Effect of particle concentration on erosion rate of mild steel bends in a pneumatic conveyor

Particle concentration is known as a main factor that affects erosion rate of pipe bends in pneumatic conveyors. With consideration of different bend radii, the effect of particle concentration on weight loss of mild steel bends has been investigated in an industrial scale test rig. Experimental results show that there was a significant reduction of the specific erosion rate for high particle concentrations. This reduction was considered to be as a result of the shielding effect during the particle impacts. An empirical model is given. Also a theoretical study of scaling on the shielding effect, and comparisons with some existing models, are presented. It is found that the reduction in specific erosion rate (relative to particle concentration) has a stronger relationship in conveying pipelines than has been found in the erosion tester. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DNS of EGR-type turbulent flame in MILD condition

Three-dimensional direct numerical simulation (DNS) of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR)-type turbulent combustion operated in moderate and intense low-oxygen dilution (MILD) condition has been carried out to study the flame structure and flame interaction. In order to achieve adequate EGR-type initial/inlet mixture fields, partially premixed mixture fields which are correlated with the turbulence are carefully preprocessed. The chemical kinetics is modelled using a skeletal mechanism for methane-air combustion. The results suggest that the flame fronts have thin flame structure and the direct link between the mean reaction rate and scalar dissipation rate remains valid in the EGR-type combustion with MILD condition. However, the commonly used canonical flamelet is not fully representative for MILD combustion. During the flame-flame interactions, the heat release rate increases higher than the maximum laminar flame value, while the gradient of progress variable becomes smaller than laminar value. It is also proposed that the reaction rate and the scalar gradient can be used as a marker for the flame interaction. © 2012 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Slowness and sparseness lead to place, head-direction, and spatial-view cells.

We present a model for the self-organized formation of place cells, head-direction cells, and spatial-view cells in the hippocampal formation based on unsupervised learning on quasi-natural visual stimuli. The model comprises a hierarchy of Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) nodes, which were recently shown to reproduce many properties of complex cells in the early visual system []. The system extracts a distributed grid-like representation of position and orientation, which is transcoded into a localized place-field, head-direction, or view representation, by sparse coding. The type of cells that develops depends solely on the relevant input statistics, i.e., the movement pattern of the simulated animal. The numerical simulations are complemented by a mathematical analysis that allows us to accurately predict the output of the top SFA layer.

An expressive text-driven 3D talking head

Creating a realistic talking head, which given an arbitrary text as input generates a realistic looking face speaking the text, has been a long standing research challenge. Talking heads which cannot express emotion have been made to look very realistic by using concatenative approaches [Wang et al. 2011], however allowing the head to express emotion creates a much more challenging problem and model based approaches have shown promise in this area. While 2D talking heads currently look more realistic than their 3D counterparts, they are limited both in the range of poses they can express and in the lighting conditions that they can be rendered under. Previous attempts to produce videorealistic 3D expressive talking heads [Cao et al. 2005] have produced encouraging results but not yet achieved the level of realism of their 2D counterparts.