Structural Health Monitoring using Index Based Reasoning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may develop cracks, erosion, delamination or other damages due to aging, fatigue or extreme loads. Identifying these damages is critical for the safe and reliable operation of the systems. ^ Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is capable of determining the conditions of systems automatically and continually through processing and interpreting the data collected from a network of sensors embedded into the systems. With the desired awareness of the systems’ health conditions, SHM can greatly reduce operational cost and speed up maintenance processes. ^ The purpose of this study is to develop an effective, low-cost, flexible and fault tolerant structural health monitoring system. The proposed Index Based Reasoning (IBR) system started as a simple look-up-table based diagnostic system. Later, Fast Fourier Transformation analysis and neural network diagnosis with self-learning capabilities were added. The current version is capable of classifying different health conditions with the learned characteristic patterns, after training with the sensory data acquired from the operating system under different status. ^ The proposed IBR systems are hierarchy and distributed networks deployed into systems to monitor their health conditions. Each IBR node processes the sensory data to extract the features of the signal. Classifying tools are then used to evaluate the local conditions with health index (HI) values. The HI values will be carried to other IBR nodes in the next level of the structured network. The overall health condition of the system can be obtained by evaluating all the local health conditions. ^ The performance of IBR systems has been evaluated by both simulation and experimental studies. The IBR system has been proven successful on simulated cases of a turbojet engine, a high displacement actuator, and a quad rotor helicopter. For its application on experimental data of a four rotor helicopter, IBR also performed acceptably accurate. The proposed IBR system is a perfect fit for the low-cost UAVs to be the onboard structural health management system. It can also be a backup system for aircraft and advanced Space Utility Vehicles. ^

Is There Hospitality for Disabled Travelers?

There is a plethora of options about what constitutes “accessibility.” Countries like England and Canada are making significant progress in improving accommodations. The Americans with Disability Act is being revised, but critics say hotels are not complying with either the letter or the spirit of the law. The author, a retired FIU professors who writes about disabled travel from his wheelchair, explores these issues from a very personal point of view.

Patterns and effects of notetaking by learning -disabled and nondisabled adolescents: A comparative study

This study analyzes the qualitative and quantitative patterns of notetaking by learning disabled (LD) and nondisabled (ND) adolescents and the effectiveness of notetaking and review as measured by the subjects' ability to recall information presented during a lecture. The study also examines relationships between certain learner characteristics and notetaking. The following notetaking variables were investigated: note completeness, number of critical ideas recorded, levels of processing information, organizational strategies, fluency of notes, and legibility of notes. The learner characteristics examined pertained to measures on achievement, short-term memory, listening comprehension, and verbal ability.^ Students from the 11th and 12th grades were randomly selected from four senior high schools in Dade County, Florida. Seventy learning disabled and 79 nondisabled subjects were shown a video tape lecture and required to take notes. The lecture conditions controlled for presentation rate, prior knowledge, information density, and difficulty level. After 8 weeks, their notes were returned to the subjects for a review period, and a posttest was administered.^ Results of this study suggest significant differences (p $\le$.01) in the patterns of notetaking between LD and ND groups not due to differences in the learner characteristics listed above. In addition, certain notetaking variables such as process levels, number of critical ideas, and note completeness were found to be significantly correlated to learning outcome. Further, deficiencies in the spontaneous use of organizational strategies and abbreviations adversely affected the notetaking effectiveness of learning disabled students.^ Both LD and ND subjects recalled more information recorded in their notes than not recorded. This difference was significant only for the ND group. By contrast, LD subjects compensated for their poor notetaking skills and recalled significantly more information not recorded on their notes than did ND subjects. The major implications of these findings suggest that LD and ND subjects exhibit very different entry behaviors when asked to perform a notetaking task; hence, teaching approaches to notetaking must differ as well. ^

Hybrid Power System Intelligent Operation and Protection Involving Plug-in Electric Vehicles

Two key solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and increase the overall energy efficiency are to maximize the utilization of renewable energy resources (RERs) to generate energy for load consumption and to shift to low or zero emission plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for transportation. The present U.S. aging and overburdened power grid infrastructure is under a tremendous pressure to handle the issues involved in penetration of RERS and PEVs. The future power grid should be designed with for the effective utilization of distributed RERs and distributed generations to intelligently respond to varying customer demand including PEVs with high level of security, stability and reliability. This dissertation develops and verifies such a hybrid AC-DC power system. The system will operate in a distributed manner incorporating multiple components in both AC and DC styles and work in both grid-connected and islanding modes. The verification was performed on a laboratory-based hybrid AC-DC power system testbed as hardware/software platform. In this system, RERs emulators together with their maximum power point tracking technology and power electronics converters were designed to test different energy harvesting algorithms. The Energy storage devices including lithium-ion batteries and ultra-capacitors were used to optimize the performance of the hybrid power system. A lithium-ion battery smart energy management system with thermal and state of charge self-balancing was proposed to protect the energy storage system. A grid connected DC PEVs parking garage emulator, with five lithium-ion batteries was also designed with the smart charging functions that can emulate the future vehicle-to-grid (V2G), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-house (V2H) services. This includes grid voltage and frequency regulations, spinning reserves, micro grid islanding detection and energy resource support. The results show successful integration of the developed techniques for control and energy management of future hybrid AC-DC power systems with high penetration of RERs and PEVs.

Dynamic Behavior and Fatigue Life of Highway Bridges Due to Doubling Heavy Vehicles

An increase in the demand for the freight shipping in the United States has been predicted for the near future and Longer Combination Vehicles (LCVs), which can carry more loads in each trip, seem like a good solution for the problem. Currently, utilizing LCVs is not permitted in most states of the US and little research has been conducted on the effects of these heavy vehicles on the roads and bridges. In this research, efforts are made to study these effects by comparing the dynamic and fatigue effects of LCVs with more common trucks. Ten Steel and prestressed concrete bridges with span lengths ranging from 30’ to 140’ are designed and modeled using the grid system in MATLAB. Additionally, three more real bridges including two single span simply supported steel bridges and a three span continuous steel bridge are modeled using the same MATLAB code. The equations of motion of three LCVs as well as eight other trucks are derived and these vehicles are subjected to different road surface conditions and bumps on the roads and the designed and real bridges. By forming the bridge equations of motion using the mass, stiffness and damping matrices and considering the interaction between the truck and the bridge, the differential equations are solved using the ODE solver in MATLAB and the results of the forces in tires as well as the deflections and moments in the bridge members are obtained. The results of this study show that for most of the bridges, LCVs result in the smallest values of Dynamic Amplification Factor (DAF) whereas the Single Unit Trucks cause the highest values of DAF when traveling on the bridges. Also in most cases, the values of DAF are observed to be smaller than the 33% threshold suggested by the design code. Additionally, fatigue analysis of the bridges in this study confirms that by replacing the current truck traffic with higher capacity LCVs, in most cases, the remaining fatigue life of the bridge is only slightly decreased which means that taking advantage of these larger vehicles can be a viable option for decision makers.

An Indexing Structure and Application Model for Vehicles Moving on Road Networks

Moving objects database systems are the most challenging sub-category among Spatio-Temporal database systems. A database system that updates in real-time the location information of GPS-equipped moving vehicles has to meet even stricter requirements. Currently existing data storage models and indexing mechanisms work well only when the number of moving objects in the system is relatively small. This dissertation research aimed at the real-time tracking and history retrieval of massive numbers of vehicles moving on road networks. A total solution has been provided for the real-time update of the vehicles��� location and motion information, range queries on current and history data, and prediction of vehicles��� movement in the near future. To achieve these goals, a new approach called Segmented Time Associated to Partitioned Space (STAPS) was first proposed in this dissertation for building and manipulating the indexing structures for moving objects databases. Applying the STAPS approach, an indexing structure of associating a time interval tree to each road segment was developed for real-time database systems of vehicles moving on road networks. The indexing structure uses affordable storage to support real-time data updates and efficient query processing. The data update and query processing performance it provides is consistent without restrictions such as a time window or assuming linear moving trajectories. An application system design based on distributed system architecture with centralized organization was developed to maximally support the proposed data and indexing structures. The suggested system architecture is highly scalable and flexible. Finally, based on a real-world application model of vehicles moving in region-wide, main issues on the implementation of such a system were addressed.

Nutritional programs for the English-speaking elderly and disabled in the "Little Havana" area of Miami

N.A.

Assessing the health outcomes of the family members of disabled individuals

The health utilization and death rates were captured for the family members of disabled individuals over a fifteen-year period to determine if exposure to disability in the family manifests poor health outcomes. Data from the Newfoundland Adult Health Survey (1995) was linked to fifteen years, 1995- 2010, of provincial health administrative data including hospital data, physician claims, and death records from the provincial health care system. The health records and survey data were analyzed in relation to the disability exposure burden experienced when a family member is disabled. The level of disability exposure burden was quantified based on the addition of individual disability scores for each family member. Disability exposure burden was associated with increased number of hospital separations, total hospitalization days and the number of physician visits, both General Practitioner and Specialist (p<0.1) but there was no association between death (p>0.1) and disability exposure burden. Family members of disabled individuals experienced increased rates of hospital separations, hospitalization days, and physician visits suggesting that deleterious health outcomes may be introduced when individuals are exposed to disability in the family unit.

Vulnerable children, stigmatised smokers : The social construction of target audiences in media debates on policies regulating smoking in vehicles

Acknowledgements S.H., S.S. and S.D. developed the study concept and gained funding for the work. S.H. developed the study design. J.B. and H.W. drafted the manuscript. J.B. and H.W. developed the coding frame and coded the articles. S.H., S.S. and S.D. critically revised the manuscript. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by Cancer Research UK (C47682/A16930) and the Scottish School of Public Health Research. Sheila Duffy is Chief Executive of ASH Scotland. Heide Weishaar and Shona Hilton are funded by the UK Medical Research Council as part of the Informing Healthly Public Policy programme (MC_UU12017-15) at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow. The authors declare no additional conflicting interest.

Disabled woman attends rally for homeless and mentally ill street women

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Disabled mother and child

Inscriptions: Verso: [stamped] Photograph by Freda Leinwand. [463 West Street, Studio 229G, New York, NY 10014].

Care-less spaces and identity construction:transition to secondary school for disabled children

There is a growing body of literature which marks out a feminist ethics of care and it is within this framework we understand transitions from primary to secondary school education can be challenging and care-less, especially for disabled children. By exploring the narratives of parents and professionals, we investigate transitions and self-identity, as a meaningful transition depends on the care-full spaces pupils inhabit. These education narratives are all in the context of privileging academic attainment and a culture of testing and examinations. Parents and professionals, as well as children are also surveyed. Until there are care-full education processes, marginalisation will remain, impacting on disabled children’s transition to secondary school and healthy identity construction. Moreover, if educational challenges are not addressed, their life chances are increasingly limited. Interdependent caring work enables engagement in a meaningful education and positive identity formation. In school and at home, care-full spaces are key in this process.

BIDIRECTIONAL AC-DC CONVERTERS USING ONE CYCLE CONTROL (OCC) FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES

The electric vehicle (EV) market has seen a rapid growth in the recent past. With an increase in the number of electric vehicles on road, there is an increase in the number of high capacity battery banks interfacing the grid. The battery bank of an EV, besides being the fuel tank, is also a huge energy storage unit. Presently, it is used only when the vehicle is being driven and remains idle for rest of the time, rendering it underutilized. Whereas on the other hand, there is a need of large energy storage units in the grid to filter out the fluctuations of supply and demand during a day. EVs can help bridge this gap. The EV battery bank can be used to store the excess energy from the grid to vehicle (G2V) or supply stored energy from the vehicle to grid (V2G ), when required. To let power flow happen, in both directions, a bidirectional AC-DC converter is required. This thesis concentrates on the bidirectional AC-DC converters which have a control on power flow in all four quadrants for the application of EV battery interfacing with the grid. This thesis presents a bidirectional interleaved full bridge converter topology. This helps in increasing the power processing and current handling capability of the converter which makes it suitable for the purpose of EVs. Further, the benefit of using the interleaved topology is that it increases the power density of the converter. This ensures optimization of space usage with the same power handling capacity. The proposed interleaved converter consists of two full bridges. The corresponding gate pulses of each switch, in one cell, are phase shifted by 180 degrees from those of the other cell. The proposed converter control is based on the one-cycle controller. To meet the challenge of new requirements of reactive power handling capabilities for grid connected converters, posed by the utilities, the controller is modified to make it suitable to process the reactive power. A fictitious current derived from the grid voltage is introduced in the controller, which controls the converter performance. The current references are generated using the second order generalized integrators (SOGI) and phase locked loop (PLL). A digital implementation of the proposed control ii scheme is developed and implemented using DSP hardware. The simulated and experimental results, based on the converter topology and control technique discussed here, are presented to show the performance of the proposed theory.

Digital geometric-sequence control technique for bidirectional dual active bridge DC-DC converters used in future electric vehicles

Bidirectional DC-DC converters are widely used in different applications such as energy storage systems, Electric Vehicles (EVs), UPS, etc. In particular, future EVs require bidirectional power flow in order to integrate energy storage units into smart grids. These bidirectional power converters provide Grid to Vehicle (V2G)/ Vehicle to Grid (G2V) power flow capability for future EVs. Generally, there are two control loops used for bidirectional DC-DC converters: The inner current loop and The outer loop. The control of DAB converters used in EVs are proved to be challenging due to the wide range of operating conditions and non-linear behavior of the converter. In this thesis, the precise mathematical model of the converter is derived and non-linear control schemes are proposed for the control system of bidirectional DC-DC converters based on the derived model. The proposed inner current control technique is developed based on a novel Geometric-Sequence Control (GSC) approach. The proposed control technique offers significantly improved performance as compared to one for conventional control approaches. The proposed technique utilizes a simple control algorithm which saves on the computational resources. Therefore, it has higher reliability, which is essential in this application. Although, the proposed control technique is based on the mathematical model of the converter, its robustness against parameter uncertainties is proven. Three different control modes for charging the traction batteries in EVs are investigated in this thesis: the voltage mode control, the current mode control, and the power mode control. The outer loop control is determined by each of the three control modes. The structure of the outer control loop provides the current reference for the inner current loop. Comprehensive computer simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed control methods. In addition, the proposed control have been verified on a 3.3 kW experimental prototype. Simulation and experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed control techniques over the conventional ones.