The evolution of the corrosion interface separating the uncorroded concrete part and the corroded part of a partially wet concrete wall of a pipe under the innuence of hydrogen sullde can be modelled by a moving boundary problem for three coupled one-dimensional diiusion equations. We show that the problem formulated via weak solutions is well-posed. The function describing the position of the ...

We report that a variety of ternary particle/liquid/liquid mixtures heavily aggregate or separate completely if (1) the particles are fully or almost fully wetted by one fluid, and (2) if the wetting fluid volume fraction is comparable to the particle volume fraction. Aggregation and separation do not happen if the particles are partially wetted by both fluids, in which case Pickering emulsions...

The ethanol industry is expanding rapidly. This expansion in production of renewable energy also increases production of by-products. These byproducts, primarily distillers grains plus solubles (DGS), are utilized very efficiently by ruminants. When the starch in corn is fermented to produce ethanol, the remaining nutrients (protein, fat, fiber) are concentrated about 3-fold. Whereas DGS is an ...

Some landslides move imperceptibly downslope, whereas others accelerate catastrophically. Experimental landslides triggered by rising pore water pressure moved at sharply contrasting rates due to small differences in initial porosity. Wet sandy soil with porosity of about 0.5 contracted during slope failure, partially liquefied, and accelerated within 1 second to speeds over 1 meter per second....

determine the erythrocyte transketolase (ETK) activity or thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) effect on admission, or thiamine excretion. Tanphaichitr et a13 state that thiamine excretion alone is not a good index of the state of thiamine nutrition in an individual subject. The absence of cardiac and central nervous system manifestations may be explained partially by the fact that the patient restrict...

Predictive maintenance is based on observing an indicator of the state of a system, at different intervals of time which gives the decision maker some information about the exact state. The problem is to obtain an optimal replacement policy minimizing the long run expected cost per unit of time and to formulate it as a partially observable Markov decision process.

The process of understanding the meaning of a written passage inherently involves dynamic manipulation and composition of ideas. Starting from this observation this thesis proposes an artificial system for text understanding in which the semantic space containing the possible meanings of the analyzed text is selectively explored by a partially observable Markov decision process trained to effec...

We present a model for water uptake by plant roots from unsaturated soil. The model includes the simultaneous flow of water inside the root network and in the soil. It is constructed by considering first the water uptake by a single root, and then using the parameterized results thereby obtained to build a model for water uptake by the developing root network. We focus our model on annual plant...