Karst topography is a special landscape shaped by the dissolution of one or more layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite. Due to subterranean drainage, overland flow, extraction of water by plants and evapotranspiration, there may be very limited surface water. The hydraulic architecture that plants use to adapt to karst topography is very interesting, bu...

Development of a cascade controller structure including adaptive backstepping for a nonlinear hydraulic-mechanical system is considered in this paper where a dynamic friction (LuGre) model is included to obtain the necessary accuracy. The paper compares the performance of two variants of an adaptive backstepping tracking controller with earlier results. The new control architecture is analysed ...

Editorial Board Eric Britton, Managing Director, EcoPlan International, The Centre for Technology & Systems Stud ies, 10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France. Paul Tra nter , Senior Lecturer, School of Geography & Oceanography, Un iversity College, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia. John Ho we, Professor of Transportation En gineering & Head of Infrastructural En gi...

A lysimeter station has been set up by AMRA for the study of the reactive transport of contaminants in soil at the field-scale. It consists of eight lysimeters that can operate individually and simultaneously. Each lysimeter is a steel cylinder (diameter 1.14m, height 2m) filled with an undisturbed soil monolith, whose upper surface is directly exposed to the external environmental agents. A se...

Recent increases in the use of hydraulic fracturing (HF) to aid extraction of oil and gas from black shales have raised concerns regarding potential environmental effects associated with predictions of upward migration of HF fluid and brine. Some recent studies have suggested that such upward migration can be large and that timescales for migration can be as short as a few years. In this articl...

Generic, ready-to-use preliminary design methodologies for aircraft utility systems, made available by means of a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tool do not exist. An attempt is made to apply principles used in preliminary aircraft design to preliminary design of utility systems. This is demonstrated for the flight control and hydraulic system. The Computer-Aided Engineering tool consists of ...

This paper reviews four critical mechanisms for successful applications of hydraulic fracturing that have emerged or grown in importance over the past 2 decades. These critical issues are managing height growth, decreasing near-wellbore tortuosity, predicting and engineering network versus localized growth geometry, and promoting simultaneous growth of multiple hydraulic fractures. Building on ...

Classical Geostatistics methods have been designed to use mainly statistical knowledge about natural variables and they lack the ability to incorporate important forms of knowledge like physical laws and scientific theories into the mapping process. On the other hand, the powerful and versatile Bayesian maximum entropy (BME) method of Modern Geostatistics can accomplish such a task, rigorously ...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) proliferate in soil pores, on the surface of soil particles and affect soil structure. Although modifications in substrate moisture retention depend on structure and could influence plant water extraction, mycorrhizal impacts on water retention and hydraulic conductivity were rarely quantified. Hence, we asked whether inoculation with AMF affects substrate wat...

This paper describes the design and experimental analysis of a Variable Structure Control (VSC) law using three reaching law strategies for a hydraulic servo control system. For this purpose we use a nonlinear mathematical model to develop a stable variable structure force control. The controller is designed using a sliding mode equivalence control and is augmented by reaching law approach to f...