Schematic and structural optimization of group water supply systems

Group water supply systems (GWSS) are designed for centralized water supply of settlements located in waterless areas and remote from drinking water sources. GWSS are an object of increased attention, have a great social and environmental significance, require significant capital investments and financial resources for operation, ensuring the required reliability and manageability. Therefore, the issues of optimization of design solutions for the structure and parameters of structures are relevant and require improvement and development of methodological and software solutions to these problems. The paper proposes a method of redundant design schemes and a method of schematic and structural optimization based on a sequential and iterative solution of two problems: for a fixed value of flows in the graph of the redundant scheme, network parameters are optimized (pipeline diameters, heads, and the composition of pumping stations); with fixed network parameters, the problem of the distribution of water flows is solved in the GWSS.

Design, Analysis, and Integration of a New Two-Degree-of-Freedom Articulated Multi-Link Robotic Tail Mechanism

Based on observations from nature, tails are believed to help animals achieve highly agile motions. Traditional single-link robotic tails serve as a good simplification for both modeling and implementation purposes. However, this approach cannot explain the complicated tail behaviors exhibited in nature where multi-link structures are more commonly observed. Unlike its single-link counterpart, articulated multi-link tails essentially belong to the serial manipulator family which possesses special motion transmission design challenges. To address this challenge, a cable-driven hyper-redundant design becomes the most used approach. Limited by cable strength and elastic components, this approach suffers from low-frequency response, inadequate generated inertial loading, and fragile hardware, which are all critical drawbacks for robotic tails design. To solve these structure-related shortcomings, a multi-link robotic tail made up of rigid links is proposed in this paper. The new structure takes advantage of the traditional hybrid mechanism architecture, but utilizes rigid mechanisms to couple the motions between the ith link and the (i + 1)th link rather than using cable actuation. By doing so, the overall tail becomes a rigid mechanism that achieves quasi-uniform spatial bending for each segment and allows performing highly dynamic motions. The mechanism and detailed design of this new robotic tail are presented. The kinematic model was developed and an optimization process was conducted to reduce the bending non-uniformity for the rigid tail. Based on this special optimization design, the dynamic model of the new mechanism is significantly simplified. A small-scale three-segment prototype was integrated to verify the proposed mechanism's unique mobility.

Management of development and conservation of oil and gas fields

The purpose of the work is to develop a methodology for managing the development and conservation of fields of field gas-oil pipelines. The analysis showed that the solution of this problem is not paid attention, both on the part of designers and specialists in the automation of design solutions. Although this is one of the most important design problems, on the solution of which the rationality of capital investments depends, the optimality of subsequent periods of operation. Traditionally, this operation is performed manually. The designer, using his experience and intuition, outlines several alternative options, which are then evaluated automatically, including for reliability, hydraulic stability and operational controllability (for example, using the OLGA software package). Methods. For optimal control of these processes, a methodology for indicative and adaptive management of the development and conservation of the field is proposed, which allows taking into account the uncertainties that arise in the future stages of the field operation. At each stage of this technique, it is proposed to carry out a comprehensive optimization of the main field pipelines and use the technique of redundant design schemes with the solution of circuit-structural and circuit-parametric optimization problems, including the stages of conservation of deposits. The numerical experiments carried out have confirmed the high computational and economic efficiency of the proposed approach and method. Conclusions. The proposed method and its software implementation are an effective computational tool for justifying the route and parameters at all stages of management of the development and conservation of field gas-oil pipelines and is recommended for use in the practice of designing the corresponding pipeline systems.