• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.95-108
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• 2015

Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is quickly being adopted by aviation safety authorities around the world as the standard for aircraft tracking. The technology provides the opportunity for live tracking of aircraft positions within range of an ADS-B receiver stations. Currently these receiver stations are bound by land and local infrastructural constraints. As such there is little to no coverage over oceans and poles, over which many commercial flights routinely travel. A low cost space based ADS-B receiving system is proposed as a constellation of small satellites. The possibility for a link between aircraft and satellite is dependent primarily on proximity. Calculating the likelihood of a link between two moving targets when considering with the non-periodic and non-uniform nature of actual aircraft flight-paths is non-trivial. This analysis of the link likelihood and the performance of the tracking ability of the satellite constellation has been carried out by a direct simulation of satellites and aircraft. Parameters defining the constellation (satellite numbers, orbit size and shape, orbit configuration) were varied between reasonable limits. The recent MH370 disappearance was simulated and potential tracking and coverage was analysed using an example constellation. The trend of more satellites at a higher altitude inclined at 60 degrees was found to be the optimal solution.

• Advances in environmental research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.155-166
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• 2013

A preliminary investigation to establish the status of contamination of trace metals in the Western coast of Ghana was conducted prior to the commercial production of crude oil in the area. The study revealed the presence of heavy metals such as Pb (4.00-79.64 mg/kg), As (8.81-236 mg/kg), Cu (12.86-108.06 mg/kg), V (28.07-953.32 mg/kg), Zn (7.08-264.25 mg/kg), Cr (101.69-1366.62 mg/kg), Ni (42.41-451.43 mg/kg), Mn (16.77-1890.45mg/kg), Br (7.66-142.78 mg/kg), Ti (542.03-19960 mg/kg) and Fe (7472.88-97120 mg/kg) at six sites sampled along the coast. With the exception of Ti and Fe which showed no variation in metal concentration, the rest of the metals varied significantly among the sampled locations. Potential ecological risk of metals particularly of Co, As and Br which exhibited extreme enrichment of the sediments indicates considerable metal pollution in the studied areas. The degree of contamination is of particular concern especially to benthic biota that inhabit this environment for survival.

• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.37-52
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• 2017

Gas turbines operating in dusty or sandy environment polluted with micron-sized solid particles are highly prone to blade surface erosion damage in compressor stages and molten sand attack in the hot-sections of turbine stages. Commercial/Military fixed-wing aircraft engines and helicopter engines often have to operate over sandy terrains in the middle eastern countries or in volcanic zones; on the other hand gas turbines in marine applications are subjected to salt spray, while the coal-burning industrial power generation turbines are subjected to fly-ash. The presence of solid particles in the working fluid medium has an adverse effect on the durability of these engines as well as performance. Typical turbine blade damages include blade coating wear, sand glazing, Calcia-Magnesia-Alumina-Silicate (CMAS) attack, oxidation, plugged cooling holes, all of which can cause rapid performance deterioration including loss of aircraft. The focus of this research work is to simulate particle-surface kinetic interaction on typical turbomachinery material targets using non-linear dynamic impact analysis. The objective of this research is to understand the interfacial kinetic behaviors that can provide insights into the physics of particle interactions and to enable leap ahead technologies in material choices and to develop sand-phobic thermal barrier coatings for turbine blades. This paper outlines the research efforts at the U.S Army Research Laboratory to come up with novel turbine blade multifunctional protective coatings that are sand-phobic, sand impact wear resistant, as well as have very low thermal conductivity for improved performance of future gas turbine engines. The research scope includes development of protective coatings for both nickel-based super alloys and ceramic matrix composites.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.83-114
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• 2003

A new simple 3-node triangular flat-shell element with standard nodal DOF (6 DOF per node) is proposed for the linear and geometrically nonlinear analysis of very thin to thick plate and shell structures. The formulation of element GT9 (Long and Xu 1994), a generalized conforming membrane element with rigid rotational freedoms, is employed as the membrane component of the new shell element. Both one-point reduced integration scheme and a corresponding stabilization matrix are adopted for avoiding membrane locking and hourglass phenomenon. The bending component of the new element comes from a new generalized conforming Kirchhoff-Mindlin plate element TSL-T9, which is derived in this paper based on semiLoof constrains and rational shear interpolation. Thus the convergence can be guaranteed and no shear locking will happen. Furthermore, a simple hybrid procedure is suggested to improve the stress solutions, and the Updated Lagrangian formulae are also established for the geometrically nonlinear problems. Numerical results with solutions, which are solved by some other recent element models and the models in the commercial finite element software ABAQUS, are presented. They show that the proposed element, denoted as GMST18, exhibits excellent and better performance for the analysis of thin-think plates and shells in both linear and geometrically nonlinear problems.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.169-186
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• 2013

The aim of this paper is to determine the effect of soil-structure interaction and time dependent material properties on behavior of concrete box-girder highway bridges. Two different finite element analyses, one stage and construction stage, have been carried out on Komurhan Bridge between Elazi$\breve{g}$ and Malatya province of Turkey, over Fırat River. The one stage analysis assume that structure was built in a second and material properties of structure not change under different loads and site conditions during time. However, construction stage analysis considers that construction time and time dependent material properties. The main and side spans of bridge are 135 m and 76 m, respectively. The bridge had been constructed in 3 years between 1983 and 1986 by balanced cantilever construction method. The parameters of soil-structure interaction (SSI), time dependent material properties and construction method are taken into consideration in the construction stage analysis while SSI is single parameter taking into consideration in the one stage analysis. The 3D finite element model of bridge is created the commercial program of SAP2000. Time dependent material properties are elasticity modulus, creep and shrinkage for concrete and relaxation for steel. Soft, medium, and firm soils are selected for evaluating SSI in both analyses. The results of two different finite element analyses are compared with each other. It is seen that both construction stage and SSI have a remarkable effect on the structural behavior of the bridge.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.383-399
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• 2015

Today, as railways increase their capacity and speeds, it is more important than ever to be completely aware of the state of vehicles fleet's condition to ensure the highest quality and safety standards, as well as being able to maintain the costs as low as possible. Operation of a modern, dynamic and efficient railway demands a real time, accurate and reliable evaluation of the infrastructure assets, including signal networks and diagnostic systems able to acquire functional parameters. In the conventional system, measurement data are reliably collected using coaxial wires for communication between sensors and the repository. As sensors grow in size, the cost of the monitoring system can grow. Recently, auto-powered wireless sensor has been considered as an alternative tool for economical and accurate realization of structural health monitoring system, being provided by the following essential features: on-board micro-processor, sensing capability, wireless communication, auto-powered battery, and low cost. In this work, an original harvester device is designed to supply wireless sensor system battery using train bogie energy. Piezoelectric materials have in here considered due to their established ability to directly convert applied strain energy into usable electric energy and their relatively simple modelling into an integrated system. The mechanical and electrical properties of the system are studied according to the project specifications. The numerical formulation is implemented with in-house code using commercial software tool and then experimentally validated through a proof of concept setup using an excitation signal by a real application scenario.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.323-331
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• 2020

With the increasing demand on reverse osmosis (RO) membranes for water purification worldwide, the number of disposed membrane elements is expected to increase accordingly. Thus, recycling and reuse of end-of-life RO membranes should be a global environmental action. In this work, we aim to reuse the spent RO membrane for nanofiltration (NF) and ultrafiltration (UF) process by subjecting the spent membrane to solvent and oxidizing solution treatment, respectively. Our results showed that solvent-treated RO membrane could perform as good as commercial NF membrane by achieving similar separation efficiencies, but with reduced water permeability due to membrane surface fouling. By degrading the polyamide layer of RO membrane, the transformed membrane could achieve high water permeability (85.6 L/㎡.h.bar) and excellent rejection against macromolecules (at least 87.4%), suggesting its reuse potential as UF membrane. More importantly, our findings showed that in-situ transformation on the spent RO membrane using solvent and oxidizing solution could be safely conducted as the properties of the entire spiral wound element did not show significant changes upon prolonged exposure of these two solutions. Our findings are important to open up new possibilities for the discarded RO membranes for reuse in NF and UF process, prolonging the lifespan of spent membranes and promoting the sustainability of the membrane process.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.731-748
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• 2010

Impact detection and health monitoring are very important tasks for civil infrastructures, such as bridges. Piezoceramic based transducers are widely researched for these tasks due to the piezoceramic material's inherent advantages of dual sensing and actuation ability, which enables the active sensing method for structural health monitoring with a network of piezoceramic transducers. Wireless sensor networks, which are easy for deployment, have great potential in health monitoring systems for large civil infrastructures to identify early-age damages. However, most commercial wireless sensor networks are general purpose and may not be optimized for a network of piezoceramic based transducers. Wireless networks of piezoceramic transducers for active sensing have special requirements, such as relatively high sampling rate (at a few-thousand Hz), incorporation of an amplifier for the piezoceramic element for actuation, and low energy consumption for actuation. In this paper, a wireless network is specially designed for piezoceramic transducers to implement impact detection and active sensing for structural health monitoring. A power efficient embedded system is designed to form the wireless sensor network that is capable of high sampling rate. A 32 bit RISC wireless microcontroller is chosen as the main processor. Detailed design of the hardware system and software system of the wireless sensor network is presented in this paper. To verify the functionality of the wireless sensor network, it is deployed on a two-story concrete frame with embedded piezoceramic transducers, and the active sensing property of piezoceramic material is used to detect the damage in the structure. Experimental results show that the wireless sensor network can effectively implement active sensing and impact detection with high sampling rate while maintaining low power consumption by performing offline data processing and minimizing wireless communication.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.55-71
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• 2013

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is vital for detecting the onset of damage and for preventing catastrophic failure of civil infrastructure systems. In particular, piezoelectric transducers have the ability to excite and actively interrogate structures (e.g., using surface waves) while measuring their response for sensing and damage detection. In fact, piezoelectric transducers such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) have been used for various laboratory/field tests and possess significant advantages as compared to visual inspection and vibration-based methods, to name a few. However, PZTs are inherently brittle, and PVDF films do not possess high piezoelectricity, thereby limiting each of these devices to certain specific applications. The objective of this study is to design, characterize, and validate piezoelectric nanocomposites consisting of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles assembled in a PVDF copolymer matrix for sensing and SHM applications. These films provide greater mechanical flexibility as compared to PZTs, yet possess enhanced piezoelectricity as compared to pristine PVDF copolymers. This study started with spin coating dispersed ZnO- and PVDF-TrFE-based solutions to fabricate the piezoelectric nanocomposites. The concentration of ZnO nanoparticles was varied from 0 to 20 wt.% (in 5 % increments) to determine their influence on bulk film piezoelectricity. Second, their electric polarization responses were obtained for quantifying thin film remnant polarization, which is directly correlated to piezoelectricity. Based on these results, the films were poled (at 50 $MV-m^{-1}$) to permanently align their electrical domains and to enhance their bulk film piezoelectricity. Then, a series of hammer impact tests were conducted, and the voltage generated by poled ZnO-based thin films was compared to commercially poled PVDF copolymer thin films. The hammer impact tests showed comparable results between the prototype and commercial samples, and increasing ZnO content provided enhanced piezoelectric performance. Lastly, the films were further validated for sensing using different energy levels of hammer impact, different distances between the impact locations and the film electrodes, and cantilever free vibration testing for dynamic strain sensing.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.5 no.2_3
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• pp.181-192
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• 2005

The effective length method for flexural (column) buckling has been used for many decades but its use is somewhat limited in various contemporary design codes to moderately slender structures with elastic critical load factor (${\lambda}_{cr}$) less than 3 to 5. In pace with the use of higher grade steel in recent years, the influence of buckling in axial buckling resistance of a column becomes more important and the over-simplified assumption of effective length factor can lead to an unsafe, an uneconomical or a both unsafe and uneconomical solution when some members are over-designed while key elements are under-designed. Effective length should not normally be taken as the distance between nodes multiplied by an arbitrary factor like 0.85, 1.0, 2.0 etc. Further, the classification of non-sway and sway-sensitive frames makes the conventional design procedure tedious to use and, more importantly, limited to simple regular frames. This paper describes the practical use of second-order analysis with section capacity check allowing for $P-{\delta}$ and $P-{\Delta}$ effects together with member and system imperfections. Most commercial software considers only the $P-{\Delta}$ effect, but not member and frame imperfections nor $P-{\delta}$ effect, and engineers must be very careful in their uses. A verification problem is also given for validation of software for this type of powerful second-order analysis and design. It is a trend for popular and advanced national design codes in using the second-order analysis as a norm for analysis and design of steel structures while linear analysis may only be used in very simple structures.