Search results for "Civil Engineering"
showing 10 items of 1216 documents
Missing Value Estimation for Microarray Data by Bayesian Principal Component Analysis and Iterative Local Least Squares
2013
Published version of an article from the journal: Mathematical Problems in Engineering. Also available from Hindawi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/162938 Missing values are prevalent in microarray data, they course negative influence on downstream microarray analyses, and thus they should be estimated from known values. We propose a BPCA-iLLS method, which is an integration of two commonly used missing value estimation methods-Bayesian principal component analysis (BPCA) and local least squares (LLS). The inferior row-average procedure in LLS is replaced with BPCA, and the least squares method is put into an iterative framework. Comparative result shows that the proposed method has obtaine…
Towards Nearly Zero Energy and Environmentally Sustainable Agritourisms: The Effectiveness of the Application of the European Ecolabel Brand
2020
Tourism represents an important economic driver in Italy, being responsible for approximately 13.2% of the total GDP (a value higher than the reference European average) and for nearly 10% of the regional GDP. Among the touristic sectors, the agritourist ones show a persistent growth, experiencing in 2019 a 6.7 point percentage improvement compared to the 2017 figures. Given this situation, the transition towards a low-carbon path, affecting the building sector for some time, should also involve agritourist buildings, through the release of EU directives, member state laws, and technical rules. On the other hand, agritourism sites could be awarded the Community EU Ecolabel. Unfortunately, a…
A Review of the Water Desalination Technologies
2021
Desalination is commonly adopted nowadays to overcome the freshwater scarcity in some areas of the world if brackish water or salt water is available. Different kinds of technologies have been proposed in the last century. In this paper, the state of the mainstream solutions is reported, showing the current commercial technologies like reverse osmosis (RO), Multi-Stages Flash desalination (MSF) and Multi-Effect Distillation (MED), and the new frontiers of the research with the aim of exploiting renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass energy. In these cases, seawater treatment plants are the same as traditional ones, with the only difference being that they use a renewable energy s…
From material flows to cash flows — an extension to traditional material flow modelling
2000
Road scenes analysis in adverse weather conditions by polarization-encoded images and adapted deep learning
2019
International audience; Object detection in road scenes is necessary to develop both autonomous vehicles and driving assistance systems. Even if deep neural networks for recognition task have shown great performances using conventional images, they fail to detect objects in road scenes in complex acquisition situations. In contrast, polarization images, characterizing the light wave, can robustly describe important physical properties of the object even under poor illumination or strong reflections. This paper shows how non-conventional polarimetric imaging modality overcomes the classical methods for object detection especially in adverse weather conditions. The efficiency of the proposed …
A Two-Stage Reconstruction of Microstructures with Arbitrarily Shaped Inclusions
2020
The main goal of our research is to develop an effective method with a wide range of applications for the statistical reconstruction of heterogeneous microstructures with compact inclusions of any shape, such as highly irregular grains. The devised approach uses multi-scale extended entropic descriptors (ED) that quantify the degree of spatial non-uniformity of configurations of finite-sized objects. This technique is an innovative development of previously elaborated entropy methods for statistical reconstruction. Here, we discuss the two-dimensional case, but this method can be generalized into three dimensions. At the first stage, the developed procedure creates a set of black synthetic …
Resolving gas bubbles ascending in liquid metal from low-SNR neutron radiography images
2021
We demonstrate a new image processing methodology for resolving gas bubbles travelling through liquid metal from dynamic neutron radiography images with an intrinsically low signal-to-noise ratio. Image pre-processing, denoising and bubble segmentation are described in detail, with practical recommendations. Experimental validation is presented—stationary and moving reference bodies with neutron-transparent cavities are radiographed with imaging conditions representative of the cases with bubbles in liquid metal. The new methods are applied to our experimental data from previous and recent imaging campaigns, and the performance of the methods proposed in this paper is compared against our p…
Effect of FRP strengthening on the flexural behaviour of calcarenite masonry walls
2017
The use of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) for structural strengthening has become increasingly popular in recent years. Several applications of FRP have been proposed and applied, depending on the target of the technique, kind and/or material of the structural member. In particular, because of their great tensile strength, FRP materials are commonly used to enhance the out-of-plane behaviour of masonry walls, allowing to increase their strength, ductility and improving safety against overturning. For these reasons, FRP laminates are often applied in vulnerable ancient buildings in seismic areas to reinforce façades and walls with poor structural features. However, some issues arise when a…
Ohmic Contacts on p-Type Al-Implanted 4H-SiC Layers after Different Post-Implantation Annealings
2019
This paper reports on the electrical activation and Ohmic contact properties on p-type Al-implanted silicon carbide (4H-SiC). In particular, the contacts were formed on 4H-SiC-implanted layers, subjected to three different post-implantation annealing processes, at 1675 °
Design and use of a Facebook 4 Urban Facelifts
2015
The renewal of the 'urban look' (Urban Facelift) could play a crucial role for the development of the whole city. This study will analyse the case of the Palermo port area, which is considered as the 'face' of the city. Sicily is indeed an island, and therefore, because of its natural and infrastructural features, the sea is still its main connection with the world. For this reason, urban renovation in the city of Palermo has begun first with its coastal area. The tested methodology combines future urban faces with the present–state evaluation criteria by involving different stakeholders. Then, the urban faces are associated with possible and suitable future scenarios. In this way, an Urban…