SPURIOUS ACTIVATION ASSESSMENT OF THERMAL POWER PLANT’S SAFETY-INSTRUMENTED SYSTEMS

Safety-instrumented systems (also called technological protections) play the significant role in prevention and mitigating of major accidents that can occur on thermal power plant. Activations of safety-instrumented system turn the power unit into safe state by shutting it down or reducing it productivity. The power generation process operates continuously. Any unplanned outage of generation equipment leads to undersupply of energy and big commercial losses to generation company. In Russia the values of allowed spurious trip rate for safety-instrumented systems are set by regulatory agency. These values are strict to all technological protections and do not take into account the differences in amounts of losses. This paper presents more flexible approach based on the Farmer’s risk criterion. Also risk reduction factor for spurious activation is proposed

A Multistage Procedure of Mobile Vehicle Acoustic Identification for Single-Sensor Embedded Device

Mobile vehicle identification has a wide application field for both civilian and military uses. Vehicle identification may be achieved by incorporating single or multiple sensor solutions and through data fusion. This paper considers a single-sensor multistage hierarchical algorithm of acoustic signal analysis and pattern recognition for the identification of mobile vehicles in an open environment. The algorithm applies several standalone techniques to enable complex decision-making during event identification. Computationally inexpensive procedures are specifically chosen in order to provide real-time operation capability. The algorithm is tested on pre-recorded audio signals of civilian vehicles passing the measurement point and shows promising classification accuracy. Implementation on a specific embedded device is also presented and the capability of real-time operation on this device is demonstrated

Optimized Acoustic Localization with SRP-PHAT for Monitoring in Distributed Sensor Networks

Acoustic localization by means of sensor arrays has a variety of applications, from conference telephony to environment monitoring. Many of these tasks are appealing for implementation on embedded systems, however large dataflows and computational complexity of multi-channel signal processing impede the development of such systems. This paper proposes a method of acoustic localization targeted for distributed systems, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The method builds on an optimized localization algorithm of Steered Response Power with Phase Transform (SRP-PHAT) and simplifies it further by reducing the initial search region, in which the sound source is contained. The sensor array is partitioned into sub-blocks, which may be implemented as independent nodes of WSN. For the region reduction two approaches are handled. One is based on Direction of Arrival estimation and the other - on multilateration. Both approaches are tested on real signals for speaker localization and industrial machinery monitoring applications. Experiment results indicate the method’s potency in both these tasks

Performance Assessment of TSO–DSO using Volt-Var Control at Smart-Inverters

The massive penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in distribution networks provides a strategic opportunity for the distribution system operator (DSO) to coordinate the assets appropriately and offer services to the transmission systems. The IEEE std. 1547-2018 introduced a control mechanism to enable the power electronic converters (PECs) to offer several services, including voltage regulation by controlling the reactive power injection/absorption; this type of PECs is also known as "smart inverter". The participation of the smart-inverters in the voltage regulation with a novel customer-centred piece of legislation and markets provide the DSO with powerful tools to enforce very positive TSO/DSO interactions. This research paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the steady-state performance provided by voltage control at the smart-inverters to the TSO – DSO system. The assessment includes analysing main indicators using time series considering short term (24-hours, 1-minute resolution) and long-term (one-year) horizon. In this paper, the three leading indicators are used as criteria for the assessment: total energy losses voltage profile in the TSO-DSO system and the power flow interaction at the interface between the systems. The assessment is based on numerical results using the DIgSILENT PowerFactory simulation tool, where the voltage controllers have been implemented, and regional electrical system in south-eastern Norway, the area of Vestfold and Telemark as been used for illustrative purpose

Синтез топологической структуры распределенной терминальной системы для аудиомониторинга пользователей локальных информационных пространств

Широкое использование многомодальных интерфейсов, обусловленное многомодальностью традиционного межличностного общения, переход к полимодальному представлению информации и систем ее обработки позволили по-новому взглянуть на ряд инфокоммуникационных технологий и сервисов и предложить подход к их реализации на основе распределенных терминальных систем. Предложен подход к синтезу топологической структуры таких систем, реализуемый в два этапа: на первом определяется минимальная совокупность узлов коммуникации и их размещение на основе требований к доступности узлов коммуникации для различных категорий пользователей и глобальности распределенной терминальной системы, на втором — варианты построения узлов коммуникации и связей между ними, которые обеспечивают выполнение функций коммуникации пользователей локальных информационных пространств при обеспечении непрерываемости связи для различных категорий пользователей. Представлен модельный пример задачи синтеза распределенной терминальной системы для аудиомониторинга двух категорий пользователей (взрослые и дети) в локальном информационном пространстве (доме), голосового управления подсистемами «умного» дома. Для ее решения на каждом этапе синтеза определены исходные данные, осуществлена формальная постановка задачи синтеза, представлен алгоритм решения и получаемые результаты. Так задача первого этапа синтеза представляет собой линейную целочисленную задачу математического программирования, решенную в модельном примере симплекс-методом. Решение задачи второго этапа основано на альтернативно-графовой формализации и методе «ветвей и границ». Полученные результаты демонстрируют возможности предложенного научно-методического инструментария синтеза топологической структуры распределенных терминальных систем и перспективность его использования во вновь возникающих задачах технической реализации новых инфокоммуникационных технологий и сервисов

Towards a Synesthesia Laboratory: Real-time Localization and Visualization of a Sound Source for Virtual Reality Applications

In this paper, we present our findings related to the problem of localization and visualization of a sound source placed in the same room as the listener. The particular effect that we aim to investigate is called synesthesia—the act of experiencing one sense modality as another, e.g., a person may vividly experience flashes of colors when listening to a series of sounds. Towards that end, we apply a series of recently developed methods for detecting sound source in a three-dimensional space around the listener.We also apply a Kalman filter to smooth out the perceived motion. Further, we transform the audio signal into a series of visual shapes, such that the size of each shape is determined by theloudness of the sound source, and its color is determined by the dominant spectral component of the sound. The developed prototype is verified in real time. The prototype configuration is described and some initial experimental results are reported and discussed. Some ideas for further development are also presented

Towards a Synesthesia Laboratory: Real-time Localization and Visualization of a Sound Source for Virtual Reality Applications

In this paper, we present our findings related to the problem of localization and visualization of a sound source placed in the same room as the listener. The particular effect that we aim to investigate is called synesthesia—the act of experiencing one sense modality as another, e.g., a person may vividly experience flashes of colors when listening to a series of sounds. Towards that end, we apply a series of recently developed methods for detecting sound source in a three-dimensional space around the listener.We also apply a Kalman filter to smooth out the perceived motion. Further, we transform the audio signal into a series of visual shapes, such that the size of each shape is determined by theloudness of the sound source, and its color is determined by the dominant spectral component of the sound. The developed prototype is verified in real time. The prototype configuration is described and some initial experimental results are reported and discussed. Some ideas for further development are also presented

Application of Fusion of Various Spontaneous Speech Analytics Methods for Improving Far-Field Neural-Based Diarization

Recently developed methods in spontaneous speech analytics require the use of speaker separation based on audio data, referred to as diarization. It is applied to widespread use cases, such as meeting transcription based on recordings from distant microphones and the extraction of the target speaker’s voice profiles from noisy audio. However, speech recognition and analysis can be hindered by background and point-source noise, overlapping speech, and reverberation, which all affect diarization quality in conjunction with each other. To compensate for the impact of these factors, there are a variety of supportive speech analytics methods, such as quality assessments in terms of SNR and RT60 reverberation time metrics, overlapping speech detection, instant speaker number estimation, etc. The improvements in speaker verification methods have benefits in the area of speaker separation as well. This paper introduces several approaches aimed towards improving diarization system quality. The presented experimental results demonstrate the possibility of refining initial speaker labels from neural-based VAD data by means of fusion with labels from quality estimation models, overlapping speech detectors, and speaker number estimation models, which contain CNN and LSTM modules. Such fusing approaches allow us to significantly decrease DER values compared to standalone VAD methods. Cases of ideal VAD labeling are utilized to show the positive impact of ResNet-101 neural networks on diarization quality in comparison with basic x-vectors and ECAPA-TDNN architectures trained on 8 kHz data. Moreover, this paper highlights the advantage of spectral clustering over other clustering methods applied to diarization. The overall quality of diarization is improved at all stages of the pipeline, and the combination of various speech analytics methods makes a significant contribution to the improvement of diarization quality

NICKEL ALUMINIDE SYNTHESIS REINFORCED WITH MOLYBDENUM BORIDE COMPOSITE

The authors study obtaining a composite material NiAl - Mo2B5 while carrying out thermally coupled reactions of self-propagating high-temperature synthesis with a deoxidizing aluminothermal stage. The authors established ultimate and phase composition of the obtained composite. The microstructure is studied. It is shown that the composite consists of the intermetallic phase NiAl with Mo2B5 inclusions