Search results for: query performance

Authors: Wided Zerguine, Farid Habelhames

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The performance of photovoltaic devices with a light absorber consisting of a single-type conjugated polymer is poor, due to a low photo-generation yield of charge carriers, strong radiative recombination’s and low mobility of charge carriers. Recently, it has been shown that ultra-fast photoinduced charge transfer can also occur between a conjugated polymer and a metal oxide semiconductor such as SnO2, TiO2, ZnO, Nb2O5, etc. This has led to the fabrication of photovoltaic devices based on composites of oxide semiconductor nanoparticles embedded in a conjugated polymer matrix. In this work, Poly [2-methoxy-5-(20-ethylhexyloxy)-p-phenylenevinylene] (MEH-PPV), (6,6)-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) and titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (n-type) were dissolved, mixed and deposited by physical methods (spin-coating) on indium tin-oxide (ITO) substrate. The incorporation of the titanium dioxide nanoparticles changed the morphology and increased the roughness of polymers film (MEH-PPV/PCBM), and the photocurrent density of the composite (MEH-PPV/PCBM +n-TiO2) was higher than that of single MEHPPV/ PCBM film. The study showed that the presence of n-TiO2 particles in the polymeric film improves the photoelectrochemical properties of MEH-PPV/PCBM composite.

Keywords: photocurrent density, organic nanostructures, hybrid coating, conducting polymer, titanium dioxide

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Authors: Marinos Dimitropoulos, George Trakakis, Nikolaus Meyerbröker, Raphael Dalpke, Polina Angelova, Albert Schnieders, Christos Pavlou, Christos Kostaras, Costas Galiotis, Konstantinos Dassios

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Intended for purifying water, water separation technologies are widely employed in a variety of contemporary household and industrial applications. Ultrathin Carbon Nanomembranes (CNMs) offer a highly selective, fast-flow, energy-efficient water separation technology intended for demanding water treatment applications as a technological replacement for biological filtration membranes. The membranes are two-dimensional (2D) materials with sub-nm functional pores and a thickness of roughly 1 nm; they may be generated in large quantities on porous supporting substrates and have customizable properties. The purpose of this work was to investigate and analyze the mechanical characteristics of CNMs and their substrates in order to ensure the structural stability of the membrane during operation. Contrary to macro-materials, it is difficult to measure the mechanical properties of membranes that are only a few nanometers thick. The membranes were supported on atomically flat substrates as well as suspended over patterned substrates, and their inherent mechanical properties were tested with atomic force microscopy. Quantitative experiments under nanomechanical loading, nanoindentation, and nano fatigue demonstrated the membranes' potential for usage in water separation applications.

Keywords: carbon nanomembranes, mechanical properties, AFM

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Authors: I. M. B. Omiogbemi, D. S. Yawas, I. M. Dagwa, F. G. Okibe

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This work present the effects of some gas metal arc welding parameters on the corrosion behavior of austenitic stainless steel, exposed to 0.5M sodium hydroxide at ambient temperatures (298K) using conventional weight loss determination, together with surface morphology evaluation by scanning electron microscopy and the application of factorial design of experiment to determine welding conditions which enhance the integrity of the welded stainless steel. The welding variables evaluated include speed, voltage and current. Different samples of the welded stainless steels were immersed in the corrosion environment for 8, 16, 24, 32 and 40 days and weight loss determined. From the results, it was found that increase in welding current and speed at constant voltage gave the optimum performance of the austenitic stainless steel in the environment. At a of speed 40cm/min, 110Amp current and voltage of 230 volt the welded stainless steel showed only a 0.0015mg loss in weight after 40 days. Pit-like openings were observed on the surface of the metals indicating corrosion but were minimal at the optimum conditions. It was concluded from the research that relatively high welding speed and current at a constant voltage gives a good welded austenitic stainless steel with better integrity.

Keywords: welding, current, speed, austenitic stainless steel, sodium hydroxide

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Authors: Meriem Senani, Noureedine Ferhoune

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This paper presents the axial bearing capacity of thin welded rectangular steel stubs filled with concrete sand. A series of tests was conducted to study the behavior of short composite columns under axial compressive load, the cross section dimensions were: 100x70x2 mm. A total of 16 stubs have been tested, as follows: 4 filled with ordinary concrete appointed by BO columns, 6 filled with concrete witch natural sand was completely substitute a crystallized sand slag designated in this paper by BSI, and 6 others were tucked in concrete whose natural sand was partially replace by a crystallized sand slag called by BSII. The main objectives of these tests were to clarify the steel specimen's performance filled by concrete sand compared to those filled with ordinary concrete. The main parameters studied are: The height of the specimen (300mm-500mm), eccentricity of load and type of filling concrete. Based on test results obtained, it is confirmed that the length of the tubes, has a considerable effect on the bearing capacity and the failure mode. In all test tubes, fracture occurred by the convex warping of the largest, followed by the smallest due to the outward thrust of the concrete, it was observed that the sand concrete improves the bearing capacity of tubes compounds compared to those filled with ordinary concrete.

Keywords: concrete sand, crystallized slag, failure mode, buckling

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Authors: A. A. Vasin, N. V. Klassen, A. M. Likhter

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Water suspensions of in-organic (metals and oxides) and organic nano-objects (chitozan and collagen) were subjected to the treatment of direct and alternative electrical fields. In addition to quasi-periodical spatial patterning resonance-like performance of spatial distributions of these suspensions has been found at low frequencies of alternating electrical field. These resonances are explained as the result of creation of equilibrium states of groups of charged nano-objects with opposite signs of charges at the interparticle distances where the forces of Coulomb attraction are compensated by the repulsion forces induced by relatively negative polarization of hydrated regions surrounding the nanoparticles with respect to pure water. The low frequencies of these resonances are explained by comparatively big distances between the particles and their big masses with t\respect to masses of atoms constituting molecules with high resonance frequencies. These new resonances open a new approach to detailed modeling and understanding of mechanisms of the influence of electrical fields on the functioning of internal organs of living organisms at the level of cells and neurons.

Keywords: bio-polymers, chitosan, collagen, nanoparticles, coulomb attraction, polarization repulsion, periodical patterning, electrical low frequency resonances, transformations

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Authors: Chandra Prayaga, Aaron Wade, Lakshmi Prayaga, Gopi Shankar Mallu

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This paper presents the use of machine learning algorithms to predict the success of students in an introductory physics course. Data having 140 rows pertaining to the performance of two batches of students was used. The lack of sufficient data to train robust machine learning models was compensated for by generating synthetic data similar to the real data. CTGAN and CTGAN with Gaussian Copula (Gaussian) were used to generate synthetic data, with the real data as input. To check the similarity between the real data and each synthetic dataset, pair plots were made. The synthetic data was used to train machine learning models using the PyCaret package. For the CTGAN data, the Ada Boost Classifier (ADA) was found to be the ML model with the best fit, whereas the CTGAN with Gaussian Copula yielded Logistic Regression (LR) as the best model. Both models were then tested for accuracy with the real data. ROC-AUC analysis was performed for all the ten classes of the target variable (Grades A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D, F). The ADA model with CTGAN data showed a mean AUC score of 0.4377, but the LR model with the Gaussian data showed a mean AUC score of 0.6149. ROC-AUC plots were obtained for each Grade value separately. The LR model with Gaussian data showed consistently better AUC scores compared to the ADA model with CTGAN data, except in two cases of the Grade value, C- and A-.

Keywords: machine learning, student success, physics course, grades, synthetic data, CTGAN, gaussian copula CTGAN

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Authors: Amanda de Oliveira Ferreira Leite, Ana Luiza del Pino Ferreira, Bruna Garcez Correa, Janaíne de Souza Mello, Marla Manquevich, Mirna Wetters Portuguez

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Objective: We sought to investigate a neuropsychological intervention focused on improving cognition, psychological aspects, and quality of life of elderly people with mild cognitive impairment. Method: A controlled and randomized study, blind to the evaluator, was executed. We evaluated 78 elderly people, divided into the neuropsychological and control groups, through a semi-structured interview, Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination, Katz Index, Lawton and Brody Scale, Geriatric Depression Scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Personal Development Scale, WHOQOL-bref and WHOQOL--old. Results: After the intervention, the neuropsychological group showed improvement in the cognitive subtests and in the total score, reduction in the frequency of symptoms associated with anxiety and depression, better psychological well-being, and quality of life. The research highlights useful intervention strategies for improving the general condition of these patients and rehabilitating damaged areas. Conclusion: We concluded that there is a relationship between neuropsychological intervention and improvement in cognitive and psychological performance, as well as in the quality of life in elderly people with mild cognitive impairment.

Keywords: aging, mild cognitive impairment, neuropsychology, quality of life

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Authors: Md. Mizanur Rahman, Chu Chi Ming, Mohd Suffian Bin Misaran

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Chimney is an important part of the industries to remove waste heat from the processes side to the atmosphere. The increased demand of energy helps to restart to think about the efficiency of chimney as well as to find out a valid option to replace forced draft chimney system from industries. In this study natural draft chimney model is air flow rate; exit air temperature and pressure losses are studied through modification with wire mesh screen and compare the results with without wire mesh screen chimney model. The heat load is varies from 0.1 kW to 1kW and three different wire mesh screens that have pore size 0.15 mm2, 0.40 mm2 and 4.0 mm2 respectively are used. The experimental results show that natural draft chimney model with wire mesh screens significantly restored the flow losses compared to the system without wire mesh screen. The natural draft chimney model with 0.40 mm2 pore size wire mesh screen can minimize the draft losses better than others and able to enhance velocity about 54 % exit air temperature about 41% and pressure loss decreased by about 20%. Therefore, it can be decided that the wire mesh screens significantly minimize the draft losses in the natural draft chimney and 0.40 mm2 pore size screen will be a suitable option.

Keywords: natural draft dhimney, wire mesh screen, natural draft flow, mechanical engineering

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Authors: Mahdad M’hamed, Belaidi Idir

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This paper develops a meshless approach, called Element Free Galerkin (EFG) method, which is based on the weak form Moving Least Squares (MLS) of the partial differential governing equations and employs the interpolation to construct the meshless shape functions. The variation weak form is used in the EFG where the trial and test functions are approximated bye the MLS approximation. Since the shape functions constructed by this discretization have the weight function property based on the randomly distributed points, the essential boundary conditions can be implemented easily. The local weak form of the partial differential governing equations is obtained by the weighted residual method within the simple local quadrature domain. The spline function with high continuity is used as the weight function. The presently developed EFG method is a truly meshless method, as it does not require the mesh, either for the construction of the shape functions, or for the integration of the local weak form. Several numerical examples of two-dimensional static structural analysis are presented to illustrate the performance of the present EFG method. They show that the EFG method is highly efficient for the implementation and highly accurate for the computation. The present method is used to analyze the static deflection of beams and plate hole

Keywords: numerical computation, element-free Galerkin (EFG), moving least squares (MLS), meshless methods

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Authors: Yun-Tao Zhang, Jong-Yeop Bae, Whoi-Yul Kim

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Background modeling and subtraction in video analysis has been widely proved to be an effective method for moving objects detection in many computer vision applications. Over the past years, a large number of approaches have been developed to tackle different types of challenges in this field. However, the dynamic background and illumination variations are two of the most frequently occurring issues in the practical situation. This paper presents a new two-layer model based on codebook algorithm incorporated with local binary pattern (LBP) texture measure, targeted for handling dynamic background and illumination variation problems. More specifically, the first layer is designed by block-based codebook combining with LBP histogram and mean values of RGB color channels. Because of the invariance of the LBP features with respect to monotonic gray-scale changes, this layer can produce block-wise detection results with considerable tolerance of illumination variations. The pixel-based codebook is employed to reinforce the precision from the outputs of the first layer which is to eliminate false positives further. As a result, the proposed approach can greatly promote the accuracy under the circumstances of dynamic background and illumination changes. Experimental results on several popular background subtraction datasets demonstrate a very competitive performance compared to previous models.

Keywords: background subtraction, codebook model, local binary pattern, dynamic background, illumination change

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Authors: Mudavath Raju, Bhaskar Gugulothu, B. Rajendra Naik

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The rapid advances in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technology has resulted in the reduction of minimum feature size to sub-quarter microns and switching time in tens of picoseconds or even less. As a result, the degradation of high-speed digital circuits due to signal integrity issues such as coupling effects, clock feedthrough, crosstalk noise and delay uncertainty noise. Crosstalk noise in VLSI interconnects is a major concern and reduction in VLSI interconnect has become more important for high-speed digital circuits. It is the most effectively considered in Deep Sub Micron (DSM) and Ultra Deep Sub Micron (UDSM) technology. Increasing spacing in-between aggressor and victim line is one of the technique to reduce the crosstalk. Guard trace or shield insertion in-between aggressor and victim is also one of the prominent options for the minimization of crosstalk. In this paper, far end crosstalk noise is estimated with mutual inductance and capacitance RLC interconnect model. Also investigated the extent of crosstalk in capacitive and inductively coupled interconnects to minimizes the same through shield insertion technique.

Keywords: VLSI, interconnects, signal integrity, crosstalk, shield insertion, guard trace, deep sub micron

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Authors: Mbambu K. Shaloom, Biba Kalengo, Pierre Echard, Olivier Gilson, Tshiswaka Ngalula, Léonard Kabeya Mukeba Yakasham

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In this 21st century, while design and eco-construction continue to be governed by considerations of functionality, safety, comfort and initial investment cost. Today, the principles of sustainable development lead us to think over longer time frames, to take into account new issues and the operating costs of green energy. DR Congo (sub-Saharan Africa) still suffers from the unusability of certain bio-sourced materials (such as bamboo, branches, etc.) and the lack of energy, i.e. 9% of the population has access to electricity and 21% of access to water. Ecoconstruction involves the energy performance of buildings which carry out a dynamic thermal simulation, which targets the different assumptions and conventional parameters (weather, occupancy, materials, thermal comfort, green energies, etc.). The objective of this article is to remedy the thermal, economic and technical artisanal problems in an aqueous environment in the city of Kinshasa. In order to establish a behavioral model to mitigate environmental impacts on architectural modifications and low-cost eco-construction through the approach of innovation and design thinking.

Keywords: thermal comfort, bio-sourced material, eco-architecture, eco-construction, squatting, design thinking

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Authors: Femy M. Makkar, S. Chandrakaran, N. Sankar

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The concept of reinforced earth has been used in the field of geotechnical engineering since 1960s, for many applications such as, construction of road and rail embankments, pavements, retaining walls, shallow foundations, soft ground improvement and so on. Conventionally, planar geosynthetic materials such as geotextiles and geogrids were used as the reinforcing elements. Recently, the use of three dimensional reinforcements becomes one of the emerging trends in this field. So, in the present investigation, three dimensional geogrid is proposed as a reinforcing material. Laboratory scaled plate load tests are conducted on a model square footing resting on 3D geogrid reinforced sand bed. The performance of 3D geogrids in triangular and square pattern was compared with conventional geogrids and the improvement in bearing capacity and reduction in settlement and heave are evaluated. When single layer of reinforcement was placed at an optimum depth of 0.25B from the bottom of the footing, the bearing capacity of conventional geogrid reinforced soil improved by 1.85 times compared to unreinforced soil, where as 3D geogrid reinforced soil with triangular pattern and square pattern shows 2.69 and 3.05 times improvement respectively compared to unreinforced soil. Also, 3D geogrids performs better than conventional geogrids in reducing the settlement and heave of sand bed around the model footing.

Keywords: 3D reinforcing elements, bearing capacity, heavy, settlement

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Authors: Mohammed Buhaya

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Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the decision, implementation process and the outcomes of the introduction of the balanced scorecard in a developing country having particular regard to the impacts of agency and institutional, endogenous and exogenous. Design/methodology/approach: This study builds on a longitudinal explanatory case study, an institutional framework, especially Ter-Bogt and Scapens (2014) framework. Findings: Empirical findings drawn from a telecom company indicate that the dynamics of change of the company are influenced by the interconnection of external institutions and the company's situation and internal institutions encompassing issues of power, politics, and culture. Organizational practice introduced to secure external legitimacy is not always the case. The adoption of the balanced scorecard was the instrumental manner and had revolutionary change. Originality/value: In contrast to much previous research on management accounting practice, the paper analyses the process of change in one of developing country. The study also sheds new light on the power of religion as one of institutional logics and how this logic rises to potential to influence management accounting change among actors and achieving the company’s targets. This paper highlights how the culture and values can play a vital role in making the process of change smoother.

Keywords: balanced scorecard, institutional, management accounting practice, rules, and routines

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Authors: Li-Jun Zheng

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The use of drums as an accompanying instrument is a common phenomenon in traditional Chinese folk rituals and musical culture. Especially, some folk rituals construct ritual-related sounds and give them ritual-specific symbolic and meaningful systems through the combination and use of multiple percussion instruments. The Yue drum(岳鼓), an asymmetrically shaped thin waist drum, is currently used in Han Chinese Shigong（师公）rituals in Guangxi, China, and is an important ritual instrument in Shigong rituals. This paper examines the use of the Yue drum and other percussion instruments in Han Chinese Shigong rituals in Guangxi, China, and shows the current status of combining instrumental accompaniment forms with human voices in Shigong rituals. Through further analysis of the musical and dance forms of Han Chinese Shigong rituals, this paper shows how Han Chinese Shigong ritual performers construct the ritual field through "sound-human-dance" and further explains the relationship between the existing and fictitious performance fields in the rituals. In addition, this paper demonstrates the relationship between Han Chinese Shigong rituals and the religious beliefs they involve, such as Taoism and Buddhism. And it further explores how performers in Han Chinese Shigong rituals use Yue drums for the dual purpose of "entertaining the gods" and "entertaining the people".

Keywords: sound research, the Han Chinese Shigong ritual, the thin waist drum, folk beliefs, ritual music

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Authors: Fei Gao, Xinyang Dong, Yisu Ge, Shufang Lu, Libo Weng

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Vehicle color recognition plays an important role in traffic accident investigation. However, due to the influence of illumination, weather, and noise, vehicle color recognition still faces challenges. In this paper, a vehicle color classification network based on spatial cluster loss and channel attention mechanism (SCNet) is proposed for vehicle color recognition. A channel attention module is applied to extract the features of vehicle color representative regions and reduce the weight of nonrepresentative color regions in the channel. The proposed loss function, called spatial clustering loss (SC-loss), consists of two channel-specific components, such as a concentration component and a diversity component. The concentration component forces all feature channels belonging to the same class to be concentrated through the channel cluster. The diversity components impose additional constraints on the channels through the mean distance coefficient, making them mutually exclusive in spatial dimensions. In the comparison experiments, the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the public datasets, VCD, and VeRi, which are 96.1% and 96.2%, respectively. In addition, the ablation experiment further proves that SC-loss can effectively improve the accuracy of vehicle color recognition.

Keywords: feature extraction, convolutional neural networks, intelligent transportation, vehicle color recognition

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Authors: Samson Mil'shtein, Dhawal N. Asthana

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The presented heterostructure n-p-n bipolar transistor is comprised of Ge/GaAs heterojunctions consisting of 0.15µm thick emitter and 0.65µm collector junctions. High diffusivity of carriers in GaAs base was major motivation of current design. We avoided grading of the base which is common in heterojunction bipolar transistors, in order to keep the electron diffusivity as high as possible. The electrons injected into the 0.25µm thick p-type GaAs base with not very high doping (1017cm-3). The designed HBT enables cut off frequency on the order of 150GHz. The Ge/GaAs heterojunctions presented in our paper have proved to work better than comparable HBTs having GaAs bases and emitter/collector junctions made, for example, of AlGaAs/GaAs or other III-V compound semiconductors. The difference in lattice constants between Ge and GaAs is less than 2%. Therefore, there is no need of transition layers between Ge emitter and GaAs base. Significant difference in energy gap of these two materials presents new scope for improving performance of the emitter. With the complete structure being modelled and simulated using TCAD SILVACO, the collector/ emitter offset voltage of the device has been limited to a reasonable value of 63 millivolts by the dint of low energy band gap value associated with Ge emitter. The efficiency of the emitter in our HBT is 86%. Use of Germanium in the emitter and collector regions presents new opportunities for integration of this vertical device structure into silicon substrate.

Keywords: Germanium, Gallium Arsenide, heterojunction bipolar transistor, high cut-off frequency

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Authors: Karla Lienau, Rafael Müller, René Moré, Debora Ressnig, Dan Cook, Richard Walton, Greta R. Patzke

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The increasing demand for renewable energy sources and storable fuels underscores the high potential of artificial photosynthesis. The four electron transfer process of water oxidation remains the bottleneck of water splitting, so that special emphasis is placed on the development of economic, stable and efficient water oxidation catalysts (WOCs). Our investigations introduced cobalt carbodiimide CoNCN and its transition metal analogues as WOC types, and further studies are focused on the interaction of different transition metals in the convenient all-nitrogen/carbon matrix. This provides further insights into the nature of the ‘true catalyst’ for cobalt centers in this non-oxide environment. Water oxidation activity is evaluated with complementary methods, namely photocatalytically using a Ru-dye sensitized standard setup as well as electrocatalytically, via immobilization of the WOCs on glassy carbon electrodes. To further explore the tuning potential of transition metal combinations, complementary investigations were carried out in oxidic spinel WOC matrices with more versatile host options than the carbodiimide framework. The influence of the preparative history on the WOC performance was evaluated with different synthetic methods (e.g. hydrothermally or microwave assisted). Moreover, the growth mechanism of nanoscale Co3O4-spinel as a benchmark WOC was investigated with in-situ PXRD techniques.

Keywords: carbodiimide, photocatalysis, spinels, water oxidation

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Authors: K. T. Sun, Y. H. Tai, H. W. Yang, H. T. Lin

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This paper presented the technique of robot control by event-related potentials (ERPs) of brain waves. Based on the proposed technique, severe physical disabilities can free browse outside world. A specific component of ERPs, N2P3, was found and used to control the movement of robot and the view of camera on the designed brain-computer interface (BCI). Users only required watching the stimuli of attended button on the BCI, the evoked potentials of brain waves of the target button, N2P3, had the greatest amplitude among all control buttons. An experimental scene had been constructed that the robot required walking to a specific position and move the view of camera to see the instruction of the mission, and then completed the task. Twelve volunteers participated in this experiment, and experimental results showed that the correct rate of BCI control achieved 80% and the average of execution time was 353 seconds for completing the mission. Four main contributions included in this research: (1) find an efficient component of ERPs, N2P3, for BCI control, (2) embed robot's viewpoint image into user interface for robot control, (3) design an experimental scene and conduct the experiment, and (4) evaluate the performance of the proposed system for assessing the practicability.

Keywords: severe physical disabilities, robot control, event-related potentials (ERPs), brain-computer interface (BCI), brain waves

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Authors: Yu-Chen Luo, Wan-Tzu Yen, I-Ping Liu, Po-Hsuan Yeh, Yuh-Lang Lee

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The use of a Pt electrode leads to high catalytic efficiency in the ethanol electro-oxidation. However, the carbon monoxide (CO) released in the reaction will poison the Pt surfaces, lowering the electrocatalytic activity. In this study, composite electrodes are prepared to overcome the poisoning issue, and the related electro-oxidation behaviors are studied by surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy (SEIRAS) and cyclic voltammetry (CV). An electroless plating method is utilized to deposit Pt catalytic layers on the Pd film-coated FTO substrates. According to the SEIRAS spectra, the carbon dioxide signal of the Pt/Pd composite electrode is larger than that of the Pt one, whereas the CO signal of the composite electrode is relatively smaller. This result suggests that the studied Pt/Pd electrode has a better ability against CO poisoning. The CV analyses are conducted in alkaline environments, and current densities related to the ethanol oxidation in the forward scan (If) and to the CO poisoning in the backward scan (Ib) are measured. A higher ratio of If to Ib (If/Ib) usually represents a better ability against the poisoning effect. The If/Ib values are 2.53 and 2.07 for the Pt and Pt/Pd electrodes, respectively, which is possibly attributed to the increasing ability of CO adsorption of Pt electrode. Despite the lower If/Ib, the Pt/Pd composite electrode shows a higher ethanol oxidation performance in the alkaline system than the Pt does. Furthermore, its stability is also superior.

Keywords: cyclic voltammogram, electroless deposition, ethanol electro-oxidation, surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy

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Authors: Jiyaul Haque, Vandana Srivastava, M. A. Quraishi

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The amino acids based corrosion inhibitors 2-(3-(carboxymethyl)-1H-imidazol-3-ium-1-yl) acetate (Z-1),2-(3-(1-carboxyethyl)-1H-imidazol-3-ium-1-yl) propanoate (Z-2) and 2-(3-(1-carboxy-2-phenylethyl)-1H-imidazol-3-ium-1-yl)-3- phenylpropanoate (Z-3) were synthesized by the reaction of amino acids, glyoxal and formaldehyde, and characterized by the FTIR and NMR spectroscopy. The corrosion inhibition performance of synthesized inhibitors was studied by electrochemical (EIS and PDP), surface and DFT methods. The results show, the studied Z-1, Z-2 and Z-3 are effective inhibitors, showed the maximum inhibition efficiency of 88.52 %, 89.48 and 96.08% at concentration 200ppm, respectively. The results of potentiodynamic polarization (PDP) study showed that Z-1 act as a cathodic inhibitor, while Z-2 and Z-3 act as mixed type inhibitors. The results of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) studies showed that zwitterions inhibit the corrosion through adsorption mechanism. The adsorption of synthesized zwitterions on the mild steel surface was followed the Langmuir adsorption isotherm. The formation of zwitterions film on mild steel surface was confirmed by the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The quantum chemical parameters were used to study the reactivity of inhibitors and supported the experimental results. An inhibitor adsorption model is proposed.

Keywords: electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, green corrosion inhibitors, mild steel, SEM, quantum chemical calculation, zwitterions

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Authors: Rong-Terng Juang

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Autonomous vehicles offer the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare. However, fully automated cars might not be going to happen in the near further. To speed the adoption of the self-driving technologies, many governments worldwide are passing laws requiring data recorders for the testing of autonomous vehicles. Currently, the self-driving vehicle, (e.g., shuttle bus) has to be monitored from a remote control center. When an autonomous vehicle encounters an unexpected driving environment, such as road construction or an obstruction, it should request assistance from a remote operator. Nevertheless, large amounts of data, including images, radar and lidar data, etc., have to be transmitted from the vehicle to the remote center. Therefore, this paper proposes a data compression method of in-vehicle networks for remote monitoring of autonomous vehicles. Firstly, the time-series data are rearranged into a multi-dimensional signal space. Upon the arrival, for controller area networks (CAN), the new data are mapped onto a time-data two-dimensional space associated with the specific CAN identity. Secondly, the data are sampled based on differential sampling. Finally, the whole set of data are encoded using existing algorithms such as Huffman, arithmetic and codebook encoding methods. To evaluate system performance, the proposed method was deployed on an in-house built autonomous vehicle. The testing results show that the amount of data can be reduced as much as 1/7 compared to the raw data.

Keywords: autonomous vehicle, data compression, remote monitoring, controller area networks (CAN), Lidar

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Authors: Waleed A. Basuliman, Khalid S. AlSaleh, Mohamed Z. Ramadan

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Applying the anthropometric dimensions is considered one of the important factors when designing any human-machine system. In this study, the estimation of anthropometric dimensions has been improved by developing artificial neural network that aims to predict the anthropometric measurements of the male in Saudi Arabia. A total of 1427 Saudi males from age 6 to 60 participated in measuring twenty anthropometric dimensions. These anthropometric measurements are important for designing the majority of work and life applications in Saudi Arabia. The data were collected during 8 months from different locations in Riyadh City. Five of these dimensions were used as predictors variables (inputs) of the model, and the remaining fifteen dimensions were set to be the measured variables (outcomes). The hidden layers have been varied during the structuring stage, and the best performance was achieved with the network structure 6-25-15. The results showed that the developed Neural Network model was significantly able to predict the body dimensions for the population of Saudi Arabia. The network mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the root mean squared error (RMSE) were found 0.0348 and 3.225 respectively. The accuracy of the developed neural network was evaluated by compare the predicted outcomes with a multiple regression model. The ANN model performed better and resulted excellent correlation coefficients between the predicted and actual dimensions.

Keywords: artificial neural network, anthropometric measurements, backpropagation, real anthropometric database

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Authors: Bowei Yuan, Shi Li, Liuyang Song, Huaqing Wang, Lingli Cui

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Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have received extensive attention in the field of fault diagnosis. Many fault diagnosis methods use CNN for fault type identification. However, when the amount of raw data collected by sensors is massive, the neural network needs to perform a time-consuming classification task. In this paper, a mechanical fault diagnosis method based on vibration signal down-sampling and the improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network is proposed. Through the robust principal component analysis, the low-rank feature matrix of a large amount of raw data can be separated, and then down-sampling is realized to reduce the subsequent calculation amount. In the improved one-dimensional CNN, a smaller convolution kernel is used to reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity, and regularization is introduced before the fully connected layer to prevent overfitting. In addition, the multi-connected layers can better generalize classification results without cumbersome parameter adjustments. The effectiveness of the method is verified by monitoring the signal of the centrifugal pump test bench, and the average test accuracy is above 98%. When compared with the traditional deep belief network (DBN) and support vector machine (SVM) methods, this method has better performance.

Keywords: fault diagnosis, vibration signal down-sampling, 1D-CNN

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Authors: Despina Vamvuka, Despina Pentari

Abstract:

Forestry wastes are readily available in large quantities around the world. Based on European Green Deal for the deployment of renewable and decarbonized energy by 2050, as well as global energy crisis, energy recovery from such wastes reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very attractive. Gasification has superior environmental performance to combustion, producing a clean fuel gas utilized in internal combustion engines, gas turbines, solid oxide fuel cells, or for synthesis of liquid bio-fuels and value-added chemicals. In this work, pine needles, which are abundantly found in Mediterranean countries, were gasified by either steam or carbon dioxide via a two-step process to improve reactivity and eliminate tar, employing a fixed bed unit and a thermal analysis system. Solid, liquid and gaseous products from the whole process were characterized and their energy potential was determined. Thermal behaviour, reactivity, conversion and energy recovery were examined. The gasification process took place above 650°C. At 950°C conversion and energy recovery were 77% dry and 2 under a flow of steam and 85% dry and 2.9 under a flow of carbon dioxide, respectively. Organic matter was almost completely converted to syngas, the yield of which varied between 89% and 99%. The higher heating values of biochar, bio-oil and pyrolysis gas were 27.8 MJ/kg, 33.5 MJ/kg and 13.6 MJ/m3. Upon steam or carbon dioxide gasification, the higher heating value of syngas produced was 11.5 MJ/m3 and 12.7 MJ/m3, respectively.

Keywords: gasification, biomass, steam, carbon dioxide

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Authors: Anita Sadat Sadati Rostami, Reza Almasi Ghaleh

Abstract:

Surface electromyography (sEMG) offers important insights into muscle activation and has applications in fields including rehabilitation and human-computer interaction. The purpose of this work is to predict the degree of activation of two joints in the index finger using an LSTM-Transformer architecture trained on sEMG data from the Ninapro DB8 dataset. We apply advanced preprocessing techniques, such as multi-band filtering and customizable rectification methods, to enhance the encoding of sEMG data into features that are beneficial for regression tasks. The processed data is converted into spike patterns and simulated using Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron models, allowing for neuromorphic-inspired processing. Our findings demonstrate that adjusting filtering parameters and neuron dynamics and employing the LSTM-Transformer model improves joint angle prediction performance. This study contributes to the ongoing development of deep learning frameworks for sEMG analysis, which could lead to improvements in motor control systems.

Keywords: surface electromyography, LSTM-transformer, spiking neural networks, hand kinematics, leaky integrate-and-fire neuron, band-pass filtering, muscle activity decoding

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Authors: Endalamaw Ewnu Kassa, Ade Kurniawan, Ya-Fen Wu, Sajal Biring

Abstract:

Perovskite-based gas sensors represent a highly promising materials within the realm of gas sensing technology, with a particular focus on detecting ammonia (NH3) due to its potential hazards. Our work conducted thorough comparison of various solvents, including dimethylformamide (DMF), DMF-dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), dimethylacetamide (DMAC), and DMAC-DMSO, for the preparation of our perovskite solution (MAPbI3). Significantly, we achieved an exceptional response at 10 ppm of ammonia gas by employing a binary solvent mixture of DMAC-DMSO. In contrast to prior reports that relied on single solvents for MAPbI3 precursor preparation, our approach using mixed solvents demonstrated a marked improvement in gas sensing performance. We attained enhanced surface coverage, a reduction in pinhole occurrences, and precise control over grain size in our perovskite films through the careful selection and mixtures of appropriate solvents. This study shows a promising potential of employing binary and multi-solvent mixture strategies as a means to propel advancements in gas sensor technology, opening up new opportunities for practical applications in environmental monitoring and industrial safety.

Keywords: sensors, binary solvents, ammonia, sensitivity, grain size, pinholes, surface coverage

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Authors: Franklin Nakpodia, Femi Olan

Abstract:

A blend of internal factors (firm performance, internal stakeholders) and external pressures (globalisation, technology, corporate scandals) have intensified calls for corporate governance reforms. While several countries and their governments have responded to these calls, the effect of such reforms on corporate governance systems across countries remains mixed. In particular, the literature reports that the effectiveness of corporate governance interventions in many developing economies is limited. Relying on the corporate governance system in Africa’s largest economy (Nigeria), this research addresses two issues. First, this study explores why previous corporate governance reforms have failed and second, the article investigates what reforms could improve corporate governance practices in the country. In addressing the above objectives, this study adopts a qualitative approach that permits data collection via semi-structured interviews with 21 corporate executives. The data supports the articulation of two sequential levels of reforms (i.e., the upstream and downstream reforms). The upstream reforms focus on two crucial but often overlooked areas that undermine reform effectiveness, i.e., the extent of government commitment and an enabling environment. The downstream reforms combine awareness and regulatory elements to proffer a path to robust corporate governance in the country. Furthermore, findings from this study stress the need to consider the use of a bottom-up approach to corporate governance practice and policymaking in place of the dominant top-down strategy.

Keywords: bottom-up approach, corporate governance, reforms, regulation

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Authors: Emmanuel Sachikumba, Micheal Msoni, Westone Mafuleka

Abstract:

Zambia has a good climate with favourable rainfall pattern; this provides sufficient recharge for the surface and groundwater resources. In spite of the sufficient surface and ground water resources, accessibility to water at household levels is problematic both in quality and quantity. The study examined water accessibility as well as water quality at the household level. The research looked at the sources of water for the households and considered the complications of accessibility to water and the available opportunities therein. The investigation involved fifty households and the data was collected by the use of questionnaires (to assess accessibility) and laboratory tests (for ascertaining water quality). In addition to this, government departments such as the health, agriculture, forestry and education as well as the municipal council were interviewed on the topic under study. The study was descriptive in nature where clustered sampling procedures using simple random methods were utilised to select the households which were to participate in the study. The key findings were that; accessibility to water household levels is still a challenge in the settlement as most of the point sources (shallow wells, the stream and the river) were found to be contaminated. In addition to this, it was found that there was no direct relationship between the economic performance of a household and the accessibility to water. The study also observed that there were opportunities for the people in the settlement as they were increasingly getting into the education system, and adult literacy was being encouraged in the settlement. Furthermore, the settlement has groundwater resources which indicate that there can be sufficient water provision for the settlers.

Keywords: accessibility, household, water, settlement

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Authors: Jamilah Halina Abdul Halim, Norsiah Hassan, Azlina Aziz, Norhayati Mat Wajid, Mohd Saipul Asrafi

Abstract:

There are various types of vertical greenery system (VGS) in Malaysia, but none is installed at government buildings, although the government is looking into energy efficient building design. This is due to lack of technical information that focus on the maintenance and care, issues, and challenges face by vertical greenery system under tropical climate conditions. This research aim to identify issues in implementation of vertical greenery system on existing government building in Malaysia. The methodology used are literature reviews (desktop study), observation on sites, and case studies. Initial findings indicates that design and maintenance issues of vertical greenery system are the main challenges faced mainly by designer, especially those who involved in decision-making process. It can be concluded that orientation, openings, maintenance, performance, longevity, structural load, access, wind resistance, design failure, system failure, and lack of maintenance foresight are the main factors that need to be considered. These factors should be holistically aligned towards the economic cost, effective time, and quality design in implementation of vertical greenery system on existing government building. A comprehensive implementation of vertical greenery system will lead to greater sustainable investment for government buildings and responsive action to climate change.

Keywords: issues, government building, maintenance, vertical greenery system

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