Identifying prognostic indicators for electrical treeing in solid insulation through pulse sequence analysis

Predictive maintenance attempts to evaluate the condition of equipment and predict the future trend of the equipment's aging, in order to reduce costs when compared to the two traditional approaches: corrective and preventive maintenance. This prediction requires an accurate prognostic model of aging. In solid insulation, the ultimate goal of prognostics is to predict the advent of failure, i.e., insulation breakdown, in terms of remaining useful life (RUL). One fault is electrical treeing, which is progressive thus leading to potentially catastrophic failure. Research has shown that diagnosis of faults can be achieved based on partial discharge (PD) monitoring [1], i.e., phase-resolved and pulse sequence analysis (PSA). This work will explore the extension of this concept towards predicting evolution of the defect: moving beyond diagnostics towards prognostics. To do this, there is a need for further investigation of prognostic features within PD characteristics leading up to breakdown. In this work, a needle-plane test arrangement was set up using a hypodermic needle and pre-formed silicone rubber as test samples. The visual observations and tree growth measurements were made using a digital microscope. PD data was captured using a radio frequency (RF) sensor and analysed using PSA. The main idea of the PSA approach is the strong relationship between two consecutive pulses caused by PD activities, which can give an understanding of the local degradation processes [1]. As for electrical treeing, a breakdown indicator in PSA is the appearance of heavily clustered data points that lie diagonally in scatter plots of the differential ratio of voltage and time of consecutive charges (Un = Δun/Δtn) [2,3]. Figure 1 shows an example of a plot that changed to a diagonal line after 14 hours of aging time. This paper investigates the formation of the diagonal line based on the distribution of the plot from the start of electrical treeing until breakdown occurs. Finally, statistical features of the PSA plot are given and will be used for lifetime prediction of insulation samples in future work

PreP+07: improvements of a user friendly tool to preprocess and analyse microarray data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nowadays, microarray gene expression analysis is a widely used technology that scientists handle but whose final interpretation usually requires the participation of a specialist. The need for this participation is due to the requirement of some background in statistics that most users lack or have a very vague notion of. Moreover, programming skills could also be essential to analyse these data. An interactive, easy to use application seems therefore necessary to help researchers to extract full information from data and analyse them in a simple, powerful and confident way.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>PreP+07 is a standalone Windows XP application that presents a friendly interface for spot filtration, inter- and intra-slide normalization, duplicate resolution, dye-swapping, error removal and statistical analyses. Additionally, it contains two unique implementation of the procedures – double scan and Supervised Lowess-, a complete set of graphical representations – MA plot, RG plot, QQ plot, PP plot, PN plot – and can deal with many data formats, such as tabulated text, GenePix GPR and ArrayPRO. PreP+07 performance has been compared with the equivalent functions in Bioconductor using a tomato chip with 13056 spots. The number of differentially expressed genes considering p-values coming from the PreP+07 and Bioconductor Limma packages were statistically identical when the data set was only normalized; however, a slight variability was appreciated when the data was both normalized and scaled.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>PreP+07 implementation provides a high degree of freedom in selecting and organizing a small set of widely used data processing protocols, and can handle many data formats. Its reliability has been proven so that a laboratory researcher can afford a statistical pre-processing of his/her microarray results and obtain a list of differentially expressed genes using PreP+07 without any programming skills. All of this gives support to scientists that have been using previous PreP releases since its first version in 2003.</p

Complementarity of a Low Energy Photon Collider and LHC Physics

We discuss the complementarity between the LHC and a low energy photon collider. We mostly consider the scenario, where the first linear collider is a photon collider based on dual beam technology like CLIC.Comment: 29 pages, 37 figure, LP-200

Accretion of water in carbonaceous chondrites: current evidence and implications for the delivery of water to early Earth

Protoplanetary disks are dust-rich structures around young stars. The crystalline and amorphous materials contained within these disks are variably thermally processed and accreted to make bodies of a wide range of sizes and compositions, depending on the heliocentric distance of formation. The chondritic meteorites are fragments of relatively small and undifferentiated bodies, and the minerals that they contain carry chemical signatures providing information about the early environment available for planetesimal formation. A current hot topic of debate is the delivery of volatiles to terrestrial planets, understanding that they were built from planetesimals formed under far more reducing conditions than the primordial carbonaceous chondritic bodies. In this review, we describe significant evidence for the accretion of ices and hydrated minerals in the outer protoplanetary disk. In that distant region highly porous and fragile carbon and water-rich transitional asteroids formed, being the parent bodies of the carbonaceous chondrites (CCs). CCs are undifferentiated meteorites that never melted but experienced other physical processes including thermal and aqueous alteration. Recent evidence indicates that few of them have escaped significant alteration, retaining unique features that can be interpreted as evidence of wet accretion. Some examples of carbonaceous chondrite parent body aqueous alteration will be presented. Finally, atomistic interpretations of the first steps leading to water-mediated alteration during the accretion of CCs are provided and discussed. From these new insights into the water retained in CCs we can decipher the pathways of delivery of volatiles to the terrestrial planets.Comment: 37 pages, 2 Tables, 10 Figures Presented in the International ESAC workshop "Ices in the Solar System" To be published in Space Science Reviews (SPAC-D-18-00036R3

The validity and reliability of a novel indoor player tracking system for use within wheelchair court sports

The aim of the current study was to investigate the validity and reliability of a radio- frequency based system for accurately tracking athlete movement within the wheelchair court sports. Four wheelchair specific tests were devised to assess the system during i) static measurements ii) incremental fixed speeds iii) peak speeds, and iv) multi-directional movements. During each test, three sampling frequencies (4, 8 & 16 Hz) were compared to a criterion method for distance, mean and peak speeds. Absolute static error remained between 0.19-0.32 m across the session. Distance values (test ii) showed greatest relative error in 4 Hz tags (1.3%), with significantly lower errors seen in higher frequency tags (< 1.0%). Relative peak speed errors of < 2.0% (test iii) were revealed across all sampling frequencies in relation to the criterion (4.00 ± 0.09 m·sˉ¹). Results showed 8 and 16 Hz sampling frequencies displayed the closest to criterion values, whilst intra-tag reliability never exceeded 2.0% coefficient of variation (% CV) during peak speed detection. Minimal relative distance errors (< 0.2%) were also seen across sampling frequencies (test iv). To conclude, the indoor tracking system is deemed an acceptable tool for tracking wheelchair court match-play using a tag frequency of 8 or 16 Hz

A small azhdarchoid pterosaur from the latest Cretaceous, the age of flying giants

Pterosaur fossils from the Campanian–Maastrichtian of North America have been reported from the continental interior, but few have been described from the west coast. The first pterosaur from the Campanian Northumberland Formation (Nanaimo Group) of Hornby Island, British Columbia, is represented here by a humerus, dorsal vertebrae (including three fused notarial vertebrae), and other fragments. The elements have features typical of Azhdarchoidea, an identification consistent with dominance of this group in the latest Cretaceous. The new material is significant for its size and ontogenetic stage: the humerus and vertebrae indicate a wingspan of ca 1.5?m, but histological sections and bone fusions indicate the individual was approaching maturity at time of death. Pterosaurs of this size are exceedingly rare in Upper Cretaceous strata, a phenomenon commonly attributed to smaller pterosaurs becoming extinct in the Late Cretaceous as part of a reduction in pterosaur diversity and disparity. The absence of small juveniles of large species—which must have existed—in the fossil record is evidence of a preservational bias against small pterosaurs in the Late Cretaceous, and caution should be applied to any interpretation of latest Cretaceous pterosaur diversity and success

Identification of key structural elements for neuronal calcium sensor-1 function in the regulation of the temperature-dependency of locomotion in C. elegans

BACKGROUND: Intracellular Ca(2+) regulates many aspects of neuronal function through Ca(2+) binding to EF hand-containing Ca(2+) sensors that in turn bind target proteins to regulate their function. Amongst the sensors are the neuronal calcium sensor (NCS) family of proteins that are involved in multiple neuronal signalling pathways. Each NCS protein has specific and overlapping targets and physiological functions and specificity is likely to be determined by structural features within the proteins. Common to the NCS proteins is the exposure of a hydrophobic groove, allowing target binding in the Ca(2+)-loaded form. Structural analysis of NCS protein complexes with target peptides has indicated common and distinct aspects of target protein interaction. Two key differences between NCS proteins are the size of the hydrophobic groove that is exposed for interaction and the role of their non-conserved C-terminal tails. RESULTS: We characterised the role of NCS-1 in a temperature-dependent locomotion assay in C. elegans and identified a distinct phenotype in the ncs-1 null in which the worms do not show reduced locomotion at actually elevated temperature. Using rescue of this phenotype we showed that NCS-1 functions in AIY neurons. Structure/function analysis introducing single or double mutations within the hydrophobic groove based on information from characterised target complexes established that both N- and C-terminal pockets of the groove are functionally important and that deletion of the C-terminal tail of NCS-1 did not impair its ability to rescue. CONCLUSIONS: The current work has allowed physiological assessment of suggestions from structural studies on the key structural features that underlie the interaction of NCS-1 with its target proteins. The results are consistent with the notion that full length of the hydrophobic groove is required for the regulatory interactions underlying NCS-1 function whereas the C-terminal tail of NCS-1 is not essential. This has allowed discrimination between two potential modes of interaction of NCS-1 with its targets