A GENERIC BENCHMARK FOR A MINI-SPLIT HEAT PUMP SYSTEM

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) accounts for half of the building energy consumption in the U.S where Mini-Split Heat Pumps (MSHPs) are an emerging type of HVAC system. Their utilization has greatly increased by 34% from 2009 to 2013 and high potential EER is recognized for MSHPs. However, there is limited research involving MSHPs systems, and there is no generic benchmark for system testing and modeling. The available simulation tools such as VapCyc, GreatLab, and CYCLE_D are either too complicated, difficult to access, or not freely available. Therefore, an accurate and public share generic benchmark is essential and will be researched for researchers and scientists. In this study, the Heat Pump Design Model (HPDM) is utilized to investigate MSHP performance values. There are five different kinds of input parameters necessary for the HPDM, namely a general system description, system refrigerant-side balancing, compressor characteristics which need a compressor scaling method, fin-and-tube heat exchanger parameters, and system operating conditions. Based on systematic inputs of the HPDM, several key outputs can be obtained, including system capacity, power consumption, and mass flow rate. By comparing output values with existing data sets, the capability of a generic model for MSHP can be identified. In order to validate the methodology analyzed above, two kinds of case studies will be presented. In the first study, a comparison of lab data and simulation results is presented, whereas in the second one, a comparison is conducted between manufacturing data and simulation results. By identifying all of the input parameters for the specified unit, which is the LG LA096HV in this study, the HPDM can obtain simulation results immediately. As indicated by simulation results, the HPDM can be a generic benchmark in a certain temperature range with a relative error below 5%. Advisor: Haorong L

Do Stereotype Consistent Media Profiles of Sexual Outgroup Members affect Perceived Entitativity of and Bias Towards Sexual Outgroups?

Intergroup contact has been shown to reduce discrimination towards several derogated social outgroups. In this paper, we examined the application of indirect contact to the reduction of bias towards male homosexuals. Specifically, we used social media to induce a situation in which participants engaged in contact with the media profile of a sexual outgroup member. In the first study, we manipulated whether the online profiles were consistent or inconsistent with social stereotypes towards gay men and examined the relation between outgroup stereotype consistency and entitativity, which may be a mediating variable between contact and bias reduction. We found that viewing stereotype consistent media profiles of sexual outgroup members might lead to perceptions that these sexual outgroup members were less entitative. In the second study, we used the same stimuli to examine the relation between outgroup stereotype consistency and implicit attitudes and affect towards sexual outgroup members. However, we found that there is no significant interaction between outgroup stereotype consistency and implicit attitudes and affect towards outgroups. Therefore, our studies show that outgroup stereotype consistency might be a manipulator of entitativity, but outgroup stereotype consistency does not change individuals’ implicit affect or attitude towards outgroup members. Future studies may further investigate methods other than social media that may alter implicit attitudes and affect towards outgroups. Key word: stereotype, consistency, entitativity, sexual minorit

Active Clothing Material Perception using Tactile Sensing and Deep Learning

Humans represent and discriminate the objects in the same category using their properties, and an intelligent robot should be able to do the same. In this paper, we build a robot system that can autonomously perceive the object properties through touch. We work on the common object category of clothing. The robot moves under the guidance of an external Kinect sensor, and squeezes the clothes with a GelSight tactile sensor, then it recognizes the 11 properties of the clothing according to the tactile data. Those properties include the physical properties, like thickness, fuzziness, softness and durability, and semantic properties, like wearing season and preferred washing methods. We collect a dataset of 153 varied pieces of clothes, and conduct 6616 robot exploring iterations on them. To extract the useful information from the high-dimensional sensory output, we applied Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) on the tactile data for recognizing the clothing properties, and on the Kinect depth images for selecting exploration locations. Experiments show that using the trained neural networks, the robot can autonomously explore the unknown clothes and learn their properties. This work proposes a new framework for active tactile perception system with vision-touch system, and has potential to enable robots to help humans with varied clothing related housework.Comment: ICRA 2018 accepte

A GENERIC BENCHMARK FOR A MINI-SPLIT HEAT PUMP SYSTEM

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) accounts for half of the building energy consumption in the U.S where Mini-Split Heat Pumps (MSHPs) are an emerging type of HVAC system. Their utilization has greatly increased by 34% from 2009 to 2013 and high potential EER is recognized for MSHPs. However, there is limited research involving MSHPs systems, and there is no generic benchmark for system testing and modeling. The available simulation tools such as VapCyc, GreatLab, and CYCLE_D are either too complicated, difficult to access, or not freely available. Therefore, an accurate and public share generic benchmark is essential and will be researched for researchers and scientists. In this study, the Heat Pump Design Model (HPDM) is utilized to investigate MSHP performance values. There are five different kinds of input parameters necessary for the HPDM, namely a general system description, system refrigerant-side balancing, compressor characteristics which need a compressor scaling method, fin-and-tube heat exchanger parameters, and system operating conditions. Based on systematic inputs of the HPDM, several key outputs can be obtained, including system capacity, power consumption, and mass flow rate. By comparing output values with existing data sets, the capability of a generic model for MSHP can be identified. In order to validate the methodology analyzed above, two kinds of case studies will be presented. In the first study, a comparison of lab data and simulation results is presented, whereas in the second one, a comparison is conducted between manufacturing data and simulation results. By identifying all of the input parameters for the specified unit, which is the LG LA096HV in this study, the HPDM can obtain simulation results immediately. As indicated by simulation results, the HPDM can be a generic benchmark in a certain temperature range with a relative error below 5%. Advisor: Haorong L

On the rapidly rotating vorticity in the unit disk

In this paper, we obtain uniformly rotating vorticity with sufficiently large angular velocity in the unit disk. The solution consists of either a small nearly-ellipse vortex patch which is highly concentrated near the origin or a $2+1$ configuration in which the another two vortical components are very close to the boundary of fluid domain. The total vorticity are prescribed and the sizes of vortical domains are not necessarily small in the same order. The construction, which is based on a perturbation argument, exhibits a subtle multiscale phenomenon in this highly rotating fluid