Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Business Recovery Strategies on Seismic Risk and Cost-Effectiveness of Structural Retrofitting for Business Enterprises

Recent earthquakes in Italy have significantly affected productive activities, particularly in business interruption (BI) and, consequently, heavy losses for companies, highlighting the need for appropriate seismic risk assessment and management. To estimate seismic risk accurately, both direct (repair/replacement) and indirect (BI) losses must be quantified. Companies’ balance sheets can be used to estimate BI losses, which, however, are very sensitive to business recovery strategies (BRSs) devised by corporate managers after the seismic event. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of BRSs on seismic risk estimates and consequently on structural retrofitting cost-effectiveness. A loss model (including direct and indirect costs and BRS effects) was defined, based on a real-life case study (a biomedical packaging company that was damaged by the 2012 Italian earthquake but recovered soon after) and was used in parametric risk analyses assessing several types of company vulnerabilities and seismic hazards. In areas with low-to-moderate seismicity, seismic retrofitting of existing reinforced concrete factories may be justified or otherwise, depending on whether BRSs are considered or not.
Linear Quadratic Regulator Control for PMSM Drive Systems Using Nonlinear Disturbance Observer

In this article, the influence of the parameter nonlinearity on the torque and stator flux is considered, and the nonlinear mathematical model of permanent magnet synchronous motor is established. On the basis, the torque controller is proposed through three steps: designing the nonlinear disturbance observer, deriving an optimal control law, and injecting the observations into the optimal control law. With the assist of space vector pulse width modulation, the proposed torque controller is applied for permanent magnet synchronous motor. Experimental results from a 2.3-kW prototype are performed, which validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Review on fault‐diagnosis and fault‐tolerance for DC–DC converters

The DC-DC converters operate extensively in a variety of industrial applications such as electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, aerospace applications, consumer electronics (smartphones, laptops, etc.) and energy storage solutions. The reliability of the DC-DC converters is of a greater significance. The research endeavours made in enhancing the reliability of the DC-DC converters are still very limited and dispersed. Due to the rapid growth in semiconductor technology, the DC-DC converters have an endless number of topologies, with various operating principles and functionalities. Enhancement of the reliability of all types of DC-DC converters is still a challenging task. Power switches are the most fragile components in converter circuits, which inherently fall prey to the faults occurring in the system. Hence, there is always a requirement to take appropriate remedial measures to deal with all kinds of faults. Further, in order to detect the occurrence of fault a fast fault-diagnosis and fault-tolerant strategies in the DC-DC converters is mandatory and the same has to be embedded in the converter for safety purpose. In view of the importance of the same, the fault-diagnostic algorithms and fault-tolerant strategies developed in the literature, by various researchers are furnished in a single document after conducting an exhaustive review.
A novel TDFEM scheme based on high‐performance parallel solver PaStiX

In this paper, we focus on the theory and fulfillment of parallel time domain finite element method (TDFEM) with PaStiX (Parallel Sparse matriX package) for solving three‐dimensional electromagnetic (EM) radiation problems. The motivation behind the research is required to maintain numerical stability and achieve high speed for parallel sparse LU factorization on parallel platforms. Firstly, we overview the concept of an unconditional stable TDFEM scheme, and numerical optimization for ill‐conditioned equations obtained from the TDFEM with perfectly matched layer (PML) was presented to alleviate nonconvergent results. Secondly, we develop sparse linear system solvers that use DS factorization to solve the preconditioned system. Numerical results were obtained from the cases of the cavity resonance problem and a cone antenna. A noteworthy observation from the time‐consuming results in different solvers is that PaStiX is usually much faster compared with UMFPACK and SuperLU.
Respiratory Monitoring During Physical Activities With a Multi-Sensor Smart Garment and Related Algorithms

Unobtrusive and wearable devices are gaining large acceptance in the continuous monitoring of physiological parameters. Among the five vital signs, respiratory rate (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) can be used to detect physiological abnormalities and health status changes. The purpose of this work was to investigate the performances of a multi-sensor smart garment in estimating the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> during walking and running activities. Bespoke algorithms have been implemented to retrieve <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> values from raw data. Experiments were carried out on ten male volunteers during walking and running activities at selected speeds controlled by a treadmill (i.e., from 1.6 km<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\cdot \text{h}^{-{1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to 8.0 km<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\cdot \text{h}^{-{1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>). Data were analysed in both frequency and time domains. In the frequency domain, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was analyzed considering a time window of 20 s. The 97% of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> estimated by the garment agreed with the reference (i.e., flowmeter) values in the range ±3 breaths per minute (bpm). In the time domain, breath-by-breath <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> analysis was carried out. The garment performance was evaluated in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), standard error (SE), mean percentage error (mean <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%{E}[{i}]$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and by the Bland-Altman analysis. Good agreement with the reference device was testified by low MAE (<1.86 bpm), SE (<0.21 bpm), mean <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\%{E}[{i}]$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (<2.83 %), and by the Bland-Altman analysis (Mean of Differences = 0.22 bpm, Limits of Agreement = 6.06 bpm). Summing up, the garment based on six sensing elements and related bespoke algorithms are able to provide robust information about <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${f}_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> on both average and breath-by-breath bases even during physical activities.
0.3V Tunable OTA and Gm-C Filter in 0.13µm CMOS

This paper presents an ultra-low-voltage operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and Gm-C filter, both working with 0.3V single supply voltage. Using pseudo-differential structure, the common mode rejection is the main challenge in low voltage condition which is overcome by a new common mode feedback circuit. The OTA can be tuned through the gate terminal of body-driven PMOS input transistors. Post-layout simulation shows 23.4 dB differential gain and 47.4 dB CMRR at low frequencies. By changing the tune voltage from 50mV to 0V, the OTA's transconductance can be tuned from 7.9 to 17.4 uA/V. By applying input voltages up to 0.36 Vpp, the THD of output current remains less than -60 dB. The proposed OTA is employed to implement a tunable low-pass Gm-C filter. The cutoff frequency of Gm-C filter can be tuned from 1.13 to 1.9 MHz that makes it applicable in the multi-standard direct conversion receivers as channel selection filter. The power consumption of filter is 111.3 uW and its input referred voltage noise is 168.7 nV/sqrt(Hz), as results of post-layout simulations. The post-layout simulation shows the IIP3 of 8.5 dBm for the cutoff frequency of 1.9 MHz.
SDDNet: Real-Time Crack Segmentation

This article reports the development of a pure deep learning method for segmenting concrete cracks in images. The objectives are to achieve the real-time performance while effectively negating a wide range of various complex backgrounds and crack-like features. To achieve the goals, an original convolutional neural network is proposed. The model consists of standard convolutions, densely connected separable convolution modules, a modified atrous spatial pyramid pooling module, and a decoder module. The semantic damage detection network (SDDNet) is trained on a manually created crack dataset, and the trained network records the mean intersection-over-union of 0.846 on the test set. Each test image is analyzed, and the representative segmentation results are presented. The results show that the SDDNet segments cracks effectively unless the features are too faint. The proposed model is also compared with the most recent models, which show that it returns better evaluation metrics even though its number of parameters is 88 times less than in the compared models. In addition, the model processes in real-time (36 FPS) images at 1025 × 512 pixels, which is 46 times faster than in a recent work.
Nonlinear Controller Design for Tracking Task of a Control Moment Gyroscope Actuator

Control moment gyroscopes (CMG) are widely used as actuators for attitude control of satellites and spacecraft, which requires the controller to fulfill the tracking task of a CMG in a wide operating range, despite its highly coupled nonlinear behavior. A variety of control techniques were proposed for tracking task of the CMG unit, model 750, from Educational Control Products (ECP), but a few accomplished it in a wide operating range, e.g., the linear parameter-varying approach. Another one that may accomplish it is the nonlinear control approach. Therefore, this article proposes a nonlinear controller design based on feedback linearization for the tracking task of the CMG unit in a wide operating range. To cope with a singularity that would appear in the control signal computation, the proposed controller has a cascade structure composed of an outer tracking controller and an inner velocity controller, both based on the input–output linearization approach. The designed controller is validated via numerical simulations and real-time practical experiments.
Standards For School Library Services at the District Level

THROUGHOUT HISTORY school libraries, THE of the work of state and district supervisors has been one of the most important and effective elements in the development and improvement of school libraries. It is generally true that places having the benefits of supervisory services show a greater degree of achievement, both in number and quality of school library programs, than do those without them. In upgrading library conditions in school buildings, supervisors have been assisted by state, regional, and national standards, quantitative as well as qualitative, but they have not had this full spectrum of support for their own offices. Statements of policy and standards pertaining to supervision have been almost entirely qualitative in nature. Qualitative principles, representing programs and services as they do, are more significant than quantitative measures, but the means to the ends are also essential. Hopefully, the day may come when quantitative standards do not have to be formulated for school library programs at any operational level, but that day is not within the immediate future. It is somewhat ironic that supervisors who have contributed so successfully to the development of school libraries and to the formulation of state, regional, and other standards for libraries in schools have usually had to work under very trying conditions in their own headquarters, with insufficient staff, funds, resources and facilities, It would indeed be useful to present quantitative standards for district centers that could help in implementing qualitative principles which already exist, but unfortunately this cannot be done at this time. The plans first outlined for the current revision of the national standards for school media programs included the formulation of quantitative standards for library services at the district level, but
Hybrid Beamforming With Finite-Resolution Phase Shifters for Multiuser Millimeter-Wave Downlink

This letter considers hybrid analog-digital beamforming with discrete-phase shifters for multiuser multiple-input and single-output (MISO) downlink transmission in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) channels. A max-min signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) fairness problem is formulated. Owing to the discrete-phase constraints, this problem is a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINP) and is generally NP-hard. To handle it, an alternating optimization approach is employed. Specifically, for the digital beamformer, zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming is utilized. For the discrete-phase analog beamformer, we first derive an equivalent continuous reformulation and then solve it by leveraging an inexact majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm, which is built upon the first-order method and MM update. Simulation results show that the proposed design can almost achieve the optimal performance of the exhaustive search method, and can approach the optimal full-digital performance with increasing resolution of the discrete-phase shifters.
A pattern diversity antenna with six input ports

A wideband antenna with conical radiation is first studied in this article. The antenna has the advantages of low profile and simple structure, and it can provide a stable radiation pattern within an impedance bandwidth of about 108%. Then, five radiating elements, including four dipole antennas and one ring slot antenna, are excited from the wideband antenna structure, forming a six‐port antenna. The integrated antenna at 3.5 GHz band can offer a broadside pattern with 9.3 dBi gain, a conical pattern with 4.3 dBi gain, and four symmetrical endfire patterns with 6.4 dBi gain. The design process of the integrated antenna is explained in details, and a prototype is fabricated. The experimental results indicate that the operation bandwidth of the pattern diversity antenna is about 14%, and the isolation between input ports is lower than −16 dB within the bandwidth. Simulated results also validate the experiments.
Two‐phase high efficiency interleaved buck converter with improved step‐down conversion ratio and low voltage stress

A two-phase interleaved buck converter (IBC) providing a high step-down conversion ratio is proposed in this study. The proposed IBC uses a switch-capacitor cell to achieve a high step-down conversion ratio compared to the conventional IBC. The cell consists of two parallel switches and two crossly placed identical capacitors. These identical capacitors are charged in series and discharged in parallel by producing a lower output voltage compared to the conventional IBC at the same duty ratio. The proposed converter provides less voltage and current stresses. The operation principle, the ripple and the average current through the inductors are described in continuous conduction mode. The boundary load condition is also determined. By describing the charging and discharging of the two identical capacitors of the cell, the capacitance value is determined. The losses and efficiency are analysed, and 96.33% efficiency is achieved. Finally, the proposed converter is implemented and experimental results are provided.
A Novel Autonomous Current-Sharing Control Strategy for Multiple Paralleled DC–DC Converters in Islanded DC Microgrid

Due to the existence of line impedances and low-bandwidth communication, the traditional peer-to-peer control method based on droop control has difficult meeting the requirements of current sharing and voltage stability in islanded DC microgrids at the same time. In this paper, a novel current-sharing control strategy based on injected small ac voltage with low frequency and low amplitude is proposed for multiple paralleled DC–DC converters. The small ac voltage is superimposed onto the output voltage of each converter. Then, the reactive circulating power is generated and used to regulate the output DC voltage of each converter. Under the droop characteristic between the injected frequency and output DC current, a feedback mechanism is generated to realize the accurate current sharing. On this basis, a reactive power-voltage limiter link and virtual negative impedance are added. Under the interaction of the two links, the bus voltage drop caused by line impedances can be almost completely eliminated. This method does not need any communication or to change the hardware structure. The controller design process is presented in detail along with a system stability analysis. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy are validated by the results obtained from simulations and experiments.
A Comparative Evaluation of the Successes and Challenges of the Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Clubs in the Helderberg District of the Western Cape Province, South Africa

Aims and objectives: To perform a comparative evaluation of the successes and challenges of the anti-retroviral therapy (ART) adherence clubs in the Helderberg District of the Western Cape Province. Methods: Phase 1: A retrospective review of patient records, comparing a group of patients enrolled in the ART adherence clubs with a pre-enrollment group. Outcome measures were CD4, viral load (VL), opportunistic infections and HIV-related hospital admissions. Statistical analysis with Statistica Version 11. Phase 2: A qualitative exploration of the views and experiences of patients and health care providers on the efficiency and patient-friendliness of the adherence club system. Results: Phase 1: The files of 281 patients were compared for measurable outcomes of ART. Despite the median baseline CD4 being higher and the median time on treatment being lower in the pre-enrollment group, opportunistic infections were more common in the pre-enrollment group, and there were more detectable VLs (p Conclusion: ART adherence clubs benefit both the patients enrolled and the greater health system. Their ability to improve HIV treatment outcomes in the study setting supports the expansion of the club programme, as well as its exploration as a model for the management of other chronic diseases.
CONCENTRATION OF SOME AMINO ACIDS IN BLOOD PLASMA AND STUDY RESULTS OF LUMBOSACRAL BONE SYSTEM COMPUTER TOMOGRAPHY

Introduction and objective: Back pain are the most common ailment within the human locomotor system. Because of their prevalence, they were classified as diseases of civilization. The aim of the study was to attempt to assess the concentration of selected amino acids in plasma and correlating the results of laboratory tests with the occurrence of backaches. Material and method: The study group included 188 patients presenting for CT scan administering as the cause of their symptoms low back pains. All of these patients gave the blood samples from which the concentration of free amino acids was estimated by ion exchange chromatography using an automated amino acid analyzer AAA 400 from INGOS Praha. The control group consisted of patients who underwent testing using computed tomography and there were no primary or secondary changes associated with degeneration in the lumbar spine. Results: Patients on the basis of research carried out by computed tomography were divided into five groups according to disease entity. Analyzing the average concentration of essential amino acids in the blood plasma of patients of each group, it was found that it is higher in the case of lysine for each considered disease entity. The average concentration of methionine in all disease entities does not deviate from the average values in the control group. Analysis of the average concentration of selected essential amino acids revealed that in the case presented disorders underwent their level of variation. Average concentrations of selected amino acids have proven to be very similar in both groups. Slightly higher values proved to be in the control group for proline and lysine. Conclusions: The concentration of amino acids varies with the severity of degenerative changes in the connections as well as in interbody joints. The highest increase in the concentrations of all tested amino acids are present in root bands. Decrease in the concentrations of all tested amino acids appears in cancer.
Underwater Bioinspired Propulsion: From Inspection to Manipulation

This article presents the design of a biomimetic underwater vehicle-manipulator system (BUVMS) with bioinspired long-fin propulsion and its control methods. The kinematic analysis of bioinspired long-fin propulsion is conducted, and the maximum thrust of this propulsion derived from our thrust measurement platform can be up to 25 N. Bioinspired long-fin propulsion is introduced to construct the BUVMS for inspection and manipulation tasks, and the system architecture of the BUVMS is described. Moreover, real-time dynamic dubins-helix path planning and tracking of the biomimetic vehicle are proposed to realize the arrival of the desired pose. The tracking error is less than 0.23 body length. Finally, coordinated control between the biomimetic vehicle and the manipulator is developed to achieve autonomous manipulation. The reaction of the manipulator served as feedforward compensation is added into the closed-loop control of the biomimetic vehicle. The experimental results are provided to illustrate the validity of the proposed methods.
Research of Modal Analysis for Impeller of Reactor Coolant Pump

This paper studies the influence of added mass, centrifugal force and hydraulic load on natural frequencies of a Reactor Coolant Pump (RCP) impeller. A series of comparative studies under different conditions were carried out on a modal test bench and a simulation platform. Modal analysis of a full-scale RCP impeller was conducted by simulation, and an improved design of impeller was proposed to prevent hydraulic resonance. These results indicated that hydraulic load increases natural frequencies of the impeller. While the centrifugal force slightly reduces them, but it is negligible. Because the distribution of hydraulic load has an effect to natural frequencies, a solution of cutting inlet edges of blades can be used to increase the natural frequency that may cause hydraulic resonance. In summary, our research shows that both added mass and hydraulic load have a significant influence on natural frequencies of the RCP impeller, and redistributing the hydraulic load can alter natural frequencies of the impeller.