Wind energy is the fastest growing alternate source of energy in the world since its purely economic potential is complemented by its great positive environmental impact. The wind turbine, whether it may be a Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) or a Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT), offers a practical way to convert the wind energy into electrical or mechanical energy. Although this book focuses on the aerodynamic design and performance of VAWTs based on the Darrieus concept, it also discusses the comparison between HAWTs and VAWTs, future trends in design and the inherent socio-economic and environmental friendly aspects of wind energy as an alternate source of energy.

Wind turbine design with emphasis on Darrieus concept Ion Paraschivoiu

Visual social attention in autism spectrum disorder: Insights from eye tracking studies.

Active infrared thermography is a fast and accurate non-destructive evaluation technique that is of particular relevance to the aerospace industry for the inspection of aircraft and helicopters’ primary and secondary structures, aero-engine parts, spacecraft components and its subsystems. This review provides an exhaustive summary of most recent active thermographic methods used for aerospace applications according to their physical principle and thermal excitation sources. Besides traditional optically stimulated thermography, which uses external optical radiation such as flashes, heaters and laser systems, novel hybrid thermographic techniques are also investigated. These include ultrasonic stimulated thermography, which uses ultrasonic waves and the local damage resonance effect to enhance the reliability and sensitivity to micro-cracks, eddy current stimulated thermography, which uses cost-effective eddy current excitation to generate induction heating, and microwave thermography, which uses electromagnetic radiation at the microwave frequency bands to provide rapid detection of cracks and delamination. All these techniques are here analysed and numerous examples are provided for different damage scenarios and aerospace components in order to identify the strength and limitations of each thermographic technique. Moreover, alternative strategies to current external thermal excitation sources, here named as material-based thermography methods, are examined in this paper. These novel thermographic techniques rely on thermoresistive internal heating and offer a fast, low power, accurate and reliable assessment of damage in aerospace composites.

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Recent Advances in Active Infrared Thermography for Non-Destructive Testing of Aerospace Components.

This paper deals with the evolution of infrared (IR) thermography into a powerful optical tool that can be used in complex fluid flows to either evaluate wall convective heat fluxes or investigate the surface flow field behavior. Measurement of convective heat fluxes must be performed by means of a thermal sensor, where temperatures have to be measured with proper transducers. By correctly choosing the thermal sensor, IR thermography can be successfully exploited to resolve convective heat flux distributions with both steady and transient techniques. When comparing it to standard transducers, the IR camera appears very valuable because it is non-intrusive, it has a high sensitivity (down to 20 mK), it has a low response time (down to 20 μs), it is fully two dimensional (from 80 k up to 1 M pixels, at 50 Hz) and, therefore, it allows for better evaluation of errors due to tangential conduction within the sensor. This paper analyses the capability of IR thermography to perform convective heat transfer measurements and surface visualizations in complex fluid flows. In particular, it includes the following: the necessary radiation theory background, a review of the main IR camera features, a description of the pertinent heat flux sensors, an analysis of the IR image processing methods and a report on some applications to complex fluid flows, ranging from natural convection to hypersonic regime.

/pdf/infrared-thermography-for-convective-heat-transfer-56a0bwe7om.pdf

Infrared thermography for convective heat transfer measurements

Flexible cognitive resources: Competitive content maps for attention and memory

Human resource development and visualization

Image reconstruction is a key problem for electrical resistance tomography (ERT). Because of the soft-field nature and the ill-posed problem in solving inverse problem, traditional image reconstruction methods cannot achieve high accuracy and the process is usually time consuming. Since deep learning is good at mapping complicated nonlinear function, a deep learning method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for image reconstruction of ERT. To establish the database, 41122 samples were generated with numerical simulations. 10-fold cross validation was used to divide all samples into training set and validation set. The network structure was based on LeNet, and refined by applying dropout layer and moving average. After 346 training epochs, the image correlation coefficient (ICC) on validation set was 0.95. When white Gaussian noise with a signal-to-noise ratio of 30, 40, and 50 were added to validation set, the ICC was 0.79, 0.89, and 0.93, respectively, which proved the anti-noise capability of the network. The reconstruction results on samples which have more inclusions, different conductivity, and other shapes explained the network has good generalization ability. Furthermore, experimental data from a 16-electrode industrial ERT system was used to compare the accuracy of the proposed model with some typical reconstruction methods. Results show that the proposed CNN method has better reconstruction results than LBP, Tikhonov, and Landweber.

Image Reconstruction Based on Convolutional Neural Network for Electrical Resistance Tomography

This paper reviews the latest development and emerging technologies on the application of process tomography to multiphase flow measurement in industrial and biomedical fields. In the industrial applications, electrical resistance tomography and electrical capacitance tomography are popularly applied in multiphase flow measurement dependent on the electrical properties of the objects. In particular, applications to circulating fluidized bed, trickle-bed reactor and temperature measurement are discussed. In the biomedical applications, in most cases, measurement is conducted in a static condition. Two latest applications in flowing condition are reviewed, which are thrombus detection in blood flow and cell sensing with a microfluidic device. Finally, the challenges to process tomography for multiphase flow measurement on industrial and biomedical applications are addressed.

Application of Process Tomography to Multiphase Flow Measurement in Industrial and Biomedical Fields: A Review

Phase-based methods of active thermographic studies provide deeper subsurface details and reduce non-uniform emissivity problems in defect detection. In this contribution analysis of subsurface anomalies has been carried out by probing a suitable frequency component with sufficient energy. This paper highlights the comparative analysis of different thermographic schemes on the basis of supplying equal energy to the chosen frequency used for the analysis of a given carbon fiber-reinforced plastic sample used in experimentation. Experiments have been carried out to find the detection ability of different excitation schemes, and comparisons have been made by taking the signal-to-noise ratio of the defects into consideration.

Frequency-modulated thermal wave imaging for non-destructive testing of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic materials

Microfluidic device embedding electrodes realizes cell manipulation with the help of dielectrophoresis. Cell manipulation is an important technology for cell sorting and cell population purification. Till now, the theory of dielectrophoresis has been greatly developed. Microfluidic devices with various arrangements of electrodes have been reported from the beginning of the single non-uniform electric field to the later multiple physical fields. This paper reviews the research status of microfluidic device embedding electrodes for cell manipulation based on dielectrophoresis. Firstly, the working principle of dielectrophoresis is explained. Next, cell manipulation approaches based on dielectrophoresis are introduced. Then, different types of electrode arrangements in the microfluidic device for cell manipulation are discussed, including planar, multilayered and microarray dot electrodes. Finally, the future development trend of the dielectrophoresis with the help of microfluidic devices is prospected. With the rapid development of microfluidic technology, in the near future, high precision, high throughput, high efficiency, multifunctional, portable, economical and practical microfluidic dielectrophoresis will be widely used in the fields of biology, medicine, agriculture and so on.

Masahiro Takei

Papers

Human resource development and visualization

Image Reconstruction Based on Convolutional Neural Network for Electrical Resistance Tomography

Application of Process Tomography to Multiphase Flow Measurement in Industrial and Biomedical Fields: A Review

Frequency-modulated thermal wave imaging for non-destructive testing of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic materials

Microfluidic device embedding electrodes for dielectrophoretic manipulation of cells-A review