Search results for "gradient"
showing 10 items of 725 documents
Performance Analysis of a RED-MED Salinity Gradient Heat Engine
2018
A performance analysis of a salinity gradient heat engine (SGP-HE) is presented for the conversion of low temperature heat into power via a closed-loop Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) coupled with Multi-Effect Distillation (MED). Mathematical models for the RED and MED systems have been purposely developed in order to investigate the performance of both processes and have been then coupled to analyze the efficiency of the overall integrated system. The influence of the main operating conditions (i.e., solutions concentration and velocity) has been quantified, looking at the power density and conversion efficiency of the RED unit, MED Specific Thermal Consumption (STC) and at the overall syste…
Exergy analysis of reverse electrodialysis
2018
Abstract Reverse electrodialysis in closed loop configurations is a promising membrane technology in the energy conversion and storage fields. One of the main advantages of closed-loop reverse electrodialysis is the possibility of using a wide range of operating concentrations, flow rates and different salts for generating the salinity gradient. In this work, an original exergy analysis of the reverse electrodialysis process was carried out in order to investigate reverse electrodialysis performance in terms of energetic and exergetic efficiency parameters in a wide range of operating conditions. A mono-dimensional model of the reverse electrodialysis process was developed, in which all sou…
Reinforcement Learning Your Way: Agent Characterization through Policy Regularization
2022
The increased complexity of state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms has resulted in an opacity that inhibits explainability and understanding. This has led to the development of several post hoc explainability methods that aim to extract information from learned policies, thus aiding explainability. These methods rely on empirical observations of the policy, and thus aim to generalize a characterization of agents’ behaviour. In this study, we have instead developed a method to imbue agents’ policies with a characteristic behaviour through regularization of their objective functions. Our method guides the agents’ behaviour during learning, which results in a…
A Region-based Gauss-Newton Approach to Real-Time Monocular Multiple Object Tracking
2018
We propose an algorithm for real-time 6DOF pose tracking of rigid 3D objects using a monocular RGB camera. The key idea is to derive a region-based cost function using temporally consistent local color histograms. While such region-based cost functions are commonly optimized using first-order gradient descent techniques, we systematically derive a Gauss-Newton optimization scheme which gives rise to drastically faster convergence and highly accurate and robust tracking performance. We furthermore propose a novel complex dataset dedicated for the task of monocular object pose tracking and make it publicly available to the community. To our knowledge, it is the first to address the common and…
Online shortest paths with confidence intervals for routing in a time varying random network
2018
International audience; The increase in the world's population and rising standards of living is leading to an ever-increasing number of vehicles on the roads, and with it ever-increasing difficulties in traffic management. This traffic management in transport networks can be clearly optimized by using information and communication technologies referred as Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). This management problem is usually reformulated as finding the shortest path in a time varying random graph. In this article, an online shortest path computation using stochastic gradient descent is proposed. This routing algorithm for ITS traffic management is based on the online Frank-Wolfe approach.…
A second-order sparse factorization method for Poisson's equation with mixed boundary conditions
1992
Abstract We propose an algorithm for solving Poisson's equation on general two-dimensional regions with an arbitrary distribution of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The algebraic system, generated by the five-point star discretization of the Laplacian, is solved iteratively by repeated direct sparse inversion of an approximating system whose coefficient matrix — the preconditioner — is second-order both in the interior and on the boundary. The present algorithm for mixed boundary value problems generalizes a solver for pure Dirichlet problems (proposed earlier by one of the authors in this journal (1989)) which was found to converge very fast for problems with smooth solutions. T…
Mass transfer in nonisothermal ferrocolloids under the effect of a magnetic field
1999
Abstract The paper presents a review of newest experimental results on particle thermal diffusion in hydrocarbon based ferrofluids. The measurements are performed using a vertical thermal diffusion column, the Soret coefficient is evaluated from particle separation curves employing a simple column theory which accounts for thermal convection in the vertical channel forced by a concentration buoyancy force arising during the thermophoretic transfer of heavy particles. High positive values of the Soret coefficient of lyophilized Fe 3 O 4 and Mn x Zn 1− x Fe 2 O 4 particles in surfacted tetradecane based colloids are measured. Experiments confirm the theoretically predicted anisotropy of parti…
Magnetically enhancing the Seebeck coefficient in ferrofluids.
2019
The influence of the magnetic field on the Seebeck coefficient (Se) was investigated in dilute magnetic nanofluids (ferrofluids) composed of maghemite magnetic nanoparticles dispersed in dimethyl-sulfoxide (DMSO). A 25% increase in the Se value was found when the external magnetic field was applied perpendicularly to the temperature gradient, reminiscent of an increase in the Soret coefficient (ST, concentration gradient) observed in the same fluids. In-depth analysis of experimental data, however, revealed that different mechanisms are responsible for the observed magneto-thermoelectric and -thermodiffusive phenomena. Possible physical and physico-chemical origins leading to the enhancemen…
Non-isothermal mass transfer of ferrocolloids through porous membrane
2011
Abstract The present paper deals with transport properties of ferrofluid nanoparticles in non-isothermal capillary-porous layer. Experiment establishes that the temperature difference, which is applied across the layer, induces a thermoosmotic pressure gradient directed toward increasing temperature. The measurement results are interpreted in a frame of phenomenology of linear irreversible thermodynamics. The transport coefficients are evaluated comparing the measured separation curves with approximate solution of the corresponding mass transfer problem.