This paper presents a novel sideslip angle estimator based on the pseudo-multi-sensor fusion method. The

kinematics-based and dynamics-based sideslip angle estimators are designed for sideslip angle estimation.

Also, considering the influence of ill-conditioned matrix and model uncertainty, a novel sideslip angle estimator

is proposed based on the wheel speed coupling relationship using a modified recursive least squares

algorithm. In order to integrate the advantages of above three sideslip angle estimators, drawing lessons

from the multisensory information fusion technology, a novel thinking of sideslip angle estimator design is

presented through information fusion of pseudo-multi-sensors. Simulations and experiments were carried

out, and effectiveness of the proposed estimation method was verified.

Forecasting yield curves with regime switches is important in academia and financial industry. As the number of interest rate maturities increases, it poses difficulties in estimating parameters due to the curse of dimensionality. To deal with such a feature, factor models have been developed. However, the existing approaches are restrictive and largely based on the stationarity assumption of the factors. This inaccuracy creates non-ignorable financial risks, especially when the market is volatile. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed to adaptively forecast yield curves. Specifically, functional principal component analysis (FPCA) is used to extract factors capable of representing the features of yield curves. The local AR(1) model with time-dependent parameters is used to forecast each factor. Simulation and empirical studies reveal the superiority of this method over its natural competitor, the dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) model. For the yield curves of the U.S. and China, the adaptive method provides more accurate 6- and 12-month ahead forecasts.

As a kind of mass transfer process as well as the basis of separating and purifying mixtures, interfacial adsorption has been widely applied to fields like chemical industry, medical industry and purification engineering in recent years. Influencing factors of interfacial adsorption, in addition to the traditional temperature, intensity of pressure, amount of substance and concentration, also include external fields, such as magnetic field, electric field and electromagnetic field, etc. Starting from the point of thermodynamics and taking the Gibbs adsorption as the model, the combination of energy axiom and the first law of thermodynamics was applied to boundary phase, and thus the theoretical expression for the volume of interface absorption under electric field as well as the mathematical relationship between surface tension and electric field intensity was obtained. In addition, according to the obtained theoretical expression, the volume of interface absorption of ethanol solution under different electric field intensities and concentrations was calculated. Moreover, the mechanism of interfacial adsorption was described from the perspective of thermodynamics and the influence of electric field on interfacial adsorption was explained reasonably, aiming to further discuss the influence of thermodynamic mechanism of interfacial adsorption on purifying air-conditioning engineering under intensification of electric field.

The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

Thermal buckling behavior of a functionally graded material (FGM) Timoshenko beam is studied based on the transformed-section method. The material and thermal properties of the FGM beam are assumed to vary across the beam thickness according to a power-law function, a sigmoid function and an exponential function. The results of buckling temperature for the FGM beams with respective temperature-dependent and temperature-independent properties under uniform and non-linear temperature rises are presented. Some results are compared with those in the published literature to verify the accuracy of the present work. The effects of the material distributions, temperature fields, temperature-dependent properties and slenderness ratios on the thermal buckling behaviors of FGM beams are discussed. It is believed that the present model provides engineers with a simple and effective method to study the effects of various parameters of the FGM beam on its thermal buckling behavior.

The increase of ship’s energy utilization efficiency and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have been high lightened in recent years and have become an increasingly important subject for ship designers and owners. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is seeking measures to reduce the CO2emissions from ships, and their proposed energy efficiency design index (EEDI) and energy efficiency operational indicator (EEOI) aim at ensuring that future vessels will be more efficient. Waste heat recovery can be employed not only to improve energy utilization efficiency but also to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, a typical conceptual large container ship employing a low speed marine diesel engine as the main propulsion machinery is introduced and three possible types of waste heat recovery systems are designed. To calculate the EEDI and EEOI of the given large container ship, two software packages are developed. From the viewpoint of operation and maintenance, lowering the ship speed and improving container load rate can greatly reduce EEOI and further reduce total fuel consumption. Although the large container ship itself can reach the IMO requirements of EEDI at the first stage with a reduction factor 10% under the reference line value, the proposed waste heat recovery systems can improve the ship EEDI reduction factor to 20% under the reference line value.

An integrated Z-source inverter for the single-phase single-stage grid-connected photovoltaic system is proposed in this paper. The inverter integrates three functional blocks including maximum-power-point-tracking, step-up/down DC-side voltage and output grid-connected current. According to the non-minimum-phase characteristic presented in DC-side and the functional demands of the system, two constant-frequency sliding-mode controllers with integral compensation are proposed to guarantee the system robustness. By using two controllers, the effects caused by the non-minimum-phase characteristic are mitigated. Under the circumstance of that the input voltage or the grid-connected current changes suddenly, the notches/protrusions following the over-shoot/ under-shoot of the DC-bus voltage are eliminated. The quality of grid-connected current is ensured. Also, a small-signal modelling method is employed to analyze the close-loop system. A 300W prototype is built in the laboratory. A solar-array simulator (SAS) is used to verify the systematic responses in the experiment. The correctness and validity of the inverter and proposed control algorithm are proved by simulation and experimental results.

In the presented paper, a problem of nonholonomic constrained mechanical systems is treated. New methods in nonholonomic mechanics are applied to a problem of a Forklift-truck robot motion. This method of the geometrical theory of general nonholonomic constrained systems on fibered manifolds and their jet prolongations, based on so-called Chetaev-type constraint forces. The relevance of this theory for general types of nonholonomic constraints, not only linear or affine ones, was then verified on appropriate models. On the other hand, the equations of motion of a Forklift-truck robot are highly nonlinear and rolling without slipping condition can only be expressed by nonholonomic constraint equations. In this paper, the geometrical theory is applied to the above mentioned mechanical problem. The results of numerical solutions of constrained equations of motion, derived within the theory, are presented.

This paper investigates state estimation of linear time-invariant systems where the sensors and controllers are geographically separated and connected over limited capacity, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) communication channels. Such channels are viewed as dropout (erasure) channels. In particular, we consider the case with limited data rates, present a necessary and sufficient condition on the data rate for mean square observability over an AWGN channel. The system is mean square observable if the data rate of the channel is larger than the lower bound given. It is shown in our results that there exist the inherent tradeoffs among the limited data rate, dropout probability, and observability. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Applying pesticides to crops is one of the causes of water pollution by surface runoff, and chlorpyrifos, trifluralin and chlorothalonil are used respectively as insecticide, herbicide and fungicide for crop plants widely. To explore effects of three pesticides on aquatic organisms, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) activities were determined after 24 h and 48 h exposure of D. magna with ages of 6–24 h to several low concentrations of chlorpyrifos (0.36, 0.72, 1.43, 2.86, 5.72 μg∙L−1), trifluralin (0.17, 0.33, 0.66, 1.33, 2.65 mg∙L−1) and chlorothalonil (0.09, 0.18, 0.36, 0.72, 1.43 mg∙L−1) respectively. Main reproductive parameters including first pregnancy time, first brood time, the number of first brood and total fecundity after 21 d exposures at the same concentrations of pesticides as described above were also measured. The results showed that the activities of GST increased in lower concentrations and decreased in higher concentrations after 24 h exposure to three pesticides, respectively. The activities of SOD showed the same changes after 48 h exposure. With the time prolonged, the activities of GST decreased while the activities of SOD increased. After 21 d exposure, the first pregnancy time and first brood time were delayed, while the number of the first brood and total fecundity per female decreased with increasing concentrations. These results corroborated that GST activity was more sensitive to those pesticides than SOD activity, and there was a significant relationship between total fecundity and pesticides-dose(r>0.94, n=6), GST activity after 48 h exposure and total fecundity after 21 d exposure (r>0.92, n=6).

To find effective and practical methods to distinguish gas-liquid two-phase flow patterns, new flow pattern maps are established using the differential pressure through a classical Venturi tube. The differential pressure signal was first decomposed adaptively into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by the ensemble empirical mode decomposition. Hilbert marginal spectra of the IMFs showed that the flow patterns are related to the amplitude of the pressure fluctuation. The cross-correlation method was employed to sift the characteristic IMF, and then the energy ratio of the characteristic IMF to the raw signal was proposed to construct flow pattern maps with the volumetric void fraction and with the two-phase Reynolds number, respectively. The identification rates of these two maps are verified to be 91.18% and 92.65%. This approach provides a cost-effective solution to the difficult problem of identifying gas-liquid flow patterns in the industrial field.

A novel method for thermal diffusivity evolution of thin-film materials with pulsed Gaussian beam and infrared video is reported. Compared with common pulse methods performed in specialized labs, the proposed method implements a rapid on-line measurement without producing the off-centre detection error. Through mathematical deduction of the original heat conduction model, it is discovered that the area s, which is encircled by the maximum temperature curve rTMAX(θ), increases linearly over elapsed time. The thermal diffusivity is acquired from the growth rate of the area s. In this study, the off-centre detection error is avoided by performing the distance regularized level set evolution formulation. The area s was extracted from the binary images of temperature variation rate, without inducing errors from determination of the heat source centre. Thermal diffusivities of three materials, 304 stainless steel, titanium, and zirconium have been measured with the established on-line detection system, and the measurement errors are: −2.26%, −1.07%, and 1.61% respectively.