A survey of monitoring tap water hardness in Japan and its distribution patterns

We conducted a comprehensive overall tap water hardness assessment for Japan. Tap water was collected from 665 points throughout Japan, and its standing position was quantitatively clarified by prefecture. The mean and median hardness of tap water in Japan was 48.9 ± 25.8 (1σ SD) and 46.0 mg/L, respectively. Compared with 27 other countries, Japan exhibited soft water with low-mineral content. Water hardness tended to be high in the Kanto region and low in the Hokkaido and Tohoku regions. The impact of the distribution system’s water pipes on tap water hardness is discussed using a unified index to evaluate variations in hardness from raw to tap water. A comparison of the variations in hardness showed that hardness variations from raw to purified water and from purified to tap water exhibited a 20% variation range. Furthermore, tap water hardness and its fluctuations in any region of Japan were found to be caused by raw water hardness. It was demonstrated that the distribution pipe system had no large impacts on water hardness.

U-INDEX: Unified Index for Measuring Quality of Scientific Research Output

Many indexes concerned with measuring the quality of the scientific scholars’ output have appeared with the beginning of the internet due to several reasons such as: the diversity of the internet applications (or web applications), the increase in the digital publishing of open access sources, and the multiplicity of websites. These indexes take the network measurements as an application hub. This study, tries to diagnose the strength and weakness points of the approved indexes. It also suggests new index that combines all the traditional indexes’ characteristics and overcomes their weakness points. This unified index is used to evaluate the scientific outcomes of scientists and scholars. After applying and comparing the unified index, the researcher concluded that the value of the new index was more accurate and objective than the values of other traditional indexes. Moreover, the possibility to overcome some negatives points of the other indexes was shown, as well.

Research on Incentive Utility Multi-attribute decision-making Model and its Application

This paper puts forward the concept of incentive utility, which converts the value of each attribute in multi-attribute decision-making into a unified index for measurement, thus simplifying multi-attribute decision-making. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation model based on the TOPSIS of incentive utility is established. Through the establishment of incentive index, the utility of incentive and the calculation of ideal point of utility, the disadvantage of "ideal point is not ideal" in the TOPSIS is overcome. It can better synthesize the sub-attribute value and realize the subjective multi-attribute decision-making. The example shows that the model can apply subjective factors to decision-making scientifically, and the result is more reasonable and effective.

Study of the Test Conditions and Thermostability of an Overcharge Test for Large Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries

In this study, a lithium-ion soft-pack battery used in an electric vehicle was taken as the research object. Based on the actual working condition of the traction battery, the regularity of the evolution of the overcharge thermal runaway experiment of the sample was deeply analyzed by taking the charging rate and the ambient temperature as variables. The results showed that the larger the overcharge current was and the higher the ambient temperature was, the lower the overcharge thermal stability of the battery was. Furthermore, based on the concept of the introduction of battery energy during charging, by analyzing the total amount of energy input and the rate of energy input, a unified index was established to measure the change of the battery overcharging stability under different experimental conditions.

U-INDEX: Unified Index for Measuring Quality of Scientific Research Output

With the beginning of the Internet and the diversity of its applications, And the increase in the digital publishing of open access sources, and the multiplicity of sites, which take the network measurements as an application axis. For this reason, many indicators have appeared, which are concerned with measuring the quality of the scientific scholar output. This study, tries to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of the approved indexes, and overcome them by designing a new index that combines all indexes characteristics and exceeds the negatives of, some of them as a Standardized index used to evaluate the scientific outcomes of scientists scholar output. After applying and comparing the Standardized index, we reached the value that was more accurate and objective than the benefits of other indexes and the possibility of overcoming some of the negatives accompanying the other indexes.

Suboptimal Disturbance Observer Design Using All Stabilizing Q Filter for Precise Tracking Control

For several decades, disturbance observers (DOs) have been widely utilized to enhance tracking performance by reducing external disturbances in different industrial applications. However, although a DO is a verified control structure, a conventional DO does not guarantee stability. This paper proposes a stability-guaranteed design method, while maintaining the DO structure. The proposed design method uses a linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based H∞ control because the LMI-based control guarantees the stability of closed loop systems. However, applying the DO design to the LMI framework is not trivial because there are two control targets, whereas the standard LMI stabilizes a single control target. In this study, the problem is first resolved by building a single fictitious model because the two models are serial and can be considered as a single model from the Q-filter point of view. Using the proposed design framework, all-stabilizing Q filters are calculated. In addition, for the stability and robustness of the DO, two metrics are proposed to quantify the stability and robustness and combined into a single unified index to satisfy both metrics. Based on an application example, it is verified that the proposed method is effective, with a performance improvement of 10.8%.

Monitoring of qualitative and quantitative indicators technological schemes for the production of copper at the enterprises of Kazakhstan

New calculation formulas for estimating the technological uncertainty and completeness of each process and the scheme as a whole are derived. A high correlation is established between the ideal hierarchical structure of complex systems and the structure of technological schemes for real metallurgical copper productions. Thus, the problem of theoretical substantiation and practical application of unified information laws for the comparative assessment of competing technological schemes and improvement of existing metallurgical industries, ensuring the achievement of the goal in the most technological way, is solved. The studies carried out in the work are completely original. A significantly high scientific level of the work is defined by the use of modern information technologies in solving practical problems in the production with the aim of comparative estimation and improving individual technological processes and schemes on the whole on the basis of the unified index which represents an objective complex technological value of chemical-and-metallurgical (and any other) production on the basis of fundamental laws of conservation. There is considered using the formulae obtained for uncertainty and completeness of each technological operation for calculating the complex uncertainty and completeness of the technological scheme on the whole on the example of typical metallurgical productions, first of all, non0ferrous metals characterized with the most variety. There are suggested new aspects of entropy-and-information analysis of chemical-and-metallurgical processes and technological schemes on the whole, new calculation formulae for determining the level and system determinations of technological systems.

Gardens4Science: Setting Up a Trusted Network for German Botanic Gardens Using Open Source Technologies

Botanic gardens are an invaluable refuge for plant diversity for conservation, education and research. Worldwide, they manage over 100,000 species, roughly 30% of all plant species diversity, and over 41% of known threatened species; the botanic gardens in Germany house approximately 50,000 different species (Marquardt et al. in press). Scientists in need of plant material rely upon these resources for their research; they require a pooled, up-to-date inventory of ideally all accessions of these gardens. Sharing data from (living) specimen collections online has become routine in the past years; initiatives like PlantSearch of Botanic Gardens Conservation International and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) allow requesting specimens of interest. However, these catalogues are accessible for everyone. Legitimate concerns about potential theft and legal issues keep curators of living collections from sharing their full catalogues; in most cases, only filtered views of the data will be fed into these networks. Gardens4Science (http://gardens4science.biocase.org) aims at overcoming this issue by creating a trusted network between botanic gardens that allows an unfiltered access on the constituents’ accession catalogues. This unified data pool needs to be automatically synchronized with the individual garden’s catalogues, irrespective of the collection management systems used locally. For the three-year construction phase of Gardens4Science, focus is on Cactaceae and Bromeliaceae, since these families are well-represented in the collections and ideal models for studying the origin of biodiversity on evolutionary time scale. Gardens4Science’s technical architecture (Fig. 1) is based on existing tools for setting up biodiversity networks: The BioCASe (Biological Collections Access Service) Provider Software acts as an interface to the local databases that shields the network from their peculiarities (database management systems and data models used). BioCASe transforms the data into the Access to Biological Collections Data schema (ABCD) and publishes them as a BioCASe-compliant web service (Holetschek and Döring 2008, Holetschek et al. 2012). The data portal is based on portal software from the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and provides a user-specific view on the data. Registered trusted users will be able to display full details of individual accessions, whereas guest users will see only an aggregated view (Droege et al. 2014). The Berlin Indexing and Harvesting Toolkit (B-HIT) is used for harvesting the BioCASe web services of the local catalogues and creating a unified index database (Kelbert et al. 2015). Harvesting is done in regular intervals in order to keep the index in sync with the source databases and does not require any action on the provider’s side. The BioCASe (Biological Collections Access Service) Provider Software acts as an interface to the local databases that shields the network from their peculiarities (database management systems and data models used). BioCASe transforms the data into the Access to Biological Collections Data schema (ABCD) and publishes them as a BioCASe-compliant web service (Holetschek and Döring 2008, Holetschek et al. 2012). The data portal is based on portal software from the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and provides a user-specific view on the data. Registered trusted users will be able to display full details of individual accessions, whereas guest users will see only an aggregated view (Droege et al. 2014). The Berlin Indexing and Harvesting Toolkit (B-HIT) is used for harvesting the BioCASe web services of the local catalogues and creating a unified index database (Kelbert et al. 2015). Harvesting is done in regular intervals in order to keep the index in sync with the source databases and does not require any action on the provider’s side. In addition to harvesting, B-HIT performs several data cleaning steps. Foremost, it reconciles scientific names from the source databases with a taxonomic backbone (currently caryophyllales.org for Cactaceae and the Butcher and Gouda checklist for Bromeliaceae), which allows harmonizing the taxonomies from the different sources and the correction of outdated species names and orthographic mistakes. Provenance information are validated (for example specified geographic coordinates versus country) and corrected, if possible; date values are parsed and converted into a standard format. The issues found and potential corrections are compiled in reports and send to the curators, so the mistakes can be rectified in the source databases. In the construction phase, Gardens4Science consists of seven German Botanic gardens that share their accessions of the Bromeliaceae and Cactaceae families. Up to now (March 2019), 19.539 records have been published in Evo-BoGa, with about 3,500 to be added until the end of the project in January 2020. After the construction phase, it is planned to extend the network to include more Botanic Gardens – both from Germany and other countries – as well as additional plant families.