The energy industry is undergoing a major upheaval. In Germany, for example, the large nuclear and coal-fired power plants in the gigawatt scale are planned to be shut down in the forthcoming years. Electricity is to be generated in many small units in a decentralized, renewable and environmentally friendly manner. The large 1000 MW multistage axial steam turbines used to this date are no longer suitable for these tasks. For this reason, the authors examine turbine architectures that are known per se but have fallen into oblivion due to their inferior efficiency and upcoming electric drives about 100 year ago. However, these uncommon turbine concepts could be suitable for small to micro scale distributed power plants using thermodynamic cycles, which use for example geothermal wells or waste heat from industry to generate electricity close to the consumers. Thus, the paper describes and discusses the concept of a velocity-compounded single wheel re-entry cantilever turbine in comparison with other turbine concepts, especially other velocity-compounded turbines like the Curtis-type. Furthermore, the authors describe the design considerations, which led to a specific design of a 5 kW air turbine demonstrator, which was later manufactured and investigated. Finally, first numerical as well as experimental results are presented, compared and critically discussed with regards to the originally defined design approach.

Recent investigations of micro engines have documented the problem of low efficiency of steady compression devices [2]. As a solution, the application of unsteady processes has been proposed [1, 6, 17-20]. Closer investigations have shown the applicability of pure unsteady devices for gas compression, but it is also shown that they are practically not applicable for torque generation [21]. A new concept of the wave engine has to be developed.

This paper presents such a new concept and numerical investigation of the hybrid wave engine. A hybrid wave engine combines in a single machine components realizing unsteady compression, steady expansion, and mixed unsteady and steady scavenging due to the centrifugal force action. MEMS technology requires or prefers a flat geometry. Therefore, the use of a radial type of wave compression device for air compression is proposed. A numerical, two-dimensional complete model of this device was built, and several numerical simulations of engine operations were performed. The numerical model includes the simplified model of the combustion chamber closing the flow loop between the high-pressure compressed air port and the high-pressure hot exhaust gas port. The model represents the complete flow scheme of the hybrid wave engine. A special type of turbine in radial configuration with serial flow layout is used for torque generation.

The paper presents the results of measurements and predictions of radial thrust in centrifugal pump with specific speed n_s = 26. In the pump tested, a volute with rectangular cross-section was used. The tests were carried out for several rotational speeds, including speeds above and below the nominal one. Commercial code ANSYS Fluent was used for the calculations. Apart from the predictions of the radial force, the calculations of axial thrust were also conducted, and correlation between thrust and the radial force was found. In the range of the measured rotational speeds, similarity of radial forces was checked.

A simple empirical study on the orientation, diameter, and extent of radial fractures (long and short) at the vicinity of the face-perpendicular preconditioned boreholes is described. Homogenous and heterogeneous mining faces were considered when studying the orientation of radial fractures, four and five face-perpendicular preconditioning practices were used to investigate the outspread and diameter of radial fractures from one blasted drill hole to another. Long radial fractures were observed to be developed along the direction of the maximum principal stress and short radial fractures were observed to be developed along the direction of the intermediate principal stress in a homogenous mining face. On the other hand, long radial fractures were observed to be developed along the direction of the intermediate principal stress, while short radial fractures were observed to be developed along the direction of the maximum principal stress when the mining faces subjected to heterogeneous rock mass. The diameters of the radial fractures observed were inconsistent and were not nine times the diameter of the original borehole. Furthermore, the extent of radial fractures from one borehole to another was noted to be gradually improved when the additional of preconditioned borehole was in place. This study maintained that the orientation of radial fractures is mostly controlled by the rock properties, however, extend and the diameters of the radial fractures are controlled by rock properties, the effectiveness of the stress wave and gas pressure and brittleness of the rock mass.

The paper presents the results of the experimental tests of Mg/Al bimetallic bars rolling process in classic and multi-radial modified round-oval-round passes. The bimetallic bar consist of magnesium core, grade AZ31 and aluminium outer layer, grade 1050A. The stocks were round bars with diameter 22.5 mm with an aluminium layer share of 28%. As a result of rolling in four passes, bars of a diameter of about 17 mm were obtained. A bimetallic feedstock was manufactured using an explosive welding method. The use of the designed arrangement of multi-radial modified stretching passes resulted in obtaining Mg/Al bimetallic bars with an uniform distribution of the cladding layer over the bar perimeter and high quality of shear strength between individual layers compared to Mg/Al bars obtained in the classic passes.

Radial basis function neural networks (RBF NNs) are one of the most useful tools in the classification of the sonar targets. Despite many abilities of RBF NNs, low accuracy in classification, entrapment in local minima, and slow convergence rate are disadvantages of these networks. In order to overcome these issues, the sine-cosine algorithm (SCA) has been used to train RBF NNs in this work. To evaluate the designed classifier, two benchmark underwater sonar classification problems were used. Also, an experimental underwater target classification was developed to practically evaluate the merits of the RBFbased classifier in dealing with high-dimensional real world problems. In order to have a comprehensive evaluation, the classifier is compared with the gradient descent (GD), gravitational search algorithm (GSA), genetic algorithm (GA), and Kalman filter (KF) algorithms in terms of entrapment in local minima, the accuracy of the classification, and the convergence rate. The results show that the proposed classifier provides a better performance than other compared classifiers as it classifies the sonar datasets 2.72% better than the best benchmark classifier, on average.

An efficiency of the nonsingular meshless method (MLM) was analyzed in an acoustic indoor problem. The solution was assumed in the form of the series of radial bases functions (RBFs). Three representative kinds of RBF were chosen: the Hardy’s multiquadratic, inverse multiquadratic, Duchon’s functions. The room acoustic field with uniform, impedance walls was considered. To achieve the goal, relationships among physical parameters of the problem and parameters of the approximate solution were first found. Physical parameters constitute the sound absorption coefficient of the boundary and the frequency of acoustic vibrations. In turn, parameters of the solution are the kind of RBFs, the number of elements in the series of the solution and the number and distribution of influence points. Next, it was shown that the approximate acoustic field can be calculated using MLM with a priori error assumed. All approximate results, averaged over representative rectangular section of the room, were calculated and then compared to the corresponding accurate results. This way, it was proved that the MLM, based on RBFs, is efficient method in description of acoustic boundary problems with impedance boundary conditions and in all acoustic frequencies.

Two optimization aspects of the meshless method (MLM) based on nonsingular radial basis functions (RBFs) are considered in an acoustic indoor problem. The former is based on the minimization of the mean value of the relative error of the solution in the domain. The letter is based on the minimization of the relative error of the solution at the selected points in the domain. In both cases the optimization leads to the finding relations between physical parameters and the approximate solution parameters. The room acoustic field with uniform, impedance walls is considered.

As results, the most effective Hardy’s Radial Basis Function (H-RBF) is pointed out and the number of elements in the series solution as a function of frequency is indicated. Next, for H-RBF and fixed n, distributions of appropriate acoustic fields in the domain are compared. It is shown that both aspects of optimization improve the description of the acoustic field in the domain in a strictly defined sense.

Land surveyors, photogrammetrists, remote sensing engineers and professionals in the Earth sciences are often faced with the task of transferring coordinates from one geodetic datum into another to serve their desired purpose. The essence is to create compatibility between data related to different geodetic reference frames for geospatial applications. Strictly speaking, conventional techniques of conformal, affine and projective transformation models are mostly used to accomplish such task. With developing countries like Ghana where there is no immediate plans to establish geocentric datum and still rely on the astro-geodetic datums as it national mapping reference surface, there is the urgent need to explore the suitability of other transformation methods. In this study, an effort has been made to explore the proficiency of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) as a novel alternative coordinate transformation method. The proposed ELM approach was applied to data found in the Ghana geodetic reference network. The ELM transformation result has been analysed and compared with benchmark methods of backpropagation neural network (BPNN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), two-dimensional (2D) affine and 2D conformal. The overall study results indicate that the ELM can produce comparable transformation results to the widely used BPNN and RBFNN, but better than the 2D affine and 2D conformal. The results produced by ELM has demonstrated it as a promising tool for coordinate transformation in Ghana.

This paper presents that the effect of single aperture size of metallic enclosure on electrical shielding effectiveness (ESE) at 0 – 1 GHz frequency range has been investigated by using both Robinson’s analytical formulation and artificial neural networks (ANN) methods that are multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks and a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). All results including measurement have been compared each other in terms of aperture geometry of metallic enclosure. The geometry of single aperture varies from square to rectangular shape while the open area of aperture is fixed. It has been observed that network structure of MLP 3-40-1 in modeling with ANN modeled with fewer neurons in the sense of overlapping of faults and data and modeled accordingly. In contrast, the RBFNN 3-150-1 is the other detection that the network structure is modeled with more neurons and more. It can be seen from the same network-structured MLP and RBFNN that the MLP modeled better. In this paper, the impact of dimension of rectangular aperture on shielding performance by using RBFNN and MLP network model with ANN has been studied, as a novelty.

Novel tendinopathy treatment protocols should be assessed for safety. The goal of this work was to compare differences in selected systemic inflammatory marker concentrations after two treatment protocols for collagenase induced Achilles tendinopathy in sheep. 14 sheep (aged 5 and 6 years, Polish Mountain Sheep breed, weight 60-70kg) were injected with bacterial collagenase type 1A-S (Clostridium histolyticum, C-5894, Sigma Aldrich, Poznań, Poland) bilaterally to Achilles tendons. Subsequently, the animals were injected with Platelet Rich Plasma (7 sheep) or Adipose Derived Stem Cells (7 sheep) to induced tendinopathy foci. Left limbs of all sheep were additionally treated with Radial Pressure Wave Therapy (RPWT) focused above the tendinopathy origins. Treatment progress was controlled by ultrasound scans, and tendon samples were taken on the 126th day of the experiment. Serum Amyloid A (SAA) concentration showed mild elevation before the experiment (2 sheep from group I, 4 sheep from group II) and two days after the intratendinous growth factors injection ( 4 sheep from group I, 3 sheep from group II) combined with RPWT (mean 22,63 mg/L and 53, 6 mg/L respectively). Haptoglobine (Hp) concentration increased from 0 to 0,01 g/L in 2 animals from group I two days after injection. These values declined to 0 during the course of the treatment. Fibrinogen (Fb) concentrations were within reference levels throughout the research, although mild elevation was observed before the treatment course in 6 sheep from group I and 1 sheep from group II. In conclusion, addition of RPWT to growth factors injections in the treatment of yatrogenic Achilles tendinopathy in sheep did not induce systemic inflammatory response.

The application of stone column technique for improvement of soft soils has attracted a considerable attention during the last decade. However, in a very soft soil, the stone columns undergo excessive bulging, because of very low lateral confinement pressure provided by the surrounding soil. The performance of stone column can be improved by the encapsulation of stone column by geosynthetic, which acts to provide additional confinement to columns, preventing excessive bulging and column failure. In the present study, a detailed experimental study on behavior of single column is carried out by varying parameters like diameter of the stone column, length of stone column, length of geosynthetic encapsulation and stiffness of encapsulation material. In addition, finite-element analyses have been performed to access the radial deformation of stone column. The results indicate a remarkable increase in load carrying capacity due to encapsulation. The load carrying capacity of column depends very much upon the diameter of the stone column and stiffness of encapsulation material. The results show that partial encapsulation over top half of the column and fully encapsulated floating column of half the length of clay bed thickness give lower load carrying capacity than fully encapsulated end bearing column. In addition, radial deformation of stone column decreases with increasing stiffness of encapsulation material.

A numerical analysis of the process of single-pass rolling of AZ31 magnesium alloy bars in the three-high skew rolling mill has been carried out in the study. Based on the obtained investigation results, the effect of rolling speed on the band twist and the state of stress and strain occurring in the rolled band has been determined. From the obtained results of the numerical studies it has been found that with the increase in rolling speed the unit band twist angle θ, increase, which translates into an increase in the value of tangential stress in the axial zone of the rolled bar. This contributes directly to an increase in redundant strain in the rolled bar axial zone, which brings about a structure refinement. To verify the effect of rolling speed on the flow pattern and the stress and strain state, experimental tests were carried out. It has been found from the tests that the band twist (flow pattern) contributes to obtaining a bimodal structure in the bar cross-section.