HMD-Net: A Vehicle Hazmat Marker Detection Benchmark

Vehicles carrying hazardous material (hazmat) are severe threats to the safety of highway transportation, and a model that can automatically recognize hazmat markers installed or attached on vehicles is essential for intelligent management systems. However, there is still no public dataset for benchmarking the task of hazmat marker detection. To this end, this paper releases a large-scale vehicle hazmat marker dataset named VisInt-VHM, which includes 10,000 images with a total of 20,023 hazmat markers captured under different environmental conditions from a real-world highway. Meanwhile, we provide an compact hazmat marker detection network named HMD-Net, which utilizes a revised lightweight backbone and is further compressed by channel pruning. As a consequence, the trained-model can be efficiently deployed on a resource-restricted edge device. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with some established methods such as YOLOv3, YOLOv4, their lightweight versions and popular lightweight models, HMD-Net can achieve a better trade-off between the detection accuracy and the inference speed.     

Numerical and Experimental Investigation of the Conjugate Heat Transfer for a High-Pressure Pneumatic Control Valve Assembly

This paper uses heat transfer experiments and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to investigate the conjugate heat transfer (CHT) in a high-pressure pneumatic control valve assembly. A heat transfer test rig was constructed, and time–temperature histories of five test points placed on the valve assembly’s outer surface were recorded for study validation. The Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) CFD methods with the standard k-ε turbulence closure equations were adopted in the numerical computations. Polyhedral grids were used; time step and mesh convergence studies were conducted. Simulated and measured temperatures profile comparisons revealed a good agreement. The CHT results obtained from CFD showed huge velocity fields downstream of the valve throat and the vent hole. The airflow through the valve was icy, mainly in the supersonic flow areas. Low temperatures below 273.15 K were recorded on the internal and external walls of the valve assembly. The consistency of the measured data with the numerical results demonstrates the effectiveness of polyhedral grids in exploring the CHT using CFD methods. The local entropy production rate analysis revealed that irreversibility is mainly due to viscous dissipation. The current CHT investigation provides a potential basis for thermostress analysis and optimization.     

Adaptive optics in astronomy

Since Galileo’s first observations in 1609, telescopes have grown dramatically in size. Larger telescopes collect more light, allowing astronomers to detect fainter sources and to look further back in time towards the birth of the universe. The angular resolution of these telescopes, however, has been limited by turbulence in the earth’s atmosphere. This limitation can be dramatically reduced with the use of adaptive optics (AO) to measure and correct the blurring introduced by atmospheric turbulence. AO is now routinely used for science observations on the world’s largest telescopes and is providing a much more detailed view of our universe.     

Third-order statistics and the dynamics of strongly anisotropic turbulent flows

Anisotropy is induced by body forces and/or mean large-scale gradients in turbulent flows. For flows without energy production, the dynamics of second-order velocity or second-order vorticity statistics are essentially governed by triple correlations, which are at the origin of the anisotropy that penetrates towards the inertial range, deeply altering the cascade and the eventual dissipation process, with a series of consequences on the evolution of homogeneous turbulence statistics: in the case of rotating turbulence, the anisotropic spectral transfer slaves the multiscale anisotropic energy distribution; nonlinear dynamics are responsible for the linear growth in terms of Ωt of axial integral length-scales; third-order structure functions, derived from velocity triple correlations, exhibit a significant departure from the 4/5 Kolmogorov law. We describe all these implications in detail, starting from the dynamical equations of velocity statistics in Fourier space, which yield third-order correlations at three points (triads) and allow the explicit removal of pressure fluctuations. We first extend the formalism to anisotropic rotating turbulence with ‘production’, in the presence of mean velocity gradients in the rotating frame. Second, we compare the spectral approach at three points to the two-point approach directly performed in physical space, in which we consider the transport of the scalar second-order structure function ?(δq)²?. This calls into play componental third-order correlations ?(δq)²δu?(r) in axisymmetric turbulence. This permits to discuss inhomogeneous anisotropic effects from spatial decay, shear, or production, as in the central region of a rotating round jet. We show that the above-mentioned important statistical quantities can be estimated from experimental planar particle image velocimetry, and that explicit passage relations systematically exist between one- and two-point statistics in physical and spectral space for second-order tensors, but also sometimes for third-order tensors that are involved in the dynamics.     

Density and velocity statistics in variable density turbulent mixing

We experimentally study variable–density mixing of miscible gases in an open-circuit wind tunnel using simultaneous particle image velocimetry and planar laser-induced fluorescence. Experiments of a high Atwood number (0.6) and low Atwood number (0.1) are performed to compare non-Boussinesq cases with the Boussinesq limit. The higher density gas is injected into the wind tunnel co-flow using a round jet configuration, and near-field and far-field measurements are performed to examine mixing in both momentum and buoyancy-dominated regimes. The effects of buoyancy are measurable and important in both large-scale mixing features and in turbulence quantities. The low Atwood number PDFs (probability density functions) show fast and uniform mixing. The high Atwood number PDFs of density have skewness towards the larger densities, indicating less mixing of the heavy fluid due to its inertia. The skewness in the density gradient PDFs at high Atwood number displays strong density local variations that can enhance mixing at molecular scales. Turbulent kinetic energy decreases with streamwise distance from the jet for low Atwood number but increases for high Atwood number due to larger buoyancy and density-driven shear. Over 3000 experimental realisations are used to calculate statistical characteristics of the mixing, including valuable and rarely given data such as Favre-averaged turbulent quantities: mass flux velocity, Reynolds stress, turbulent kinetic energy, and density-specific volume correlation. Buoyancy effects are observed in these quantities and the trends are compared qualitatively with direct numerical simulations.     

Mechanical Behavior of Bulk Poly(Ethylene Terephthalate) Subjected to Simple Shear

Abstract

Mechanical behavior of bulk semicrystalline poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) processed through simple shear is investigated. The equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE) process was used to achieve the simple shear condition. The PET samples were processed in one and two ECAE passes in the same direction, with the sample rotated 180° about the extrusion axis for the second pass. Microstructural features at the nanometer and micrometer scales were studied by small‐angle x‐ray scattering (SAXS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). SAXS results showed that at the nanometer scale, two types of lamellar orientations are induced in both samples, but with different extents of orientation. In the ECAE‐oriented PET structures on the micrometer scale, as revealed by SEM, are well‐defined macrofibrils. However, the fibrillar structures in the sample extruded once are more oriented than those in the sample extruded twice. Fractography investigations suggest that the ECAE‐induced fibrillar structure and stretched amorphous chains are responsible for the change in mechanical properties.     

Generalization of Strang's Preconditioner with Applications to Toeplitz Least Squares Problems

In this paper, we propose a method to generalize Strang's circulant preconditioner for arbitrary n-by-n matrices A_n. The th column of our circulant preconditioner Sn is equal to the th column of the given matrix A_n. Thus if A_n is a square Toeplitz matrix, then Sn is just the Strang circulant preconditioner. When Sn is not Hermitian, our circulant preconditioner can be defined as . This construction is similar to the forward-backward projection method used in constructing preconditioners for tomographic inversion problems in medical imaging. We show that if the matrix A_n has decaying coefficients away from the main diagonal, then is a good preconditioner for An. Comparisons of our preconditioner with other circulant-based preconditioners are carried out for some 1-D Toeplitz least squares problems: min ∥ b - Ax∥₂. Preliminary numerical results show that our preconditioner performs quite well, in comparison to other circulant preconditioners. Promising test results are also reported for a 2-D deconvolution problem arising in ground-based atmospheric imaging.     

Negative-viscosity lattice gases

A new irreversible collision rule is introduced for lattice-gas automata. The rule maximizes the flux of momentum in the direction of the local momentum gradient, yielding a negative shear viscosity. Numerical results in 2D show that the negative viscosity leads to the spontaneous ordering of the velocity field, with vorticity resolvable down to one lattice-link length. The new rule may be used in conjunction with previously proposed collision rules to yield a positive shear viscosity lower than the previous rules provide. In particular, Poiseuille flow tests demonstrate a decrease in viscosity by more than a factor of 2.     

湍流大气中图像传输的信息量

分别从系统像的信息量和信息自由度的角度分析了大气湍流对相干和不相干照明光学系统成像质量和分辨率的影响。理论上，处于一定大气湍流条件下的相干照明系统存在着超出经典衍射极限的超分辨率。