Characterisation of the relationship between surface texture and surface integrity of superalloy components machined by grinding

The surface texture of a machined component is influenced largely by the processing parameters used during machining and hence, there is a relationship between both the formation of the surface texture and surface integrity of the machined component. In the study to be reported in this paper, GH4169, a hard-to-cut superalloy, widely used in aero-engines, was selected for a detailed investigation into the relationship between the surface texture and the component-performance (surface integrity) of the machined components for which a series of grinding experiments with different grinding-wheels and grinding parameter-values was carried out in order to quantitatively analyze variations of the surface roughness with processing parameters. Further, considering that the features of the ground-surfaces measured are of a random nature, statistic properties of the produced surfaces were revealed and characterised with power spectral density function (PSD) and auto-covariance function(ACV) method respectively

A rest time-based prognostic framework for state of health estimation of lithium-ion batteries with regeneration phenomena

State of health (SOH) prognostics is significant for safe and reliable usage of lithium-ion batteries. To accurately predict regeneration phenomena and improve long-term prediction performance of battery SOH, this paper proposes a rest time-based prognostic framework (RTPF) in which the beginning time interval of two adjacent cycles is adopted to reflect the rest time. In this framework, SOH values of regeneration cycles, the number of cycles in regeneration regions and global degradation trends are extracted from raw SOH time series and predicted respectively, and then the three sets of prediction results are integrated to calculate the final overall SOH prediction values. Regeneration phenomena can be found by support vector machine and hyperplane shift (SVM-HS) model by detecting long beginning time intervals. Gaussian process (GP) model is utilized to predict the global degradation trend, and nonlinear models are utilized to predict the regeneration amplitude and the cycle number of each regeneration region. The proposed framework is validated through experimental data from the degradation tests of lithium-ion batteries. The results demonstrate that both the global degradation trend and the regeneration phenomena of the testing batteries can be well predicted. Moreover, compared with the published methods, more accurate SOH prediction results can be obtained under this framewor

Memory-Efficient Topic Modeling

As one of the simplest probabilistic topic modeling techniques, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has found many important applications in text mining, computer vision and computational biology. Recent training algorithms for LDA can be interpreted within a unified message passing framework. However, message passing requires storing previous messages with a large amount of memory space, increasing linearly with the number of documents or the number of topics. Therefore, the high memory usage is often a major problem for topic modeling of massive corpora containing a large number of topics. To reduce the space complexity, we propose a novel algorithm without storing previous messages for training LDA: tiny belief propagation (TBP). The basic idea of TBP relates the message passing algorithms with the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms, which absorb the message updating into the message passing process, and thus avoid storing previous messages. Experimental results on four large data sets confirm that TBP performs comparably well or even better than current state-of-the-art training algorithms for LDA but with a much less memory consumption. TBP can do topic modeling when massive corpora cannot fit in the computer memory, for example, extracting thematic topics from 7 GB PUBMED corpora on a common desktop computer with 2GB memory.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

State of health estimation of Li-ion batteries with regeneration phenomena: a similar rest time-based prognostic framework

State of health (SOH) prediction in Li-ion batteries plays an important role in intelligent battery management systems (BMS). However, the existence of capacity regeneration phenomena remains a great challenge for accurately predicting the battery SOH. This paper proposes a novel prognostic framework to predict the regeneration phenomena of the current battery using the data of a historical battery. The global degradation trend and regeneration phenomena (characterized by regeneration amplitude and regeneration cycle number) of the current battery are extracted from its raw SOH time series. Moreover, regeneration information of the historical battery derived from corresponding raw SOH data is utilized in this framework. The global degradation trend and regeneration phenomena of the current battery are predicted, and then the prediction results are integrated together to calculate the overall SOH prediction values. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed to obtain an appropriate regeneration threshold for the historical battery. Gaussian process (GP) model is adopted to predict the global degradation trend, and linear models are utilized to predict the regeneration amplitude and the cycle number of each regeneration region. The proposed framework is validated using experimental data from the degradation tests of Li-ion batteries. The results demonstrate that both the global degradation trend and the regeneration phenomena of the testing batteries can be well predicted. Moreover, compared with the published methods, more accurate SOH prediction results can be obtained under this framewor

Combining Subgoal Graphs with Reinforcement Learning to Build a Rational Pathfinder

In this paper, we present a hierarchical path planning framework called SG-RL (subgoal graphs-reinforcement learning), to plan rational paths for agents maneuvering in continuous and uncertain environments. By "rational", we mean (1) efficient path planning to eliminate first-move lags; (2) collision-free and smooth for agents with kinematic constraints satisfied. SG-RL works in a two-level manner. At the first level, SG-RL uses a geometric path-planning method, i.e., Simple Subgoal Graphs (SSG), to efficiently find optimal abstract paths, also called subgoal sequences. At the second level, SG-RL uses an RL method, i.e., Least-Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI), to learn near-optimal motion-planning policies which can generate kinematically feasible and collision-free trajectories between adjacent subgoals. The first advantage of the proposed method is that SSG can solve the limitations of sparse reward and local minima trap for RL agents; thus, LSPI can be used to generate paths in complex environments. The second advantage is that, when the environment changes slightly (i.e., unexpected obstacles appearing), SG-RL does not need to reconstruct subgoal graphs and replan subgoal sequences using SSG, since LSPI can deal with uncertainties by exploiting its generalization ability to handle changes in environments. Simulation experiments in representative scenarios demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, SG-RL can work well on large-scale maps with relatively low action-switching frequencies and shorter path lengths, and SG-RL can deal with small changes in environments. We further demonstrate that the design of reward functions and the types of training environments are important factors for learning feasible policies.Comment: 20 page