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Laminar technology provides tools to reduce the specific fuel burn of aircraft. Promising results give the hybrid laminar flow control (HLFC) technology. Together with efficient flying, bird strike tolerance is mandatory for safety reasons. The current work considers HLFC in horizontal stabiliser leading edges with a multi-chambered structure. The bird strike simulation accompanied manufacturing and engineering studies. The developed design was confirmed by testing of a demonstrator. Based on the results validation methods were used to improve the modelling & simulation. The work has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 945583 (ECHO, HLFC-WIN). The JU receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Clean Sky 2 JU members other than the Union. Furthermore, the work has received institutional funding of DLR under the aeronautical research programme.

Optical fiber sensing systems have been widely developed for several fields such as biomedical diagnosis, food technology, military and industrial applications and civil engineering. Nowadays, the growth and advances of optical fiber sensors (OFS) are focused on the development of novel sensing concepts and transducers as well as sensor cost reduction. This review provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of OFS based on sol-gel materials for diverse applications with particular emphasis on OFS for structural health monitoring of concrete structures. The types of precursors used in the development of sol-gel materials for OFS functionalization to monitor a wide range of analytes are debated. The main advantages of OFS compared to other sensing systems such as electrochemical sensors are also considered. An interdisciplinary review to a broad audience of engineers and materials scientists is provided and the relationship between the chemistry of sol-gel material synthesis and the development of OFS is considered. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no review manuscripts were found in which the fields of sol-gel chemistry and OFS are correlated. The authors consider that this review will serve as a reference as well as provide insights for experts into the application of sol-gel chemistry and OFS in the civil engineering field. (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry.

The recent spectacular progress in nano-electronic technology has enabled the implementation of very complex multi-processor systems on single chips (MPSoCs). However in parallel, new highly demanding complex embedded applications are emerging, in fields like communication and networking, multimedia, medical instrumentation, monitoring and control, military, etc., which impose stringent and continuously increasing functional and parametric demands. The high demands of these applications cannot be satisfied by systems implemented using general purpose processors (GPP). For these applications increasingly complex and highly optimized application-specific MPSoCs are required to perform real-time computations to extremely tight schedules, when satisfying high demands regarding the energy, area, cost and development efficiency. High-quality MPSoCs for these applications can only be constructed through adequate usage of efficient application-specific system architectures exploiting more adequate concepts of computation, storage and communication, as well as, usage of efficient design methods and electronic design automation (EDA) tools for synthesizing the actual high-quality hardware platforms implementing the architectures. Some of the representative examples of these highly-demanding applications include the based-band processing in wired/wireless communication (e.g. the upcoming 4G wireless systems), different kinds of encoding/decoding in communication, image processing and multimedia, 3D graphics, ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV), and encryption applications, etc. These applications require to perform complex computations with a very high throughput, while at the same time demanding low energy and low cost. The decoders of the low density parity check (LDPC) codes, adopted as an advance error-correcting scheme in the newest wired/wireless communication standards, like IEEE 802.11n, 802.16e/m, 802.15.3c, 802.3an, etc., for applications as digital TV broadcasting, mm-wave WPAN, etc., can serve as a representative example of such applications. These standards, for instance, the IEEE 802.15.3c specifies as high as 5~6 Gbps throughput for the upcoming wireless communication systems. For the realization of the so high throughput as several Gbps massively parallel hardware multi-processors are indispensable. These modern complex applications involve massive parallelism of various kinds (e.g. task, data and functional, etc) and complex interrelationships among the data and computing operations. Therefore, an adequate accelerator design for such applications requires a careful exploration and exploitation of various kinds of parallelism and resolution of complex interrelationships between the data and computing operations. The accelerator design for such kind of applications has to involve adequately combined micro- and macro-architecture design for the processors, and the corresponding adequate memory and communication architectures design. Since the processor's micro-/macro-architecture and the memory and communication architectures are strongly interrelated and cannot be designed in separation, complex mutual tradeoffs have to be resolved among the processor parallelism at the two levels, and the corresponding memory and communication architectures, as well as, among the performance, area and power consumption. For the design of hardware accelerators high-level-synthesis (HLS) methods and tools are often used. However, the HLS methods and tools only support the micro-architecture synthesis of a single processing unit, while not taking into account the macro-architecture, memory and communication synthesis and not accounting for the relationships and tradeoffs among these design aspects, what is necessary in the design of hardware accelerators for highly-demanding applications. To address the issues highlighted above and to resolve the mutual tradeoffs effectively and efficiently, a novel quality-driven model-based hardware multi-processor design method is proposed in this thesis and related design space exploration (DSE) tool that jointly consider the processor, memory and communication architectures, and the possible mutual tradeoffs among them. For the high-throughput requirements that demand massively parallel hardware multi-processor architectures, the communication and memory have usually a dominating influence on all the most important architecture quality aspects, such as delay, area and power consumption. Although some research results on the memory and communication architectures can be found in the literature, these results are for programmable on-chip multi-processor systems that utilize the time-shared communication resources, such as shared buses or Network on Chip (NoC), which are not adequate to sustain the multi-Gbit bandwidth required for the high-end massively parallel hardware multi-processors. Therefore, the research reported in this thesis was especially focused on the memory and communication issues, and proposed several promising generic scalable communication and memory architectures to satisfy the required data transfer bandwidth of the high-end hardware accelerators. In its scope several generic hierarchical partitioned communication and memory architectures were proposed, as well as, their application method to the memory and communication design of massively parallel accelerators that ensure the scalability when applied to massively parallel hardware multi-processors. The proposed novel design method makes it possible to perform an effective and efficient exploration and exploitation of the various tradeoffs between the processing parallelism at the micro- and macro-architecture level, and the corresponding memory and communication architectures, as well as, among the area, performance and power consumption, to arrive at high-quality accelerator architectures. Several novel scheduling, processing parallelism exploration, and the memory and communication architecture exploration strategies are incorporated into the proposed architecture DSE framework. To analyze and evaluate the proposed design methodology and its related DSE framework, a series of extensive case studies are performed through implementing and applying the methodology for several industrial strength applications of the LDPC decoding for the latest communication system standards. These case studies involved extensive architecture synthesis experiments with the LDPC decoder designs for IEEE 802.15.3c LDPC codes. In particular, the results of our experiments clearly demonstrate that neither the fully serial nor the fully parallel micro-architectures are adequate to satisfy the ultra-high performance requirements. The extreme fully serial or fully parallel micro-architectures are also not appropriate from the viewpoint of area and power consumption. To satisfy the ultra-high or ultra-low performance requirements, the combined micro-/macro-architecture exploration is necessary which explores and exploits various partially parallel architecture combinations. The results of the experiments performed confirmed that without considering the micro- and macro-architecture design, as well as, processor, communication and memory architecture design in combination, it is very difficult to arrive at an adequate high-quality multi-processor accelerator. They confirmed that our design methodology adequately supports the design of complex multi-processor accelerators, while taking into account the numerous complex tradeoffs. To our knowledge, despite a more than a decade of research on the hardware accelerators for the highly-demanding applications no similar holistic quality-driven design approach has been proposed. In this thesis, we take into account all the design components jointly as a single design task, as well as, consider the mutual tradeoffs among them and among different design objectives. Finally, using our method, it is possible to implement various high-quality multi-processor accelerators for the highly-demanding applications (e.g. LDPC decoders of practical importance for the newest upcoming wireless communication standards) with a limited human designer effort and in a short time.

Over the previous decades, industry has been one of the major drivers of global economic growth and the issue of energy efficiency has become a matter of concern in different industries. Improving energy efficiency in industry, particularly in manufacturing plays a key role in reducing production costs and the environmental impact. Manufacturers also are driven to practise more energy efficient measures because of governmental regulations and policies.In this regard, a holistic view of the entire system is needed in which the dynamic behaviour of the production processes, supporting services, other energy consumers and their interrelationships must be considered. Predominantly, the underlying system is too complex so it is vital to utilise simulation to model the system. Furthermore, a simulation model can be used to design a system with an optimal performance where the performance relies on the value of some input parameters and the point is how to determine the values of these parameters (possibly subjected to some constraints) which contribute to an optimal performance.To address both above-mentioned issues, an integrated simulation-based optimisation framework was proposed in which a simulation model represented the production system in a hierarchical structure and simulated the energy consumed in the system using a bottom to up approach. Six basic modules were embedded, including four modules for main energy consuming equipment (one for machine tools and process chains, and three for TBSs including steam generation unit, compressed air system and HVAC systems). Careful observations of a wide range of diverse equipment were carried out for the first four modules, and then the basic components of a generic state-based energy consumption model were identified for each. Regarding the optimisation part of the framework, a population-based optimisation algorithm called the Cross Entropy method was utilised which treated the simulation model as a black box model to evaluate the system under different settings. A weighted sum method was used to combine different objectives in case of multi objectives. The proposed methodology was applied in two different manufacturing environments; a mass production system where a small number of products with large quantity were produced and a discrete-part production environment where a medium number of products with medium quantity were manufacture.

Purpose: This study determines the moderating effect of organizational commitment on end-user training, and the re-engineering process as means to prevent the fraud risks, in the context of e-procurement. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted a survey in the regional government in Blitar Regency, using purposive sampling as its technique. Findings: The study suggests that an organizational commitment was able to moderate the relationships between the end-user training and the re-engineering e-procurement and fraud prevention. Originality: This study considers the importance of points grounded in the idea of organizational commitment as underpinning stands for conceptualising the end-user training, and the re-engineering process as means to prevent the fraud risks.

25 páginas, 7 figuras, 2 tablas.-- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited ; Despite significant efforts and remarkable progress, the inference of signaling networks from experimental data remains very challenging. The problem is particularly difficult when the objective is to obtain a dynamic model capable of predicting the effect of novel perturbations not considered during model training. The problem is ill-posed due to the nonlinear nature of these systems, the fact that only a fraction of the involved proteins and their posttranslational modifications can be measured, and limitations on the technologies used for growing cells in vitro, perturbing them, and measuring their variations. As a consequence, there is a pervasive lack of identifiability. To overcome these issues, we present a methodology called SELDOM (enSEmbLe of Dynamic lOgic-based Models), which builds an ensemble of logic-based dynamic models, trains them to experimental data, and combines their individual simulations into an ensemble prediction. It also includes a model reduction step to prune spurious interactions and mitigate overfitting. SELDOM is a data-driven method, in the sense that it does not require any prior knowledge of the system: the interaction networks that act as scaffolds for the dynamic models are inferred from data using mutual information. We have tested SELDOM on a number of experimental and in silico signal transduction case-studies, including the recent HPN-DREAM breast cancer challenge. We found that its performance is highly competitive compared to state-of-the-art methods for the purpose of recovering network topology. More importantly, the utility of SELDOM goes beyond basic network inference (i.e. uncovering static interaction networks): it builds dynamic (based on ordinary differential equation) models, which can be used for mechanistic interpretations and reliable dynamic predictions in new experimental conditions (i.e. not used in the training). For this task, SELDOM's ensemble prediction is not only consistently better than predictions from individual models, but also often outperforms the state of the art represented by the methods used in the HPN-DREAM challenge ; JRB and DH acknowledge funding from the EU FP7 project NICHE (ITN Grant number 289384). JRB acknowledges funding from the Spanish MINECO project SYNBIOFACTORY (grant number DPI2014-55276-C5-2-R). AFV acknowledges funding from the Galician government (Xunta de Galiza) through the I2C postdoctoral fellowship ED481B2014/133-0. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ; Peer reviewed

Time poverty is a conundrum for many Australian households and workers. Australians start work young, and we are working more, and longer into old age. And while maximising our productivity and enhancing our professional skills, we must raise our children well, care for our aged, be involved in our community and shrink our carbon footprint – a footprint shaped by the patterns and habits of our work, social obligations and households. Time Bomb investigates what it's costing Australian families to try and do it all. How men's time is taken up by work, crowding out their capacity to care, while women struggle to strike a balance between professional ambition and household obligations. What about our children, caught up in the middle of it all? And how do our teenagers cope as they enter into a work-life squeeze of their own? Relevant and sharp, Time Bomb turns a careful eye on all these issues, throwing light on poor urban planning, workplace policies and other socio-political issues that rob working families of time. And it looks at how work impacts our response to the greatest concern of our time – the planet's sustainability.

Radio communications using very broad frequency bands (UWB) have been developed rapidly since the early 2000s. This technique has advantages that made it attractive in many civil and military applications. The aim of this thesis is to design and characterize miniature Ultra Wide Band antennas in the time domain for the lower part of the frequency band (0.1-2 GHz). First, a new UWB antenna has been designed: the folded wire monopole antenna. This very simple and small size structure has naturally high bandwidth and quasi-omnidirectional radiation pattern over its entire band of operation. We develop an analytical model describing fast and accurate behavior of this antenna which enabled us to understand the role of different parameters of the antenna. There is excellent agreement between the results obtained by this model and those obtained by numerical simulation. With this analytical model, we can optimize the performance of the folded wire monopole for the low frequencies in two different ways: by thickening the diameter of radiating wires or by adding stubs. Both new antennas have been characterized and they have the same radiation characteristics, but a different matching. Typically, UWB antennas are characterized in the frequency domain (radiation pattern and antenna matching). However, a more adequate approach might be preferred: Ultra Wideband antennas can be described in the time-domain. We have introduced new descriptors which are used to quantify the distortion introduced by the antenna: fidelity function and time-domain gain. Time and frequency domain measurements have been performed. Measurements on the different versions of the folded wire antenna showed a good agreement with the simulations in terms of both frequency and time domain characterization. Finally, we have developed a very effective time domain technique measurement by using time domain reflectometry. This method gives very good results in terms of radiated pulses and antenna matching ; Les communications radio utilisant des très larges bandes de fréquences (ULB) se sont rapidement développées depuis le début des années 2000. Cette technique présente des avantages qui l'ont rendue attractive dans un grand nombre d'applications civiles et militaires. L'objectif de cette thèse était de concevoir, de réaliser et de caractériser en régime impulsionnel des antennes Ultra Large Bande miniatures, dans la partie basse du spectre (0.1-2 GHz). Dans un premier temps, une nouvelle structure d'antenne ULB a été conçue: l'antenne filaire repliée. Cette structure très simple et de petite taille, possède naturellement une large bande passante ainsi qu'un diagramme de rayonnement quasi omnidirectionnel sur toute sa bande de fonctionnement. Nous avons développé un modèle analytique rapide et précis décrivant le comportement de cette antenne, ce qui nous a permis de comprendre le rôle des différents paramètres de l'antenne. Il y a un excellent accord entre les résultats obtenus par ce modèle et ceux obtenus par simulation numérique. Grâce à ce modèle analytique, nous avons pu optimiser les performances du monopole filaire replié vers les basses fréquences et ce, par deux méthodes : épaississement des brins rayonnants et ajout de tronçons de lignes. Les deux nouvelles antennes ainsi obtenues ont été caractérisées; elles présentent les mêmes caractéristiques de rayonnement, mais une adaptation différente. Les outils usuels de caractérisation des antennes dans le domaine fréquentiel (adaptation, diagramme de rayonnement) étant mal adaptés à une étude en mode impulsionnel, nous avons introduit de nouveaux descripteurs qui permettent de quantifier la distorsion introduite par l'antenne: Fonction de fidélité et gain temporel. Une campagne de mesures utilisant un banc impulsionnel et un banc de mesures fréquentiel a été réalisée. Les mesures effectuées sur les différentes versions de l'antenne filaire repliée ont montré un bon accord avec les simulations tant au niveau de la caractérisation fréquentielle que temporelle. Enfin, nous avons mis au point une technique de mesure temporelle très efficace en utilisant la réflectométrie temporelle. Cette méthode donne de très bons résultats en termes d'impulsions rayonnées et d'adaptation.

Radio communications using very broad frequency bands (UWB) have been developed rapidly since the early 2000s. This technique has advantages that made it attractive in many civil and military applications. The aim of this thesis is to design and characterize miniature Ultra Wide Band antennas in the time domain for the lower part of the frequency band (0.1-2 GHz). First, a new UWB antenna has been designed: the folded wire monopole antenna. This very simple and small size structure has naturally high bandwidth and quasi-omnidirectional radiation pattern over its entire band of operation. We develop an analytical model describing fast and accurate behavior of this antenna which enabled us to understand the role of different parameters of the antenna. There is excellent agreement between the results obtained by this model and those obtained by numerical simulation. With this analytical model, we can optimize the performance of the folded wire monopole for the low frequencies in two different ways: by thickening the diameter of radiating wires or by adding stubs. Both new antennas have been characterized and they have the same radiation characteristics, but a different matching. Typically, UWB antennas are characterized in the frequency domain (radiation pattern and antenna matching). However, a more adequate approach might be preferred: Ultra Wideband antennas can be described in the time-domain. We have introduced new descriptors which are used to quantify the distortion introduced by the antenna: fidelity function and time-domain gain. Time and frequency domain measurements have been performed. Measurements on the different versions of the folded wire antenna showed a good agreement with the simulations in terms of both frequency and time domain characterization. Finally, we have developed a very effective time domain technique measurement by using time domain reflectometry. This method gives very good results in terms of radiated pulses and antenna matching ; Les communications radio utilisant des très larges bandes de fréquences (ULB) se sont rapidement développées depuis le début des années 2000. Cette technique présente des avantages qui l'ont rendue attractive dans un grand nombre d'applications civiles et militaires. L'objectif de cette thèse était de concevoir, de réaliser et de caractériser en régime impulsionnel des antennes Ultra Large Bande miniatures, dans la partie basse du spectre (0.1-2 GHz). Dans un premier temps, une nouvelle structure d'antenne ULB a été conçue: l'antenne filaire repliée. Cette structure très simple et de petite taille, possède naturellement une large bande passante ainsi qu'un diagramme de rayonnement quasi omnidirectionnel sur toute sa bande de fonctionnement. Nous avons développé un modèle analytique rapide et précis décrivant le comportement de cette antenne, ce qui nous a permis de comprendre le rôle des différents paramètres de l'antenne. Il y a un excellent accord entre les résultats obtenus par ce modèle et ceux obtenus par simulation numérique. Grâce à ce modèle analytique, nous avons pu optimiser les performances du monopole filaire replié vers les basses fréquences et ce, par deux méthodes : épaississement des brins rayonnants et ajout de tronçons de lignes. Les deux nouvelles antennes ainsi obtenues ont été caractérisées; elles présentent les mêmes caractéristiques de rayonnement, mais une adaptation différente. Les outils usuels de caractérisation des antennes dans le domaine fréquentiel (adaptation, diagramme de rayonnement) étant mal adaptés à une étude en mode impulsionnel, nous avons introduit de nouveaux descripteurs qui permettent de quantifier la distorsion introduite par l'antenne: Fonction de fidélité et gain temporel. Une campagne de mesures utilisant un banc impulsionnel et un banc de mesures fréquentiel a été réalisée. Les mesures effectuées sur les différentes versions de l'antenne filaire repliée ont montré un bon accord avec les simulations tant au niveau de la caractérisation fréquentielle que temporelle. Enfin, nous avons mis au point une technique de mesure temporelle très efficace en utilisant la réflectométrie temporelle. Cette méthode donne de très bons résultats en termes d'impulsions rayonnées et d'adaptation.

Urban growth and the development of the megalopolis have forced a re-examination of all urban transportation systems in terms of their ability to satisfy human needs and preferences. Encouraging the re-emergence of public transportation in cities requires a total assessment of the physical and behavioral characteristics of the user population as well as their economic, social, and esthetic preferences. This population includes many groups not normally considered in human engineering design, such as the physically or functionally handicapped and the aged. Existing data am reviewed and research needs are identified for the design of urban transportation systems.

Sustainable production presented from an overarching perspective. The book provides information on the identification and assessment of footprints, concepts of sustainability practice in manufacturing companies, stakeholder management and communication. For the reader practical examples permit the analysis of the current situation and emerging developments. the current technical status of footprint analysis according to the Green House Gas Protocol is displayed. case studies with a focus on the manufacturing industry are discussed

For todays transformation towards a circular and resource-efficient economy, an understanding is needed of how changes in socio-technical systems affect resource efficiency (RE). This paper suggests an approach to analyse the RE of socio-technical systems and the related Product-Service Systems (PSSs). A conceptual framework consisting of elements of business models, governmental policies and product and service design is developed. Laundry practices in Sweden serve as the context for a case study. The results indicate that asset sharing is most resource-efficient to facilitate domestic laundry practices, followed by PSSs and individual ownership coming last. This type of analysis helps to understand the role of PSS for RE. Future research focuses on dynamic modelling of socio-technical systems and their impact on RE. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a worldwide healthcare crisis. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been used with encouraging results to help detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. However, to generalize well to unseen data, CNNs require large labeled datasets. Due to the lack of publicly available COVID-19 datasets, most CNNs apply various data augmentation techniques during training. However, there has not been a thorough statistical analysis of how data augmentation operations affect classification performance for COVID-19 detection. In this study, a fractional factorial experimental design is used to examine the impact of basic augmentation methods on COVID-19 detection. The latter enables identifying which particular data augmentation techniques and interactions have a statistically significant impact on the classification performance, whether positively or negatively. Using the CoroNet architecture and two publicly available COVID-19 datasets, the most common basic augmentation methods in the literature are evaluated. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the methods of zoom, range, and height shift positively impact the model's accuracy in dataset 1. The performance of dataset 2 is unaffected by any of the data augmentation operations. Additionally, a new state-of-the-art performance is achieved on both datasets by training CoroNet with the ideal data augmentation values found using the experimental design. Specifically, in dataset 1, 97% accuracy, 93% precision, and 97.7% recall were attained, while in dataset 2, 97% accuracy, 97% precision, and 97.6% recall were achieved. These results indicate that analyzing the effects of data augmentations on a particular task and dataset is essential for the best performance. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-SPER-01 Full Text: PDF