Search

The paper presents a numerical study on electrodynamic behavior of the inter-pancake twin-box joints of the Poloidal Field (PF) coils of the ITER Magnet System. This work was carried out with the THELMA code, developed at the University of Bologna. The THELMA model was adapted to describe both the superconducting wires and the resistive saddle of the joint in a set of reference configurations representative of a set of experimental tests performed on a joint sample at the SULTAN facility in Villigen, Switzerland. The model was applied to analyze both the DC joint resistance measurements and the AC loss vs frequency curve, in order to obtain a full representation of the joint electromagnetic behavior. The paper reports a comparison between the numerical and experimental results and parametric studies on the impact of the main model parameters on the loss vs frequency curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, cancer patients are treated with protons. The PSI Gantries work with Pencil Beam Scanning (PBS) technology. For beam profile characterization, a new 2-D planar pixel detector based on Printed Circuit Board technology was developed. The main challenge of the design was the limited amount of 256 readout channels while several thousands of detector signals had to be processed. With PBS, only a few pixels will be hit by the proton beam and give a significant signal, while most of them will not capture any signal. On the detector design, the active area was divided into pixel arrays with equal size, while one array is such big to cover the whole size of the proton beam. By a so-called channel recycling technique, the same pixel number of all pixel arrays were connected together to one readout channel. The proof of concept was verified with a small detector. In the next step, the design was changed such, getting a full-scale detector for Gantry 2. The readout electronics board itself is also a development performed at PSI. A core component of the design is the ADAS1128 chip from ANALOG Devices featuring 128 input channels. The pixel detector is fully integrated into the therapy control system (TCS) through readout electronics with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The FPGA technology allows to readout the detector synchronized to the beam delivery. This paper summarizes the features of the pixel detector design, the readout electronics, and shows the first experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel unsupervised damage detection approach based on a memetic algorithm that establishes the normal or undamaged condition of a structural system as data clusters through a global xpectation–maximization technique, using only damage-sensitive features extracted from output-only vibration measurements. The health state is then discriminated by considering the Mahalanobis squared distance between the learned clusters and a new observation. The proposed approach is compared with state-of-the-art ones by taking into account real-world data sets from the Z-24 Bridge (Switzerland), where several damage scenarios were performed. The results indicated that the proposed approach can be applied in structural health monitoring applications where life safety, economic, and reliability issues are the most important motivations to consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]