Tag Archives: Engineering

Everything is in flux but it’s not always been recognised

3 Replies

Decorative photograph or ruins of Fountains Abbey next to River SkellI am teaching thermodynamics to first year undergraduate students at the moment and in most previous years this experience has stimulated me to blog about thermodynamics [for example: ‘Isolated systems in nature?’ on February 12th, 2020].  However, this year I am more than half-way through the module and this is the first post on the topic.  Perhaps that is an impact of teaching on-line via live broadcasts rather than the performance involved in lecturing to hundreds of students in a lecture theatre.  Last week I introduced the second law of thermodynamics and explained its origins in efforts to improve the efficiency of steam engines by 19th century engineers and physicists, including Rudolf Clausius (1822 – 1888), William Thomson (1827 – 1907) and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906).  The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of the universe increases during all real processes, where entropy can be described as the degree of disorder. The traditional narrative is that thermodynamics was developed by the Victorians; however, I think that the ancient Greeks had a pretty good understanding of it without calling it thermodynamics.  Heraclitus (c. 535 BCE – c. 475 BCE) understood that everything is in flux and nothing is at rest so that the world is one colossal process.  This concept comes close to the modern interpretation of the second of law of thermodynamics in which the entropy in the universe is constantly increasing leading to continuous change.  Heraclitus just did not state the direction of flux.  Unfortunately, Plato (c. 429 BCE – c. 347 BCE) did not agree with Heraclitus, but thought that some divine intervention had imposed order on pre-existing chaos to create an ordered universe, which precludes a constant flux and probably set back Western thought for a couple of millennia.  However, it seems likely that in the 17th century, Newton (1643 – 1727) and Leibniz (1646 – 1716), when they independently invented calculus, had more than an inkling about everything being in flux.  In the 18th century, the pioneering geologist James Hutton (1726 – 1797), while examining the tilted layers of the cliff at Siccar Point in Berwickshire, realised that the Earth was not simply created but instead is in a state of constant flux.  His ideas were spurned at the time and he was accused of atheism.  Boltzmann also had to vigorously defend his ideas to such an extent that his mental health deteriorated and he committed suicide while on vacation with his wife and daughter.  Today, it is widely accepted that the second law of thermodynamics governs all natural and synthetic processes, and many people have heard of entropy [see ‘Entropy on the brain’ on November 29th, 2017] but far fewer understand it [see ‘Two cultures’ on March 5th, 2013].  It is perhaps still controversial to talk about the theoretical long-term consequence of the second law, which is cosmic heat death corresponding to an equilibrium state of maximum entropy and uniform temperature across the universe such that nothing happens and life cannot exist [see ‘Will it all be over soon?’ on November 2nd, 2016].  This concept caused problems to 19th century thinkers, particular James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1979), and even perhaps to Plato who theorised two worlds in his theory of forms, one unchanging and the other in constant change, maybe in an effort to dodge the potential implications of degeneration of the universe into chaos.

Image: decaying ruins of Fountains Abbey beside the River Skell.  Heraclitus is reported to have said ‘no man ever steps twice into the same river; for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’.

An upside to lockdown

4 Replies

While pandemic lockdowns and travel bans are having a severe impact on spontaneity and creativity in research [see ‘Lacking creativity‘ on October 28th, 2020], they have induced a high level of ingenuity to achieve the final objective of the DIMES project, which is to conduct prototype demonstrations and evaluation tests of the DIMES integrated measurement system.  We have gone beyond the project brief by developing a remote installation system that allows local engineers at a test site to successfully set-up and run our measurement system. This has saved thousands of airmiles and several tonnes of CO2 emissions as well as hours waiting in airport terminals and sitting in planes.  These savings were made by members of our project team working remotely from their bases in Chesterfield, Liverpool, Ulm and Zurich instead of flying to the test site in Toulouse to perform the installation in a section of a fuselage, and then visiting a second time to conduct the evaluation tests.  For this first remote installation, we were fortunate to have our collaborator from Airbus available to support us [see ‘Most valued player on performs remote installation‘ on December 2nd, 2020].  We are about to stretch our capabilities further by conducting a remote installation and evaluation test during a full-scale aircraft test at the Aerospace Research Centre of the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa, Canada with a team who have never seen the DIMES system and knew nothing about it until about a month ago.  I could claim that this remote installation and test will save another couple of tonnes of CO2; but, in practice, we would probably not be performing a demonstration in Canada if we had not developed the remote installation capability. 

The University of Liverpool is the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners are Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.  Airbus is our topic manager.

Logos of Clean Sky 2 and EUThe DIMES project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820951.  The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

 

From strain measurements to assessing El Niño events

4 Replies

Figure 11 from RSOS 201086One of the exciting aspects of leading a university research group is that you can never be quite sure where the research is going next.  We published a nice example of this unpredictability last week in Royal Society Open Science in a paper called ‘Transformation of measurement uncertainties into low-dimensional feature space‘ [1].  While the title is an accurate description of the contents, it does not give much away and certainly does not reveal that we proposed a new method for assessing the occurrence of El Niño events.  For some time we have been working with massive datasets of measurements from arrays of sensors and representing them by fitting polynomials in a process known as image decomposition [see ‘Recognising strain‘ on October 28th, 2015]. The relatively small number of coefficients from these polynomials can be collated into a feature vector which facilitates comparison with other datasets [see for example, ‘Out of the valley of death into a hype cycle‘ on February 24th, 2021].  Our recent paper provides a solution to the issue of representing the measurement uncertainty in the same space as the feature vector which is roughly what we set out to do.  We demonstrated our new method for representing the measurement uncertainty by calibrating and validating a computational model of a simple beam in bending using data from an earlier study in a EU-funded project called VANESSA [2] — so no surprises there.  However, then my co-author and PhD student, Antonis Alexiadis went looking for other interesting datasets with which to demonstrate the new method.  He found a set of spatially-varying uncertainties associated with a metamodel of soil moisture in a river basin in China [3] and global oceanographic temperature fields collected monthly over 11 years from 2002 to 2012 [4].  We used the latter set of data to develop a new technique for assessing the occurrence of El-Niño events in the Pacific Ocean.  Our technique is based on global ocean dynamics rather than on the small region in the Pacific Ocean which is usually used and has the added advantages of providing a confidence level on the assessment as well as enabling straightforward comparisons of predictions and measurements.  The comparison of predictions and measurements is a recurring theme in our current research but I did not expect it to lead into ocean dynamics.

Image is Figure 11 from [1] showing convex hulls fitted to the cloud of points representing the uncertainty intervals for the ocean temperature measurements for each month in 2002 using only the three most significant principal components . The lack of overlap between hulls can be interpreted as implying a significant difference in the temperature between months.

References:

[1] Alexiadis, A. and Ferson, S. and  Patterson, E.A., , 2021. Transformation of measurement uncertainties into low-dimensional feature vector space. Royal Society Open Science, 8(3): 201086.

[2] Lampeas G, Pasialis V, Lin X, Patterson EA. 2015.  On the validation of solid mechanics models using optical measurements and data decomposition. Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory 52, 92-107.

[3] Kang J, Jin R, Li X, Zhang Y. 2017, Block Kriging with measurement errors: a case study of the spatial prediction of soil moisture in the middle reaches of Heihe River Basin. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 14, 87-91.

[4] Gaillard F, Reynaud T, Thierry V, Kolodziejczyk N, von Schuckmann K. 2016. In situ-based reanalysis of the global ocean temperature and salinity with ISAS: variability of the heat content and steric height. J. Climate. 29, 1305-1323.

Out of the valley of death into a hype cycle?

4 Replies

Fig 5 from Middleton et al with full captionThe capability to identify damage and track its propagation in structures is important in ensuring the safe operation of a wide variety of engineering infrastructure, including aircraft structures. A few years ago, I wrote about research my group was performing, in the INSTRUCTIVE project [see ‘INSTRUCTIVE final reckoning‘ on January 9th, 2019] with Airbus and Strain Solutions Limited, to deliver a new tool for monitoring the development of damage using thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) [see ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ on November 18th, 2015].  We collected images using a TSA system while a structural component was subject to cycles of load that caused damage to initiate and propagate during a fatigue test. The series of images were analysed using a technique based on optical flow to identify apparent movement between the images which was taken as indication of the development of damage [1]. We demonstrated that our technique could indicate the presence of a crack less than a millimetre in length and even identify cracks initiating under the heads of bolts using experiments performed in our laboratory [see ‘INSTRUCTIVE update‘ on October 4th, 2017].  However, this technique was susceptible to errors in the images when we tried to use low-cost sensors and to changes in the images caused by flight cycle loading with varying amplitude and frequency of loads.  Essentially, the optical flow approach could be fooled into identifying damage propagation when a sensor delivered a noisy image or the shape of the load cycle was changed.  We have now overcome this short-coming by replacing the optical flow approach with the orthogonal decomposition technique [see ‘Recognising strain‘ on October 28th, 2015] that we developed for comparing data fields from measurements and predictions in validation processes [see ‘Million to one‘ on November 21st, 2018] .  Each image is decomposed to a feature vector and differences between the feature vectors are indicative of damage development (see schematic in thumbnail from [2]).  The new technique, which we have named the differential feature vector method, is sufficiently robust that we have been able to use a sensor costing 1% of the price of a typical TSA system to identify and track cracks during cyclic loading.  The underpinning research was published in December 2020 by the Royal Society [2] and the technique is being implemented in full-scale ground-tests on aircraft structures as part of the DIMES project.  Once again, a piece of technology is emerging from the valley of death [see ‘Slowly crossing the valley of death‘ on January 27th, 2021] and, without wishing to initiate the hype cycle [see ‘Hype cycle‘ on September 23rd, 2015], I hope it will transform the use of thermal imaging for condition monitoring.

Logos of Clean Sky 2 and EUThe INSTRUCTIVE and DIMES projects have received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 685777 and No. 820951 respectively.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

References

[1] Middleton CA, Gaio A, Greene RJ & Patterson EA, Towards automated tracking of initiation and propagation of cracks in Aluminium alloy coupons using thermoelastic stress analysis, J. Non-destructive Testing, 38:18, 2019.

[2] Middleton CA, Weihrauch M, Christian WJR, Greene RJ & Patterson EA, Detection and tracking of cracks based on thermoelastic stress analysis, R. Soc. Open Sci. 7:200823, 2020.