This study was focused on preparation and characterization of fatty acid eutectic mixtures as phase change materials (PCMs). The four common fatty acids: stearic acid (SA), palmitic acid (PA), myristic acid (MA) and lauric acid (LA) were selected as representative to prepare binary and ternary...

The preparation and characteristics of a composite phase change material (PCM) produced by incorporating polynary fatty acid eutectic mixture into sludge ceramsite were studied. According to Schröeder–Van Laar equation, five different kinds of polynary fatty acid eutectic mixture were...

This paper presents a method to estimate the state-of-charge (SOC) of a lithium-ion battery, based on an online identification of its open-circuit voltage (OCV), according to the battery’s intrinsic relationship between the SOC and the OCV for application in electric vehicles. Firstly an...

This paper considers a mean shift with a unknown change point in α-mixing processes with κ stable innovations and estimates the unknown change point by the robust nonparametric CUSUM estimator based on the indicators of the data minus the sample median. The strong convergence rate of the...

In view of the high cost and sparse spatial resolution of offshore meteorological observations, ocean winds retrieved from satellites are valuable in offshore wind resource assessment as a supplement to<i> in situ</i> measurements. This study examines satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images...

Driving patterns exert an important influence on the fuel economy of vehicles, especially hybrid electric vehicles. This paper aims to build a method to identify driving patterns with enough accuracy and less sampling time compared than other driving pattern recognition algorithms. Firstly a...

This paper analyzes whether hospital competition is associated with improved health care delivery in China, particularly in the dimensions of health care quality and cost. We explore the differences in competition over time and across regions to examine the relationship in an environment wherein...

In recent decades, a number of centrality metrics describing network properties of nodes have been proposed to rank the importance of nodes. In order to understand the correlations between centrality metrics and to approximate a high-complexity centrality metric by a strongly correlated...

This paper considers the process optimal strategies for an enhanced index tracking problem. The investment goals are set to achieve a higher return than the benchmark by setting the portfolio's risk profile identical to the primary index risk factors. Return differences between the index and the...

Land use and land cover (LULC) change within a watershed is recognized as an important factor affecting hydrological processes and water resources. Modeling the hydrological effects of land-use change is important not only for after-the-fact analyses, but also for understanding and predicting...