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Turbidity is an important parameter in monitoring water quality, and thus attracts significant attention. Changes in the various components and constituent elements of water directly affect turbidity measurements. The turbidity of water is generally quantified by measuring the absorbance or scattering characteristics of substances suspended in it. The complex composition of environmental water bodies complicates the determination of factors influencing their turbidity. Controlled experiments that quantitatively analyze the effect of a single factor on the measurement of turbidity in the laboratory are an important means to improve the accuracy of turbidity assessment. Properties of suspended materials in a water column that may affect its measured turbidity include the concentration of algae, particle size, and the color of soluble substances, etc. The laboratory experiments reported here used Chlorella as an example to investigate the effect of algal concentration on turbidity measurement. The results are as follows. When the turbidity is low (100 NTU), the average relative error between the theoretical and practical absorbance is about 37.52%, which decreases to 19.20% at 100–200 NTU and 5.16% at 200–400 NTU. The characteristic spectral bands sensitive to turbidity (680 nm) and Chlorella (240 nm) were selected, and the theoretical and practical turbidity results were analyzed. The average relative errors of mixed liquids of less than 100, 100–200, and 200–400 NTU are 65.07%, 34.18%, and 3.95%, respectively. Therefore, the concentration of Chlorella significantly affects the measured turbidity, and results in a more complex effect at low turbidity (<100 NTU). Combining the analysis of absorbance peak values and characteristic spectral bands, we can assess the turbidity changes in different components, and through calibration, information regarding the concentration and variation of different components in water bodies can be obtained. The results of this research could improve the accuracy of on-site measurement of the concentrations of different components suspended in water, and also facilitate the development of new turbidity sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an actual industrial or military operations environment, a multi-state system (MSS) consisting of multi-state components often needs to perform multiple missions in succession. To improve the probability of the system successfully completing the next mission, all the maintenance activities need to be performed during maintenance breaks between any two consecutive missions under limited maintenance resources. In such case, selective maintenance is a widely used maintenance policy. As a typical discrete mathematics problem, selective maintenance has received widespread attention. In this work, a selective maintenance model considering human reliability for multi-component systems is investigated. Each maintenance worker can be in one of multiple discrete working levels due to their human error probability (HEP). The state of components after maintenance is assumed to be random and follow an identified probability distribution. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a human reliability model and a method to determine the state distribution of components after maintenance. The objective of selective maintenance scheduling is to find the maintenance action with the optimal reliability for each component in a maintenance break subject to constraints of time and cost. In place of an enumerative method, a genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to solve the complicated optimization problem taking human reliability into account. The results show the importance of considering human reliability in selective maintenance scheduling for an MSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]