A constitutive model for transversely isotropic foams, and its application to the indentation of balsa wood

An elastic-plastic constitutive model for transversely isotropic compressible solids (foams) has been developed. A quadratic yield surface with four parameters and one hardening function is proposed. Associated plastic flow is assumed and the yield surface evolves in a self-similar manner calibrated by the uniaxial compressive (or tensile) response of the cellular solid in the axial direction. All material constants in the model (elastic and plastic) can be determined from a combination of a total of four uniaxial and shear tests. The model is used to predict the indentation response of balsa wood to a conical indenter. For the three cone angles considered in this study, very good agreement is found between the experimental measurements and the finite element (FE) predictions of the transversely isotropic cellular solid model. On the other hand, an isotropic foam model is shown to be inadequate to capture the indentation response. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Exploiting Chinese character models to improve speech recognition performance

The Chinese language is based on characters which are syllabic in nature. Since languages have syllabotactic rules which govern the construction of syllables and their allowed sequences, Chinese character sequence models can be used as a first level approximation of allowed syllable sequences. N-gram character sequence models were trained on 4.3 billion characters. Characters are used as a first level recognition unit with multiple pronunciations per character. For comparison the CU-HTK Mandarin word based system was used to recognize words which were then converted to character sequences. The character only system error rates for one best recognition were slightly worse than word based character recognition. However combining the two systems using log-linear combination gives better results than either system separately. An equally weighted combination gave consistent CER gains of 0.1-0.2% absolute over the word based standard system. Copyright © 2009 ISCA.