A novel target following solution for the electric powered hospital bed

© 2015 IEEE. The paper proposes a novel target following solution for an electric powered hospital bed. First, an improved real-time decoupling multivariable control strategy is introduced to stabilize the overall system during its operation. Environment laser-based data are then collected and pre-processed before engaging a neural network classifier for target detection. Finally, a high-level control algorithm is implemented to guarantee safety condition while the hospital bed tracks its target. The proposed solution is successfully validated through real-time experiments

Development of an assistive patient mobile system for hospital environments

This paper presents an assistive patient mobile system for hospital environments, which focuses on transferring the patient without nursing help. The system is a combination of an advanced hospital bed and an autonomous navigating robot. This intelligent bed can track the robot and routinely navigates and communicates with the bed. The work centralizes in building a structure, hardware design and robot detection and tracking algorithms by using laser range finder. The assistive patient mobile system has been tested and the real experiments are shown with a high performance of reliability and practicality. The accuracy of the method proposed in this paper is 91% for the targeted testing object with the error rate of classification by 6%. Additionally, a comparison between our method and a related one is also described including the comparison of results. © 2013 IEEE

Effect of sponge volume fraction on the performance

A novel fluidized bed bioreactor (FBBR) was designed by integration of anaerobic granular activated carbon and aerobic sponge reactors. This FBBR was evaluated at different sponge volume fractions for treating a synthetic wastewater. Polyester urethane sponge with cube size of 1 × 1 × 1 cm and density of 28-30 kg/m3 with 90 cells per 25 mm was used as biomass carrier. The results indicate that the FBBR could remove more than 93% of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). The highest nutrient removal efficiencies (58.2% PO4 -P and 75.4% NH4-N) were achieved at 40% sponge volume fraction. The system could provide a good condition for biomass growth (e.g. 186.2 mg biomass/g sponge). No significant different performance in specific oxygen uptake rate was observed between 30, 40, and 50% sponge volume fractions. © IWA Publishing 2013 Water

Pilot scale study on a new membrane bioreactor hybrid system in municipal wastewater treatment

A pilot scale membrane bioreactor hybrid system (MBR-HS) was evaluated for municipal wastewater treatment. This novel system comprised of a granular activated carbon-sponge fluidized bed bioreactor (GACS-FBBR) followed by a submerge membrane bioreactor (MBR) with the capacity of 2L/min. The results indicated that the MBR-HS could effectively remove 90% DOC and 95% NH4-N. PO4-P removal efficiency was remained stable at about 70% throughout the experiment. Specific oxygen uptake rate (SOUR) of activated sludge increased from 0.72 to 2.21mg O2/gVSSh for the first 10days and then followed by a steady stage until the end of experiment. Sludge volume index (SVI) was always below 50mL/g, demonstrated an excellent settling properties of sludge. The system also showed an achievement in terms of low trans-membrane pressure (TMP) development rate. The TMP increasing rate was only 0.65kPa/day, suggesting GACS-FBBR can be a promising pre-treatment for MBR. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Effect of internal recycling ratios on biomass parameters and simultaneous reduction of nitrogen and organic matter in a hybrid treatment system

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. A new large-scale pilot hybrid treatment system of 53 m3/day was developed by combining 3 treatment methods: switched internal recycling flows to equalization tank (EQ); rotating hanging media bioreactor (RHMBR); and submerged flat sheet membrane bioreactor (SMBR). The system was operated for more than 16 months in a real-world municipal wastewater treatment plant, using different internal recycling ratios and observing/monitoring the results. This paper addresses not only the urgent problems of treating nutrient and organic pollutants in municipal wastewater, but also assesses characteristics of biomass production, sludge yield, and observed yield during the pilot operation. It also details design parameters used to achieve these assessed levels. Furthermore, the effects and correlations of the loading rates, activated sludge and biomass parameters, on different runs were also studied. The purpose of this was to identify the most suitable indicator for assessing the hybrid system's performance. Results strongly indicated that increasing the internal circulation rate greatly influenced the declining yield trend. The lowest biomass production (Px,bio) and sludge yields (PX,VSS or PX,TSS) were shown for conditions in run 3, and run 4, respectively. Overall the developed treatment system performed extremely well in biological terms for actual municipal wastewater treatment and resulted in high pollutant removal efficiencies, reduced sludge production at a reasonable cost. The hybrid system is a potential option for wastewater treatment, reuse and economy

Data-driven pattern identification and outlier detection in time series

We address the problem of data-driven pattern identification and outlier detection in time series. To this end, we use singular value decomposition (SVD) which is a well-known technique to compute a low-rank approximation for an arbitrary matrix. By recasting the time series as a matrix it becomes possible to use SVD to highlight the underlying patterns and periodicities. This is done without the need for specifying user-defined parameters. From a data mining perspective, this opens up new ways of analyzing time series in a data-driven, bottom-up fashion. However, in order to get correct results, it is important to understand how the SVD-spectrum of a time series is influenced by various characteristics of the underlying signal and noise. In this paper, we have extended the work in earlier papers by initiating a more systematic analysis of these effects. We then illustrate our findings on some real-life data

Integration of SWAT and QUAL2K for water quality modeling in a data scarce basin of Cau River basin in Vietnam

© 2019 European Regional Centre for Ecohydrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences Water quality modeling in a river basin often faces the problem of having a large number of parameters yet limited available data. The important inputs to the water quality model are pollution concentrations and discharge from river tributaries, lateral inflows and related pollution load from different sources along the river. In general, such an extensive data set is rarely available, especially for data scarce basins. This makes water quality modeling more challenging. However, integration of models may be able to fill this data gap. Selection of models should be made based on the data that is available for the river basin. For the case of Cau River basin, the SWAT and QUAL2K models were selected. The outputs of SWAT model for lateral inflows and discharges of ungauged tributaries, and the observed pollutant concentrations data and estimated pollution loads of sub-watersheds were used as inputs to the water quality model QUAL2K. The resulting QUAL2K model was calibrated and validated using recent water quality data for two periods in 2014. Four model performance ratings PBIAS, NSE, RSR and R2 were used to evaluate the model results. PBIAS index was chosen for water quality model evaluation because it more adequately accounted for the large uncertainty inherent in water quality data. In term of PBIAS, the calibration and validation results for Cau River water quality model were in the “very good” performance range with ǀPBIASǀ < 15%. The obtained results could be used to support water quality management and control in the Cau River basin

2-D two-fold symmetric circular shaped filter design with homomorphic processing application

A design method of a linear-phased, two-dimensional (2-D), two-fold symmetric circular shaped filter is presented in this paper. Although the proposed method designs a non-separable filter, its implementation has linear complexity. The shape of the passband and the stopband is expressed in terms of level sets of second order trigonometric polynomials. This enables the transformation of the filter specifications to a Semi-Definite Program (SDP) of moderate dimension. The proposed filter outperforms currently available filter design methods. We present a performance comparison, as well as a homomorphic processing image enhancement example to illustrate the effectiveness of this method. ©2010 IEEE

Bridge Pile Response to Lateral Soil Movement Induced by Installation of Controlled Modulus Columns

© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Controlled modulus columns (CMC) for ground improvement are installed using a hollow stem displacement auger to induce lateral soil displacement effect, followed by grout injection. While the method reduces spoils, the excessive lateral soil displacement may damage adjacent structures. Although there has been growing interest in quantifying such effects, only a handful of studies have been attempted. This paper presents the results of a numerical investigation on the CMC installation effect on an existing bridge pile using the three-dimensional finite difference software package FLAC3D. It has been found that when the CMC is long and the existing bridge pile is slender, the pile bending moment and pile lateral movement, induced by the CMC installation effect, can be significant

A new combined inorganic-organic flocculant (CIOF) as a performance enhancer for aerated submerged membrane bioreactor

In this study, a new combined inorganic-organic flocculant (CIOF) of FeCl3 and membrane performance enhancer (MPE50) was prepared and added to an aerated submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR). The effects of CIOF on the performance of an aerated submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) were evaluated. The results indicated that the SMBR with CIOF addition could remove almost 100% total phosphate while eliminating over 90% ammonia (NH 4-N) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) during an 80-day of operation. The respiration tests revealed that the specific oxygen uptake rate (SOUR) was stable around 1.5-2.0 mg O2/gMLVSS h. The sludge volume index (SVI) of less than 100 mL/g during the operation showed the importance of CIOF on the improvement of settling properties of the sludge. Soluble carbohydrate concentration was also well correlated with DOC of the supernatant. CIOF was successful in the reduction of fouling of membrane as the membrane was only chemically cleaned after 53 days of operation. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved