The safety and efficiency of air traffic are significantly affected by adverse weather. This holds especially in terminal maneuvering areas () where, in addition to the impact of weather itself, potential weather avoidance routes are strongly restricted by air traffic regulations. A weather avoidance model DIVMET has been developed which proposes a route through a field of developing thunderstorms. Air traffic control regulations have not been included in it at this stage. DIVMET was applied to the of Hong Kong International Airport as air traffic control (ATC) there has become interested in improving the controller’s work load, especially for managing incoming traffic by avoidance route simulations. Although visual inspection of simulated avoidance routes by ATC was satisfactory, a quantitative validation of simulated with real observed routes was also carried out. Two real adverse weather situations with thunderstorms within the of Hong Kong and with heavily distorted traffic were chosen. The main objective prior to any validation, however, was to identify routes which are solely impacted by weather but do not show any signs of regulation. Route selection was done on the base of flight position data. Landing flights were selected and deviations from standard approach routes were analyzed. As a result, the majority of 272 flights were found to be affected by both weather and regulations (60%), highlighting the challenge for air traffic controllers to manage landing traffic under adverse weather conditions safely and efficiently. Only a few weather-affected flights (7%) were not regulated and could be used for validation. DIVMET simulation routes were presented to local air traffic controllers who confirmed them as potential and realistic avoidance routes. DIVMET weather avoidance route simulations within a appear to be helpful but further model development has to incorporate traffic regulations, to include holdings, short-cuts, and slow-downs.

A good efficiency performance of a pump over a wide range of displacement conditions is crucially important for variable pump control systems to save energy. However, according to the literature, less attention has been paid to the understanding of the efficiency, leakage flow, and compression flow characteristics of the pump with respect to displacement conditions. In this study, a test bench was built, and a novel explicit volumetric loss model was proposed to investigate these problems. The overall efficiency is found to drop considerably with the decreasing displacement. The volumetric losses range from 13% to 47% of the total power losses of pump at the rated speed, under the conditions of pressure ranging from 5 to 35 MPa and displacement ranging from 13% to 100% of full displacement. The highest proportion of compression flow losses in the total volumetric losses of pump at the rated speed can reach up to 41% when the pressure and displacement are greater than 30 MPa and 88% of full displacement, respectively; after that, the proportion gradually decreases with decreasing displacement. However, the leakage flow generally increases with decreasing displacement, or may decrease first and begin to increase after the minimum with the further decrease of displacement. In the components of leakage of slipper/swash plate pair, the squeeze leakage is found to reach a magnitude equal to that of the Poiseuille leakage. The findings can guide the further research and design of pumps with better efficiency performance.

In this paper, dynamic analyses of the swash plate vibration and pressure pulsation of an aircraft piston pump based on fluid-structure interactions (FSIs) are presented. Models of the swash plate piston pumps with three FSIs (named full FSIs and non FSI) are given. The simulation results of the discharge pressures at different rotation speeds in the synthesized pump model and experiments show good agreement. The numerical simulation results of the forces on the swash plate and the flow rate of the outlet chamber are presented and compared. The results of the two models show that the discharge pressure pulsation mostly depends on the kinematic relations of the piston slipper-shoe units (FSI-1), and is almost isolated from the swash plate vibration. The full FSIs simulation shows that the swash plate vibration is strongly influenced by the pressure pulsation through the control actuator mechanism (FSI-2) and the control valve mechanism (FSI-3), but the non FSI model does not show the same result. The full FSIs model is much more accurate in predicting the vibration of the swash plate and the pulsation of the discharge pressure than the non FSI model.

Ultrasonic guided waves have been successfully applied in nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) of pressure vessels and pipelines due to their advantages, such as long detection range and high inspection efficiency. Compared with other ultrasonic guided wave actuators, magnetostrictive transducers are more cost-effective, involve simpler fabrication process, and have higher possible transduction efficiency. The normal mode expansion (NME) method is adopted to analyze the forced response and perturbation analysis of elastic hollow cylinders with respect to magnetostrictive loadings, including partial loading, axial array loading, and circular array loading. The phase velocity and frequency spectra of axisymmetric/non-axisymmetric guided waves excited by magnetostrictive transducers are analyzed. The theoretically predicted trends are verified by finite element numerical simulations and experiments.

The perforated plate is one of the effective devices for measuring flow rate accurately. In this study, a perforated plate is investigated for its characteristics, mainly including discharge coefficient C and pressure loss coefficient ζ, when applied to cryogenic fluids with the help of ANSYS Fluent. Three cryogenic fluids are studied, including liquid nitrogen (LN₂), liquid oxygen (LO₂), and liquid hydrogen (LH₂). For comparison, two states of water are also investigated. The realizable κ-ε model with standard wall function is used to describe the turbulence and simulate the near-wall flow. The Schnerr-Sauer cavitation model is used to investigate the effect of cavitation on the performance of the perforated plate. Simulation results indicate that the upper limit of Reynolds number of the perforated plate is significantly dependent on the properties of the measured fluid when the temperatures of the fluids are set as the normal boiling point temperatures and the outlet pressures are 0.2 MPa.

The crucial point in calibrating soil water content using the technology of time domain reflectometry (TDR) is to establish the relationship between the apparent dielectric constant and the water content. Based on a database, which included 45 kinds of soil samples and 418 data points from our own test data and relevant literature, an empirical calibration equation is proposed. Additionally, the influence of soil type, dry density of soil, compaction energy, pore fluid conductivity, and temperature on the calculated result for water content was also analyzed. Results show that the equation can offer an error of ±0.05 g/g for most soils encountered in geotechnical engineering. However, the estimation error given by the empirical equation becomes significant for soils with dry density less than 1.3 g/cm³, so the equation was modified to consider the influence of dry density. Both of the empirical equations can be used to test gravimetric water content using the TDR method conveniently and efficiently without calibration.