overall petroleum average tax rate (ATR). The study concludes that the UK Government adopted a proprietorial type of mineral governance during the period 1975-1982, before changing to a non-proprietorial regime in the period 1983-2000. Since 2000 it has begun to move back towards a proprietorial style of governance. This change is still in its early stages, however; the evidence shows that although there has been an increase in fiscal revenues, this increase has been small

An ontology based personalized privacy preservation

Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC)11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2019 -- 17 September 2019 through 19 September 2019 -- -- 152660Various organizations share sensitive personal data for data analysis. Therefore, sensitive information must be protected. For this purpose, privacy preservation has become a major issue along with the data disclosure in data publishing. Hence, an individual’s sensitive data must be indistinguishable after the data publishing. Data anonymization techniques perform various operations on data before it’s shared publicly. Also, data must be available for accurate data analysis when data is released. Therefore, differential privacy method which adds noise to query results is used. The purpose of data anonymization is to ensure that data cannot be misused even if data are stolen and to enhance the privacy of individuals. In this paper, an ontology-based approach is proposed to support privacy-preservation methods by integrating data anonymization techniques in order to develop a generic anonymization model. The proposed personalized privacy approach also considers individuals’ different privacy concerns and includes privacy preserving algorithms’ concepts. Copyright © 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserve

Application of a Fuzzy Logic Controller for Speed Control on a Small-Scale Turbojet Engine

Having a small-scale turbojet engine operate at a desired speed with minimum steady state error, while maintaining good transient response is crucial in many applications, such as UAVs, and requires precise control of the fuel flow

A new hardware-in-the-loop simulator for control engineering education

As a part of a "lab-at-home" education paradigm for control engineering courses, this paper proposes (and elaborates) a novel hardware-in-the-loop simulator with 3D animation capabilities. The developed software, which can be tailored to simulate any dynamic systems in non-real-time, is designed to work in conjunction with a control hardware. In the paper, the specific application of the software to a graduate-level course is presented within the framework of a final term project involving the control of a satellite tracking antenna. The success of the software (along with the methodology) is rigorously evaluated through the information collected in three academic semesters including the course instructor's feedback and the questionnaires filled out by the students

GPU Based Fast Free-Wake Calculations For Multiple Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Rotors

Unsteady free-wake solutions of wind turbine flow fields involve computationally intensive interaction calculations, which generally limit the total amount of simulation time or the number of turbines that can be simulated by the method. This problem, however, can be addressed easily using high-level of parallelization. Especially when exploited with a GPU, a Graphics Processing Unit, this property can provide a significant computational speed-up, rendering the most intensive engineering problems realizable in hours of computation time. This paper presents the results of the simulation of the flow field for the NREL Phase VI turbine using a GPU-based in-house free-wake panel method code. Computational parallelism involved in the free-wake methodology is exploited using a GPU, allowing thousands of similar operations to be performed simultaneously. The results are compared to experimental data as well as to those obtained by running a corresponding CPU-based code. Results show that the GPU based code is capable of producing wake and load predictions similar to the CPU- based code and in a substantially reduced amount of time. This capability could allow free- wake based analysis to be used in the possible design and optimization studies of wind farms as well as prediction of multiple turbine flow fields and the investigation of the effects of using different vortex core models, core expansion and stretching models on the turbine rotor interaction problems in multiple turbine wake flow fields