The changing face and role of CACSD

Computer Aided Control Engineering involves three parallel streams: Simulation and modelling, Control system design (off-line), and Controller implementation. In industry the bottleneck problem has always been modelling, and this remains the case - that is where control (and other) engineers put most of their technical effort. Although great advances in software tools have been made, the cost of modelling remains very high - too high for some sectors. Object-oriented modelling, enabling truly re-usable models, seems to be the key enabling technology here. Software tools to support control systems design have two aspects to them: aiding and managing the work-flow in particular projects (whether of a single engineer or of a team), and provision of numerical algorithms to support control-theoretic and systems-theoretic analysis and design. The numerical problems associated with linear systems have been largely overcome, so that most problems can be tackled routinely without difficulty - though problems remain with (some) systems of extremely large dimensions. Recent emphasis on control of hybrid and/or constrained systems is leading to the emerging importance of geometric algorithms (ellipsoidal approximation, polytope projection, etc). Constantly increasing computational power is leading to renewed interest in design by optimisation, an example of which is MPC. The explosion of embedded control systems has highlighted the importance of autocode generation, directly from modelling/simulation products to target processors. This is the 'new kid on the block', and again much of the focus of commercial tools is on this part of the control engineer's job. Here the control engineer can no longer ignore computer science (at least, for the time being). © 2006 IEEE.

The changing face and role of CACSD

Computer Aided Control Engineering involves three parallel streams: Simulation and modelling, Control system design (off-line), and Controller implementation. In industry the bottleneck problem has always been modelling, and this remains the case - that is where control (and other) engineers put most of their technical effort. Although great advances in software tools have been made, the cost of modelling remains very high - too high for some sectors. Object-oriented modelling, enabling truly re-usable models, seems to be the key enabling technology here. Software tools to support control systems design have two aspects to them: aiding and managing the work-flow in particular projects (whether of a single engineer or of a team), and provision of numerical algorithms to support control-theoretic and systems-theoretic analysis and design. The numerical problems associated with linear systems have been largely overcome, so that most problems can be tackled routinely without difficulty - though problems remain with (some) systems of extremely large dimensions. Recent emphasis on control of hybrid and/or constrained systems is leading to the emerging importance of geometric algorithms (ellipsoidal approximation, polytope projection, etc). Constantly increasing computational power is leading to renewed interest in design by optimisation, an example of which is MPC. The explosion of embedded control systems has highlighted the importance of autocode generation, directly from modelling/simulation products to target processors. This is the 'new kid on the block', and again much of the focus of commercial tools is on this part of the control engineer's job. Here the control engineer can no longer ignore computer science (at least, for the time being). ©2006 IEEE.

A critical review of Glucose biosensors based on Carbon nanomaterials: Carbon nanotubes and graphene

There has been an explosion of research into the physical and chemical properties of carbon-based nanomaterials, since the discovery of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by Iijima in 1991. Carbon nanomaterials offer unique advantages in several areas, like high surface-volume ratio, high electrical conductivity, chemical stability and strong mechanical strength, and are thus frequently being incorporated into sensing elements. Carbon nanomaterial-based sensors generally have higher sensitivities and a lower detection limit than conventional ones. In this review, a brief history of glucose biosensors is firstly presented. The carbon nanotube and grapheme-based biosensors, are introduced in Sections 3 and 4, respectively, which cover synthesis methods, up-to-date sensing approaches and nonenzymatic hybrid sensors. Finally, we briefly outline the current status and future direction for carbon nanomaterials to be used in the sensing area. © 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

An ngram-based statistical machine translation decoder

In this paper we describe MARIE, an Ngram-based statistical machine translation decoder. It is implemented using a beam search strategy, with distortion (or reordering) capabilities. The underlying translation model is based on an Ngram approach, extended to introduce reordering at the phrase level. The search graph structure is designed to perform very accurate comparisons, what allows for a high level of pruning, improving the decoder efficiency. We report several techniques for efficiently prune out the search space. The combinatory explosion of the search space derived from the search graph structure is reduced by limiting the number of reorderings a given translation is allowed to perform, and also the maximum distance a word (or a phrase) is allowed to be reordered. We finally report translation accuracy results on three different translation tasks.

The dynamic response of edge clamped plates loaded by spherically expanding sand shells

The dynamic deformation of both edge clamped stainless steel sandwich panels with a pyramidal truss core and equal mass monolithic plates loaded by spherically expanding shells of dry and water saturated sand has been investigated, both experimentally and via a particle based simulation methodology. The spherically expanding sand shell is generated by detonating a sphere of explosive surrounded by a shell of either dry or water saturated synthetic sand. The measurements show that the sandwich panel and plate deflections decrease with increasing stand-off between the center of the charge and the front of the test structures. Moreover, for the same charge and sand mass, the deflections of the plates are significantly higher in the water saturated sand case compared to that of dry sand. For a given stand-off, the mid-span deflection of the sandwich panel rear faces was substantially less than that of the corresponding monolithic plate for both the dry and water saturated sand cases. The experiments were simulated via a coupled discrete-particle/ finite element scheme wherein the high velocity impacting sand is modeled by interacting particles while the plate is modeled within a Lagrangian finite element setting. The simulations are in good agreement with the measurements for the dry sand impact of both the monolithic and sandwich structures. However, the simulations underestimate the effect of stand-off in the case of the water saturated sand explosion, i.e. the deflections decrease more sharply with increasing stand-off in the experiments compared to the simulations. The simulations reveal that the momentum transmitted into the sandwich and monolithic plate structures by the sand shell is approximately the same, consistent with a small fluid-structure interaction effect. The smaller deflection of the sandwich panels is therefore primarily due to the higher bending strength of sandwich structures. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Advanced carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube fibers for biosensing applications

Since the discovery of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) by Iijima in 1991[1, 2], there has been an explosion of research into the physical and chemical properties of this novel material. CNT based biosensors can play an important role in amperometric, immunosensor and nucleic-acid sensing devices, e.g. for detection of life threatening biological agents in time of war or in terrorist attacks, saving life and money for the NHS. CNTs offer unique advantages in several areas, like high surfacevolume ratio, high electrical conductivity, chemical stability and strong mechanical strength, and CNT based sensors generally have higher sensitivities and lower detection limit than conventional ones. In this review, recent advances in biosensors utilising carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube fibres will be discussed. The synthesis methods, nanostructure approaches and current developments in biosensors using CNTs will be introduced in the first part. In the second part, the synthesis methods and up-to-date progress in CNT fibre biosensors will be reviewed. Finally, we briefly outline some exciting applications for CNT and CNT fibres which are being targeted. By harnessing the continual advancements in micro and nano- technology, the functionality and capability of CNT-based biosensors will be enhanced, thus expanding and enriching the possible applications that can be delivered by these devices. © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers. All rights reserved.