Effects of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative on the wine import logistics of China

China’s Belt and Road (BR) initiative is expected to facilitate international trade between the countries involved. In this study, we review the special requirements of wine logistics and the market growth potential of wine consumption in China. A model minimizing generalized logistical costs is developed and applied to wine imports in China, so that the best candidate cities in which to locate transport gateways and distribution centers can be identified. Our analysis suggests that the most preferred gateways are Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, which all have similar delivery costs. In comparison, Beijing and Chongqing have much higher delivery costs, mainly because they do not have good access to marine transport and/or efficient domestic distribution networks. For long-distance intercontinental transport of large volumes of wine, marine shipping remains the only viable delivery mode. However, wine distribution within China extensively uses air, road, and water transport. Therefore, cities with excellent multi-modal transport services are better positioned to become wine logistics gateways. Our study also highlights the importance of value-added services and good government support, which are important factors that influence distribution costs and quality.     

Transient design waves for green-water loading on bulk carriers

The wave surface profiles associated with extreme relative motion between a slender stationary vessel and the adjacent wave surface are investigated for long-crested head seas. The methodology is based upon an established statistical relationship for a Gaussian random process which indi-cates that in the vicinity of an extreme event the most probable shape of the time history approaches that of the autocorrelation function. Attention is given to the relative motion at a longitudinal position which is representative of the No. 1 hatch cover location on a bulk carrier. Second-order corrections to the wave surface profiles are used to provide estimates of nonlinear relative motions. It is shown that extreme relative motion at the hatch cover location is associated with the vessel encountering a steep-fronted wave with pronounced asymmetry in the horizontal and vertical directions. In order to evaluate the exceedence probabilities, it is hypothesized that the peaks of the nonlinear relative motions are closely correlated with the peaks of an underlying linear process. The overall methodology is applied to an investigation of relative motion exceedence probabilities for vessel lengths of 250 m and 300 m over a range of survival seastates. Received: July, 1999 / Accepted: November, 1999     

Altimeter assimilation in the OCCAM global model: Part I: A twin experiment

An altimeter data assimilation scheme has been tested in the OCCAM (Ocean Circulation and Climate Advanced Modelling) global 1/4°, 36-level model using a twin experiment format. The Cooper and Haines displacement scheme is used. The method works well in most regions and depths. Currents and densities in the top 1000 m generally improve by over 50–70% after 5 months of sea level assimilation every 15 days. Below 1000 m, an error reduction of up to 50% is achieved. The errors remain low during a further 60-day run without assimilation. Diagnostics for the North Atlantic, the Tropical Pacific and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current are shown alongside the global averages.The main problems encountered were in weakly stratified regions of the Antarctic and Arctic seas. A scale selective filter is developed to avoid assimilating scales much larger than the local deformation radius, and this avoids the adverse assimilation effects in the southern oceans. A companion paper uses this scheme to assimilate TOPEX and ERS-1 altimeter maps.     

Dynamic response of offshore jacket structures under random loads

In this paper, the dynamic response of a scale model of a jacket offshore structure is investigated both theoretically and experimentally. The experiments were conducted both in air and in water. The in-water experiments were done in the towing tank of Memorial University to simulate the realistic operating conditions. The model was subjected to random wave loads. Froude's law of modeling was used to obtain the dimensions of the scale model based on the dimensions of an existing structure. The effects of varying the structure's weight, and the characteristics of the wave loading were investigated. The structure's weight was changed by adding weights to the structure's deck. A finite element model was designed to determine the dynamic response of the model. Excellent agreement between the experimental and theoretical results was obtained.The reaction force at the foundation was estimated from strain measurements and compared with the finite element calculations. Fair agreement was obtained.This work is the first stage of a project whose objective is to develop a method for structural damage detection using the free vibration response of the structure. The free vibration response will be obtained from the stationary random response of the structure using the random decrement method. Having an accurate model to describe the dynamic response of the structure is the first step in this study.     

Condition monitoring of wooden railway sleepers

Wooden railway sleeper inspections in Sweden are currently performed manually by a human operator; such inspections are to large extent based on visual analysis. In this paper a machine vision based approach has been considered to emulate the visual abilities of the human operator to enable automation of the process. Digital images from either ends (left and right) of the sleepers have been acquired. A pattern recognition approach has been adopted to classify the condition of the sleeper into classes (good or bad) and thereby achieve automation. Appropriate image analysis techniques were applied and relevant features such as the number of cracks on a sleeper, average length and width of the crack and the condition of the metal plate were determined. Feature fusion has been proposed in order to integrate the features obtained from each end for the classification task which follows. The effect of using classifiers like multi-layer perceptron and support vector machines has been tested and compared. Results obtained from the experiments show that multi-layer perceptron and support vector machines have achieved encouraging results, with a classification accuracy of 90%; thereby exhibiting a competitive performance when compared to a human operator.