Experimental Study on Optimal Layout of Grid Desilting Gallery

Based on the desilting research of one scheduling project in the southwest of China, the method of setting grid desilting gallery before the desilting tunnel is put forward to expand the scope of the scouring funnel before the dam and solve the problem of sediment deposition at the power station water intake. The experimental results show that, in the design of a grid desilting gallery, the width of the grid gallery should not be smaller than that of the desiring bottom intake, the size of the grid orifice should be in the range of 1.5 m--2.0 m along the flow direction, and the grid spacing should be 3--5 times the size of the grid orifice. The discharging ability of the desilting bottom intake will decrease after the grid desilting gallery is added. The average of the decrease rates is about 5%-10%. The scouring funnel draws in the longitudinal direction before the dam obviously after the construction of the grid desilting gallery.

Differential Quadrature Method for Bending Problem of Plates with Transverse Shear Effects

A differential quadrature (DQ) method for orthotropic plates was proposed based on Reddy' s theory of plates with the effects of the higher-order transverse shear deformations. Wang-Bert's DQ approach was also further extended to handle the boundary conditions of plates. The computational convergence was studied, and the numerical results were obtained for different grid spacings and compared with the existing results. The results show that the DQ method is fairly reliable and effective.

Variable Stiffness Identification and Configuration Optimization of Industrial Robots for Machining Tasks

Industrial robots are increasingly being used in machining tasks because of their high flexibility and intelligence.However,the low structural stiffness of a robot significantly affects its positional accuracy and the machining quality of its operation equipment.Studying robot stiffness characteristics and optimization methods is an effective method of improving the stiffness performance of a robot.Accordingly,aiming at the poor accuracy of stiffness modeling caused by approximating the stiffness of each joint as a constant,a variable stiffness identification method is proposed based on space gridding.Subsequently,a task-oriented axial stiffness evaluation index is proposed to quantitatively assess the stiffness performance in the machining direction.In addition,by analyzing the redundant kinematic characteristics of the robot machining system,a configuration optimization method is further developed to maximize the index.For numerous points or trajectory-processing tasks,a configuration smoothing strategy is proposed to rapidly acquire optimized configurations.Finally,experiments on a KR500 robot were conducted to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed stiffness identification and configuration optimization methods.

Limited Spatial Transferability of the Relationships Between Kriging Variance and Soil Sampling Spacing in Some Grasslands of Ireland:Implications for Sampling Design

Sampling plays an important role in acquiring precise soil information required in modern agricultural production worldwide, which determines both the cost and quality of final soil mapping products. For sampling design, it has been proposed possibile to transfer the relationships between kriging variance and sampling grid spacing from an area with existing information to other areas with similar soil-forming environments. However, this approach is challenged in practice because of two problems: i) different population vaxiograms among similar areas and ii) sampling errors in estimated variograms. This study evaluated the effects of these two problems on the transferability of the relationships between kriging variance and sampling grid spacing, by using spatial data simulated with three variograms and soil samples collected from four grasslands in Ireland with similar soil-forming environments. Results showed that the variograms suggested by different samples collected with the same grid spacing in the same or similar areas were different, leading to a range of mean kriging variance (MKV) for each grid spacing. With increasing grid spacing, the variation of MKV for a specific grid spacing increased and deviated more from the MKV generated using the population variograms. As a result, the spatial transferability of the relationships between kriging variance and grid spacing for sampling design was limited.