Hello friends, I am Satish Araparyani working as Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Volchian Institute of Technology Shorapuram. Today, I am discussing the topic Gravity Dicasting, Learning Out. At the end of this session, students will be able to understand Gravity Dicasting which is also called as Permanent Mold Casting. What are the contents we will cover in this session? First, we will have an introduction and we will have the little bit information about the Dicasting Machine. And what do you mean by Gravity Dicasting? What are the advantages compared to sand molding and limitations and then finally the applications? First, introduction. Dicasting process, first of all, has an advantage. The main drawback of sand molding process is a mold needs to prepare for each casting produce. And the specialty of Dicasting process, which is also called as Specialized Casting Process, a metallic mold is used to prepare sand mold with which larger number of castings are made. The metallic mold is also called as a dye. So these are the basic main advantage of Dicasting compared to mold. Here we don't need to prepare mold again and again and there we need to prepare the mold generally for the castings. Generally, the mold material employed is metal or any alloy. And the Dicasting is classified into two types basically. First one is called Gravity Dicasting which we will be studying in this session which is also called as permanent molding. And second is called Pressure Dicasting which we will be studying in future lecture. And pressure Dicasting which is further classified into cold chamber pressure Dicasting and hot chamber pressure Dicasting. Unlike Gravity Dicasting, in pressure Dicasting the molten metal is forced into permanent mold which is also called as a dye cavity under pressure. The pressure varies from 20 to 2000 kgf per square centimeter and is maintained till solidification stage is reached. The pressure is generally obtained by compressed air or hydraulically. So this is an initial basic difference between Gravity Dicasting and Pressure Dicasting. But we will study. Now Dicasting Machines. Dicasting machines perform the following functions. Holding the two dye halves firmly together. Closing the dye. Injecting molten metal into dye. Opening the dye. Ejecting the casting out of the dye. These are some of the basic steps which are performed with the help of Dicasting machine. Now we will come to the Gravity Dicasting our main topic. The casting is called Gravity Dicasting because molten metal is poured into mold under gravity only. Here no external force is applied to the liquid metal into the mold cavity. The casting is also called permanent mold casting because it uses the mold which is permanent. That is the mold can be used as many of times before it is discarded or rebuilt. Now we will come to see the figure here. Now we will see Gravity Dicasting which is also called permanent mold casting. This is hydraulic operated cylinder which is open and closed the mold. This is movable mold section, movable mold section and stationary mold section. So with the help of this cylinder which we can here close the mold and spray with the help of nozzle we can spray. And mold is preheated and closed. See the mold is preheated and then closed. Now coming, now the force is applied here. So core if it is all required is placed. These are the cavities with the help of this pressure. Core if you insert in the mold is closed. This second step we can say. Now see this is called gravity as I told you. The metal is poured in the mold with the help of gravity. It fills the mold cavity with the help of gravity. So now we will see. There is no some external force is required. Just this is the stationary part of the mold. This is moving part with the help of force. This is closed and finally the molten metal is poured. And molten metal solidifies itself in the mold. Now we will come to the point permanent mold castings are made. How permanent mold castings are made? Permanent mold castings are made with the help of gray cast iron into two halves. Having the high resistance to thermal shocks, alloy steels. Why? For very high temperature and withstanding surface erosion or non ferrous alloys. Inner surface of molds are closed first and refractory and with the lamp black or coroy. This is done in order to reduce the chilling effect. Chilling effect in compared to sand molding in die casting is more because mold itself is made up of metal or alloys. So chilling effect on the cast metal and facilitate the removal of casting and to prevent the adherence of molten metal into the mold. So we are applying refractory and then lamp black or coroy into the mold. Pouring cup risers, gates, sprue are present in the mold. Now what are the advantages compared to what you can say sand casting? Here in case we in die casting we can have a very closer dimensional tolerances. Because mold itself is made of metal and easily we can achieve the same. Second, smoother surface and better appearance can be obtained. Third, fine grain metal surface because of chilling effect as I told you chilling effect is more compared to sand casting. Mass production is more economical because mold itself is made of metal or alloys. Low shrinkage and gas porosity because porosity is less or gas shrinkage. Problems are less associated with the metal casting compared to the sand mold. Now we think whether toys, small baby toys can be produced with this process? Now coming to the limitations. The first and foremost big limitation associated with this process is permanent mold cost is more compared to sand mold. Here as it is metal and some setup is required so the casting is more compared to sand mold. And the second basically it is suited for small or medium size non ferrous castings only. And the third, several defects such as stress and surface hardening may be produced due to surface chilling effect. As I told you in previous slide also the chilling effect is more compared to the sand because the mold itself is made of metal parts, alloys parts. So here in this process in die casting the chilling effect is more so the several defects like stress and surface hardening may be produced due to surface chilling effect. Since the gating system is cut in the mold halves once machine it cannot be changed. Now as the gating system as it is flowing metal is flowed through the gravity and it is in the permanent mold also through the once the gating system is cut. So it cannot be what you can say it can be repaired but it cost once again it is generally cost heavy or many times it needs to that mold itself needs to be discarded. So it costs more or generally it is not economical in that case. The extremely high temperature of the molten metal make this metal unsuitable for steel casting. Now coming to the application part the basic application or basically these processes applied for carburetor bodies of the what you can say automobiles. Refrigation castings oil pump bodies connecting rods and automotive pistons are made of from this process typewriter segments etc. Now what is basically throughout this session what we have understand is the basically the mold itself has an has a gating system in the casting in the mold itself from which molten metal is poured. Then once it is made so there are thorough design consideration needs to made because we cannot modify again and again. So generally it is suited for what you can say mass production system it is not suited generally for prototype or small production system. Basically this is and it is also as it is a gravity die casting it is also with the help of gravity only the metal pours. In the next session what we will be studying is what are the advantages or disadvantages compared with the help of pressure die casting of this process. So this process is many times suited for small to medium side castings only and because of chilling effects we need to take care many things in this case. Now the references what we have taken is from YouTube and PL Jane principle of foundry technology and the NPTEL notes. Thank you.


The paper presents a new 3D point cloud classification benchmark data set with over 4 billion manually labeled points. The authors discuss the use of deep convolutional neural networks, CNNs, as a workhorse for 3D point cloud labeling tasks, which have shown remarkable performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The paper aims to close the data gap in 3D labeling tasks by providing a massive data set that consists of dense point clouds acquired with static terrestrial laser scanners. The semantic 3D.net data set contains eight semantic classes and covers a wide range of urban outdoor scenes. The authors describe their labeling interface and show that the data set provides more dense and complete point clouds with much higher overall number of labeled points compared to those already available to the research community. They also provide baseline method descriptions and comparison between methods submitted to their online system, indicating that deep learning methods in 3D point cloud labeling can learn richer, more general 3D representations. This article was authored by T. Hackel, N. Savanov, L. Lataki and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Hello, I'm Leanne George, Coordinator of the Spec Survey Program at the Association of Research Libraries, and I'd like to thank you all for joining us for this Spec Survey webcast. Today we'll hear about the results of the survey on affordable course content and open educational resources, and these results have been published in Spec Kit 351. Before we begin, I have just a couple announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down on background noise, so if you are part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. You won't be disturbing the presentation. But we do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. We'll answer as many questions as possible at the end of the presentation, and I will read the questions aloud before the presenters answer them, because I realize you all won't be able to see the questions yourselves. The webcast is being recorded, and we will send all the registrants the slides and a link to the recording in the next week. Now, let me introduce today's presenters. Christy Jensen is Program Development Lead for the E-Learning Support Initiative at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Joe Salem is Associate Dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services, and Commonwealth Campus Libraries at Penn State University. Anita Walts is Open Education and Online Learning Environments Librarian at Virginia Tech Libraries. So use the hashtag ARLSpecKit351 to continue the conversation with them on Twitter. And now, let me turn the presentation over to Anita. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for attending today. We're really excited to share some of our observations from the survey. First, before we get started, I want to present a roadmap and some brief definitions. In this presentation, we'll discuss why we took on this research and survey findings related to institution-wide initiatives and library involvement, including the focus, origination, governance, and common functions of affordable course content and open educational resource initiatives. We'll discuss faculty initiatives, tenure and promotion realities, and the types of faculty practices and library activities common in this work. Then we'll end with everybody's favorite topic, the future. We're especially interested in your questions, so as Leanne mentioned, please post questions via the chat during and after the presentation, and we'll address as many as we can at the end. So very quickly, two definitions are important in this webinar, affordable course content, and open educational resources. We defined affordable course content, or ACC as we like to call it, as including materials that are library licensed or available at low additional cost to students. While there may be cost barriers, the direct cost to students are either zero or very low. So that is ACC, no or low cost materials. The other term that you'll hear frequently in this presentation is OER, Open Educational Resources. We defined OER in line with the Hewlett Foundation's definition as any type or format of content or software that is freely available and either in the public domain or licensed with an intellectual property license that allows modification and redistribution. Some common examples of open educational resources would be four of the six Creative Commons license, those that allow modification and redistribution. Academic institutions are increasingly realizing that access to and affordability of learning materials are problematic for students, and are a contributor to students dropping, failing, or withdrawing from courses. These institutions and the libraries within them are developing programmatic approaches to support creation, adoption, and adaptation of affordable course content and open educational resources. We see this occurring at all levels of education from K-12 to university, while our research covers only ARL institutions. We want you to know that many other institutions are actively exploring these topics as well. Regarding the spec survey, we wanted to know what libraries are doing. So we intentionally cast a wide net on the access, affordability, and student success initiatives related to course learning materials including both affordable course content and OER. And we focused on identifying collaborative campus-wide partnerships that are influential in starting and implementing such initiatives. So let's talk about the survey. The survey ran for six weeks in March and April 2016. Over half of ARL member institutions responded to the survey. Of these 46 or 70 percent of the respondents either have or are planning an initiative, and nearly 20 percent plan to investigate ACC and OER initiatives in the near future. We could have looked at only purely OER approaches but knew that some libraries, though not all, are formally leveraging library subscriptions, OER, and more in support of student learning. So we broadened our scope to include initiatives which utilize many types of potential course content including library license materials and materials with a low direct cost to students. There are various philosophical and pragmatic reasons for each approach which we won't get into here. We learned that 70 percent of respondents focus on a combination of openly licensed and library subscribed resources. Somewhat surprising was the finding that only 26 percent of institution initiatives indicated that they focus exclusively on openly licensed content. The campus-wide initiatives reported in response to the survey included open coursework initiatives, creation of digital course packs, interactive course companions, open or low cost textbook adoption, creation, and use of public domain openly licensed library subscribed materials. So who is initiating, implementing, and leading these kinds of initiatives? We're happy to say that libraries are very involved. Campus-wide ACC and OER initiatives tend to involve multiple members of the campus community both in origination and governance. We asked survey respondents to identify all of the entities that played a part in originating their initiative and those involved in implementing it. By far, and in both categories, libraries were the largest group. 64 percent of respondents indicated that their library was involved in originating their campus-wide initiative. And 73 percent indicated that the library is involved in implementing the initiative. For contrast, the second most frequent originators and implementers were upper level administration at 38 percent, and the campus teaching and learning group at 36 percent. While not I was involved, libraries are frequently involved and were nearly twice as likely to be involved than other groups. Other members of the campus community often involved included instructional design groups, student organizations, academic departments, and bookstores. Several respondents also mentioned collaboration among local, state, or province-wide library consortia. Organized governance of ACC OER initiatives appears to still be emerging with fewer than 40 percent of respondents indicating that they have a standing committee, limited term task force, or working group dedicated to the campus-wide ACC OER initiative. For those with a governing body, though, libraries were very well represented. 89 percent of respondents indicated that the library participates. Sorry, 89 percent of respondents with a governing board, governing group, indicated that the library participates in that body. And 40 percent of those indicated that the library leads that governing body. Now we'll hear from Kristi regarding program funding. I add my thanks to Anita for joining us today to talk about this topic. I'm going to talk a little bit here about what we learned about how ACC OER initiatives were funded. As you all probably know, academic libraries have been turning their attention to many new areas of support on campus, data management, publishing, interdisciplinary research, and more. And they frequently have to decide among these various competing priorities when determining how to allocate or reallocate funds and personnel. Despite these many competing priorities, numerous libraries have provided significant funding to support affordable course content and OER efforts we found from the survey. Over half of the responding institutions have utilized funds from their general operating budgets and about a quarter use special project funds. Less than a third of responding institutions indicated that external grants provided funding for their efforts. Once new efforts have been initiated, plans for continued support often indicate the perceived value and impact to date. In our survey we found out that three-fourths of institutions indicated that they have funding continuation plans in place for ACC OER on their campus. And it appears that the results then of these efforts are significant and valued. And this bodes well for continued growth both at participating institutions and those that are planning new efforts in this area. When asked what items funding covered, the most common use was to provide direct grants or stipends to faculty with almost three-fourths, evidently the magic number when it comes to this area of the survey, providing incentive grant programs. Given the interest in incentive grant programs and perhaps the perceived importance based on this interest, we wanted to highlight more information from the survey in this area. If you harken back to our early slides that Anita presented, you'll recall that 46 institutions have or are planning an ACC OER program. Of those 25 institutions, they indicate that they offer financial incentives as part of their program. The varying amounts might be tied to a number of factors. If you look at the data, you will see groupings in the $200 to $250 range. I suspect this might be related to institutional participation in the Open Textbook Network Workshop where faculty can earn that amount for attending and then writing a review of an open textbook. The next grouping ranges from $1,000 to $1,250 which would match up with many of the incentive programs aimed at helping faculty move from a traditional high-cost textbook to other alternatives, digital course packs, open textbooks, or OER contents and more. Finally, the very large grants are likely tied to the publication of open textbooks at several institutions. The promising thing about this wide variance in funding incentives is that you can begin small if needed and eventually move on to bigger projects as your program gains traction or more support in your library or on your campus. One final area of note, over half of the institutions offering incentives also provide instructional design support. This may be an expanding area for library interactions with faculty at some institutions and a little bit more on faculty incentive grants. The final thing we wanted to touch on related to faculty incentives are the types of requirements that are included with the provisions of the grants. Those who are thinking about implementing new grant funding programs might be interested in these requirements. Grant providers frequently had more than one requirement but these varied widely across institutions. You can see that there is broad interest in affordability savings data with over 60% of libraries requiring course size and textbook cost and 50% requiring continued project updates. Openly licensed content both development and use and sharing of content as well as assessment were other areas that demonstrate where we could expect to see additional impact with potential downstream use as well as savings to students. And now I'm going to hand the phone back to Anita when she'll talk about institutional policies and practices. Great. At many ARL institutions, tenure and promotion are primary faculty motivators. While several respondents indicated that selected departments look favorably on the ACC OER efforts and that faculty could argue for OER as a form of scholarship, exactly zero respondents indicated that adoption, adaptation, or creation of ACC OER is a formally encouraged tenure and promotion activity. Tenure and promotion policies do not formally encourage faculty adoption, adaptation, or creation of ACC OER. Yet, nearly all institutions, this is another area of institutional policy, that nearly all institutions have intellectual property policies that specify ownership and rights to original works including research works, curriculum, learning materials created as well as software. At times, IP policies pose a barrier for authors of instructional material who wish to affix an open license and share their work beyond the institution. A majority, 21 of 33 of respondents, fortunately reported clarity regarding faculty ownership of teaching material which implies for those faculty that it might be easy to openly license or share their original learning materials. However, other respondents described their institutional policies as complicated, dependent on how heavily university resources were used, determined by the class of employment, dependent on whether or not the university could monetize the original works created by the faculty or that the curriculum resources are owned jointly or exclusively by the institution. Faculty ownership of original learning software is even more murky than policies surrounding faculty ownership of original learning materials. So we have a ways to go here. Next, Joe is going to talk with us about current faculty ACC OER practices. Joe. Thank you, Anita. And thank you, I want to join everyone else in thanking you for participating today, especially so close to the beginning of the semester. So this is really focused on what current faculty practices are around ACC and OER at responding institutions. One of the benefits of ACC and OER adoption is an expansion or a potential expansion of the types of materials used in these courses. While current faculty practices at responding institutions look pretty traditional, there is some evidence that their portfolio of resources is expanding. The majority of faculty at responding institutions have adopted or created textual course content with the textbook at the top of that list. These data make supporting and using resources like OpenStacks and the Open Textbook Network a very good way for libraries interested in ACC and OER to get started. Majorities also use library license content and multimedia. I think we were all pleasantly surprised to see that so many institutions reported that faculty had created their own OER. The interest is there among many of our colleagues, and this opens up opportunities to help them share that content or to reuse the work of others before creating their own. On assessment, at the risk of assessment shaming, which is something I think that we as a profession in general and people like me with an assessment background in particular often do, it was clear from the results that assessment of these initiatives is an area of opportunity among respondents in particular and within libraries in general. Only 17 institutions were currently assessing their initiatives and another 19 planned to assess. The most common metrics used among the respondents were student savings and numbers of students using these resources, likely reflecting the focus on access and affordability as objectives for their initiatives. Obviously program objectives drive assessment, so the metrics selected at libraries interested in getting started with ACC and OER may differ. For those programs seeking to deliver pedagogical innovation through ACC and OER, adaption or creation, assessment of student learning or user experience with the generated resources are recommended metrics. Recent studies suggest that overall students in courses that use OER perform at a similar or slightly better level than their four-fee counterparts, so local assessment would focus more on locally developed resources and their impact. By combining cost reduction and pedagogical innovation, these initiatives also make student retention a potential objective, so metrics aligned with student retention may have interest in those cases. The survey then focused on overall library support services for ACC and OER. Institutions were asked to select all of the ACC and OER support services that they provide. As you can see, there was some variability, but a very nice suite of services available at many of the 42 institutions responding to this question. The surprise to me was the high number of libraries providing copyright and licensing consultations. For those interested in getting started, any of these services would serve as a good starting point. So finally, with regard to the services provided around ACC and OER, we asked respondents to indicate to the staff who support ACC and OER initiatives. Respondents were asked to select all of the departments in which ACC and OER initiatives were supported. Overall, initiatives have not found a single home, but in some ways these results reinforce the services that we just discussed. The four departments indicated above make good sense with scholar of the communication, likely providing the intellectual property and licensing and publishing services just discussed. Depending on the institution, liaisons can be doing outreach or serving and consulting roles. The same can be said of teaching and learning departments and public services and reference, likely helping to identify existing resources. In many ways, the multi-departmental mode within many libraries fits the model at the institutions where the library has the opportunity to partner with many units to administer these programs. There was great variation in the number of staff involved, likely depending on the model. At the low end of the range is a single open education or scholarly communication librarian. And at the high end of the range is an approach to ACC and OER that is fully embedded with the liaison or public service program. The median seems to be to be fit that multi-departmental model. So with that, I will transition to Chrissy and she will talk a little bit more about future library roles with ACC and OER. Thank you. So finally, we just want to talk a little bit about what we heard from our respondents about the future of library in this area. Future of libraries in this area. As you might expect, Anita, Joe, and I, with our interest in this, see many areas of potential growth for libraries going forward. Luckily, our survey respondents seem to confer with those leanings as well. It is clear that libraries have opportunities to provide, did I go forward? There we go. I went too far forward on the slides. It is clear that libraries have opportunities to provide strong leadership for ACC, OER programs and efforts. Libraries are often the sole leaders on campus but also are out and about working on campus with a variety of partners and collaborators. ACC, OER specialists and library liaisons can provide a voice for strong advocacy, promotion, and awareness raising about these topics and issues. The recent Hewlett sponsored Babson Report indicates growing faculty awareness of OER, but adoptions have not increased significantly. Also, tenure and promotion systems do not typically include or value work related to teaching with affordable open content or publishing the same. There is definitely more work to be done in this area, as Anita mentioned. Library participation spans both traditional roles like discovery and systems that provide ease of access and new roles including publishing and hosting open textbooks or other open content. Many institutions are making use of existing systems like institutional repositories, while others are installing and utilizing new systems like press books. And finally, OER ACC efforts provide opportunities for libraries to continue their historic collaborative behavior across institutions. In order to be strategic and effective, we do not want to be all be publishing the latest OER work and basic social work. Instead, we need to devise methods for communicating and sharing information that allows us to expand the breadth and depth of quality OER material available to our faculty. Finally, creating and sharing sustainable models for funding ACC OER will be needed if we hope to continue work in this area in the future. Along with sustainable models, robust assessment with standards that allow comparison across institutions will be needed as well. Overall, we were pleased to see the number of libraries that raise investing in ACC OER efforts. We believe the survey provides a blueprint that others can modify to fit their circumstances as they consider and implement new programs to fit the needs of their faculty and institutions. And that is the end of our presentation, and we welcome your questions. And thank you for taking the time to listen to us, but we'd really love to engage a little bit in conversation with all of you and find out what you're thinking about the survey and what questions you might have. So yes, please join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. We do have one here from Kim who asked if you got any further breakdowns on the sources for library funds. Any funds coming from collections or IT or other sources? So this is Anita. Kim, thanks for your question. The survey was essentially in two parts, and the questions about funding were directed toward the institution-wide initiatives. We're seeing sometimes funding coming from libraries, but funding sometimes coming from the provost office or coming from other units around campus. So we didn't dive deeply into how libraries themselves are funding this. Actually, Christy, you might have... No, I think that might not be correct. Well, I agree with Anita that we... When we were writing the survey, we had to make determinations about how much detail to go into. And I would say that we weren't able to provide that level of detail in this particular survey, but I do anecdotally know from many conversations that Anita and I and Joe have had with others that I think that when you ask the question in the chat box, you mentioned like collections or IT. I do know that some institutions have been using money from collections in order to support these efforts. And so I think when you look at the number of people involved in the departments and where they're coming from and you see how varied it is across the different institutions, as Joe was pointing out, I think the same thing just anecdotally, based on what we know from conversations with people, the same thing would be true for where libraries are pulling money to fund these sorts of efforts. So that doesn't give you an exact answer, but I do think it just varies. It's another one of those areas that varies widely. So for reference... Go ahead. Sorry. So for reference, this is question number eight when you have access to the full tax, there's a breakdown of everything that all of the comments and responses to that, but they're not library specific institution-wide. And the follow-up question is what kinds of grant sources are the universities using? So to my knowledge, the most common grant funding that was used were by institutions. So again, they didn't specify but just based on the institutions that I'm familiar with, one of the most common grant resources was early on the Open Textbook Network grant when that was the model that was available. I'm not familiar with a lot of other grant resources that are external to the universities that others have been able to get. It's a question that arises frequently. People ask where they might be able to get external funding, but I haven't seen any indication that folks have been able to get that kind of external money from other places. So this is the one thing I would add. It wasn't in our results quote, one emerging area for external funding just from the Gates Foundation. This seems to be an area where they're interested, but not at a single institution level. They seem to be really interested in what can be done at scale and looking at multiple institutions. So if you have the ability to partner with institutions, especially somewhat peers, but with differing maybe student profiles or different staffing factors, they seem to be interested in those types of programs as well. This is Anita again. I will say if you're wanting to look really broadly at lots of institutions, community colleges have benefited greatly from the Department of Labor grants, there are several foundations that are actively involved in supporting these kinds of initiatives at two-year institutions. So while those funds are not available for four years, there are good reasons why community colleges and junior colleges, two-year colleges, however you call them, are very active as well in this area. Karen asks, what did you find out about the appropriateness of the current type of library resources to serve the needs of the OER ACC initiatives? Karen, that's very controversial. There are people who are of two minds about this. One is to really prioritize affordability and then there are some with a strong philosophical commitment to try to not take on the cost of those things, take on the cost of resources, but to provide open alternatives that can be edited and freely shared without copyright restrictions. I think I would defer to Christy and Joe because you're more familiar with the nuts and bolts of actually using those materials. Would you like to comment? Could you clarify what you mean by appropriateness, Karen? I'm not sure that I... Is it that tension between affordable versus OER, or do you mean like do libraries own content that's appropriate for the classroom, or is there another nuance there? I'm not sure if I understand that part of the question. And if it's the latter, whether libraries have material that's appropriate for the classroom, I think we didn't ask that specifically, but if you look at responses to the middle section, the middle section is really hard to indicate, but there's a section on ACC and OER resources that indicate the types of resources that faculty are using. Just after that, there are questions related to where the library resources, licensed content fit into that mix. I think it varies a bit. One of the things also in the supporting documents, we were looking at the even repositories that libraries might support for OER content either created or used at the institution. And those vary. There are only a handful among the respondents that were really focused entirely on OER. In some ways these resources are embedded in other subscriptions or there are parts of other programs. The repository is a good example where there might be OER in the general institutional repository and not necessarily an OER repository. And so it's not necessarily the case that there's a lot of resources specifically for teaching and learning or for the classroom, but they're part of overall packages or other subscriptions in general. I guess I would add, this is Christy again, I would add to what Joe's saying by, and kind of commenting on what Anita was saying about there being philosophical differences. So both related to the survey and in the work that I do on a day-to-day basis, there's not OER available for every person who comes to me who's interested in doing something more affordable for their students. And I think that that is demonstrated by what Joe was talking about, the portion of the survey that indicates that faculty are embracing a wide variety of things that they're vetting and choosing the things that are best for them in the classroom. Adding on to that, again, I don't think that the survey addresses whether or not library collections in general have the sorts of content that work in the classroom, but my experience has been that it is the case that we do have a wide range of things that faculty are surprised to find out about and that help them customize the content, especially when they've been dissatisfied when the commercial textbook wasn't meeting their needs. And the last thing I would point out is I think one of the lessons from all the work around this particular survey and OER in general for me is you'd be surprised at how much is already in our collections or our resources. So Minnesota, because you could talk much more to this, but they do a really great job working with their bookstore of generating lists of what is being adopted in the classroom, running it against current licensing and then dropping that into course reserves. And it's a great model that if you can work with your bookstore to get those lists or just get those adoption lists or even target that, you'd be surprised at how much you're already licensing that's being used in the classroom and that can be pretty automatically dropped into the learning management system. Yeah, I think we had 400 courses in the spring semester that we had a multi-user ebook for. And we weren't on the forefront of this other, we learned about this from other institutions that were already doing this. But those kinds of partnerships, I think that's another thing that the survey emphasizes is the importance of the partnerships on campus to creating successful pieces that add up to a complete program. And I think the other thing that is kind of hopeful with regards to when you look at the survey information, if you haven't started work in this area, you don't have to do everything. You can pick and choose the things that are strategic for your institution and you don't have to implement things at full scale. You don't have to install press books and be publishing open textbooks that way. You can be creating open textbooks or modifying open textbooks and publish them via an existing institutional repository. I agree with... Go ahead. No, go ahead. I'm changing the subject here. Okay. I wanted to agree with Christie with regard to the realities of libraries already doing some of these things in various departments. And one of the early challenges that we had was trying to understand how we should ask questions to flesh out libraries who are in a very, very early stage of thinking about affordability and we're doing some of the regular things, reserves, multi-user e-books, things that are easier but might not be thought of as an initiative. So we really wanted to capture a lot of those and we think those are good places to start and to start looking at what you already do and is this something to build on? So, Leigh Ann. I was just wondering if there's anything more you can say about tenure and promotion and ACC, OER, there seems to be some interest in that. Sure. So right now, tenure policies don't seem to explicitly support creation, adoption, adaptation of openly licensed resources or public domain resources. We know that some faculty are getting departmental support. We know that some faculty are presenting their work in that area as a work of scholarship. And one of the other thoughts we had was this is one of the major distinctives between adoption, creation, adaptation at an R1 institution or a comprehensive university or an institution that's much more focused on teaching. So it's a barrier but it's also an opportunity. It'll be interesting to see if there are changes in the next few years or if we just learn to communicate with faculty about the importance or the value of these kinds of efforts. So I would add also that even though it's not explicit in most of the policies it seems to be a really significant area for opportunity. Things like the faculty incentive programs that we saw in the results, those types of programs help because obviously they can be competitive. Even if it's small, it's a small grant. Really the outcomes related to that, the reporting that is related to that can result in scholarship about teaching and learning for the faculty member. So even in an adoption, if those are the goals of a program, those incentive programs are a good way of getting faculty something out of it even in a traditional tenure and promotion environment. To change the topic again, Jennifer has a pretty nitty-gritty question of how do you get the books into the catalog and is it different if you have a shared catalog with other libraries? So I would just... I can't answer the catalog question but I think it's in the supporting documentation. I think it's the University of Hawaii who has an OER repository. And one of the things that they're doing there, they're using that as kind of a one-stop shop for anyone who's using OER even if it's not locally generated or created. And so if it's an open-fax textbook or anything from one of the other major services or programs or a neighboring institution, they will get it into that repository with some of the course information. Students can check there to see if their open content is available for their courses. And so that might be a model to explore. The other thing you'll see are these referatories where they won't necessarily grab a local copy of the resource because they change and that's one of the benefits of OER is that they can be updated but they will create stable links to whatever that resource is. But we'll do it outside of the cataloging because some of the flexibility that has to be involved in some of that. It's my understanding that some new mark records have been released. Anita, did you know anything about that from I thought the open textbook network was releasing some mark records? Yes, they have created through a partnership I believe with Colorado State. They've created a number of mark records. I assume that it's a large percentage of the collection. So those might be available for people to get a hold of if they want to get those books into their catalogs. So on the open textbook library website there is a link for our textbooks and underneath that it says Discovery and you can download the mark record batch which is really exciting. The other thing that I would point out and it's kind of anyway this isn't related to the surveys related to my experience but a lot of the work that I've done with faculty related to OER involves mediation. So discovering quality OER that my faculty have been willing to consider requires a bit of vetting on the front end. So I'm fine with introducing them to the open textbook library because that's a limited set that's been vetted but sending them to look for OER in general can be kind of precarious I think because there are so many different things out there that maybe don't meet the quality standards of the faculty and so I would prefer to go through the material and give them things to vet rather than have them unable to locate things that they think are worthwhile and then becoming discouraged and thinking that there's nothing that they would like to consider and kind of developing a negative attitude towards open educational resources. Sort of the difference between fishing in the ocean versus a smaller pond. The more we can curate and direct faculty to places where the more appropriate material more complete material is available is really helpful. It's really easy to get lost in trying to find what you're looking for. And there's quite a bit of dated material sometimes as well in some of the resources and so you have to decide whether dated material is okay. But you can update it. You can. Sometimes it looks like 1980s web pages. Yeah. Well, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today to discuss the results of this survey on affordable course content and open educational resources. We have recorded this presentation and all the registrants will receive the slides and a link to the recording next week. So join me in thanking our presenters today and I hope to see you on our next webcast. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much.


Hello everyone, good morning and welcome to the second in our four part series from Maine Audubon exploring the potential benefits of offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine, as well as its potential environmental impacts. Today, our second presentation called offshore wind and birds we are joined by Dr. Wayne Goodale from the science director at the biodiversity research Institute, and Dr. Roberto Albertani from Oregon State University. Before I introduce our two guests I'd like to talk a little bit about why Maine Audubon is hosting this series. More than a century of burning fossil fuels has already altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere, changing the climate we are accustomed to and throwing the natural world out of balance. Mainers are seeing these changes firsthand as evidenced by the scientifically measured three degrees warming trend in the state since 1895, a growing season which has lengthened by about 16 days. Since 1950 and a Gulf of Maine that is warming faster than almost any other water body on earth. These changes are impacting our wildlife loose populations are falling as the warmer winters are permitting the advancement of deadly ticks. Additionally, Southern species are showing up in Maine woods and waters, including Carolina Ren, Black Sea Bass, Lined Seahorse, and Red Bellied Woodpecker. Modern reports from the National Audubon Society predict that if the current rate of warming continues more than 106 of Maine's bird species will lose habitat by 2050, and some like our iconic common loon will be pushed out of their state breeding range entirely. We need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels or else Maine will no longer be Maine. At the top of the list of ways to achieve this is to convert to electric energy powered by renewable sources. Southern is a longtime supporter of renewable energy dating back to at least the 1970s when our Falmouth headquarters was built with passive solar and radiant heat and continuing through our current work supporting appropriately cited solar and terrestrial wind projects. Therefore, offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine, especially floating offshore wind is far greater than any other source with an estimated 156 gigawatts of energy available for conversion per year. To put that 156 gigawatt number in perspective that is more than 70 times the total amount of electricity used by the entire state of Maine in a year. The opportunity to produce such a large amount of clean renewable energy locally cannot be ignored and deserves full study. We understand that the build out of floating offshore wind, which is still an experimental technology would have impacts on both the environmental resource and the human use of the oceans. But we owe it to ourselves and to future manors to make every effort to meet our climate goals. That's why we are launching the series beginning last week with Dr. Habib Dogger from the University of Maine. We will be hosting two additional events on following Tuesdays and I hope you can join us for those. Next week on Tuesday April 6 at 1230pm we're hosting bat researcher Trevor Peterson from stand tech, as well as marine mammal experts to talk about offshore wind and the marine environment. Finally on April 13 at noon we'll be hosting Celia Cunningham the deputy deputy director of the governor's energy office to talk about the latest developments in the Gulf of Maine. Before we get started with our attendees I just want to remind you that we are on webinar format today, which means that we cannot see you or hear you just the panelists. If you have questions please put them down below in the Q&A box which is the two speech bubbles with the Q&A. And we're going to save all the questions for the end so we can make sure we get through our speakers today. And we are recording this it will be available on Maine Audubon's website probably either this afternoon or tomorrow. All right, let's get going today we are honored to be joined by two scientists working to understand and prevent turbine impacts to birds. Dr. Wing Goodale is the science director at the Biodiversity Research Institute, a main base organization which assesses emerging threats to wildlife and ecosystems through collaborative research and uses scientific findings to advance environmental awareness and informed decision makers. Welcome Wing Goodale. Dr. Roberto Albertani is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State. Dr. Albertani's research includes aerodynamics and stress analysis of flexible structures, high performance sailboat test testing techniques, fiber composites technology, micro air vehicles, biological flight mechanics, and most importantly for today's purposes, the environmental impact of wind energy. Welcome Dr. Albertani. Great, so I am going to without further ado turn it over to Dr. Goodale. Take it away. All right, great. So hopefully you can hear me and see my screen. We all good Nick. All right, great. So everyone really appreciate you joining us today, and I don't know if you've participated in some of the other webinars in Maine so I'm going to give a brief overview of what's going on on the East Coast, then put main in a context, discuss very briefly the negatives going on in Maine. Selena, Governor's Office will cover that more later in much greater detail in her presentation, and then focus mostly on what do we know about how birds respond to offshore wind. I'm going to move on to just give a little little background here and I'm sorry if some of this is review for some folks but I think it's very helpful to put the rapidly changing industry here in context. If some of you have seen onshore turbines they range in size of you know two and a half to 3.3 megawatts or so. You can see a picture of what those look like and to some degree in most locations so those turbines are limited in their size by some basic logistics of how you get large turbine components to the project site. Now with the offshore environment because turbines can be built basically at the edge of the shore and then taken via vessel to the site you can you're no longer constrained on the size of the turbines from a logistical standpoint. And because of that offshore wind turbines have been increasing significantly in size and in fact this this figure is you know already out of date these turbines are getting bigger and bigger by the day and we're now. There's discussions about turbines above 12 megawatts in size and what you're able to do with these larger turbines is we're able to get further offshore and reach into the greater wind resource. And so there's generally the sort of movement of getting further offshore and there are advantages to doing so from a production standpoint because generally speaking the further offshore you go the more wind there air there is and in some but certainly not all cases being further offshore starts to reduce conflicts. In different ways. So where's the wind this is a map that you may have seen already but it's just worth pointing out again is that a majority of the best wind in the United States is actually up in New England and in the Gulf of Maine. And that's why there's interest in the Gulf of Maine for offshore wind and it's up and down the East Coast as well. If you're keeping an eye to the news, there's a lot going on in the offshore wind world and yesterday, the Biden administration made a pretty significant announcement of a signaling strong support from the White House moving offshore wind forward, establishing 30 gigawatt by 30 goal. The vineyard wind final EIS has come out. So if you're interested in that you can check that out but there is a significant amount of movement forward to the south of us in the Gulf of Maine and offshore wind. There are eight leases, often Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and you can see vineyard wind there in the middle of that lease area and as we move down into New York. The blue area is owned by Equinor and that now has a power purchase agreement so that project has some real movement moving forward and one of the announcements. Let me go back actually one of the announcements that came out yesterday is those purple areas you can see there those are called call areas so those. This is in the center. Those are areas that are generally being considered for offshore wind with understanding that they need to be refined and something that came out yesterday was these areas starting to be refined and they will probably continue to be refined as we go forward. And then there are viable projects going all the way down to North Carolina right now and leases that are currently owned and moving forward in various ways. Further to the south these are more call areas and as far as I'm aware I don't think there are leases yet there. As you may remember from that wind map you're starting to get down into areas where the wind speed is not as high as up to the north. Just very briefly for what's going on in Maine there's a lot of different things that are going on. There was the Baldachi administration that was established to have a five gigawatt by 2030 goal for the Gulf of Maine that is not likely to be met, but that goal is out there and there's been various efforts through time to try to move towards that. Right now there's several things going on that's just worth knowing about. At the highest level there's interagency task force that's in sort of is nascent right now but we'll over the next five to probably seven years so it's going to be a longer process is a multi state effort to identify one of those are larger wind energy areas like we see to ourselves somewhere in the Gulf of Maine. So that's a federal state effort. Then we have the main offshore wind initiative. And this is comes from the state and from the Mills administration and sort of the key component of that moving forward right now is this roadmap effort and the roadmap effort is really looking at offshore wind from 360 degrees. Thinking through everything from supply chains to job creation to environmental considerations on how can the state best best approach this. There's been discussion I'm actually not sure its current status about a 10 year moratorium of offshore wind development in state water so that's out to three miles. Then there is the main researcher Ray and there's been various workshops ongoing about this and Selena I'm sure will provide more information about this and her talk. This is an effort by the state of Maine to identify a 16 square mile area within this area of interest you see here on the map. And there's an ongoing effort multi stakeholder effort right now to identify areas with least conflicts and the idea of this is going to be a project of, you know, approximately 10 turbines, and it will be set up so that there could be various research efforts to help understand specifically how floating off for when the main is influencing different resources and be able to use that in order to inform future projects. And then finally there's the main Aquaventus project which is off of Monhegan I'm sure you heard more about that last week from Dr. Dogger, and that's a one turbine project that is through a DOE initiative, and that is a demonstration project. And for those if you're interested if you just go to Google and type in Maine and offshore wind will take you to the main offshore wind website and here's a link to it can give you much more detail on what's going on. So what are the kind of the key components here of offshore wind we have the turbines we have cables that connect the electricity between the turbines and then eventually to a substation from that offshore substation we go from the cable to an onshore substation and then to the power line so on one hand there's sort of it's sort of fairly simple conceptually but each one of these components are areas that when we think about birds that we want to be aware of how these could birds interact with these different phases of our different portions of the projects. So what we have here in Maine is the traditional type of foundation that is used is a monopile or jacket foundation and this is essentially where you have, you know I sort of think of it of taking a nail and driving it into the sea floor and on top of that you put your, your lines, but in Maine our water is so deep and so quickly that we really are going to be looking towards floating types technology so semi submersible types designs like what University of Maine is working on that is anchored with catenary lines there's some other options of tension legs and spar buoys. What you're probably most interested in here is well what do we know about the effects of offshore wind birds and wildlife and I'm going to focus really here on birds but we're also dealing with an ecosystem so there's interaction that occur above water and below water. Probably what comes to mind for most folks is that there's a potential for collisions so this is where birds and bats can collide with the turbine blades themselves or the support structures. It's important to note that the actual number of fatalities that have been recorded offshore are very low is also important to note that as you may imagine this is a very hard and difficult thing in order to monitor successfully. There's also been some research in Europe and we'll get some more details on that on a certain set of birds are really have strong avoidance responses to turbines and that avoidance response can have two potential effects one is a potential displacement from a foraging area or was termed a barrier effect a basically a structure that the bird have to go around during migration or on their way to foraging areas. So below water and be expected that we're going to see some micro habitat changes so these new hard substrate that goes on the water is going to be a place for new benefit communities to develop and can be a place for fish aggregation so we're actually going to be seeing the habitat around the turbines and to some degree this is an area of open research of how will the birds respond to that habitat change. And there's also, this is really more about construction of traditional pile driven projects that there can be a lot of noise generated during that and those have the potential to affect marine mammals in particular, that's not my area of expertise and I want to note that floating projects will be the sort of the general thought is the turbines will primarily be constructed close to shore and then pulled out and anchored offshore so pile driving won't be a concern here in the Gulf of Maine. So I think one thing that's helpful is, at least for me, if you think of the sort of question of what are the impacts of offshore wind on birds, sort of big, that's a lot to digest and there's a real outcome and the basic risk approach that I think I found really helpful and it's looking at the risk in terms of hazards and vulnerability and exposure so hazards are you know what are the things that the birds are responding to so that's the physical turbines the wind farm itself vulnerability is so if the birds are present if they're exposed, are they going to be vulnerable to vulnerable to the offshore wind turbines. And as I already discussed a really kind of to kind of for adverse effects you want to consider both direct and indirect so indirect would be those displacement. So from a hazard perspective, you know, most of what we have learned about offshore wind comes from traditional pile driven turbines, that being said is probably the bird response the above water piece is probably relatively similar. So what are potential differences, there might be different type of reef effect that occurs. So that's the where fish might be attracted to the turbines there might be a different type of reef reef effect that occurs both here in the Gulf of Maine and also through a floating structure. Are there greater perching opportunities, and a really important note and we'll get into this and a little bit more is that a lot of what we've learned about avoidance comes from smaller turbines in Europe, and the turbines that would be considered here in the Gulf of Maine are going to be much larger in space much further apart. So how does that factor into avoidance behavior. Also here in the Gulf of Maine we need to consider the unique species assemblages that are here and also the unique geography of the area. So when we think about vulnerability to collision. These are difficult things to monitor offshore. And the way that researchers have approached this are sort of twofold one is directly trying to you actually detect collisions themselves, and Roberto is going to talk more about this and how to approach this. So this is an area of ongoing research and is a challenging area there's also been research around trying to understand what are the behaviors that make a species more or less vulnerable to collision so understanding flight heights and their flight speeds and basically also how many birds are going to be in an area and really importantly avoidance rates. Displacement is an area where there's actually been some very helpful studies that have given us an idea of which species are more likely to avoid projects and potentially be displaced by them. We talk about avoidance we we talk about in sort of three scales, we have macro which is a avoidance of the whole wind farm area meets so which is avoidance of individual turbines within a offshore wind farm, and then micro which are those last sort of moment avoidance responses that occur around the structure itself. So from a macro avoidance perspective, there's been some really seminal studies done in Europe of looking at loons and sea ducks in particular, and also ox and gannets that have looked at some pre construction work and post construction work with a before after gradient type design so that's where you're surveying a much larger area than the wind farm and you can look at how species distribution changes before and after and so you can see here from the macro avoidance work for loons and this is red throated loons the before and after of loon distribution with sort of that blue area being the concentrations and green areas being lower and you can see that loons really are not particularly interested in being near the offshore wind projects at all and in fact they can initiate avoidance response as far as 16.5 kilometers away and we've seen similar types of results for sea ducks. Looking like I'm kind of running low on time so I'm just going to sort of go through these last couple slides and then there'll certainly be opportunity for us to have conversation and ask questions in a bit. There's also some evidence to suggest for some species this idea of a barrier effects so during migration that the birds are going around. What's important to note for both displacement and barrier effect is that we have some pretty good idea of this response but what the potential impacts of that response remains a bit unclear on energetic consequences fitness consequences and ultimately will be a really good idea to get at. As we look at here at the Gulf of Maine. We have a really complex and dynamic ecosystem with some really unique qualities that we're both have southern and northern species we have listed species we have breeding seabirds here that aren't nesting to the south and we also have migratory birds and bats that are actually expected to be crossing. Across the the Gulf this this map here that we see here first is the MDAT maps of all species put together that shows you sort of overall higher and lower use areas that are predicted for 47 species. We also look to models developed from tracking data so this is northern Gannet in the fall and shows their higher and lower use areas as they're moving through this area during migration. More and more we're learning about how birds are crossing the Gulf and we now have pretty good information about falcons, songbirds, shorebirds and bats potentially moving across the Gulf and some of you may have seen this but I think it's a pretty interesting new finding that we, my colleague Krista Sorbo at BRI puts highlight transmitters on peregrine falcons and we track their migration across the Gulf of Maine and we can see them moving right through across the Gulf of Maine. As we start to consider the area of interest, we have a variety of useful tools from the Northeast data portal and this all comes from these bird distribution models that developed by NOAA and we can see varying use of the area by state listed species, species with higher collision or displacement risk and rosie turn which is certainly of particular interest because it is a listed species and I think with that I will finish up. Excellent. Thank you very much Dr. Goodell and we will turn it over to Dr. Albatani. Remember we are saving all our questions at the end. Please put them into the Q&A box below and I will stop talking so we can continue on. Thank you Dr. Alright, so I'm going to share my screen. Okay, so I hope that everybody can see my screen, the presentation. Well, thanks first to Maine Audubon, to Nick to organize this thing, a great presentation from Dr. Goodell was very interesting to know what's going on on the northeast coast. We in the northwest, Pacific Northwest, we are also active with offshore, with energy and wave energy, especially Oregon State. Anyway, I'm going to start right away, so this is just a brief outline. I'm going to cover a summary of two plus one project that have been funded with my team by the Department of Energy about detection of birds, a certain particular species that we will see applied to golden eagle or eagles and how to eventually deter them from getting too close to wind turbines. And finally, the main part of this project was how we can automatically detect events on blades, wind turbine, wind turbine blades. Very briefly, wind turbines are very machine that are quite large, and they could be with vertical axis shaft or horizontal axis shaft. The one on the sides of this slide are vertical shaft, the one in the middle is horizontal. So the shaft is spinning about the horizontal axis, which by the way now is the most popular and almost the only type of turbines that are out there, but just a brief perspective of history of engineering of wind turbines. There was a time that vertical shaft was popular and thought to be a good solution. Turbines are not almost never by running by themselves. They are organized in clusters or arrays or wind farms. These are just few pictures on a few arrays of wind farms. The turbines on the left, and I will talk about that particular turbine, turbine fuselage, is a GE 1.5 megawatt that is installed at the National Wind Technology Center, run by NREL, DOE, and we have used extensively the turbine for testing our systems. Very briefly, how the turbine works, there are these kind of gigantic blades converting kinetic energy from the wind to mechanical energy at the shaft. There are actually two shafts and there is a gearbox in between. There is the low speed shaft attached to the rotor. The main shaft runs through a gearbox. The gearbox multiplies the shaft speed, which is needed to run the electric generator. As far as a 2.5 typically, a typical wind turbine size now is about 2.5 megawatt. We have therefore a rotor diameter of about 100 meters. More important for our work, it means that the 50 or so meter long blade with the low speed rotor shaft spinning at about 18, 20 rounds per minute, it means that the tip of the blade runs at about 200 miles per hour, 225 miles per hour, which is 360 kilometers per hour. That's one of the main risk factors for birds and bats that are flying around. Those big blades that seem to run very, very slowly, they are indeed slow, but the velocity of the single section of the blade at the tip can be much higher than that. There is the, who in the world is producing most of energy. This is a 2015 slide data from DOE that was United States number one, second to second is China. I believe the now is reverse, but if we, this is the total production of single countries. If you look at the pro-capital production in 2012 data, Denmark was number one and followed by Spain, Portugal, and this is the anyway that the plot that showed the pro-capital, pro-capital production of wind energy. Where the wind energy is, I'm going to skip this slide because Dr. Goudel already gave a presentation about where the wind energy mainly is. Of course, this is the same or similar map from NREL that showed the potential of wind energy offshore and particularly the northeast coast of the United States, northwest, and of course there is the Tornado All in the center of the country, where it's not as high as offshore, but still is a high concentration of wind energy. So what is the motivation of our, my team work? We need to find out if blades are causing damages to birds or bats. On land, as probably most of you know, is the main way to understand and to do statistics is just look at carcasses on land, which already give some uncertainties due to scavengers. All these carcasses, if they are, they may disappear for just the weather or scavengers, and of course it's practically impossible to do the same methodology offshore. So there is no carcass count offshore. So how we can try to understand statistics on blade events? That's exactly one of the three steps that we are going to present in this work. The first part of our work, again funded by DOE, was specifically tailored to eagles. That was the main scope of the funding and everything that I will show about detecting a bird coming toward the turbine is focused on eagle. As I will explain in a few slides, the same system could be trained to detect and recognize and identify basically any other species of bird or bats. So the three step approach are target detection and identification, deterrent, and blade impact automatic monitoring. So having an automatic system that will tell us with a very high probability of detecting if the blade stroke some kind of object during the motion. How the overall system is organized around the turbine? Again, this system has been tested on the ground in the lab, on the ground, and on the GE 1.5 at the National Wind Technology Center. So we have a 360 degrees field of view single camera on top of the turbine. Basically, we have a field of view that is all the way around the turbine horizontally and 180 degrees vertically. There is one camera that look all the airspace around the turbine. And this is used for two things. First, and I will show a slide in a few minutes, a general understanding of the fly activity around the turbine. And then it will specifically be used to detect an eagle coming toward the turbine. Then we try to design a system that will deter or frighten eagle coming too close to the turbine, which is very difficult by the way to scare eagles away, but we try. And then finally there is the blade number three and number four. There is our detection on what's going on at the blade level, and I'll show in a few slides how we do that. Okay, so we have a single camera in the panel of the hand is a commercial weather proof 360 degrees camera installed on the top of the turbine. This camera will again view all the airspace around the turbine 360 degrees horizontally that's how that picture on the on the second arrow shows what is the view from the camera. Remember, we are looking at everything around us. On the right, there is the the an eagle a golden eagle that was specifically the the objective of this project that we have been using to train an algorithm that will number one recognize if there is a moving target in the sky. Number two is that moving target is coming towards and closer to the to the turbine and finally try to identify the species. How do you do that. Well, I'm not a special computer specialist I am out of space and in the outer space engineering all my life but I have colleagues at Oregon State that are specialists in image, image data processing and the recognition. They've been using algorithm that are a sort of artificial intelligence they are called deep convolutional neural network basically is a very complicated algorithm that is able to recognize things from and from others. What is the main fear that the main action that is algorithm need training and for this we went to the two locations. Oops. Two locations in our Oregon where we have where we have. Where there are golden eagles that have been saved in the past and being trained. So we've been flying those two golden eagles over and over and over, taking videos with the camera. That is on the top of the missile of the turbine. And this is just one example of the video with the eagle flying by the camera. Remember, this is a 360 degree so we are looking everything everywhere around us. But the next slide will give you an example on how the camera will look at the scene on top of the turbine. We of course never ever flew any bird train or not train closer or anywhere around the turbine so we flew golden eagles in the field in their own area to different area in Oregon, then we took videos. This is a sample of the videos on the top of the turbine and we match the two videos to train the algorithm to recognize things and more videos we have and more and better train the algorithm would be. Now we are assumed that the system works and we have indeed the 90 plus percent of true positive and the temp about 1015% of false positive and and 90 so percent of true net negative so we are assuming that we have a system that can recognize a bird coming is indeed an eagle. What we do then well there are several ways to avoid troubles with the bird coming around the turbine one typical way that we do not we have not a system that is shut down the turbine or put the turbine in a low energy mode so basically we spin slower or just shut down the turbine is not very desirable for several reasons like of course lots of lots of energy. So we put the blades and the raw and and the rotor. In a suck in a with more loads which is not exactly the best way so we we think we thought to study the feature that. was annoyed by anthropomorphic figures around the ground so we thought to use what we call kinetic kinetic deterrent which is basically those wind socks or wind dancers that you can maybe see typically on the outside the car dealer so we we have studied a system that can run several of these wind dancer with different colors colors were selected with the from another team sponsored by DOE to study the physiology of the eagle. So they suggested as colors that according to their study their research are the most annoying for eagles so we can run a certain number of kinetic deterrent on on on the ground. We did a lot of tests in the wind tunnel at OSU on the on the van just to see how they these wind, these deterrent reacts with wind, and we can run a number of them in random way, and this will be these are run automatically by the computer system when the camera and the camera go in the tech that we the an eagle is coming automatically the system we start to run all these these deterrents on on the ground. We file a scientific collect collection permit with the Oregon wildlife and Cali and Idaho wildlife. So we did some to test campaign or these deterrents in the present of wild eagle with all the permit and everything we were just not harming the body with just where we just deploy one or two that the deterrent when the wild eagle were flying around we have sort of relatively positive results but in the end after to the deployment in two different the same are in Oregon in the two different time of the year we really could not tell that it was not enough data not enough test not enough encounter to really tell if the deterrent will make a difference. So we have now a system that can identify a species coming specifically an eagle, we could have a system with the, the, the, the deterrent, but the, the, the core of the, or the problem is okay, whatever system you have to deter or whatever system you have try to avoid impact like shut down or whatever other idea you have to look at interactions between birds bats and Thorbine, what is the real effective effective result of that so we need something that will that will detect if the blade had any impact with with with something. So we, we had the idea to use the vibrations on blades vibration that will be induced by an impact of the blade on something. So of course, vibration runs along a solid. The blade is a solid and because it's a fiberglass with some carbon fiber inside for the last blade but mainly fiberglass the fibers conduct vibrations very very well. So we put some sensors at the root of each blade, the sensor will monitor continuously for vibrations on the blades and with other specialized algorithm. We will be able in real time to detect if there was a spike in vibration that probably was due to an impact on the blade. So vibrations are the key measurement for us. The spike in vibration will activate automatically a micro camera that is on the same sensor that is that is a picture on the bottom right the the all these sensors are in a box the box as also a micro camera looking at the leading edge of the blade like the picture on the on the top right. So, and the camera continuously monitor the blade, but only when only when there is a strike detected by the sensor will tell to the camera to the computer to save a certain number of frames of the video before and after the impact. Those frames like the one at the bottom right is a frame automatically saved when the the blade at the GE 1.5 in Boulder Colorado at the National Wind Technology Center at the strike with a tennis ball. Why tennis ball. Well, because we need it. We need some way to to to simulate birth impact on the blade. So my students had a really, really fun. I had the fun to to design a Canon, a compressed Canon or cutting is called potato launcher or potato gun or something like that. So with that Canon, we were shooting tennis balls and small potatoes toward the rotor and we had a certain number of events and the graph on the bottom left shows an example of the vibration the continuous vibration recorded by the system because blades are continuously affected by vibration for the normal turbine operation. But when there is a strike there is a spike in the vibration and again we detect automatically that spike and the camera on board this is a just a recording this by the way is another GE 1.5 at the at the community college in New Mexico that we also use for testing. So the camera is continually looking at the blade like the video there, but only when the strike is detected the images will be saved for species recognition and event confirmation. So species recognition is fundamentally important of course for in our system. Moreover, for specifically for night births and baths, we are right now is a new project experimenting and we think that we will be able to deploy this new system in the mid-May again in Boulder, Colorado, we will have a high resolution infrared camera mounted on the rotor blade that will operate similarly to the daylight camera, but specifically for nocturnal vision. And finally, the same 360 camera that is on top of the NACER will also be used as a general general, higher space, general surveillance around wind turbines. And with this I think I conclude my presentation with this Eagle Detection, the Terrain System and more important, Blade Event Automatic Detection System. And with this I think I can close my talk and open for questions. Excellent. Thank you so much Dr. Albertani. Thank you so much Dr. Goodell. Let's take some questions now and I would like to invite my colleague Eliza Donahue if she would like to be on for this section in case there are questions about Maine Audubon. Let's just dive into it. First, Dr. Goodell, if I could ask you to talk a little bit more about what's known about the threats to migratory, say, passerines, smaller simbers and things over the Gulf, are they what do we know maybe about the heights that they fly or the sort of the threat that turbines may pose in the Gulf? Yeah, great question. So thinking back to that sort of simple risk matrix, the couple of things we want to consider first is so exposure, when are the birds out there and how are they out there? And we certainly know that some species like black pole warblers are going to leave the Gulf of Maine, the coast of Maine over the Gulf of Maine and fly south down to the Caribbean and areas down there. Other species may be making those kind of jumps across the Gulf that we saw with like the Peregrine Falcon map that I showed. So we certainly know that the species are out there. How are they differentiating their use across the entire Gulf? Are they using some areas more than others? I'd say that's an area that we don't have a lot of information. I think the assumption is that there's going to be greater use for some species closer to shore, but you will get those sort of cutoffs going across the Gulf. As some of you may know that there's different ways to track wildlife and learn about them. And songbirds are so small that we can't put satellite transmitters on them that give you that detailed information. But there's been some really interesting work with a kind of technology called MODIS tags or nano tags. There's these tiny little VHF transmitters that we can put on the birds. And their signal gets picked up by receiver stations that are set up around the Gulf of Maine. And there's been research on songbirds that's gone up and down through time. Starting actually over on Nova Scotia and down through the Gulf of Maine. So we have a sense of that the birds are moving around. One interesting thing though, we think of migration in our head as this sort of directional continual movement of birds just, hey, they're all heading south. But some of the things that we've learned in this nano tag work is that the birds do all sorts of weird things, right? So another way that we can learn about their use offshore is weather radar or next rad radar. If any of you have checked out unfiltered next rad radar on a evening when there is in September and there's a cold front after a rainy period, it's pretty amazing to see what looks like this eruption of like thunderstorms along the coast of Maine. And that's where we're seeing songbirds starting to move offshore. So we do have some general understanding of their movement offshore. So to the question of flight heights, that's a hard one. There's some radar work that was done on Monhegan in which we saw differential use through the air column of songbird use, but that's likely to be different offshore. And, you know, Adrian Laphole of the IF&W is considering this a lot. One thing she thinks about is how the birds are ascending and descending from the islands. So the further that you get from shore, the assumption is that the birds are getting higher. So they're going up. And their altitude of flight is going to be relative to the weather. So in those sort of traditional cold fronts, the assumption is the birds are probably getting pretty high. They're getting up there and they're cooking along. The areas of concern happen when those birds have been hunkered down for a while because of poor weather. They're heading out. And then another system comes in that pushes them down. So they're going to, as a cloud cover comes in, they're going to be becoming lower. How does that put them at risk is, you know, remains an open question offshore, but certainly one of the important things is reducing lighting. So, you know, these birds evolved to navigate using a variety of cues, but they certainly evolved with having only the moon and stars as lighting out there. And so when there's, and there's many records that there are lighthouses of migrants being attracted to lighthouses. So large white lights are not good at all. And some of the work in Germany, Athena once saw a lot of attraction of some songbirds to an area that was really lit up. So we're able to really minimize those potential effects by reducing lighting at the turbine themselves. And the good news is that the traditional FAA lighting that is flashing reds are lights that the birds are attracted to us. And that's probably more than you wanted, but I will. That's fantastic. That's really important. Dr. Albert I have a question here from Sally about, do you think your detection cameras can catch smaller birds or how do you see, you know, use a tennis ball in the test which was interesting. And how do you think that those land based tests might transfer to offshore sites. Thank you for the questions. Cameras can, we are now experimenting cameras with higher resolution. And of course, you know, the, the evolution of electronic so fast that the answer is yes, I think we can definitely catch any size of birds actually just by using the camera maybe we are now using more than one camera with different resolution and field field of view. Problem is camera supposed to be triggered by the spike of the of the of the event and the smaller the bird or the lower kinetic energy or the lower speed of the blade, the spikes going to be lower and lower. And the, the, the ultimate solution would probably be having the camera running continuously, which again with the model with the evolution of electronic we can compress the data. So definitely small birds and small bats. Yes. And could be also using nighttime with infrared cameras. And we don't think there will be much difference between land and offshore for all these systems will be just a difference in the in in environmental conditions but I don't think there will be any any fundamental difference in the systems. Question, more of a general question I think for Dr good else. As we are moving forward with, you know, research turbines in the Gulf and a researcher Ray coming up. Do you think that we will know what we need to know. In other words, do you think that the, what do what what should the turbines or what should scientists make sure we look at as we are entering these research and test phases. To make sure that we are accurately understanding the impacts of birds and then eliminating them, mitigating them, etc. A great question. A long conversation, but some, there's certain things that we can learn without structures out there through surveys and some of this, some types of tracking. But for some species, we really need structures out there in order to affix various sensor equipment to them. And so I think that's sort of two helpful ways to think about this what can we learn in the absence of structures and what can we learn with structures in place and then the absence of structures we can get a baseline understanding of what birds are out there when through sort of traditional survey methodologies and that's very helpful and in the Gulf of Maine. We really don't have recent information on this, and this is an important thing that we collectively need to do in this space is to get new baseline data we have a hodgepodge of data from 1978 to present through the Gulf of Maine but it's and that's what's been used in these predictive maps, the MDAT maps that are available on the portal so that's helpful predictive models are helpful but we really don't have recent information here. So number one, we've got to get the baseline surveys. So secondly, then the question is what what can we learn from a research array. And I think it's helpful to think about that first in a technology monitoring technology testing phase. So taking the kind of technology that we heard from from Roberto and thinking, can we test that out on a research array in the same way that NREL allows access to turbines that kind of access is not necessarily even possible in a commercial scale project so having access to test different technologies being able to manipulate the turbines themselves attach things to it all sorts of things that are just not going to be that feasible and commercial project so that's number one. Number two having technology out there so that we can learn about say what the activity of nocturnal migrants offshore. Obviously, when you're doing basic survey work you're doing that during daylight hours and getting information on those nocturnal migrants is not really possible so having sensor technology out there some of the nanotags that we talked about is really and then maybe the last piece to consider is sort of the ecological side is considering the relationship between what's going on underwater and above water and having interdisciplinary studies that help us understand that relationship because one of the tricky things with anything like this is that you can do your best to predict what's going to happen, but you're putting a novel structure in the water and that's going to change what's happening out there and it's going to change how wildlife are responding so. And then we have unique species a unique situation here in the Gulf of Maine and we need to use the research array in order to learn on these initial turbines, how wildlife responding so that as you move forward to more commercial scale projects that you can take what's been done such as things like spacing as you change spacing does that allow for quarters and movement for birds between the turbines and starts to reduce this concern about displacement and how to tell us. Thank you very much. Dr Albertani a couple other questions about detection or avoidance possibilities out there. One is that the possibility of using sound to potentially cause avoidance and and another one is, is there an option for potential avoidance measures that are sort of running continuously not maybe waiting for an event or or birds to come near. All right. Thank you again for the questions sound. Yes and no. Our work and I am an engineer not biology so I just read the things about the turning for birds and it turned out that sound will not work for eagle. And again I say go because that was the specific objective of our study sound may work for other birds is actually there is a very famous I learned company in Oregon close by where we are here. That is a specific that is specialized making sound the turn and for bird that seems to be very successful with certain bird species for crops, protecting crops and other things so sound for certain species I understand is certainly a possibility. Of course we need to think about the scale wind farms and wind turbines are so vast and so large that generating enough sound for those big large areas. I don't could be a little kind of child child challenging. So sound I would say yes and no running continuously the monitoring. Yes, is certainly a possibility, but running videos for each blade continuously generates a enormous amount of data, and there will be problematic to process or to store those data for a continuous monitoring. As I mentioned with the improving technology of memory and the algorithm that will compress the data, it could probably be an option instead of activate the video only when an event is detected so yes it's probably a possibility in the near future to have a continuous running video. Thank you. So I'm aware of the time here and I want to take just one more question I, I urge you if you have additional questions to email them to me. I can put my email in the chat. Because there are a lot more questions the other things I will say and my lights are flickering for some reason. So there are some questions here about other things that can be done in the Gulf or other measures that are taken. I encourage you to register for the additional presentations in our series so next week we have presentation on benefit communities and marine mammals. I want to talk a little bit more about what happens under water and under, you know, on the, on the subsurface. And then finally, the governor's energy office, silly Cunningham is joining us on April 13. And that's a great time to ask questions about, you know, other things can be that we will learn from the research array and how we make sure we are we are researching those things and asking the right questions. Please join there you can just go to main Audubon and register for those programs and we'd love to have you. I just I guess I want to ask one last question for for Dr. Goodale which is about what about birds diving under water. Is there any potential threat there and our other understanding. Yeah great question I want to just follow up in the deterrent question to very quickly and please please. Birds are really smart, they habituate quickly. And, you know, I think one of the, the great things about Roberto is showing is having novel things that shock the birds so that they see something new and response if you have things running continuously the birds are more particularly birds like gulls are very smart and they're going to become accustomed to it. And also more anecdotal I heard that you know this is a real issue at airports right. And I heard a whole variety of methods. You know, I think it was a Navy they spent a ton of money on this and what they found out was the best deterrent was to have somebody walk with their little terrier around the periphery of the airport, every so often. And that was more effective than any light show or sounds or anything else at deterring birds. So that sort of that predator out there is what helps so I'm sorry Nick what was your, what was the question underwater birds diving birds, right. You know, I think that a lot of the birds that are diving birds, some of them are the ones that avoid projects so your, your seed ox, your gannets, your ox, our species that tend to avoid something that has started to show up in European countries is seed ox will initially avoid projects, but then as the new new food resource becomes available to them they can be attracted in and potentially be foraging on muscles that are available. Now the base of the turbines. So I think this is like one area if we think about the research array is understanding how things change through time and how birds are going to respond to that through time it's, you're not. To do a study just in the first several years is going to be very helpful but one thing that the research array can allow for is longer term studies and look at how changes of that ecology around those turbines are going to affect foraging opportunities for the birds. During construction for traditional pile driven, you know the sound attenuation, probably what's going to happen is the birds will avoid the area, as will pray. So they're probably going to avoid that potential hazard. So that's a great area for continued research as we go forward. There is much to learn. Thank you very much to both Dr Albertani Dr Goodell for your presentations today or really appreciate your time and the work that you are doing. Everyone thanks for joining. It's great to have you on this video will be available on our website soon and please join us for our two following presentations. Thanks again to our presenters and have a great day everyone. Thank you.


Hello everyone! It's your day, it's your day, and today I want to talk to you about a topic that I've been very interested in lately. Well, I know that I've said it in my official Facebook page that I've made a grammar lesson last night, but I'll do that tomorrow, because I really want to discuss this topic with you. Because I really want to discuss it for a long time, but I don't know how I've ever started the conversation, but now I suppose that I have to say the topic of this video blog. And the topic is the fact that I've made a huge mistake in Esperanto. For example, when I first spoke Esperanto, I noticed that maybe you were active Esperantists in the local movement, but there were many more views, and at first I thought that maybe it was just a local problem, maybe it wasn't the same in other parts of the world, but then I started to talk to other Esperantists from around the world, and I heard from almost everyone that it was the same thing, that and that. There were many more views, and then I started to think, it seems that the difference between views and views in Esperanto is actually very big. And then I didn't think that much about it, and I thought that maybe it's not that big, maybe it's 40% of the views, and 60% of the views. It can't be that big, but when I first started this channel, the difference was not that big, it wasn't really a difference, but one after another, when my channel grew much more, the difference between the two, the views and the views, increased much more. And for example, now in my channel, only 10% of all the subscribers are actually viewers, and maybe it's because my face doesn't like other people, because I just said that one person was very strange, but he didn't like the views, but maybe it's not that big, maybe it's really that big, or that big difference between the views and the views. And if that's true, I think that we, the Esperantists, should do something to change that, because of course, Esperantism is a good thing, when the whole language almost appears to only one sex, we really have to change that, and if it's really that big, why can't we change it? First, I suppose that maybe I have to ask you all, if you take a part in your local movement, does the difference between the views and the views is that big, and if it's really that big, and we hear from all the people, that it's really that big, then maybe a big society like the U.E.A. has to be a commission on foreign affairs, or something else, because really, the difference is so big, we have to change it. And I suppose that's all. I know that maybe some of you think, that you simply want to find an Esperantist, but no, I don't want to find one, I have a wife, she doesn't like that, but I have a second wife, I just want to start a conversation. So that's all, if you liked this film, like it, share it, subscribe to my channel, if you haven't subscribed yet, and I'll see you in the next film, and if you're not there, I'll find you, and I'll see you in the next film.