Evaluation of damage in reinforced concrete bridge beams using acoustic emission technique

Acoustic emission (AE) testing is a well-known method for damage identification of various concrete structures including bridges. This article presents a method to assess damage in reinforced concrete (RC) bridge beams subjected to incremental cyclic loading. The specifications in the standard NDIS-2421 were used to classify the damage in RC bridge beams. Earlier researchers classified the damage occurring in bridge beams by using crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) and AE released and proposed a standard (NDIS-2421: the Japanese Society for NonDestructive Inspection). In general, multiple cracks take place in RC beams under bending; therefore, utilisation of CMOD for crack detection may not be appropriate. In the present study, the damage in RC beams is classified by using the AE released, deflection, strains in steel and concrete, because the measurement of the strains in steel and concrete is easy and the codes of practice are specified for different limit states (IS-456:2000). The observations made in the present experimental study have some important practical applications in assessing the state of damage of concrete structural members.

An experimental study on cracking evolution in concrete and cement mortar by the b-value analysis of acoustic emission technique

Notched three point bend (TPB) specimens made with plain concrete and cement mortar were tested under crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) control at a rate of 0.0004 mm/s and simultaneously acoustic emissions (AE) released were recorded during the experiments. Amplitude distribution analysis of AE released during concrete was carried out to study the development of fracture process in concrete and mortar specimens. The slope of the log-linear frequency-amplitude distribution of AE is known as the AE based b-value. The AE based b-value was computed in terms of physical process of time varying applied load using cumulative frequency distribution (Gutenberg-Richter relationship) and discrete frequency distribution (Aki's method) of AE released during concrete fracture. AE characteristics of plain concrete and cement mortar were studied and discussed and it was observed that the AE based b-value analysis serves as a tool to identify the damage in concrete structural members. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Experimental Investigation on the Effect of Advanced Bus-Clamping Pulsewidth Modulation on Motor Acoustic Noise

Voltage source inverters (VSIs) supply nonsinusoidal voltages to induction motor drives, leading to line current distortion and torque pulsation. Conventional space vector pulsewidth modulation (PWM) techniques are widely used in VSIs on the account of good waveform quality and high dc bus utilization. In a conventional space vector PWM technique, the switching sequence begins with one zero state and ends with the other zero state in a subcycle. Some novel switching sequences have been proposed, which employ only one zero state but apply one of the two active states twice in a subcycle. One pair of such special switching sequences has recently been shown to reduce the pulsating torque considerably. In this paper, the conventional and special switching sequences are compared experimentally in terms of acoustic noise. In the low-and medium-speed ranges, the special switching sequence is seen to reduce the amplitude of the tonal component of noise at the switching frequency considerably and is also found to result in spread spectrum.

Resource Usage Monitoring in Clouds

Monitoring of infrastructural resources in clouds plays a crucial role in providing application guarantees like performance, availability, and security. Monitoring is crucial from two perspectives - the cloud-user and the service provider. The cloud user’s interest is in doing an analysis to arrive at appropriate Service-level agreement (SLA) demands and the cloud provider’s interest is to assess if the demand can be met. To support this, a monitoring framework is necessary particularly since cloud hosts are subject to varying load conditions. To illustrate the importance of such a framework, we choose the example of performance being the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement and show how inappropriate provisioning of resources may lead to unexpected performance bottlenecks. We evaluate existing monitoring frameworks to bring out the motivation for building much more powerful monitoring frameworks. We then propose a distributed monitoring framework, which enables fine grained monitoring for applications and demonstrate with a prototype system implementation for typical use cases.

Acoustic and optical phonon dynamics from femtosecond time-resolved optical spectroscopy of the superconducting iron pnictide Ca(Fe0.944Co0.056)(2)As-2

We report the temperature evolution of coherently excited acoustic and optical phonon dynamics in the superconducting iron pnictide single crystal Ca(Fe0.944Co0.056)(2)As-2 across the spin density wave transition at T-SDW similar to 85 K and the superconducting transition at T-SC similar to 20 K. The strain pulse propagation model applied to the generation of the acoustic phonons yields the temperature dependence of the optical constants, and longitudinal and transverse sound velocities in the temperature range from 3.1 K to 300 K. The frequency and dephasing times of the phonons show anomalous temperature dependence below T-SC indicating a coupling of these low-energy excitations with the Cooper-pair quasiparticles. A maximum in the amplitude of the acoustic modes at T similar to 170 is seen, attributed to spin fluctuations and strong spin-lattice coupling before T-SDW. Copyright (c) EPLA, 2012

Nanoparticle agglomeration in an evaporating levitated droplet for different acoustic amplitudes

Radiatively heated levitated functional droplets with nanosilica suspensions exhibit three distinct stages namely pure evaporation, agglomeration, and finally structure formation. The temporal history of the droplet surface temperature shows two inflection points. One inflection point corresponds to a local maximum and demarcates the end of transient heating of the droplet and domination of vaporization. The second inflection point is a local minimum and indicates slowing down of the evaporation rate due to surface accumulation of nanoparticles. Morphology and final precipitation structures of levitated droplets are due to competing mechanisms of particle agglomeration, evaporation, and shape deformation. In this work, we provide a detailed analysis for each process and propose two important timescales for evaporation and agglomeration that determine the final diameter of the structure formed. It is seen that both agglomeration and evaporation timescales are similar functions of acoustic amplitude (sound pressure level), droplet size, viscosity, and density. However, we show that while the agglomeration timescale decreases with initial particle concentration, the evaporation timescale shows the opposite trend. The final normalized diameter can be shown to be dependent solely on the ratio of agglomeration to evaporation timescales for all concentrations and acoustic amplitudes. The structures also exhibit various aspect ratios (bowls, rings, spheroids) which depend on the ratio of the deformation timescale (t(def)) and the agglomeration timescale (t(g)). For t(def) < t(g), a sharp peak in aspect ratio is seen at low concentrations of nanosilica which separates high aspect ratio structures like rings from the low aspect ratio structures like bowls and spheroids. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4775791]

Fast acoustic likelihood computation using low-rank matrix approximation

Acoustic modeling using mixtures of multivariate Gaussians is the prevalent approach for many speech processing problems. Computing likelihoods against a large set of Gaussians is required as a part of many speech processing systems and it is the computationally dominant phase for LVCSR systems. We express the likelihood computation as a multiplication of matrices representing augmented feature vectors and Gaussian parameters. The computational gain of this approach over traditional methods is by exploiting the structure of these matrices and efficient implementation of their multiplication.In particular, we explore direct low-rank approximation of the Gaussian parameter matrix and indirect derivation of low-rank factors of the Gaussian parameter matrix by optimum approximation of the likelihood matrix. We show that both the methods lead to similar speedups but the latter leads to far lesser impact on the recognition accuracy. Experiments on a 1138 word vocabulary RM1 task using Sphinx 3.7 system show that, for a typical case the matrix multiplication approach leads to overall speedup of 46%. Both the low-rank approximation methods increase the speedup to around 60%, with the former method increasing the word error rate (WER) from 3.2% to 6.6%, while the latter increases the WER from 3.2% to 3.5%.

Three-dimensional acoustic analysis of an elliptical chamber muffler with a side inlet and a side outlet

The acoustical behaviour of an elliptical chamber muffler having a side inlet and side outlet port is analyzed in this paper, wherein a uniform velocity piston source is assumed to model the 3-D acoustic field in the elliptical chamber cavity. Towards this end, we consider the modal expansion of the acoustic pressure field in the elliptical cavity in terms of the angular and radial Mathieu func-tions, subjected to the rigid wall condition. Then, the Green's function due to the point source lo-cated on the side (curved) surface of the elliptical chamber is obtained. On integrating this function over the elliptical piston area on the curved surface of the elliptical chamber and subsequent divi-sion by the area of the elliptic piston, one obtains the acoustic pressure field due to the piston driven source which is equivalent to considering plane wave propagation in the side ports. Thus, one can obtain the acoustic pressure response functions, i.e., the impedance matrix (Z) parameters due to the sources (ports) located on the side surface, from which one may also obtain a progressive wave rep-resentation in terms of the scattering matrix (S). Finally, the acoustic performance of the muffler is evaluated in terms of the Transmission loss (TL) which is computed in terms of the scattering pa-rameters. The effect of the axial length of the muffler and the angular location of the ports on the TL characteristics is studied in detail. The acoustically long chambers show dominant axial plane wave propagation while the TL spectrum of short chambers indicates the dominance of the trans-versal modes. The 3-D analytical results are compared with the 3-D FEM simulations carried on a commercial software and are shown to be in an excellent agreement, thereby validating the analyti-cal procedure suggested in this work.

Modeling of agglomeration inside a droplet with nanosuspensions in an acoustic field

This short communication reports results of particle agglomeration details of an acoustically levitated nanosilica droplet. The droplet undergoes thermo-physical and morphological changes under external heating load (convective or radiative) forming different solid structures due to particle agglomeration. We report an agglomeration model based on population balance approach coupled with species and energy conservation equations in the liquid phase and compare it with the experimentally observed structure formations using high speed photography. The analysis is able to predict similar spherical bowl shaped morphologies as observed experimentally using scanning electron microscopy and laser induced fluorescence. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Gap-Dependent Quasiparticle Dynamics and Coherent Acoustic Phonons in CaFe2As2 across Spin Density Wave Phase Transition

We report ultrafast quasiparticle (QP) dynamics and coherent acoustic phonons in undoped CaFe2As2 iron pnictide single crystals exhibiting spin-density wave (SDW) and concurrent structural phase transition at temperature T-SDW similar to 165K using femtosecond time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy. The contributions in transient differential reflectivity arising from exponentially decaying QP relaxation and oscillatory coherent acoustic phonon mode show large variations in the vicinity of T-SDW. From the temperature-dependence of the QP recombination dynamics in the SDW phase, we evaluate a BCS-like temperature dependent charge gap with its zero-temperature value of similar to(1.6 perpendicular to 0.2)k(B)T(SDW), whereas, much above T-SDW, an electron-phonon coupling constant of similar to 0.13 has been estimated from the linear temperature-dependence of the QP relaxation time. The long-wavelength coherent acoustic phonons with typical time-period of similar to 100 ps have been analyzed in the light of propagating strain pulse model providing important results for the optical constants, sounds velocity and the elastic modulus of the crystal in the whole temperature range of 3 to 300 K.

Accelerated multistress aging of polymer nanocomposites and its condition monitoring

In recent years, the time dependant maintenance of expensive high voltage power equipments is getting replaced by condition based maintenance so as to detect apriori an impending failure of the equipment. For condition based maintenance, most monitoring systems concentrate on the electrical quantities such as measurement and evaluation of partial discharges, tan delta, tip-up test, dielectric strength, insulation resistance, polarization and depolarization current. However, in the case of equipments being developed with novel nanodielectric insulating materials, the variation in these parameters before an impending failure is not available. Hence in this work, accelerated electrothermal aging studies have been conducted on unfilled epoxy as well as epoxy nanocomposite samples of 5 wt% filler loading, and the tan d values were continuously monitored to obtain the condition of the samples under study. It was observed that those samples whose tan d increased at a rapid rate failed first.

Insight into morphology changes of nanoparticle laden droplets in acoustic field

Hollow structures with unique morphologies form due to particle agglomeration in acoustically levitated nanofluid functional droplets when subjected to external heating. The final diameter of the structure depends only on the ratio of agglomeration to evaporation time scales for various nanoparticle laden droplets, and not on the type of the suspended particles. These time scales depend only on nanoparticle concentration. This valuable information may be exploited to form microstructures with desired properties from ceramic compounds. Phase diagrams for alumina and silica droplets indicate the transition from a bowl to ring structure depending on concentration.

Mobile agent based node monitoring protocol for MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc network is a wireless ad-hoc network with dynamic network topology. The Dynamicity, due to the random node movement, and scarcity of resources lead to a challenge in monitoring the nodes in a MANET. Monitoring the lack of resources (bandwidth, buffer, and energy), misbehavior, and mobility at node level remains, a challenge. In a MANET the proposed protocol uses both static as well as mobile agents, where the mobile agents migrate to different clusters of the zones respectively, collect the node status information periodically, and provide a high level information to the static agent (which resides at the central node) by analyzing the raw information at the nodes. This, in turn, reduces the network traffic and conserves the workload of the central node, where a static agent is available with high level information and in coordination with other modules. The protocol has been tested in different size MANETs with variable number of nodes and applications. The results shown in the simulation indicates the effectiveness of the protocol.

SeaMo plus : a virtual real-time multimedia service framework on handhelds to enable remote real-time patient monitoring for mobile doctors

The key requirements for enabling real-time remote healthcare service on a mobile platform, in the present day heterogeneous wireless access network environment, are uninterrupted and continuous access to the online patient vital medical data, monitor the physical condition of the patient through video streaming, and so on. For an application, this continuity has to be sufficiently transparent both from a performance perspective as well as a Quality of Experience (QoE) perspective. While mobility protocols (MIPv6, HIP, SCTP, DSMIP, PMIP, and SIP) strive to provide both and do so, limited or non-availability (deployment) of these protocols on provider networks and server side infrastructure has impeded adoption of mobility on end user platforms. Add to this, the cumbersome OS configuration procedures required to enable mobility protocol support on end user devices and the user's enthusiasm to add this support is lost. Considering the lack of proper mobility implementations that meet the remote healthcare requirements above, we propose SeaMo+ that comprises a light-weight application layer framework, termed as the Virtual Real-time Multimedia Service (VRMS) for mobile devices to provide an uninterrupted real-time multimedia information access to the mobile user. VRMS is easy to configure, platform independent, and does not require additional network infrastructure unlike other existing schemes. We illustrate the working of SeaMo+ in two realistic remote patient monitoring application scenarios.

Narrowband signal detection techniques in shallow ocean by acoustic vector sensor array

This paper presents the formulation and performance analysis of four techniques for detection of a narrowband acoustic source in a shallow range-independent ocean using an acoustic vector sensor (AVS) array. The array signal vector is not known due to the unknown location of the source. Hence all detectors are based on a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) which involves estimation of the array signal vector. One non-parametric and three parametric (model-based) signal estimators are presented. It is shown that there is a strong correlation between the detector performance and the mean-square signal estimation error. Theoretical expressions for probability of false alarm and probability of detection are derived for all the detectors, and the theoretical predictions are compared with simulation results. It is shown that the detection performance of an AVS array with a certain number of sensors is equal to or slightly better than that of a conventional acoustic pressure sensor array with thrice as many sensors.