Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Economical Field Datalogger, Norbert H. Maerz, M. B. Dusseault, R. W. Gillham

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Data acquisition is important in geotechnical and hydrological field investigations. Commercially available data acquisitions systems are often not well suited to field use, and can be costly. An alternative to buying a data acquisition system is to build one, and recent advances in computer micro-chip technology have made it easy to understand, design and build simple data acquisition devices.

The design of a data acquisition system developed at the University of Waterloo, along with an example of its use, is discussed in the paper. The intent was to sample 16 channels at 12 bit resolution for prolonged periods under adverse …

Microcomputer Image Analysis Of Rock Fabric, Norbert H. Maerz, C. P. Bennettt, B. A. Dony

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The behavior of many types of rock is largely dependent on the fabric of the rock mass. Current methods of manually measuring the discontinuity networks in rock masses are slow, tedious and error prone. The alternative is to make automated measurements of rock jointing parameters on digital images of rock faces in mines, tunnels, and surface excavations.

Photoanalysis techniques are being developed to measure various rock fabric parameters. Techniques presented here include the generation of a joint trace map from a photograph, and the measurement of simple statistics on the joint trace map. Methods are also presented for the determination …

Statistical Analysis Of A Compound Power-Law Model For Repairable Systems, Max Engelhardt, Lee J. Bain

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Conclusions - A compound (mixed) Poisson distribution is sometimes used as an alternative to the Poisson distribution for count data. Such a compound distribution, which has a negative binomial form, occurs when the population consists of Poisson distributed individuals, but with intensities which have a gamma distribution. A similar situation can occur with a repairable system when failure intensities of each system are different. A more general situation is considered where the system failures are distributed according to nonhomogeneous Poisson processes having Power Law intensity functions with gamma distributed intensity parameter. If the failures of each system in a population …