Investigation of the Effects of Baffles on the Shallow Water Sloshing in A Rectangular Tank Using A 2D Turbulent ISPH Method

Liquid sloshing is a common phenomenon in the liquid tanks transportation. Liquid waves lead to fluctuating forces on the tank wall. Uncontrolled fluctuations lead to large forces and momentums. Baffles can control these fluctuations. A numerical method, which has been widely used to model this phenomenon, is Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics(SPH). The Lagrangian nature of this method makes it suitable for simulating free surface flows. In the present study, an accurate Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics(ISPH) method is developed and improved using the kernel gradient correction tensors, particle shifting algorithms, k–ε turbulence model, and free surface particle detectors. Comparisons with the experimental data approve the ability of the present algorithm for simulating shallow water sloshing. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the vertical baffle on the damping of liquid sloshing. Results show that baffles number has a major role in sloshing fluctuation damping.     

Mapping red edge-based vegetation health indicators using Landsat TM data for Australian native vegetation cover

The usefulness of red edge bands, and vegetation indices based on red edge bands, for vegetation health monitoring has already been demonstrated. There are some satellites such as WorldView-2 and Sentinel-2 acquiring images in red edge band data; while, the former data can be expensive and often lack consistent global coverage, the latter does not have a long term archive and consequently cannot be used for a long term time series analysis. This study tests the ability to predict red edge band and red edge-based vegetation indices through freely available Landsat Thematic Mapper data for an Australian Eucalyptus-dominated vegetation cover within and around a mine site. Two modelling strategies including multiple-linear regression as a linear approach and random forests as a non-linear approach were used. The results showed that it is possible to generate red edge derivatives using the Landsat Thematic Mapper data with less than 10% error using both linear and non-linear methods; however, the linear method resulted in higher estimation accuracies than non-linear methods.     

A monitoring framework for land use around kaolin mining areas through Landsat TM images

Sustainable management of land requires regular acquisition of qualitative information regarding the status of its use. It is especially important to track the changes relating to the land’s competitive development needs such as mining. The field-based monitoring of a mine with a wide footprint is expensive and time-consuming. Remote sensing techniques have been developed and demonstrated as cost-effective alternatives for the conventional methods of land use/land cover (LULC) monitoring. In this study, the land cover changes that occurred between the year of 2000 and 2009 in a kaolin mining and processing area in the Kutch region of India are mapped using two Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images. For this purpose, the spectral signature of the land covers including vegetation cover and kaolin were determined and matched filtering (MF) method was applied to classify the images. The overall accuracy of the classified 2009 image was estimated for the kaolin and the vegetation cover to 89.5 and 86.0 % respectively. The change in the land use which occurred from 2000 to 2009 were quantified and analysed for both classes. This study provided a practical framework for rapid mapping of the land cover changes around open-cut kaolin mining area using freely available Landsat data.