•The effects of particle size, chemical composition, glassy phase content on the reactivity of slag and fly ash are investigated.•The physical and chemical requirements of slag and fly ash for the ...stable performance of AAM are summarized.•The reaction mechanisms of BFS-AAM, FA-AAM, and BFS/FA-AAM are clarified.•The reaction products of BFS-AAM, FA-AAM, BFS/FA-AAM are studied.•The factors affecting the strength of BFS-AAM, FA-AAM, BFS/FA-AAM are explored and influencing mechanisms are discussed.
Alkali-activated materials (AAM) are known to be environmentally friendly alternatives to cement-based materials because they can potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reutilize industrial by-products/wastes. To study the factors influencing the strength of slag based alkali-activated materials (BFS-AAM), fly ash based alkali-activated materials (FA-AAM), slag, and fly ash-based alkali-activated materials (BFS/FA-AAM), and clarifying their reaction mechanisms, this paper reviews current knowledge about the mechanical properties and the reaction mechanisms of BFS-AAM, FA-AAM, and BFS/FA-AAM. The precursor requirements and the strength control factors are summarized. The control factors for the strength of BFS/FA-AAM are the BFS/binder ratio, the Na2O/binder ratio, the SiO2/Na2O ratio, and the w/binder ratio. Ion concentrations, determined by these control factors, play a decisive role in the development of strength. Generally, the strength is proportional to the BFS/FA ratio. The optimal values of the Na2O/binder ratio of BFS-AAM and FA-AAM are between 5.5% and 8% and between 7 and 10%, respectively. The optimal values of the SiO2/Na2O ratio of BFS-AAM and FA-AAM are between 0.85 and 1.4 and between 0.6 and 1, respectively. Increasing the w/binder ratio will only benefit workability but will affect the strength negatively. A w/binder ratio of around 0.4 may strike a balance between strength and workability.
The aim of multi-speaker emotional speech synthesis is to generate speech for a designated speaker in a desired emotional state. The task is challenging due to the presence of speech variations, such ...as noise, content, and timbre, which can obstruct emotion extraction and transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to performing multi-speaker emotional speech synthesis. The proposed method, which is based on a seq2seq synthesizer, integrates emotion embedding as a conditioned variable to convey exact emotional information from reference audio to the synthesized speech. To dig emotion representation capability, we utilize a three-dimensional acoustic feature as input. And an emotion generalization module with adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) is proposed to obtain emotion embedding with high generalization ability, which also results in improved controllability. The derived emotion embedding from the generalization module can be readily conditioned by affine parameters, allowing for control both the emotion category and the emotion intensity of synthesized speech. Various emotional speech synthesis experimental results of the propposed method demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance in multi-speaker emotional speech synthesis, coupled with its advantage of high emotion controllability.
The cross-speaker emotion transfer task in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis particularly aims to synthesize speech for a target speaker with the emotion transferred from reference speech recorded by ...another (source) speaker. During the emotion transfer process, the identity information of the source speaker could also affect the synthesized results, resulting in the issue of speaker leakage, i.e., synthetic speech may have the voice identity of the source speaker rather than the target speaker. This paper proposes a new method with the aim to synthesize controllable emotional expressive speech and meanwhile maintain the target speaker's identity in the cross-speaker emotion TTS task. The proposed method is a Tacotron2-based framework with emotion embedding as the conditioning variable to provide emotion information. Two emotion disentangling modules are contained in our method to 1) get speaker-irrelevant and emotion-discriminative embedding, and 2) explicitly constrain the emotion and speaker identity of synthetic speech to be that as expected. Moreover, we present an intuitive method to control the emotion strength in the synthetic speech for the target speaker. Specifically, the learned emotion embedding is adjusted with a flexible scalar value, which allows controlling the emotion strength conveyed by the embedding. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a Mandarin disjoint corpus, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to synthesize reasonable emotional speech for the target speaker. Compared to the state-of-the-art reference embedding learned methods, our method gets the best performance on the cross-speaker emotion transfer task, indicating that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on learning the speaker-irrelevant emotion embedding. Furthermore, the strength ranking test and pitch trajectories plots demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively control the emotion strength, leading to prosody-diverse synthetic speech.
Image style transferring is a process of generating an output image in a target style from a given pair of content and target style images. Recently, a simple linear interpolation technique in ...encoded feature space has been employed in this process to generate output images of intermediate style because controlling the strength of style transferring effect is a key function of an image editing filter. However, this simple technique is effective in generating images of around full style but around zero style hence it cannot smoothly control the style transferring effect from an original content image to a fully stylised image. In this Letter, the authors tackle the missing work on style-strength control from content reconstruction to full style generation. To deal with this problem, they propose to use additional unbiased training data and losses for a style transfer network to learn an unbiased regression between output style strength and style control parameter. Experimental results verified that the proposed method achieved a full range of style-strength control from zero style to full style with no additive complexity in image generating process.
An energy efficient technology and a method for the production of foam concrete products have been developed. They involve the use of solar energy in the process in order to reduce energy consumption ...for heat treatment, which allows to produce high-quality products with a low production cost with a daily production cycle.The technical and economic evaluation of the developed solar technology shows that during the hot season up to 95% of the heat energy needed to intensify the hardening of the foam concrete is provided by a renewable energy source. The annual replacement of organic fuels with solar energy, considering the winter period of the year, is up to 65%. The annual economic effect in the oil equivalent of the use of this solar technology in enterprises located in regions with favorable weather and climate conditions, with a productivity of 20 thousand m3/year is up to 85 tons.The use of solar technology to ensure accelerated hardening of foam concrete products makes it possible to make production highly efficient, energy-saving and environmentally friendly. It meets modern requirements for saving organic fuels and reducing harmful emissions into the atmosphere.The energy efficiency of a yearly solar thermal treatment consists of high heat-absorbing and heat-insulating ability of helio-coatings, helio-chambers, and controlling the expenses of the heat source. As a result, energy savings in the winter months are 15-35%, in summer - 70-100%, and the average annual energy savings are in the range from 50 to 75% depending on the class of concrete and the thickness of products.
Flicker is a common video-compression-related temporal artifact. It occurs when co-located regions of consecutive frames are not encoded in a consistent manner, especially when Intra frames are ...periodically inserted at low and medium bit rates. In this paper we propose a flicker reduction method which aims to make the luminance changes between pixels in the same area of consecutive frames less noticeable. To this end, a temporal low-pass filtering is proposed that smooths these luminance changes on a block-by-block basis. The proposed method has some advantages compared to another state-of-the-art methods. It has been designed to be compliant with conventional video coding standards, i.e., to generate a bitstream that is decodable by any standard decoder implementation. The filter strength is estimated on-the-fly to limit the PSNR loss and thus the appearance of a noticeable blurring effect. The proposed method has been implemented on the H.264/AVC reference software and thoroughly assessed in comparison to a couple of state-of-the-art methods. The flicker reduction achieved by the proposed method (calculated using an objective measurement) is notably higher than that of compared methods: 18.78% versus 5.32% and 31.96% versus 8.34%, in exchange of some slight losses in terms of coding efficiency. In terms of subjective quality, the proposed method is perceived more than two times better than the compared methods.
Emotion embedding space learned from references is a straight-forward approach for emotion transfer in encoder-decoder structured emotional text to speech (TTS) systems. However, the transferred ...emotion in the synthetic speech is not accurate and expressive enough with emotion category confusions. Moreover, it is hard to select an appropriate reference to deliver desired emotion strength. To solve these problems, we propose a novel approach based on Tacotron. First, we plug two emotion classifiers - one after the reference encoder, one after the decoder output - to enhance the emotion-discriminative ability of the emotion embedding and the predicted mel-spectrum. Second, we adopt style loss to measure the difference between the generated and reference mel-spectrum. The emotion strength in the synthetic speech can be controlled by adjusting the value of the emotion embedding as the emotion embedding can be viewed as the feature map of the mel-spectrum. Experiments on emotion transfer and strength control have shown that the synthetic speech of the proposed method is more accurate and expressive with less emotion category confusions and the control of emotion strength is more salient to listeners.
This report introduces the results of cooperative experiments carried out by the Technical Committee on Establishment of Construction Standard and Quality Control Standards for Performance-Based ...Design of Porous Concrete. The Committee presents the draft proposal of a strength control method that uses a strength ratio-void ratio relation formula. The results of these common experiments verify the relationship between strength ratio and void ratio, and empirical constants for this relational formula are proposed, but each organization ought to determine appropriate empirical constants for practical application. The process that led to the present proposal is described while introducing the results of the common experiments.
Infrared dedicated short-range communication (IR-DSRC) has been used in single-lane vehicle-to-roadside applications, and is challenged for its application in multi-lane-free-flow vehicle-to-vehicle ...(V2V) conditions. However, based on IR positioning technology, the IR-DSRC is expected to be useful and valuable under V2V conditions for several intelligent-transportation-system applications. In the previous studies, a three-dimensional IR positioning system was developed to position a preceding vehicle. However, the positioning performance degrades as the longitudinal or the lateral distance between vehicles increases because the resolution of the received signal is deteriorated for weak signals. In this study, onboard units (OBUs) with wide radiation-pattern designs and automatic radiation-strength control are realised to provide stable signal strength for positioning, and the non-ideality of the IR positioning system is compensated by the calibrating procedures as well. A two-vehicle trial is performed, in which the positioning OBU is installed on the most front of the following vehicle to reduce the scattering effect of the vehicle body. The experimental result demonstrates that the positioning performance is greatly improved after aforementioned improvements.
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