The growth of manufacturing was central to the economic development of nineteenth century America. In the early stages of industrialization, the commitment to produce was frequently seasonal or part-time, and establishments might shut down operations for weeks or months at a time. But, as transportation improved and markets widened in their geographic scope and, as technological and organizatio...

Remote and autonomous operation of robotic platforms is revolutionizing the way in which work is done and information is gathered. Through the removal of the human element, costs decrease, quality of work increases, and continuous operation is achievable at little to no additional cost. Remote control offers almost all individuals regardless of physical limitations the ability to operate machin...

Every large multi-site infrastructure such as Grids and Clouds must implement fault-tolerance mechanisms and smart schedulers to enable continuous operation even when resource failures occur. Evaluating the efficiency of such mechanisms and schedulers requires representative failure models that are able to capture realistic properties of real world failure data. This paper shows that failures i...

Disk arrays have been proposed as a way of improving I/O performance by using parallelism among multiple disks. This paper focuses, however, on improving the performance of disk array systems in the presence of disk failures, which are signi"cant for applications where continuous operation is of concern. Although several approaches have been explored, the goals of achieving high performance and...

The value of a corporate information system such as an experience base tends to degrade with time. To keep the value of such a system, maintenance is an essential. Maintenance should not simply happen ad-hoc but systematically and based on specific maintenance knowledge. As a jump-start for maintenance, maintenance knowledge should be available right from the start of continuous operation. This...

The present paper evaluates the technical and economical feasibility of converting wet chemical scrubbers to biotrickling filters for H2S control at the Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD), California. Results of 8 months of continuous operation of a biotrickling filter treating 16,000 m3 h–1 of foul air are analyzed. The reactor was operated at a gas contact time of 1.6 to 2.2 seconds rea...

The main challenge in designing mobile embedded systems for internet of things is to provide a solution that has the limitied power by battery lifetime, in addition to overcome frequent battery recharging or replacement. The help of solar and wind energy harvesting systems is an attractive method to increase the autonomy of mobile embedded systems for internet of things trying to make a continu...

Charge–discharge behavior of SONY 18650 lithium-ion batteries for aerospace applications was simulated under low-earth-orbit (LEO) condiions, by using a first-principles based mathematical model. The model determines the capacity fade on the basis of the irreversible loss of active ithium ions due to electrolyte reduction. The capacity fade during LEO cycling was studied for 5 years of continuo...

The dish-Stirling technology for power generation, using a Stirling engine fed with a renewable energy such as solar, means a promising development regarding electricity generation. The dish-Stirling technology presents the highest efficiency, around 30%, in relation to other solar energy generation systems. However the technology status has not achieved enough advancement to be competitive wit...

This descriptive study explores deliberate barriers to user participation on the long-lived discussion site Metafilter.com. Metafilter has been in continuous operation since its founding in 1999, and at the time of this writing has around 12,000 active users. While many newer online sites appear eager to eliminate barriers to participation and recruit as many new members as possible, Metafilter...