A finite element thermomechanical analysis of the development of wheel polygonal wear

Polygonal wear is a type of damage commonly observed on the railway wheel tread. It induces wheel-rail impacts and consequent train/track components failure. This study presents a finite element (FE) thermomechanical wheel-rail contact model, which is able to cope with the three possible generation and development mechanisms of polygonal wear...

Hierarchical Model Predictive Control for on-Line High-Speed Railway Delay Management and Train Control in a Dynamic Operations Environment

In practice, the operation of high-speed trains is often affected by adverse weather conditions or equipment failures, which result in delays and even cancellations of train services. In this article, a novel two-layer hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) model is proposed for on-line high-speed railway delay management and train...

Artificial Intelligence for Automated Vehicle Control and Traffic Operations: Challenges and Opportunities

This chapter summarizes the presentations of speakers addressing such issues during the Automated Vehicles Symposium 2020 (AVS20) held virtually on July 27–30, 2020. These speakers participated in the break-out session titled “Artificial Intelligence for Automated Vehicle Control and Traffic Operations: Challenges and Opportunities”. The...

A Finite Element Thermomechanical Analysis of Polygonal Wear

Polygonal wear is a common type of damage on the railway wheel tread, which could induce wheel-rail impacts and further components failure. This study presents a finite element (FE) thermomechanical model to investigate the causes of wheel polygonal wear. The FE model is able to cope with three possible causes of polygonal wear: thermal...

Wheel-rail dynamic interaction

A better understanding of wheel-rail dynamic interaction is necessary for the capacity increase of railway transportation. This chapter briefly introduces the consequences, modeling and detection methods of wheel-rail dynamic interaction, and maintenance of the weak track spots where wheel-rail dynamic interaction often occurs. Wheel-rail...

Interactions between Diffuse Light and Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) Canopy Structure, Simulations of Light Interception in Virtual Canopies

Plant photosynthesis and biomass production are associated with the amount of intercepted light, especially the light distribution inside the canopy. Three virtual canopies (n = 80, 3.25 plants/m2) were constructed based on average leaf size of the digitized plant structures: ‘small leaf’ (98.1 cm2), ‘medium leaf’ (163.0 cm2) and ‘big leaf’ (241...

Multi-Source Hydrological Data Products to Monitor High Asian River Basins and Regional Water Security

This project explored the integrated use of satellite, ground observations and hydrological distributed models to support water resources assessment and monitoring in High Mountain Asia (HMA). Hydrological data products were generated taking advantage of the synergies of European and Chinese data assets and space-borne observation systems....

An attribute-based model to retrieve storm surge disaster cases

In China, storm surge disasters cause severe damages in coastal regions. One of the most critical tasks is to predict affected regions and their relative damage levels to support decision-making. This study develops a two-stage retrieval model to search the most similar past disaster case to complete prediction. Based on spatial attributes of...

A computationally efficient thermo-mechanical model for wire arc additive manufacturing

Residual stresses and distortions are major obstacles against the more widespread application of wire arc additive manufacturing. Since the steep temperature gradients due to a moving localised heat source are inevitable in this process, accurate prediction of the thermally induced residual stresses and distortions is of paramount importance....

New innovations in pavement materials and engineering: A review on pavement engineering research 2021

Sustainable and resilient pavement infrastructure is critical for current economic and environmental challenges. In the past 10 years, the pavement infrastructure strongly supports the rapid development of the global social economy. New theories, new methods, new technologies and new materials related to pavement engineering are emerging....

A rapid and high-precision mountain vertex extraction method based on hotspot analysis clustering and improved eight-connected extraction algorithms for digital elevation models

Digital Elevation Model (DEM)-based mountain vertex extraction is one of the most useful DEM applications, providing important information to properly characterize topographic features. Current vertex-extraction techniques have considerable limitations, such as yielding low-accuracy results and generating false mountain vertices. To overcome...

Moisture source variations for summer rainfall in different intensity classes over Huaihe River Valley, China

Rainfall is one of the most influential climatic factors on regional development and environment, and changes in rainfall intensity are of specific concern. In the Huaihe River Valley (HRV), heavy rainfall is a primary trigger of floods. However, the difference in the origin of moisture contributed to heavy rainfall and light rainfall is...

Reliability assessment of ultra-deep oil and gas wellbore casing using data statistics and numerical simulations

Ultra-deep oil and gas wells have become a new development trend in onshore oil and gas exploitation. However, Ultra-deep oil and gas wellbore casing is with high failure risk due to the harsh environment. It is essential to evaluate the reliability of wellbore casing. This paper assesses the operational reliability of wellbore casing using...

Comparison of Questionnaire Based and User Model Based Usability Evaluation Methods

The usability now serves as a fundamental quality of a computational device, e.g. smartphone. Moreover, the smartphone has firmly embedded into our daily life as an indispensable part, so the context and style that user may interact with them are largely different from a decade ago. Nowadays, testing usability with end user has become a...

Numerical modeling of wheel-rail squeal-exciting contact

Complex frictional rolling contact and high-frequency wheel dynamic behavior make modeling squeal greatly challenging. The falling-friction effect and wheel mode-coupling behavior are believed to be the two main mechanisms that generate unstable wheel vibration and the resulting squeal noise. To rigorously consider both mechanisms in one...