Enabling the Transition to ECP Braking

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan A. Dougherty

Abstract This paper addresses the limitations of conventional freight train air brake systems, the stalled adoption of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes and a cost-effective industry transition to ECP technology. There are two types of ECP train braking systems (cable and radio) and three types of electronically controlled freight car brake control valves. This paper describes the different types ECP braking systems and their limitations and provides a clear path to enable a fleet wide railcar transition to ECP braking technology.

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 587-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Santangelo ◽  
Alessandro Dell'Edera ◽  
Arianna Sala ◽  
Giordano Cecchetti ◽  
Federico Masserini ◽  
...  

Background: The incoming disease-modifying therapies against Alzheimer’s disease (AD) require reliable diagnostic markers to correctly enroll patients all over the world. CSF AD biomarkers, namely amyloid-β 42 (Aβ42), total tau (t-tau), and tau phosphorylated at threonine 181 (p-tau181), showed good diagnostic accuracy in detecting AD pathology, but their real usefulness in daily clinical practice is still a matter of debate. Therefore, further validation in complex clinical settings, that is patients with different types of dementia, is needed to uphold their future worldwide adoption. Methods: We measured CSF AD biomarkers’ concentrations in a sample of 526 patients with a clinical diagnosis of dementia (277 with AD and 249 with Other Type of Dementia, OTD). Brain FDG-PET was also considered in a subsample of 54 patients with a mismatch between the clinical diagnosis and the CSF findings. Results: A p-tau181/Aβ42 ratio higher than 0.13 showed the best diagnostic performance in differentiating AD from OTD (86% accuracy index, 74% sensitivity, 81% specificity). In cases with a mismatch between clinical diagnosis and CSF findings, brain FDG-PET partially agreed with the p-tau181/Aβ42 ratio, thus determining an increase in CSF accuracy. Conclusions: The p-tau181/Aβ42 ratio alone might reliably detect AD pathology in heterogeneous samples of patients suffering from different types of dementia. It might constitute a simple, cost-effective and reproducible in vivo proxy of AD suitable to be adopted worldwide not only in daily clinical practice but also in future experimental trials, to avoid the enrolment of misdiagnosed AD patients.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Seyyed Mojtaba Mousavi ◽  
Seyyed Alireza Hashemi ◽  
Seyed Mohammad Iman Moezzi ◽  
Navid Ravan ◽  
Ahmad Gholami ◽  
...  

Nowadays, pollution of the environment is a huge problem for humans and other organisms’ health. Conventional methods of pollutant removal like membrane filtration or ion exchange are not efficient enough to lower the number of pollutants to standard levels. Biological methods, because of their higher efficiency and biocompatibility, are preferred for the remediation of pollutants. These cost-effective and environment-friendly methods of reducing pollutants are called bioremediation. In bioremediation methods, enzymes play the most crucial role. Enzymes can remedy different types of organic and inorganic pollutants, including PAHs, azo dyes, polymers, organocyanides, lead, chromium, and mercury. Different enzymes isolated from various species have been used for the bioremediation of pollutants. Discovering new enzymes and new subtypes with specific physicochemical characteristics would be a promising way to find more efficient and cost-effective tools for the remediation of pollutants.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S Hoch ◽  
Carolyn S Dewa

Objective: This paper describes the main types of economic evaluation techniques. Method: To examine the strengths and limitations of different types of economic evaluations, we used a hypothetical example to review the reasoning underlying each method and to illustrate when it is appropriate to use each method. Results: The choice of economic evaluation method reflects a decision about what should represent “success” and how success should be valued. Measures of benefit and cost must be considered systematically and simultaneously. Claiming that a new treatment is cost-effective requires making a value judgment based on the personal beliefs of the claimant. Even when cost and effect data are objective, a verdict of cost-effective is subjective. The conclusions of an economic study can change significantly, depending on which patient outcome is used to measure success. Conclusions: Clinicians must be sure that important patient outcomes are not excluded from economic evaluations. Economic evaluation is a process designed to produce an estimate rather than a decision. New treatment can be more costly and still be cost-effective (if the extra benefit is valued more than the extra cost to produce it). However, since economic evaluation does not explicitly consider a decision maker's available budget, a new treatment can be deemed cost-effective but too expensive to approve.


2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (06) ◽  
pp. 929-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. SUN ◽  
Y. ZHAO ◽  
W. M. HUANG ◽  
T. H. TONG

We demonstrate a simple and cost-effective approach to realize two combined surface features of different scales together, namely submillimeter-sized protrusion array and microwrinkles, atop a polystyrene shape-memory polymer. Two different types of protrusions, namely flat-top protrusion and crown-shaped protrusion, were studied. The array of protrusions was produced by the Indentation-Polishing-Heating (IPH) process. Compactly packed steel balls were used for making array of indents. A thin gold layer was sputter deposited atop the polymer surface right after polishing. After heating for shape recovery, array of protrusions with wrinkles on the top due to the buckling of gold layer was produced.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Zilberman ◽  
Abdelaziz Abu Sbaih ◽  
Ibrahim Hadad

Abstract Wind energy has become an important resource for the growing demand for clean energy. In 2020 wind energy provided more than 6% of the global electricity demand. It is expected to reach 7% at the end of 2021. The installation growth rate of small wind turbines, though, is relatively slow. The reasons we are interested in the small vertical axis wind turbines are their low noise, environmentally friendly, low installation cost, and capable of being rooftop-mounted. The main goal of the present study is an optimization process towards achieving the optimal cost-effective vertical wind turbine. Thirty wind turbine models were tested under the same conditions in an Azrieli 30 × 30 × 90 cm low-speed wind tunnel at 107,000 Reynolds number. The different types of models were obtained by parametric variations of five basic models, maintaining the same aspect ratio but varying the number of bucket phases, the orientation angles, and the gaps between the vanes. The best performing turbine model was made of one phase with two vanes of non-symmetric bipolynomial profiles that exhibited 0.2 power coefficient, relative to 0.16 and 0.13 that were obtained for symmetrical polynomial and the original Savonius type turbines, respectively. Free rotation, static forces and moments, and dynamic moments and power were measured for the sake of comparison and explanation for the variations in performances of different types of turbines. CFD calculations were used to understand the forces and moment behaviors of the optimized turbine.


Author(s):  
Satyandra K. Gupta

Abstract Sheet metal bending press-brakes can be setup to produce more than one type of parts without requiring a setup change. To exploit this flexibility, we need setup planning techniques to generate press-brake setups that can be shared among many different parts. In this paper, we describe an algorithm which partitions a given set of parts into setup compatible part families which can be produced on the same setup. Our algorithm is based on a two step approach. The first step is to identify setup constraints for each individual part. The second step is to form setup-compatible part families based on the compatibility of setup constraints. We expect that by producing many different types of parts on the same setup, we can significantly reduce the required number of setups and enable cost effective small batch manufacturing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (18) ◽  
pp. 6386
Author(s):  
Xing Bai ◽  
Jun Zhou

Benefiting from the booming of deep learning, the state-of-the-art models achieved great progress. But they are huge in terms of parameters and floating point operations, which makes it hard to apply them to real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, named MPDNet, for fast and efficient semantic segmentation under resource constraints. First, we use a light-weight classification model pretrained on ImageNet as the encoder. Second, we use a cost-effective upsampling datapath to restore prediction resolution and convert features for classification into features for segmentation. Finally, we propose to use a multi-path decoder to extract different types of features, which are not ideal to process inside only one convolutional neural network. The experimental results of our model outperform other models aiming at real-time semantic segmentation on Cityscapes. Based on our proposed MPDNet, we achieve 76.7% mean IoU on Cityscapes test set with only 118.84GFLOPs and achieves 37.6 Hz on 768 × 1536 images on a standard GPU.


Author(s):  
Neha Varun ◽  
Nidhi Gupta ◽  
Sana Khan

Background: Abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) is one of the most commonly encountered gynecological problem and almost 33 % of women in gynecological outpatient department presented with abnormal uterine bleeding. Dilatation and curettage (D and C) have been the main diagnostic procedure in the evaluation of abnormal uterine bleeding patients for decades. The objective of the present study was to analyze the different types of endometrial histopathology of patients presented with the abnormal uterine bleeding and its correlation with the different types of abnormal uterine bleedingMethods: This is a retrospective study, conducted in a medical college in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology over a period of one year from June ’17 to June ’18. All cases of AUB more than 35 years of the age group who underwent D and C procedure were included in this study. Total 100 patients were analyzed.Results: Total 100 patients were analyzed. Age group ranges from 35-58 years and most common age group presenting with AUB was 35-39 years. The most common presenting complaint was menorrhagia 54% (54/100). Histopathology of endometrium showed non-organic causes in 80% (80/100) of AUB patients and the remaining 20% (20/100) had organic causes. Most common endometrial histopathology among non-organic causes was proliferative endometrium 43.75% (35/80) and the most common organic cause was endometrial polyp 40% (8/20). Endometrial hyperplasia was found in 30% (6/20) and endometrial carcinoma was found in 20% (4/20) of cases among organic causes.Conclusions: D and C is the useful and the cost-effective diagnostic procedure in the evaluation of AUB. Histopathological evaluation of endometrial samples is especially indicated in AUB patients to rule out carcinoma and preneoplastic conditions as histopathology is 100% diagnostic in cases of endometrial hyperplasia and carcinoma.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
José María González-González ◽  
Manuel Jesús García-Fénix

Este trabajo se propone analizar las formas de trabajo institucional desarrolladas por distintos actores para la emergencia e implantación del Coste Efectivo de los Servicios de las Entidades Locales (CESEL). Los resultados del estudio de caso longitudinal realizado ponen de manifiesto que los principales actores, Gobierno Central y Ayuntamiento, llevaron a cabo diferentes formas de trabajo institucional (político, cultural y técnico), surgiendo conflictos durante su desarrollo debido a las distintas lógicas institucionales en las que se apoyaron: eficiencia económica e interés social, respectivamente. Este trabajo contribuye a la perspectiva teórica adoptada evidenciando que las formas en las que se desarrolla el trabajo institucional por distintos actores determinan la configuración final de la nueva institución que quiere crearse. Así, aunque la regulación estableció como finalidad del CESEL profundizar en el cumplimiento de los principios de eficiencia y de transparencia de la gestión pública local, las formas en las que se ha desarrollado el trabajo institucional durante su implantación lo han configurado como un instrumento de transparencia, presentando además serias limitaciones para que ésta sea efectiva. This paper aims to analyze the forms of institutional work carried out by different actors with regard to the emergence and implementation of Cost-Effective of Local Government Services (CESEL, Coste Efectivo de los Servicios de las Entidades Locales). The results of the longitudinal case study evidence that the main actors, Central Government and Local Government, carried out different types of institutional work (political, cultural and technical), by arising conflicts during their development due to the different institutional logics in which they were supported: economic efficiency and social interest, respectively. This work contributes to the theoretical perspective adopted by evidencing that the ways in which institutional work is developed by different actors determine the final configuration of the new institution that is to be created. Thus, although the regulation established that the purpose of CESEL is to deepen on compliance with the principles of efficiency and transparency of local public management, the ways in which the institutional work has been developed during its implementation have configured it as an instrument for transparency and also it presents serious limitations so that transparency is effective.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Wu ◽  
Xiang Wu ◽  
Tiancai Liang

This paper reports a method for three-dimensional (3D) analysis of shift-invariant pattern recognition and applies to holographic images digitally reconstructed from holographic microscopes. It is shown that the sequential application of a 2D filter to the plane-by-plane reconstruction of an optical field is exactly equivalent to the application of a more general filter with a 3D impulse response. We show that any 3D filters with arbitrary impulse response can be implemented in this way. This type of processing is applied to the two-class problem of distinguishing different types of bacteria. It is shown that the proposed technique can be easily implemented using a modified microscope to develop a powerful and cost-effective system with great potential for biological screening.


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