Systems

Appropriate disposal of effluent from coastal desalination facilities [An article from: Desalination]

This digital document is a journal article from Desalination, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The effluent of concentrated seawater results from desalting ocean water, whether thermal or pressure processes are used. Disposal of the concentrated seawater needs to be addressed during the early stage of planning the design and site selection of the desalination facility. Recent developments in energy recovery technology have significantly improved the economics of producing fresh water from seawater. Optimized specific power consumption yields recovery rates that are lower than those employed historical, resulting in a lower concentration of dissolved salts in the plant effluent. With seawater desalination becoming a growing option for a secure source of drinking water, management of the waste streams becomes significant. We highlight a 'total systems engineering approach', which encompasses several key attributes that lessen the environmental burden of the seawater desalination option. Included among these approaches are smaller distributed systems with no chemical pre-treatment. For RO systems, reject water with lower salt concentrations is achieved by incorporating pressure exchange technology. For thermal distillation systems, reject water 1^oC above ambient seawater temperature can be achieved by employing thermoplastic heat exchangers with no significant increase in capital costs. A case study utilizing a retrofit of an existing municipal seawater desalination plant will highlight our approach.

Ustoichivost i kolebaniia mekhanicheskikh sistem: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik (Prikladnaia mekhanika)

Using cognitive engineering for system design and evaluation: A visualization aid for stability and support operations [An article from: International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics]

This digital document is a journal article from International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Cognitive engineering offers a principled approach to the design and development of human-centered systems. The cognitive engineering process integrates an analysis of the cognitive and collaborative demands of a user engaged in work with an iterative design, implementation, and evaluation approach to developing support tools. In this paper, we illustrate this process in the context of a specific design application: a tool to support military intelligence analyses in stability and support operations (SASO), called the stability and support operations visualization aid (SASOVA). As part of the cognitive engineering process, we performed a cognitive task analysis that uncovered the sources of complexity in the military intelligence support of SASO and identified opportunities to provide more effective aiding. Working in close collaboration with domain experts, we developed aiding concepts and implemented a rapid prototype of the SASOVA system. We then evaluated the prototype using military analysts with extensive SASO experience as study participants. The results of the evaluation supported the viability of the design concepts while uncovering additional requirements for effective decision-aiding. In this paper, the SASOVA development and evaluation process is used to illustrate the benefits of the cognitive engineering process as well as the issues and trade-offs that arise in the cognitive engineering of complex systems. Relevance to Industry: This work presents an approach to user-centered system design that can be applied to many types of complex, human-in-the-loop system development. An identification and description of key issues and tradeoffs are included to support the application of this approach.

Matematicheskie i eksperimentalnye metody sinteza tekhnicheskikh sistem: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov

On the inverse optimal control problem in manual control systems (NASA contractor report)

Third IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems: Proceedings, Villa Olmo, Como, Italy, September 8-12, 1997