A novel satellite-equipped receiver for autonomous monitoring of GNSS navigation signal quality

Global navigation satellite system(GNSS) comes with potential unavoidable application risks such as the sudden distortion or failure of navigation signals because its satellites are generally operated until failure. In order to solve the problems associated with these risks, receiver autonomous integrity monitoring(RAIM) and ground-based signal quality monitoring stations are widely used. Although these technologies can protect the user from the risks, they are expensive and have limited region coverage. Autonomous monitoring of satellite signal quality is an effective method to eliminate these shortcomings of the RAIM and ground-based signal quality monitoring stations; thus, a new navigation signal quality monitoring receiver which can be equipped on the satellite platform of GNSS is proposed in this paper. Because this satellite-equipped receiver is tightly coupled with navigation payload, the system architecture and its preliminary design procedure are first introduced. In theory, code-tracking loop is able to provide accurate time delay estimation of received signals. However, because of the nonlinear characteristics of the navigation payload, the traditional code-tracking loop introduces errors. To eliminate these errors, the dummy massive parallel correlators(DMPC) technique is proposed. This technique can reconstruct the cross correlation function of a navigation signal with a high code phase resolution. Combining the DMPC and direct radio frequency(RF) sampling technology, the satellite-equipped receiver can calibrate the differential code bias(DCB) accurately. In the meantime, the abnormities and failures of navigation signal can also be monitored. Finally, the accuracy of DCB calibration and the performance of fault monitoring have been verified by practical test data and numerical simulation data, respectively. The results show that the accuracy of DCB calibration is less than 0.1 ns and the novel satellite-equipped receiver can monitor the signal quality effectively.

Identifying the major fluorescent components responsible for ultrafiltration membrane fouling in different water sources

Three-dimensional fluorescence excitation–emission matrix（EEM） coupled with parallel factor analysis（PARAFAC） was performed for a total of 18 water samples taken from three water sources（two lakes and one wastewater treatment plant（WWTP） secondary effluent）,with the purpose of identifying the major ultrafiltration（UF） membrane foulants in different water sources. Three fluorescent components（C1, C2 and C3） were identified,which represented terrestrially derived humic-like substances（C1）, microbially derived humic-like substances（C2）, and protein-like substances（C3）. The correlations between the different fluorescent components and UF membrane fouling were analyzed. It was shown that for the WWTP secondary effluent, all three components（C1, C2 and C3） made a considerable contribution to the irreversible and total fouling of the UF membrane.However, for the two lakes, only the C3 exhibited a strong correlation with membrane fouling, indicating that the protein-like substances were the major membrane foulants in the lake waters. Significant attachment of C1, C2 and C3 to the UF membrane was also confirmed by mass balance analyses for the WWTP secondary effluent; while the attachment of C1 and C2 was shown to be negligible for the two lakes. The results may provide basic formation for developing suitable fouling control strategies for sustainable UF processes.