The electricity access in Sub-Saharan African countries is below 10%; thus, introducing a microgrid for rural electrification can overcome the endemic lack of modern electricity access that hampers the provision of basic services such as education, healthcare, safety, economic and social growth for rural communities. This work studies different possible comparison methods considering variations...

Feasibilities of heat and cold storage technologies for vehicles were discussed for improvement of vehicle fuel efficiency. Energy performance of a plug-in cold thermal energy storage system, in which ice slurry is produced at a stationary chiller and charged into a tank in a vehicle for cabin and cargo cooling, was discussed. Energy balance of the plug-in system was compared with onboard heat ...

Trigeneration is a booming power production technology where three energy commodities are simultaneously produced in a single integrated process. Electric power, heat (e.g. hot water) and cooling (e.g. chilled water) are three typical energy commodities in the trigeneration system. The production of three energy commodities follows a joint characteristic. This paper presents a Lagrangian relaxa...

The importance of real-time pattern recognition in streaming media is rapidly growing (Liu, Wang, & Chen, 1998). Extracting information from audio and video streams in an e-collaboration scenario is getting increasing relevance as the networking infrastructure develops. This development enables the use of rich media content. Shared archives of this kind of knowledge need tools for exploration, ...

This paper focuses on the control strategies for islanded mode micro-grid system, which consists of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, batteries and super-capacitors. When micro-grid is connected to the utility grid, DC-bus voltage is regulated by the inverter. And the magnitude and frequency of AC bus are the same with the grid. However when the microgrid works in island mode, DC-bus voltage ...

Automated tongue image segmentation in Chinese medicine is difficult due to two special factors: (1) There are a lot of pathological details on the surface of tongue, which have a large influence on edge extraction; (2) The shapes of tongue bodies captured from various diseases or persons are quite different, so they are impossible to be properly described by a predefined deformable template. T...

We present a new class of magnetically shaped deformable liquid mirrors made of a magnetic liquid (ferrofluid). Deformable liquid mirrors offer advantages with respect to deformable solid mirrors: large deformations, low costs and the possibility of very large mirrors with added aberration control. They have some disadvantages (e.g. slower response time). We made and tested a deformable mirror,...

Following the success of applying deformable models to feature extraction, a natural next step is to apply such models to pattern classiication. Recently, we have cast a deformable model under a Bayesian framework for classiication, giving promising results. However, deformable model methods are computation-ally expensive due to the required iterative optimization process. The problem is even m...

Deformable 3D reconstruction from 2D images requires prior knowledge on the scene structure. Template-free methods [1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 14] use generic prior knowledge such as piecewise smoothness but require multiple images with significant baseline. Template-based methods [4, 10, 13] require only one image but handle only one object for which they need specific prior knowledge, namely a 3D templat...

This paper addresses the problem of describing the significant intra and inter variability of 3D deformable structures within 3D image data sets. In pursuing it, a 3D probabilistic physically based deformable model is defined. The statistically learned deformable model captures the spatial relationships between the different objects surfaces, together with their shape variations. The structures...