Maintainability of electronic instruments for meteorological applications

The concept of Maintainability (M) of electronic instruments. though of recent origin, has Important application for meteorological equipments, which have special requirements. M is defined quantitatively in terms of mean time to repair and is Influenced by the failure behaviour of an equipment. An equipment goes through teething trouble, useful and terminal phase. Much of maintainability can be incorporated during design and production phase. This reduces the effective overall cost of the equipment during its life time. Special maintenance support system is necessary for meteorological Instruments. Some recent tools for trouble shooting in digital systems have been discussed.

Prediction of the failure of a human supraspinatus tendon using a NARX network

The modelling of tendon behaviour during failure stages is nonlinear and heavily random. However, the understanding of its behavior during such stages, and development of models that can give an accurate prediction of its behavior during failure can provide a means for developing effective tendon therapies. This study is aimed at demonstrating the capability of an artificial neural network in the modelling of failure phases in tendons. A nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous inputs network is applied to three different tensile test data of the human supraspinatus tendons. Owing to data scarcity, the network was trained using two different test data which were randomly sampled and divided into 50%, 25% and 25% proportions for training, validation and preliminary testing. The third test data were used for the final testing phase. The procedure was cyclically performed for each of the results that have been presented in this study. The neural network predictions are presented as curves fitted over actual test results with corresponding error plots. The results indicate that the network is able to accurately predict the failure behaviour of these tendons with correlations of above 99 % for all tests. This is an excellent and very promising result in the light of the difficulties that most deterministic mechanistic models encounter in the modelling of soft tissue failure behaviour. With further development of this technique, sports and exercise physicians would enhance knowledge in mechanisms of tendon failure and be able to devise more injury preventive strategies.

The Effect of Chemical Corrosion on Mechanics and Failure Behaviour of Limestone Containing a Single Kinked Fissure

This study concerns the influence of chemical corrosion and geometric parameters on the macroscopic damage characteristics of brittle limestone containing a kinked fissure under uniaxial compression. The specimens are prepared in chemical solutions with different NaCl concentrations and pH values. The acoustic emission (AE) technique is adopted to detect the inner distortion of the failure behaviour. The physical process of the crack coalescence of kinked fissures is synchronously captured by a high-speed camera. Seven failure patterns are identified based on the final failure mode and the failure process. Furthermore, the stress intensity factor of kinked cracks under chemical corrosion is obtained by a theoretical analysis. Chemical erosion with an acidic solution has a relatively strong effect on the compressive strength of the tested specimen, while the initial crack angle is not affected by short-term chemical corrosion.