Search results for: conventional extraction

Authors: Felipa De Mello-Sampayo

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Background: The aim of this study is to undertake, from a patient perspective, an economic analysis of presurgical teledermatology, comparing it with a conventional referral system. Store-and-forward teledermatology allows surgical planning, saving both time and number of visits involving travel, thereby reducing patients’ out-of-pocket expenses, i.e., costs that patients incur when traveling to and from health providers for treatment, visits’ fees, and the opportunity cost of time spent in visits. Method: Patients’ out-of-pocket expenses-effectiveness of presurgical teledermatology were analyzed in the setting of a public hospital during two years. The mean delay in surgery was used to measure effectiveness. The teledermatology network covering the area served by the Hospital Garcia da Horta (HGO), Portugal, linked the primary care centers of 24 health districts with the hospital’s dermatology department. The patients’ opportunity cost of visits, travel costs, and visits’ fee of each presurgical modality (teledermatology and conventional referral), the cost ratio between the most and least expensive alternative, and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio were calculated from initial primary care visit until surgical intervention. Two groups of patients: those with squamous cell carcinoma and those with basal cell carcinoma were distinguished in order to compare the effectiveness according to the dermatoses. Results: From a patient perspective, the conventional system was 2.15 times more expensive than presurgical teledermatology. Teledermatology had an incremental out-of-pocket expenses-effectiveness ratio of €1.22 per patient and per day of delay avoided. This saving was greater in patients with squamous cell carcinoma than in patients with basal cell carcinoma. Conclusion: From a patient economic perspective, teledermatology used for presurgical planning and preparation is the dominant strategy in terms of out-of-pocket expenses-effectiveness than the conventional referral system, especially for patients with severe dermatoses.

Keywords: economic analysis, out-of-pocket expenses, opportunity cost, teledermatology, waiting time

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Authors: Akash K. Walunj, Dipendu Bhunia, Samarth Gupta, Prabhat Gupta

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Coupled shear walls consist of two shear walls connected intermittently by beams along the height. The behavior of coupled shear walls is mainly governed by the coupling beams. The coupling beams are designed for ductile inelastic behavior in order to dissipate energy. The base of the shear walls may be designed for elastic or ductile inelastic behavior. The amount of energy dissipation depends on the yield moment capacity and plastic rotation capacity of the coupling beams. In this paper, an analytical model of coupling beam was developed to calculate the rotations and moment capacities of coupling beam with conventional reinforcement.

Keywords: design studies, computational model(s), case study/studies, modelling, coupling beam

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Authors: B. Kabane, G. G. Redhi

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An ammonium based ionic liquid (methyltrioctylammonium chloride) [N_{8 8 8 1}] [Cl] was investigated as an extraction potential solvent for volatile organic solvents (in this regard, solutes), which includes alkenes, alkanes, ketones, alkynes, aromatic hydrocarbons, tetrahydrofuran (THF), alcohols, thiophene, water and acetonitrile based on the experimental activity coefficients at infinite THF measurements were conducted by the use of gas-liquid chromatography at four different temperatures (313.15 to 343.15) K. Experimental data of activity coefficients obtained across the examined temperatures were used in order to calculate the physicochemical properties at infinite dilution such as partial molar excess enthalpy, Gibbs free energy and entropy term. Capacity and selectivity data for selected petrochemical extraction problems (heptane/thiophene, heptane/benzene, cyclohaxane/cyclohexene, hexane/toluene, hexane/hexene) were computed from activity coefficients data and compared to the literature values with other ionic liquids. Evaluation of activity coefficients at infinite dilution expands the knowledge and provides a good understanding related to the interactions between the ionic liquid and the investigated compounds.

Keywords: separation, activity coefficients, methyltrioctylammonium chloride, ionic liquid, capacity

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Authors: A. Novikova, L. Rocchi, G. Startiene

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Market and non-market outputs are produced jointly in agriculture. Their supply depends on the intensity and type of production. The role of agriculture as an economic activity and its effects are important for the Lithuanian case study, as agricultural land covers more than a half of country. Positive and negative externalities, created in agriculture are not considered in the market. Therefore, specific techniques such as stated preferences methods, in particular choice experiments (CE) are used for evaluation of non-market outputs in agriculture. The main aim of this paper is to present construction of the research path for evaluation of non-market farming system outputs in Lithuania. The conventional and organic farming, covering crops (including both cereal and industrial crops) and livestock (including dairy and cattle) production has been selected. The CE method and nested logit (NL) model were selected as appropriate for evaluation of non-market outputs of different farming systems in Lithuania. A pilot survey was implemented between October–November 2018, in order to test and improve the CE questionnaire. The results of the survey showed that the questionnaire is accepted and well understood by the respondents. The econometric modelling showed that the selected NL model could be used for the main survey. The understanding of the differences between organic and conventional farming by residents was identified. It was revealed that they are more willing to choose organic farming in comparison to conventional farming.

Keywords: choice experiments, farming system, Lithuania market outputs, non-market outputs

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Authors: Selfa Johnson Zwalnan, Nanchen Nimyel Caleb, Gideon Duvuna Ayuba

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Air conditioning accounts for a significant share of the overall energy consumed in residential buildings. Solar thermal gains in buildings account for a significant component of the air conditioning load in buildings. This study compares the solar thermal gain and air conditioning load of a proposed building design with a typical conventional building in the climatic conditions of Jos, Nigeria, using a combined experimental and computational method using TRNSYS software. According to the findings of this study, the proposed design building's annual average solar thermal gains are lower compared to the reference building's average solar heat gains. The study case building's decreased solar heat gain is mostly attributable to the somewhat lower temperature of the building zones because of the greater building volume and lower fenestration ratio (ratio of external opening area to the area of the external walls). This result shows that the innovative building design adjusts to the local climate better than the standard conventional construction in Jos to maintain a suitable temperature within the building. This finding means that the air-conditioning electrical energy consumption per volume of the proposed building design will be lower than that of a conventional building design.

Keywords: building simulation, solar gain, comfort temperature, temperature, carbon foot print

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Authors: Muhammad Aji Fajari, Ririt Aprilin Sumarsono

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Particular instability of structural building under lateral load (e.g earthquake) will rise due to irregularity in vertical and horizontal direction as stated in SNI 03-1762-2012. The conventional slab has been considered for its less contribution in increasing the stability of the structure, except special slab system such as flat slab turned into account. In this paper, the analysis of flat slab system at Sequis Tower located in South Jakarta will be assessed its performance under earthquake. It consists of 6 floors of the basement where the flat slab system is applied. The flat slab system will be the main focus in this paper to be compared for its performance with conventional slab system under earthquake. Regarding the floor plan of Sequis Tower basement, re-entrant corner signed for this building is 43.21% which exceeded the allowable re-entrant corner is 15% as stated in ASCE 7-05 Based on that, the horizontal irregularity will be another concern for analysis, otherwise vertical irregularity does not exist for this building. Flat slab system is a system where the slabs use drop panel with shear head as their support instead of using beams. Major advantages of flat slab application are decreasing dead load of structure, removing beams so that the clear height can be maximized, and providing lateral resistance due to lateral load. Whilst, deflection at middle strip and punching shear are problems to be detail considered. Torsion usually appears when the structural member under flexure such as beam or column dimension is improper in ratio. Considering flat slab as alternative slab system will keep the collapse due to torsion down. Common seismic load resisting system applied in the building is a shear wall. Installation of shear wall will keep the structural system stronger and stiffer affecting in reduced displacement under earthquake. Eccentricity of shear wall location of this building resolved the instability due to horizontal irregularity so that the earthquake load can be absorbed. Performing linear dynamic analysis such as response spectrum and time history analysis due to earthquake load is suitable as the irregularity arise so that the performance of structure can be significantly observed. Utilization of response spectrum data for South Jakarta which PGA 0.389g is basic for the earthquake load idealization to be involved in several load combinations stated on SNI 03-1726-2012. The analysis will result in some basic seismic parameters such as period, displacement, and base shear of the system; besides the internal forces of the critical member will be presented. Predicted period of a structure under earthquake load is 0.45 second, but as different slab system applied in the analysis then the period will show a different value. Flat slab system will probably result in better performance for the displacement parameter compare to conventional slab system due to higher contribution of stiffness to the whole system of the building. In line with displacement, the deflection of the slab will result smaller for flat slab than a conventional slab. Henceforth, shear wall will be effective to strengthen the conventional slab system than flat slab system.

Keywords: conventional slab, flat slab, horizontal irregularity, response spectrum, shear wall

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Authors: Tamanna Goyal, Divya Bansal, Sanjeev Sofat

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In world-threatening terrorist attacks, where early detection, distinction, and prediction are effective diagnosis techniques and for functionally accurate and precise analysis of terrorism data, there are so many data mining & statistical approaches to assure accuracy. The computational extraction of derived patterns is a non-trivial task which comprises specific domain discovery by means of sophisticated algorithm design and analysis. This paper proposes an approach for similarity extraction by obtaining the useful attributes from the available datasets of terrorist attacks and then applying feature selection technique based on the statistical impurity measures followed by clustering techniques on the basis of similarity measures. On the basis of degree of participation of attributes in the rules, the associative dependencies between the attacks are analyzed. Consequently, to compute the similarity among the discovered rules, we applied a weighted similarity measure. Finally, the rules are grouped by applying using hierarchical clustering. We have applied it to an open source dataset to determine the usability and efficiency of our technique, and a literature search is also accomplished to support the efficiency and accuracy of our results.

Keywords: association rules, clustering, similarity measure, statistical approaches

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Authors: Afzaal Bashir, Sunaina Afzaal

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Background: Facial contour deformities associated with pigmentary changes are of major concern for plastic surgeons, both being important and difficult in treating such issues. No definite ideal treatment option is available to simultaneously address both the contour defect as well as related pigmentation. Objectives: The aim of the current study is to compare the long-term effects of conventional adipose tissue grafting and ex-vivo expanded Mesenchymal Stem Cells enriched adipose tissue grafting for the treatment of contour deformities with pigmentary changes on the face. Material and Methods: In this study, eighty (80) patients with contour deformities of the face with hyperpigmentation were recruited after informed consent. Two techniques i.e., conventional fat grafting (C-FG) and fat grafts enriched with expanded adipose stem cells (FG-ASCs), were used to address the pigmentation. Both techniques were explained to patients, and enrolled patients were divided into two groups i.e., C-FG and FG-ASCS, per patients’ choice and satisfaction. Patients of the FG-ASCs group were treated with fat grafts enriched with expanded adipose stem cells, while patients of the C-FGs group were treated with conventional fat grafting. Patients were followed for 12 months, and improvement in face pigmentation was assessed clinically as well as measured objectively. Patient satisfaction was also documented as highly satisfied, satisfied, and unsatisfied. Results: Mean age of patients was 24.42(±4.49), and 66 patients were females. The forehead was involved in 61.20% of cases, the cheek in 21.20% of cases, the chin in 11.20% of cases, and the nose in 6.20% of cases. In the GF-ASCs group, the integrated color density (ICD) was decreased (1.08×10⁶ ±4.64×10⁵) as compared to the C-FG group (2.80×10⁵±1.69×10⁵). Patients treated with fat grafts enriched with expanded adipose stem cells were significantly more satisfied as compared to patients treated with conventional fat grafting only. Conclusion: Mesenchymal stem cell-enriched autologous fat grafting is a preferred option for improving the contour deformities related to increased pigmentation of face skin.

Keywords: hyperpigmentation, color density, enriched adipose tissue graft, fat grafting, contour deformities, Image J

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Authors: Min-Su Song, Haeng-Bok Kil, Eui-Rim Jeong

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This paper proposes a new method to reduce the overhead by pilots for single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) transmission. In the conventional SC-FDE transmission structure, the overhead by transmitting pilot is heavy because the pilot are transmitted at every SC-FDE block. The proposed SC-FDE structure has fewer pilots and many SC-FCE blocks are transmitted between pilots. The channel estimation and equalization is performed at the pilot period and the channels between pilots are estimated through linear interpolation. This reduces the pilot overhead by reducing the pilot transmission compared with the conventional structure, and enables reliable channel estimation and equalization.

Keywords: channel estimation, linear interpolation, pilot overhead, SC-FDE

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Authors: Bernadett Henn, Katalin Tálos, Éva Kováss Széles

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During the last 50 years, the worldwide permeation of the nuclear techniques induces several new problems in the environmental and in the human life. Nowadays, due to the increasing of the risk of terrorism worldwide, the potential occurrence of terrorist attacks using also weapon of mass destruction containing radioactive or nuclear materials as e.g. dirty bombs, is a real threat. For instance, the uranium pellets are one of the potential nuclear materials which are suitable for making special weapons. The nuclear forensics mainly focuses on the determination of the origin of the confiscated or found nuclear and other radioactive materials, which could be used for making any radioactive dispersive device. One of the most important signatures in nuclear forensics to find the origin of the material is the determination of the rare earth element patterns (REE) in the seized or found radioactive or nuclear samples. The concentration and the normalized pattern of the REE can be used as an evidence of uranium origin. The REE are the fourteen Lanthanides in addition scandium and yttrium what are mostly found together and really low concentration in uranium pellets. The problems of the REE determination using ICP-MS technique are the uranium matrix (high concentration of uranium) and the interferences among Lanthanides. In this work, our aim was to develop an effective chemical sample preparation process using extraction chromatography for separation the uranium matrix and the rare earth elements from each other following some publications can be found in the literature and modified them. Secondly, our purpose was the optimization of the ICP-MS measuring process for REE concentration. During method development, in the first step, a REE model solution was used in two different types of extraction chromatographic resins (LN® and TRU®) and different acidic media for environmental testing the Lanthanides separation. Uranium matrix was added to the model solution and was proved in the same conditions. Methods were tested and validated using REE UOC (uranium ore concentrate) reference materials. Samples were analyzed by sector field mass spectrometer (ICP-SFMS).

Keywords: extraction chromatography, nuclear forensics, rare earth elements, uranium

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Authors: Oluwasanmi Teniola, Abraham Adeleke, Ademola Ibitoye, Moshood Shitu

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To establish an economical and efficient process for the recovery of gold metal from refractory gold ore obtained from Esperando axis of Osun state Nigeria, the adsorption of gold (III) from aqua reqia leached solution of the ore using bagasse nanoparticles has been studied under various experimental variables using batch technique. The extraction percentage of gold (III) on the prepared bagasse nanoparticles was determined from its distribution coefficients as a function of solution pH, contact time, adsorbent, adsorbate concentrations, and temperature. The rate of adsorption of gold (III) on the prepared bagasse nanoparticles is dependent on pH, metal concentration, amount of adsorbate, stirring rate, and temperature. The adsorption data obtained fit into the Langmuir and Freundlich equations. Three different temperatures were used to determine the thermodynamic parameters of the adsorption of gold (III) on bagasse nanoparticles. The heat of adsorption was measured to be a positive value ΔHo = +51.23kJ/mol, which serves as an indication that the adsorption of gold (III) on bagasse nanoparticles is endothermic. Also, the negative value of ΔGo = -0.6205 kJ/mol at 318K shows the spontaneity of the process. As the temperature was increased, the value of ΔGo becomes more negative, indicating that an increase in temperature favors the adsorption process. With the application of optimal adsorption variables, the adsorption capacity of gold was 0.78 mg/g of the adsorbent, out of which 0.70 mg of gold was desorbed with 0.1 % thiourea solution.

Keywords: adsorption, bagasse, extraction, nanoparticles, recovery

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Authors: Tareq Nikzad

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Since the first bank was established in 1933, Afghanistan's banking sector has seen a number of variations but hasn't been able to grow to its full potential because of the civil war. The implementation of dual banks in Afghanistan is investigated in this study in relation to the effects of inflation and interest rates. This research took data from World Bank Data (WBD) over a period of nineteen years. For the banking sector, inflation, which is the general rise in prices of goods and services over time, presents considerable difficulties. The objectives of this research are to analyze the effect of inflation and interest rates on conventional and Islamic banks in Afghanistan, identify potential differences between these two banking models, and provide insights for policymakers and practitioners. A mixed-methods approach is used in the research to analyze quantitative data and qualitatively examine the unique difficulties that banks in Afghanistan's economic atmosphere encounter. The findings contribute to the understanding of the relationship between interest rate, inflation rate, and the performance of both banking systems in Afghanistan. The paper concludes with recommendations for policymakers and banking institutions to enhance the stability and growth of the banking sector in Afghanistan. Interest is described as "a prefixed rate for use or borrowing of money" from an Islamic perspective. This "prefixed rate," known in Islamic economics as "riba," has been described as "something undesirable." Furthermore, by using the time series regression data technique on the annual data from 2003 to 2021, this research examines the effect of CPI inflation rate and interest rate of Banking in Afghanistan.

Keywords: inflation, Islamic banking, conventional banking, interest, Afghanistan, impact

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Authors: Erol Bayraktarov, Asya Ilgun, Thomas Schickl, Alexandre Campo, Nicolis Stamatios

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Traditional means of harvesting honey are often stressful for honeybees. Each time honey is collected a portion of the colony can die. In consequence, the colonies’ resilience to environmental stressors will decrease and this ultimately contributes to the global problem of honeybee colony losses. As part of the project HIVEOPOLIS, we design and build a different kind of beehive, incorporating technology to reduce negative impacts of beekeeping procedures, including honey harvesting. A first step in maintaining more sustainable honey harvesting practices is to design honey storage frames that can automate the honey collection procedures. This way, beekeepers save time, money, and labor by not having to open the hive and remove frames, and the honeybees' nest stays undisturbed.This system shows promising features, e.g., high reliability which could be a key advantage compared to current honey harvesting technologies.Our original concept of fractional honey harvesting has been to encourage the removal of honey only from "safe" locations and at levels that would leave the bees enough high-nutritional-value honey. In this abstract, we describe the current state of our honey harvester, its technology and areas to improve. The honey harvester works by separating the honeycomb cells away from the comb foundation; the movement and the elastic nature of honey supports this functionality. The honey sticks to the foundation, because of the surface tension forces amplified by the geometry. In the future, by monitoring the weight and therefore the capped honey cells on our honey harvester frames, we will be able to remove honey as soon as the weight measuring system reports that the comb is ready for harvesting. Higher viscosity honey or crystalized honey cause challenges in temperate locations when a smooth flow of honey is required. We use resistive heaters to soften the propolis and wax to unglue the moving parts during extraction. These heaters can also melt the honey slightly to the needed flow state. Precise control of these heaters allows us to operate the device for several purposes. We use ‘Nitinol’ springs that are activated by heat as an actuation method. Unlike conventional stepper or servo motors, which we also evaluated throughout development, the springs and heaters take up less space and reduce the overall system complexity. Honeybee acceptance was unknown until we actually inserted a device inside a hive. We not only observed bees walking on the artificial comb but also building wax, filling gaps with propolis and storing honey. This also shows that bees don’t mind living in spaces and hives built from 3D printed materials. We do not have data yet to prove that the plastic materials do not affect the chemical composition of the honey. We succeeded in automatically extracting stored honey from the device, demonstrating a useful extraction flow and overall effective operation this way.

Keywords: honey harvesting, honeybee, hiveopolis, nitinol

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Authors: Stella O. Olubodun, George E. Eriyamremu

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The study assessed the effect of crude oil applied at rates, 0, 2, 5, and 10% on the fractional chemical forms and availability of some metals in soils from Usen, Edo State, with no known crude oil contamination and soil from a crude oil spill site in Ubeji, Delta State, Nigeria. Three methods were used to determine the bioavailability of metals in the soils: maize (Zea mays) plant, EDTA and BCR sequential extraction. The sequential extract acid soluble fraction of the BCR extraction (most labile fraction of the soils, normally associated with bioavailability) were compared with total metal concentration in maize seedlings as a means to compare the chemical and biological measures of bioavailability. Total Fe was higher in comparison to other metals for the crude oil contaminated soils. The metal concentrations were below the limits of 4.7% Fe, 190mg/kg Cu and 720mg/kg Zn intervention values and 36mg/kg Cu and 140mg/kg Zn target values for soils provided by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) guidelines. The concentration of the metals in maize seedlings increased with increasing rates of crude oil contamination. Comparison of the metal concentrations in maize seedlings with EDTA extractable concentrations showed that EDTA extracted more metals than maize plant.

Keywords: availability, crude oil contamination, EDTA, maize, metals

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Authors: So-Young Ju, Sung-Mi Jo, Eui-Rim Jeong

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In this paper, based on the conventional single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) structure, we propose a new SC-FDE structure to cope with narrowband jammer. In the conventional SC-FDE structure, channel estimation is performed in the time domain. When a narrowband jammer exists, time-domain channel estimation is very difficult due to high power jamming interference, which degrades receiver performance. To relieve from this problem, a new SC-FDE frame is proposed to enable channel estimation under narrow band jamming environments. In this paper, we proposed a modified SC-FDE structure that can perform channel estimation in the frequency domain and verified the performance via computer simulation.

Keywords: channel estimation, jammer, pilot, SC-FDE

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Authors: G. Çelik Gül, F. Kurtuluş

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Colemanite is the most common borate mineral, and the main source of the boron required by plants, human, and earth. Transition metals exhibit optical and physical properties such as; non-linear optical character, structural diversity, thermal stability, long cycle life and luminescent radiation. The doping of colemanite with a transition metal, bring it very interesting and attractive properties which make them applicable in industry. Iron doped calcium borate was synthesized by conventional solid state method at 1200 °C for 12 h with a systematic pathway. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive analyze (SEM/EDS) were used to characterize structural and morphological properties. Also, thermal properties were recorded by thermogravimetric-differential thermal analysis (TG/DTA). 

Keywords: colemanite, conventional synthesis, powder x-ray diffraction, borates

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Authors: Bilal Ahmed

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Rehabilitation of congenital and acquired maxillofacial defects is always a challenging clinical scenario. These defects pose major physiological and psychological threat not only to the patient but to the entire family. There has been an enormous scientific development in maxillofacial rehabilitation with the advent of CAD CAM, 3-D scanning, Osseo-integrated implants and improved restorative materials. There are also specialized centers with latest diagnostic and treatment facilities in the developed countries. However, in certain clinical case scenarios, conventional prosthodontic principles are still the gold standards. Similarly in a less developed world, financial and technical constraints are factors affecting treatment planning and final outcomes. However, we can do a lot of benefits to the affected human beings, even with use of simple and cost-effective conventional prosthodontic techniques and materials. These treatment strategies may sometimes be considered as intermediate or temporary options, but with regular follow-up maintenance these can be used on a definitive basis.

Keywords: maxillofacial defects, obturators, prosthodontics, medical and health sciences

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Authors: P. S. Rajinikanth, Shobana Mariappan, Jestin Chellian

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The objective of the study was to prepare and characterize a water-in-oil nano emulsion of 5-Fluorouracil (5FU) to enhance the skin penetration. The present study describes a nano emulsion of 5FU using Capyrol PGMC, Transcutol HP and PEG 400 as oil, surfactant and co-surfactant, respectively. The optimized formulations were further evaluated for heating cooling cycle, centrifugation studies, freeze thaw cycling, particle size distribution and zeta potential in order to confirm the stability of the optimized nano emulsions. The in-vitro characterization results showed that the droplets of prepared formulation were ~100 nm with ± 15 zeta potential. In vitro skin permeation studies was conducted in albino mice skin. Significant increase in permeability parameters was also observed in nano emulsion formulations (P<0.05). The steady-state flux (Jss), enhancement ration and permeability coefficient (Kp) for optimized nano emulsion formulation (FU2, FU1, 1:1 S mix were found to be 24.21 ±2.45 μg/cm2/h, 3.28±0.87 & 19.52±1.87 cm/h, respectively), which were significant compared with conventional gel. The in vitro and in vivo skin deposition studies in rat indicated that the amount of drug deposited from the nano emulsion (292.45 µg/cm2) in skin was significant (P<0.05) an increased as compared to a conventional 5FU gel (121.42 µg/cm2). The skin irritation study using rat skin showed that the mean irritation index of the nano emulsion reduced significantly (P<0.05) as compared with conventional gel contain 1% 5FU. The results from this study suggest that a water-in-oil nano emulsion could be safely used to promote skin penetration of 5FU following topical application.

Keywords: nano emulsion, controlled release, 5 fluorouracil, skin penetration, skin irritation

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Authors: S. B. Rathna Kumar, Sandya K. Varudhini, Aparna Ravichandran

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Telugu is a south central Dravidian language spoken in Andhra Pradesh, a southern state of India. The available speech identification tests in Telugu have been developed to determine the communication problems of individuals having a flat frequency hearing loss. These conventional speech audiometric tests would provide redundant information when used on individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss because of better hearing sensitivity in the low- and mid-frequency regions. Hence, conventional speech identification tests do not indicate the true nature of the communication problem of individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss. It is highly possible that a person with a high-frequency sloping hearing loss may get maximum scores if conventional speech identification tests are used. Hence, there is a need to develop speech identification test materials that are specifically designed to assess the speech identification performance of individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss. The present study aimed to develop speech identification test for individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss in Telugu. Individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss have difficulty in perception of voiceless consonants whose spectral energy is above 1000 Hz. Hence, the word lists constructed with phonemes having mid- and high-frequency spectral energy will estimate speech identification performance better for such individuals. The phonemes /k/, /g/, /c/, /ṭ/ /t/, /p/, /s/, /ś/, /ṣ/ and /h/are preferred for the construction of words as these phonemes have spectral energy distributed in the frequencies above 1000 KHz predominantly. The present study developed two word lists in Telugu (each word list contained 25 words) for evaluating speech identification performance of individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss. The performance of individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss was evaluated using both conventional and high-frequency word lists under recorded voice condition. The results revealed that the developed word lists were found to be more sensitive in identifying the true nature of the communication problem of individuals with high-frequency sloping hearing loss.

Keywords: speech identification test, high-frequency sloping hearing loss, recorded voice condition, Telugu

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Authors: Ali Reza Sattarzadeh, Ronny J. Kutadinata, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Van Thanh Huynh

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Traffic congestion has become a severe worldwide problem, affecting everyday life, fuel consumption, time, and air pollution. The primary causes of these issues are inadequate transportation infrastructure, poor traffic signal management, and rising population. Traffic flow forecasting is one of the essential and effective methods in urban congestion and traffic management, which has attracted the attention of researchers. With the development of technology, undeniable progress has been achieved in existing methods. However, there is a possibility of improvement in the extraction of temporal and spatial features to determine the importance of traffic flow sequences and extraction features. In the proposed model, we implement the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning models for mining nonlinear correlations and their effectiveness in increasing the accuracy of traffic flow prediction in the real dataset. According to the experiments, the results indicate that implementing Conv-LSTM networks increases the productivity and accuracy of deep learning models for traffic flow prediction.

Keywords: deep learning algorithms, intelligent transportation systems, spatiotemporal features, traffic flow prediction

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Authors: Jin-Lung Guan, Jyh-Cherng Gu, Chun-Wei Huang, Hsin-Hung Chang

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This investigation develops a revisable method for estimating the estimate value of equivalent 10 Hz voltage flicker (DV10) of a DC Electric Arc Furnace (EAF). This study also discusses three 161kV DC EAFs by field measurement, with those results indicating that the estimated DV10 value is significantly smaller than the survey value. The key point is that the conventional means of estimating DV10 is inappropriate. There is a main cause as the assumed Qmax is too small. Although DC EAF is regularly operated in a constant MVA mode, the reactive power variation in the Main Transformer (MT) is more significant than that in the Furnace Transformer (FT). A substantial difference exists between estimated maximum reactive power fluctuation (DQmax) and the survey value from actual DC EAF operations. However, this study proposes a revisable method that can obtain a more accurate DV10 estimate than the conventional method.

Keywords: voltage flicker, dc EAF, estimate value, DV10

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Authors: D. Pugazhenthi, B. Sree Vidya

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Cloud computing is one of the emerging technologies that enables end users to use the services of cloud on ‘pay per usage’ strategy. This technology grows in a fast pace and so is its security threat. One among the various services provided by cloud is storage. In this service, security plays a vital factor for both authenticating legitimate users and protection of information. This paper brings in efficient ways of authenticating users as well as securing information on the cloud. Initial phase proposed in this paper deals with an authentication technique using multi-factor and multi-dimensional authentication system with multi-level security. Unique identification and slow intrusive formulates an advanced reliability on user-behaviour based biometrics than conventional means of password authentication. By biometric systems, the accounts are accessed only by a legitimate user and not by a nonentity. The biometric templates employed here do not include single trait but multiple, viz., iris and finger prints. The coordinating stage of the authentication system functions on Ensemble Support Vector Machine (SVM) and optimization by assembling weights of base SVMs for SVM ensemble after individual SVM of ensemble is trained by the Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (AFSA). Thus it helps in generating a user-specific secure cryptographic key of the multimodal biometric template by fusion process. Data security problem is averted and enhanced security architecture is proposed using encryption and decryption system with double key cryptography based on Fuzzy Neural Network (FNN) for data storing and retrieval in cloud computing . The proposing scheme aims to protect the records from hackers by arresting the breaking of cipher text to original text. This improves the authentication performance that the proposed double cryptographic key scheme is capable of providing better user authentication and better security which distinguish between the genuine and fake users. Thus, there are three important modules in this proposed work such as 1) Feature extraction, 2) Multimodal biometric template generation and 3) Cryptographic key generation. The extraction of the feature and texture properties from the respective fingerprint and iris images has been done initially. Finally, with the help of fuzzy neural network and symmetric cryptography algorithm, the technique of double key encryption technique has been developed. As the proposed approach is based on neural networks, it has the advantage of not being decrypted by the hacker even though the data were hacked already. The results prove that authentication process is optimal and stored information is secured.

Keywords: artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA), biometric authentication, decryption, encryption, fingerprint, fusion, fuzzy neural network (FNN), iris, multi-modal, support vector machine classification

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Authors: Zharama M. Llarena

Abstract:

Green chemistry for plant extraction of active principles is the main interest of many researchers concerned with climate change. While classical organic solvents are detrimental to our environment, greener alternatives to ionic liquids are very promising for sustainable organic chemistry. This study focused on the determination of functional groups observed in the main constituents from the ionic liquid extracts of Coleus aromaticus Benth leaves using FT-IR Spectroscopy. Moreover, this research aimed to determine the best ionic liquid that can separate functionalized plant constituents from the leaves Coleus aromaticus Benth using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. Coleus aromaticus Benth leaf extract in different ionic liquids, elucidated pharmacologically important functional groups present in major constituents of the plant, namely, rosmarinic acid, caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid. In connection to distinctive appearance of functional groups in the spectrum and highest % transmittance, potassium chloride-glycerol is the best ionic liquid for green extraction.

Keywords: chlorogenic acid, coleus aromaticus, ionic liquid, rosmarinic acid

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Authors: Fatemeh Cheraghali, Saeedeh Shojaee-Aliabadi, Seyede Marzieh Hosseini, Leila Mirmoghtadaie

Abstract:

In recent years, the field of natural antimicrobial and antioxidant compounds is one of the main research topics in the food industry. Application of agricultural residues is mainly cheap, and available resources are receiving increased attention. Walnut green husk is one of the agricultural residues that is considered as natural compounds with biological properties because of phenolic compounds. In this study, maltodextrin 10% was used for microencapsulation of walnut green husk extract. At first, the extract was examined to consider extraction yield, total phenolic compounds, and antioxidant activation. The results showed the extraction yield of 81.43%, total phenolic compounds of 3997 [mg GAE/100 g], antioxidant activity [DPPH] of 84.85% for walnut green husk extract. Antioxidant activity is about 75%-81% and by DPPH. At the next stage, microencapsulation was done by spry-drying method. The microencapsulation efficiency was 72%-79%. The results of SEM tests confirmed this microencapsulation process. In addition, microencapsulated and free extract was more effective on gram-positive bacteria’s rather than the gram-negative ones. According to the study, walnut green husk can be used as a cheap antioxidant and antimicrobial compounds due to sufficient value of phenolic compounds.

Keywords: biopolymer, microencapsulation, spray-drying, walnut green husk

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Authors: Masni Mat Yusoff, Michael H. Gordon, Keshavan Niranjan

Abstract:

The study reports on the effect of aqueous enzymatic extraction (AEE) parameters on the Moringa oleifera (MO) oil yield and the formation of emulsion at the end of the process. A mixture of protease and cellulase enzymes was used at 3:1 (w/w) ratio. The highest oil yield of 19% (g oil/g sample) was recovered with the use of a mixture of pH 6, 1:4 material/moisture ratio, and incubation temperature, time, and shaking speed of 50 ⁰C, 12.5 hr, and 300 stroke/min, respectively. The use of pH 6 and 8 resulted in grain emulsions, while solid-intact emulsion was observed at pH 4. Upon fixing certain parameters, higher oil yield was extracted with the use of lower material/moisture ratio and higher shaking speed. Longer incubation time of 24 hr resulted in significantly (p < 0.05) similar oil yield with that of 12.5 hr, and an incubation temperature of 50 ⁰C resulted in significantly (p < 0.05) higher oil yield than that of 60 ⁰C. In overall, each AEE parameter showed significant effects on both the MO oil yields and the emulsions formed. One of the major disadvantages of an AEE process is the formation of emulsions which require further de-emulsification step for higher oil recovery. Therefore, critical studies on the effect of each AEE parameter may assist in minimizing the amount of emulsions formed whilst extracting highest total MO oil yield possible.

Keywords: enzyme, emulsion, Moringa oleifera, oil yield

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Authors: Karishma Chester, Sarvesh K. Paliwal, Sayeed Ahmad

Abstract:

Inab-us-salab also known as Solanum nigrum L. (Family: Solanaceae), is an important Indian medicinal plant and have been used in various unani traditional formulations for hepato-protection. It has been reported to contain significant amount of steroidal glycosides such as solamargine and solasonine as well as their aglycone part solasodine. Being important pharmacologically active metabolites of several members of solanaceae, these markers have been attempted various times for their extraction and quantification but separately for glycoside and aglycone part because of their opposite polarity. Here, we propose for the first time its fractionation and fingerprinting of aglycone (solasodine) and glycosides (solamargine and solasonine) in leaves and berries of S. nigrum using solvent extraction and fractionation followed by HPTLC analysis. The fingerprinting was done using silica gel 60F254 HPTLC plates as stationary phase and chloroform: methanol: acetone: 0.5% ammonia (7: 2.5: 1: 0.4 v/v/v/v) as mobile phase at 400 nm, after derivatization with antimony tri chloride reagent for identification of steroidal glycoside. The statistical data obtained can further be validated and can be used routinely for quality control of various solanaceous drugs reported for these markers as well as traditional formulations containing those plants as an ingredient.

Keywords: solanum nigrum, solasodine, solamargine, solasonine, quantification

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Authors: Mamiza Haq

Abstract:

This paper examines the relevance of bank capital and charter value on bank insolvency and liquidity risks. Using an unbalanced panel of 2,111 unique local banks across 22 countries over 1998-2012, we find that both bank capital and charter value lower insolvency and liquidity risks, but this effect varies among conventional, Islamic, and Islamic-window banks. The risk constraining effect of bank capital becomes more prominent in the post 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Moreover, the relationships vary when conditioned upon other key bank-specific characteristics. For instance, the effect of capital on risk-reduction diminishes in the presence of high charter value for conventional-G7 and Islamic-window banks, during-GFC and pre-GFC period; respectively. Our findings have important policy implications related to bank safety. The results are robust to a range of robustness tests.

Keywords: bank capital, charter value, risk, financial crisis

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Authors: Kay Thinzar Phu, Lwin Lwin Oo

Abstract:

In an intelligent transport system and advanced driver assistance system, the developing of real-time traffic sign detection and recognition (TSDR) system plays an important part in recent research field. There are many challenges for developing real-time TSDR system due to motion artifacts, variable lighting and weather conditions and situations of traffic signs. Researchers have already proposed various methods to minimize the challenges problem. The aim of the proposed research is to develop an efficient and effective TSDR in real time. This system proposes an adaptive thresholding method based on RGB color for traffic signs detection and new features for traffic signs recognition. In this system, the RGB color thresholding is used to detect the blue and yellow color traffic signs regions. The system performs the shape identify to decide whether the output candidate region is traffic sign or not. Lastly, new features such as termination points, bifurcation points, and 90’ angles are extracted from validated image. This system uses Myanmar Traffic Sign dataset.

Keywords: adaptive thresholding based on RGB color, blue color detection, feature extraction, yellow color detection

Procedia PDF Downloads 299

Authors: Jong-Jy Shyu, Soo-Chang Pei, Yun-Da Huang

Abstract:

In this paper, design of wide-range variable fractional-delay (WR-VFD) finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters is proposed. With respect to the conventional VFD filter which is designed such that its delay is adjustable within one unit, the proposed VFD FIR filter is designed such that its delay can be tunable within a wider range. By the traces of coefficients of the fractional-delay FIR filter, it is found that the conventional method of polynomial substitution for filter coefficients no longer satisfies the design demand, and the circuits perform the sinc function (sinc converter) are added to overcome this problem. In this paper, least-squares method is adopted to design WR-VFD FIR filter. Throughout this paper, several examples will be proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented methods.

Keywords: digital filter, FIR filter, variable fractional-delay (VFD) filter, least-squares approximation

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Authors: Zuoji Huang, Haiming Qian, Chunlin Wang, Jinyan Sun, Nan Xu

Abstract:

In this paper, the strategy to extract double road edge lines from acquired road stripe image was explored. The workflow is as follows: the road stripes are acquired by probabilistic boosting tree algorithm and morphological algorithm immediately, and road centerlines are detected by thinning algorithm, so the initial road edge lines can be acquired along the road centerlines. Then we refine the results with big variation of local curvature of centerlines. Specifically, the energy function of edge line is constructed by gradient feature and spectral information, and Dijkstra algorithm is used to optimize the initial road edge lines. The Snake model is constructed to solve the fracture problem of intersection, and the discrete dynamic programming algorithm is used to solve the model. After that, we could get the final road network. Experiment results show that the strategy proposed in this paper can be used to extract the continuous and smooth road edge lines from high-resolution remote sensing images with an accuracy of 88% in our study area.

Keywords: road edge lines extraction, energy function, intersection fracture, Snake model

Procedia PDF Downloads 331