Search results for: systems design

Authors: Barenten Suciu, Yoshiki Tsuji

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In this paper, a theoretical investigation on the dynamic characteristics of one degree of freedom vibration system equipped with inerter of variable inertance, is presented. Differential equation of movement was solved under proper initial conditions in the case of free undamped/damped vibration, considered in the absence/presence of the inerter in the mechanical system. Influence of inertance on the amplitude of vibration, phase angle, natural frequency, damping ratio, and logarithmic decrement was clarified. It was mainly found that the inerter decreases the natural frequency of the undamped system and also of the damped system if the damping ratio is below 0.707. On the other hand, the inerter increases the natural frequency of the damped system if the damping ratio exceeds 0.707. Results obtained in this work are useful for the adequate design of inerters.

Keywords: damping, frequency control, inerter, one degree of freedom vibration system, parallel connection, variable inertance

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Authors: Amirmozafar Benshams, Khatere Kashmari, Farzad Hatami, Mesbah Saybani

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Shape memory alloys with high capability of energy dissipation and large deformation bearing with return ability to their original shape without too much hysteresis strain have opened their place among the other damping systems as smart materials. Ninitol which is the most well-known and most used alloy material from the shape memory alloys family, has high resistance and fatigue and is coverage for large deformations. Shape memory effect and super-elasticity by shape alloys like Nitinol, are the reasons of the high power of these materials in energy depreciation. Thus, these materials are suitable for use in reciprocating dynamic loading conditions. The experiments results showed that Nitinol wires with small diameter have greater energy dissipation capability and by increase of diameter and thickness the damping capability and energy dissipation increase.

Keywords: shape memory alloys, shape memory effect, super elastic effect, nitinol, energy dissipation

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Authors: G.Venkatachalam, Gautham Shankar, Dasarath Raghav, Krishna Kuar, Santhosh Kiran, Bhargav Mahesh

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Uncertainty in the availability of fossil fuels in the future and global warming increased the need for more environment-friendly materials. In this work, an attempt is made to fabricate a hybrid polymer matrix composite. The blend is a mixture of General Purpose Resin and Cashew Nut Shell Liquid, a natural resin extracted from cashew plant. Palm fiber, which has high strength, is used as a reinforcement material. The fiber is treated with alkali (NaOH) solution to increase its strength and adhesiveness. Parametric study of flexure strength is carried out by varying alkali concentration, duration of alkali treatment and fiber volume. Taguchi L9 Orthogonal array is followed in the design of experiments procedure for simplification. With the help of ANOVA technique, regression equations are obtained which gives the level of influence of each parameter on the flexure strength of the composite.

Keywords: Adhesion, CNSL, Flexural Analysis, Hybrid Matrix Composite, Palm Fiber

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Authors: C. Gebauer, C. Henke, R. Vossen

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Within the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020, a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is used to capture intruder drones by physical interaction. The challenge is motivated by UAV safety. The purpose of this work is to investigate the agility of a quadcopter being controlled visually. The aim is to track and follow a highly dynamic target, e.g., an intruder quadcopter. The following is realized in close range and the opponent has a velocity of up to 10 m/s. Additional limitations are given by the hardware itself, where only monocular vision is present, and no additional knowledge about the targets state is available. An image based visual servoing (IBVS) approach is applied in combination with a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The IBVS is integrated into the LQR and an optimal trajectory is computed within the projected three-dimensional image-space. The approach has been evaluated on real quadcopter systems in different flight scenarios to demonstrate the system's stability.

Keywords: image based visual servoing, quadcopter, dynamic object tracking, linear-quadratic regulator

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Authors: Valentina Futoryanova, Hugh Hunt

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One of the common failure modes of the diesel engine turbochargers is high cycle fatigue of the turbine wheel blades. Mistuning of the blades due to the casting process is believed to contribute to the failure mode. Laser vibrometer is used to characterize mistuning for a population of turbine wheels through the analysis of the blade response to piezo speaker induced noise. The turbine wheel design under investigation is radial and is typically used in 6-12 L diesel engine applications. Amplitudes and resonance frequencies are reviewed and summarized. The study also includes test results for a paddle wheel that represents a perfectly tuned system and acts as a reference. Mass spring model is developed for the paddle wheel and the model suitability is tested against the actual data. Randomization is applied to the stiffness matrix to model the mistuning effect in the turbine wheels. Experimental data is shown to have good agreement with the model.

Keywords: vibration, radial turbines, mistuning, turbine blades, modal analysis, periodic structures, finite element

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Authors: Narges Nejati

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Nowadays as science hasten toward technology, only quantity of construction noticed and there is a little attention toward quality of construction and there is no usage for element which was prevalent in traditional architecture. This is the cause of this issue that nowadays we see building that most of them just keep you from heat and cold of outside environment and there is no trace of any culture of their country or nation in it. And although we know that man is a creature that adores beauty by his nature, but this spiritual need of him is ignored. And designers by taking an enormous price instead of planning (spiritual designing) to release peace, they attend to planning which make a human soul bothered and ill. The present research is trying to illustrate price of concepts and principles of water usage as one of the elements of nature and also shows the water application in some of the Iranian constructions and the results show the motif of using water in constructions and also some benefits of using it in constructions. And also this matter can causes a reconnection between nature and constructing of a beautiful environment which is consonant and proportional with man’ physical, spiritual and cultural needs. And causes peace and comfort of men. A construction which man feels a friendly atmosphere in them which he has a sense of belonging to them not a construction which arouses feeling of weariness and fatigue.

Keywords: water usage, belonging, sustainable architecture, urban design

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Authors: Sara Nasiri Semnani, Alireza Ramzani

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Background and Aims: Sodium bicarbonate is a supplementation that used to reduce fatigue and increase power output in short-term training. On the other hand, the Ischemic Reperfusion Preconditioning (IRPC) is an appropriate stimulus to increase the submaximal contractile response. Materials and methods: 9 female student-athletes in double-blind randomized crossover design were three mode, sodium bicarbonate + IRPC, sodium bicarbonate and placebo+ IRPC. Participants moved forward single arm dumbbell hand with a weight of 2 kg can be carried out most frequently. Results: The results showed that plasma lactate concentration and records of sodium bicarbonate + IRPC and sodium bicarbonate conditions were significantly different compared to placebo + IRPC (Respectively p=0.001, p=0/02). Conclusion: According to the research findings, bicarbonate supplementation in IRPC training condition increased force and delay fatigue in submaximal dynamic contraction.

Keywords: ischemic reperfusion, preconditioning, sodium bicarbonate, submaximal dynamic force

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Authors: S. S. Mahlangu, R. K. K. Mbaya, D. D. Delport, H. Van. Zyl

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The degrading effect due to bacterial growth on the structural integrity of concrete floor surfaces is predictable; this consequently cause development of surface micro cracks in which organisms penetrate through resulting in surface spalling. Hence, the need to develop mix design meeting the requirement of floor surfaces exposed to aggressive agent to improve certain material properties with good workability, extended lifespan and low cost is essential. In this work, tests were performed to examine the microbial activity on kitchen floor surfaces and the effect of adding admixtures. The biochemical test shows the existence of microorganisms (E.coli, Streptococcus) on newly casted structure. Of up to 6% porosity was reduced and improvement on structural integrity was observed upon adding mineral admixtures from the concrete mortar. The SEM result after 84 days of curing specimens, shows that chemical admixtures have significant role to enable retard bacterial penetration and good quality structure is achieved.

Keywords: admixture, organisms, porosity, strength

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Authors: Khaleel Bader Bataineh

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Past studies have maintained that the Arab learners' beliefs about language learning hold vital effects on their performance. Thus, this study was carried out to investigate the language learning beliefs of Irbid National University students. It aimed at identifying the language learning beliefs according to gender. This study is a descriptive design that employed survey questionnaire of Language Learning Beliefs Inventory (BALLI). The data were elicited from 83 English major students during the class sessions. The data were analyzed using an SPSS program in which frequency analysis and t-test were performed to examine the students’ responses. Thus, the major findings of this research indicated that there is a variation in responses with regards to the subjects’ beliefs about English learning. Also, the findings show significant differences in four questionnaire items according to gender. It is hoped that the findings provide valuable insights to educators about the learners’ beliefs which assist them to develop the teaching and learning English language process in Jordan universities.

Keywords: foreign language, students’ beliefs, language learning, Arab students

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Authors: Supattra Kanchanopast

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The purpose of this research was to identify factors that influenced the trust of e-commerce within retail businesses. In order to achieve the objectives of this research, the researcher collected data from random e-commerce users in Bangkok. The data was comprised of the results of 382 questionnaires. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics, which included frequency, percentages, and the standard deviation of pertinent factors. Multiple regression analysis was also used. The findings of this research revealed that the majority of the respondents were female, 25-40 years old, and graduated a bachelor degree. The respondents mostly worked in private sectors and had monthly income between 15,000-25,000 baht. The findings also indicate that information quality factors, website design factors, service quality factor, security factor and advertising factors as significant factors effecting customer trust of e-commerce in online retail. The hypotheses testing revealed that these factors in e-commerce had an effect on customer’s trust in the same direction with high level.

Keywords: e-commerce, online retail, Retail business, trust, website

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Authors: Veronica Diaz Quezada

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In this article, the performance and errors are featured and analysed in the limit problems solving of a real-valued function, in correspondence to competency-based education in engineering careers, in the south of Chile. The methodological component is contextualised in a qualitative research, with a descriptive and explorative design, with elaboration, content validation and application of quantitative instruments, consisting of two parallel forms of open answer tests, based on limit application problems. The mathematical competences and errors made by students from five engineering careers from a public University are identified and characterized. Results show better performance only to solve routine-context problem-solving competence, thus they are oriented towards a rational solution or they use a suitable problem-solving method, achieving the correct solution. Regarding errors, most of them are related to techniques and the incorrect use of theorems and definitions of real-valued function limits of real variable.

Keywords: engineering education, errors, limits, mathematics competences, problem solving

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Authors: Shu-Hsi Ho

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The problems of aging and number of widowed peers gradually rise in Taiwan. It is worth to concern the related issues for elderly after the death of a spouse. Hence, this study is to examine the impact of spousal death on the surviving spouse’s self-perceived health and mental health for the elderly in Taiwan. A cross section data design and ordered logistic regression models are applied to investigate whether marriage is associated significantly to self-perceived health and mental health for the widowed older Taiwanese. The results indicate that widowed marriage shows significant negative effects on self-perceived health and mental health regardless of widows or widowers. Among them, widows might be more likely to show worse mental health than widowers. The belief confirms that marriage provides effective sources to promote self-perceived health and mental health, particularly for females. In addition, since the social welfare system is not perfect in Taiwan, the findings also suggest that family and social support reveal strongly association with the self-perceived health and mental health for the widows and widowers elderly.

Keywords: logistic regression models, self-perceived health, widow, widower

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Authors: Malika Yaici, Assia Arab, Betitra Yakouben, Samia Zermani

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Ubiquitous computing is nowadays a reality through the networking of a growing number of computing devices. It allows providing users with context aware information and services in a heterogeneous environment, anywhere and anytime. Selection of the best context-aware service, between many available services and providers, is a tedious problem. In this paper, a service selection method based on Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) formalism is proposed. The services are considered as variables and domains; and the user context, preferences and providers characteristics are considered as constraints. The Backtrack algorithm is used to solve the problem to find the best service and provider which matches the user requirements. Even though this algorithm has an exponential complexity, but its use guarantees that the service, that best matches the user requirements, will be found. A comparison of the proposed method with the existing solutions finishes the paper.

Keywords: ubiquitous computing, services selection, constraint satisfaction problem, backtrack algorithm

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Authors: Ersin Bozkurt

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The aim of the study is to develop materials for understanding image formations through virtual objects in geometric optics. The images in physics course books are formed by using real objects. This results in mistakes in the features of images because of generalizations which leads to conceptual misunderstandings in learning. In this study it was intended to identify pre-service physics teachers misunderstandings arising from false generalizations. Focused group interview was used as a qualitative method. The findings of the study show that students have several misconceptions such as "the image in a plain mirror is always virtual". However a real image can be formed in a plain mirror. To explain a virtual object's image formation in a more understandable way an overhead projector and episcope and their design was illustrated. The illustrations are original and several computer simulations will be suggested.

Keywords: computer simulations, geometric optics, physics education, students' misconceptions in physics

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Authors: Chaoyan Huang, Hongxia Zheng

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For deep space exploration and long duration interplanetary manned missions, protection of astronauts from cosmic radiation is an unavoidable problem. However, passive shielding can be little effective for protecting particles which energies are greater than 1GeV/nucleon. In this study, active magnetic protection method is adopted. Taking into account the structure and size of the end-cap, eight shielding magnetic field configurations are designed based on the Hoffman configuration. The shielding effect of shielding magnetic field structure, intensity B and thickness L on H particles with 2GeV energy is compared by test particle simulation. The result shows that the shielding effect is better with the linear type magnetic field structure in the end-cap region. Furthermore, two magnetic field configurations with better shielding effect are investigated through H and He galactic cosmic spectra. And the shielding effect of the linear type configuration adopted in the barrel and end-cap regions is best.

Keywords: galactic cosmic rays, active protection, shielding magnetic field configuration, shielding effect

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Authors: Maria Luisa Jaramillo, Alvaro Turriago Hoyos, Ulf Thoene

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Financial inclusion has become a crucially important factor in debates on economic inequality posing challenges to the financial systems of countries around the world. Nowadays, governments and banks are concerned about creating products that allow access to wide sectors of the population. The creation of banking products by the financial sector for people with low incomes tends to lead to improvements in the quality of life of vulnerable parts of the population. In countries with notable social and economic inequalities financial inclusion is a key aspect for equitable economic growth. This study is based on the case of Colombia, which is a country with a strong record of economic growth over the past decade. Nevertheless, corruption, unemployment, and poverty contribute to uncertainty regarding the country’s future growth prospects. This study wants to explain the situation of financial exclusion and financial inclusion with respect to the Colombian case. Financial inclusion is going to be studied from the perspective of social innovation.

Keywords: Colombia, financial exclusion, financial inclusion, social innovation

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Authors: Trevor Stephen, Joshua D. Aceves, David Guyer, Jona Jacobson

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As a profession, social work has much to offer individuals, groups, and organizations. A multidisciplinary approach to understanding and solving complex challenges and a commitment to developing and training ethical practitioners outlines characteristics of a profession embedded with leadership skills. This presentation will take an overview of the historical context of social work leadership, examine social work as a unique leadership model composed of its qualities and theories that inform effective leadership capability as it relates to our code of ethics. Reflect critically on leadership theories and their foundational comparison. Finally, a look at recommendations and implementation to social work education and practice. Similar to defining leadership, there is no universally accepted definition of social work leadership. However, some distinct traits and characteristics are essential. Recent studies help set the stage for this research proposal because they measure views on effective social work leadership among social work and non-social leaders and followers. However, this research is interested in working backward from that approach and examining social workers' leadership preparedness perspectives based solely on social work training, competencies, values, and ethics. Social workers understand how to change complex structures and challenge resistance to change to improve the well-being of organizations and those they serve. Furthermore, previous studies align with the idea of practitioners assessing their skill and capacity to engage in leadership but not to lead. In addition, this research is significant because it explores aspiring social work leaders' competence to translate social work practice into direct leadership skills. The research question seeks to answer whether social work training and competencies are sufficient to determine whether social workers believe they possess the capacity and skill to engage in leadership practice. Aim 1: Assess whether social workers have the capacity and skills to assume leadership roles. Aim 2: Evaluate how the development of social workers is sufficient in defining leadership. This research intends to reframe the misconception that social workers do not possess the capacity and skills to be effective leaders. On the contrary, social work encompasses a framework dedicated to lifelong development and growth. Social workers must be skilled, competent, ethical, supportive, and empathic. These are all qualities and traits of effective leadership, whereas leaders are in relation with others and embody partnership and collaboration with followers and stakeholders. The proposed study is a cross-sectional quasi-experimental survey design that will include the distribution of a multi-level social work leadership model and assessment tool. The assessment tool aims to help define leadership in social work using a Likert scale model. A cross-sectional research design is appropriate for answering the research questions because the measurement survey will help gather data using a structured tool. Other than the proposed social work leadership measurement tool, there is no other mechanism based on social work theory and designed to measure the capacity and skill of social work leadership.

Keywords: leadership competencies, leadership education, multi-level social work leadership model, social work core values, social work leadership, social work leadership education, social work leadership measurement tool

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Authors: Liu Lin Xin

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With the increasing complexity of systems, log parsing and anomaly detection have become crucial for maintaining system stability. However, traditional methods often struggle with adaptability and accuracy, especially when dealing with rapidly evolving log content and unfamiliar domains. To address these challenges, this paper proposes approach that integrates Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology with Prompt Engineering for Large Language Models, applied specifically in LogPrompt. This approach enables dynamic log parsing and intelligent anomaly detection by combining real-time information retrieval with prompt optimization. The proposed method significantly enhances the adaptability of log analysis and improves the interpretability of results. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the method's superior performance, particularly in scenarios lacking training data, where it significantly outperforms traditional methods. This paper introduces a novel technical pathway for log parsing and anomaly detection, showcasing the substantial theoretical value and practical potential.

Keywords: log parsing, anomaly detection, RAG, prompt engineering, LLMs

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Authors: Jaechun No

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As the technology of NAND flash memory rapidly grows, SSD is becoming an excellent alternative for storage solutions, because of its high random I/O throughput and low power consumption. These SSD potentials have drawn great attention from IT enterprises that seek for better I/O performance. However, high SSD cost per capacity makes it less desirable to construct a large-scale storage subsystem solely composed of SSD devices. An alternative is to build a hybrid storage subsystem where both HDD and SSD devices are incorporated in an economic manner, while employing the strengths of both devices. This paper presents a hybrid file system, called hybridFS, that attempts to utilize the advantages of HDD and SSD devices, to provide a single, virtual address space by integrating both devices. HybridFS not only proposes an efficient implementation for the file management in the hybrid storage subsystem but also suggests an experimental framework for making use of the excellent features of existing file systems. Several performance evaluations were conducted to verify the effectiveness and suitability of hybridFS.

Keywords: hybrid file mapping, data layout, hybrid device integration, extent allocation

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Authors: Faezeh Aghazadeh, Mohammad Javad Sharifi

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The application of neural networks to model a full-scale industrial acetylene hydrogenation in olefin plant has been studied. The operating variables studied are the, input-temperature of the reactor, output-temperature of the reactor, hydrogen ratio of the reactor, [C₂H₂]input, and [C₂H₆]input. The studied operating variables were used as the input to the constructed neural network to predict the [C₂H₆]output at any time as the output or the target. The constructed neural network was found to be highly precise in predicting the quantity of [C₂H₆]output for the new input data, which are kept unaware of the trained neural network showing its applicability to determine the [C₂H₆]output for any operating conditions. The enhancement of [C₂H₆]output as compared with [C₂H₆]input was a consequence of low selective acetylene hydrogenation to ethylene.

Keywords: acetylene hydrogenation, Pd-Ag/Al₂O₃, artificial neural network, modeling, optimal design

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Authors: Sabrina Azzi, Michal Iglewski, Véronique Nabelsi

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Diagnosis error problem is frequent and one of the most important safety problems today. One of the main objectives of our work is to propose an ontological representation that takes into account the diagnostic criteria in order to improve the diagnostic. We choose pneumonia disease since it is one of the frequent diseases affected by diagnosis errors and have harmful effects on patients. To achieve our aim, we use a semi-automated method to integrate diverse knowledge sources that include publically available pneumonia disease guidelines from international repositories, biomedical ontologies and electronic health records. We follow the principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The resulting ontology covers symptoms and signs, all the types of pneumonia, antecedents, pathogens, and diagnostic testing. The first evaluation results show that most of the terms are covered by the ontology. This work is still in progress and represents a first and major step toward a development of a diagnosis decision support system for pneumonia.

Keywords: Clinical decision support system, Diagnostic errors, Ontology, Pneumonia

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Authors: S. P. Koko, K. Kusakana, H. J. Vermaak

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Standalone micro-hydrokinetic river (MHR) system is one of the promising technologies to be used for remote rural electrification. It simply requires the flow of water instead of elevation or head, leading to expensive civil works. This paper demonstrates an economic benefit offered by a standalone MHR system when compared to the commonly used standalone systems such as solar, wind and diesel generator (DG) at the selected study site in Kwazulu Natal. Wind speed and solar radiation data of the selected rural site have been taken from national aeronautics and space administration (NASA) surface meteorology database. The hybrid optimization model for electric renewable (HOMER) software was used to determine the most feasible solution when using MHR, solar, wind or DG system to supply 5 rural houses. MHR system proved to be the best cost-effective option to consider at the study site due to its low cost of energy (COE) and low net present cost (NPC).

Keywords: economic analysis, micro-hydrokinetic, rural-electrification, cost of energy (COE), net present cost (NPC)

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Authors: Mohammad A. Khasawneh

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The design of high pressure water jet based polishing equipment and its fabrication conducted in this study is reported herein, together with some preliminary test results for assessing its applicability for HMA surface polishing. This study also provides preliminary findings concerning the test variables, such as the rotational speed, the water jet pressure, the abrasive agent used, and the impact angel that were experimentally investigated in this study. The preliminary findings based on four trial tests (two on large slab specimens and two on small size gyratory compacted specimens), however, indicate that both friction and texture values tend to increase with the polishing durations for two combinations of pressure and rotation speed of the rotary deck. It seems that the more polishing action the specimen is subjected to; the aggregate edges are created such that the surface texture values are increased with the accompanied increase in friction values. It may be of interest (but which is outside the scope of this study) to investigate if the similar trend exist for HMA prepared with aggregate source that is sand and gravel.

Keywords: high-pressure, water jet, friction, texture, polishing, statistical analysis

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Authors: R. B. Patil, B. S. Kothavale, L. Y. Waghmode

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Today, the CNC turning center becomes an important machine tool for manufacturing industry worldwide. However, as the breakdown of a single CNC turning center may result in the production of an entire plant being halted. For this reason, operations and preventive maintenance have to be minimized to ensure availability of the system. Indeed, improving the availability of the CNC turning center as a whole, objectively leads to a substantial reduction in production loss, operating, maintenance and support cost. In this paper, fault tree analysis (FTA) method is used for reliability analysis of CNC turning center. The major faults associated with the system and the causes for the faults are presented graphically. Boolean algebra is used for evaluating fault tree (FT) diagram and for deriving governing reliability model for CNC turning center. Failure data over a period of six years has been collected and used for evaluating the model. Qualitative and quantitative analysis is also carried out to identify critical sub-systems and components of CNC turning center. It is found that, at the end of the warranty period (one year), the reliability of the CNC turning center as a whole is around 0.61628.

Keywords: fault tree analysis (FTA), reliability analysis, risk assessment, hazard analysis

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Authors: Fasanmi Samuel Sunday

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This study investigated the influence of gender and personality traits on emotional distress among awaiting trial inmates in Nigeria. Participants were three hundred and twenty (320) awaiting trial inmates, drawn from three main correctional centres in Northeast Nigeria, namely: Gashua Correctional Centre, Postiskum Correctional Centre, and Bauchi Correctional Centre. Expo facto research design was adopted. Questionnaires such as the Big Five Inventory and the Perceived Emotional Distress Inventory (PEDI) were used to measure the variables of the study. Three hypotheses were tested. Logistic regression was used for data analysis. Results of the analysis indicated that conscientiousness significantly predicted emotional distress among awaiting trial inmates. However, most of the identified personality traits did not significantly predict emotional distress among awaiting trial inmates. There was no significant gender difference in emotional distress among awaiting-trial inmates. The implications of the study were discussed.

Keywords: personality traits, emotional distress, awaiting-trial inmates, gender

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Authors: Liang Zhao, Chongquan Zhong

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Introduction: According to statistics, people spend 80% to 90% of time indoor, so indoor air quality, either at home or in the office, greatly impacts the quality of life, health and work efficiency. Therefore, indoor air quality is very important to human activities. With the acceleration of urbanization, people are spending more time in indoor activity. The time in indoor environment, the living space, and the frequency interior decoration are all increasingly increased. However, housing decoration materials contain formaldehyde and other harmful substances, causing environmental and air quality problems, which have brought serious damage to countless families and attracted growing attention. According to World Health Organization statistics, the indoor environments in more than 30% of buildings in China are polluted by poisonous and harmful gases. Indoor pollution has caused various health problems, and these widespread public health problems can lead to respiratory diseases. Long-term inhalation of low-concentration formaldehyde would cause persistent headache, insomnia, weakness, palpitation, weight loss and vomiting, which are serious impacts on human health and safety. On the other hand, as for offices, some surveys show that good indoor air quality helps to enthuse the staff and improve the work efficiency by 2%-16%. Therefore, people need to further understand the living and working environments. There is a need for easy-to-use indoor environment monitoring instruments, with which users only have to power up and monitor the environmental parameters. The corresponding real-time data can be displayed on the screen for analysis. Environment monitoring should have the sensitive signal alarm function and send alarm when harmful gases such as formaldehyde, CO, SO2, are excessive to human body. System design: According to the monitoring requirements of various gases, temperature and humidity, we designed a portable, light, real-time and accurate monitor for various environmental parameters, including temperature, humidity, formaldehyde, methane, and CO. This monitor will generate an alarm signal when a target is beyond the standard. It can conveniently measure a variety of harmful gases and provide the alarm function. It also has the advantages of small volume, convenience to carry and use. It has a real-time display function, outputting the parameters on the LCD screen, and a real-time alarm function. Conclusions: This study is focused on the research and development of a portable parameter monitoring instrument for indoor environment. On the platform of an STM32 development board, the monitored data are collected through an external sensor. The STM32 platform is for data acquisition and processing procedures, and successfully monitors the real-time temperature, humidity, formaldehyde, CO, methane and other environmental parameters. Real-time data are displayed on the LCD screen. The system is stable and can be used in different indoor places such as family, hospital, and office. Meanwhile, the system adopts the idea of modular design and is superior in transplanting. The scheme is slightly modified and can be used similarly as the function of a monitoring system. This monitor has very high research and application values.

Keywords: indoor air quality, gas concentration detection, embedded system, sensor

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Authors: Sandra Mendes

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Social Work has encountered over time with multivariate requests in the field of its action, provisioning frameworks of knowledge and praxis. Over the years, we have observed a transformation of society and, consequently, of the public who deals with the social work practitioners. Both, training and profession have had need to adapt and readapt the ways of doing, bailing up theories to action, while action unfolds emancipation of new theories. The theoretical questioning of this subject lies on classical authors from social sciences, and contemporary authors of Social Work. In fact, both enhance, in the design of social work, an integration and social cohesion function, creating a culture of action and theory, attributing to its method a relevant function, which shall be promoter of social changes in various dimensions of both individual and collective life, as well as scientific knowledge. On the other hand, it is assumed that Social Work, through its professionalism and through the academy, is now closer to distinguish itself from other Social Sciences as an autonomous scientific field, being, however, in the center of power struggles. This paper seeks to fill the gap in social work literature about the study of the scientific field of this area of knowledge.

Keywords: field theory, knowledge, science, social work

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Authors: Janet Ige, Paul Pilkington, Selena Gray, Jane Powell

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Older adults from socially disadvantaged groups and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups experience a higher burden of physical inactivity. Physical inactivity among BME groups is associated with the disproportionately higher level of health inequalities. People from minority ethnic groups encounter more barriers to physical activity. However, this is not often reported. There is very limited review-level evidence on the barriers and facilitators of physical activity among older adults from BME groups in the UK. This study aims to answer the following research question: what are the barriers and facilitators of physical activity participation among adults and older adults from BME background in the UK? To address this, we conducted a review of qualitative studies investigating the barriers and opportunities for physical activity among of BME adults and older adults in the UK. Method: This study is nested in an interpretive paradigm of meta-ethnography. A structured search for published literature was conducted on 6 electronic databases (MEDLINE, PsychINFO, Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Allied and Complementary Medicine) from January 2007 to July 2017. Hand searching of the reference list of publications was performed in addition to a search conducted on Google Scholar to identify grey literature. Studies were eligible provided they employed any qualitative method and included participants identified as being BME, aged 50 and above, living in any community within the UK. In total, 1036 studies were identified from the structured search for literature, 718 studies were screened by titles after duplicates were removed. On applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, a final selection of 10 studies was considered eligible for synthesis. Quality assessment was performed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme tool. Logic maps were used to show the relationship between factors that impact on physical activity participation among adults and older adults Result: Six key themes emerged from the data: awareness of the links between physical activity and health, interaction, and engagement with health professionals, cultural expectations and social responsibilities, appropriate environment, religious fatalism and practical challenges. Findings also showed that the barriers and facilitators of physical activity exist at the individual, community, and socio-economic, cultural and environmental level. There was a substantial gap in research among Black African groups. Findings from the review also informed the design of an ongoing survey investigating the experience and attitude of adults from Somali backgrounds towards physical activity in the UK. Conclusion: Identifying the barriers and facilitators of physical activity among BME groups is a crucial step in addressing the widening inequality gap. Findings from this study highlight the importance of engaging local BME residents in the design of exercise facilities within the community. This will ensure that cultural and social concerns are recognized and properly addressed.

Keywords: BME, UK, meta-ethnographic, adults

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Authors: Hanan Begali, Shahi Dost, Annett Ziegler, Markus Cornberg, Maria-Esther Vidal, Anke R. M. Kraft

Abstract:

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection can be treated with nucleot(s)ide analog (NA), for example, which inhibits HBV replication. However, they have hardly any influence on the functional cure of HBV, which is defined by hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) loss. NA needs to be taken life-long, which is not available for all patients worldwide. Additionally, NA-treated patients are still at risk of developing cirrhosis, liver failure, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Although each patient has the same components of the immune system, immune responses vary between patients. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the immune response against HBV in different patients is necessary to understand the parameters leading to HBV cure and to use this knowledge to optimize HBV therapies. This requires seamless integration of an enormous amount of diverse and fine-grained data from viral markers, e.g., hepatitis B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg). The data integration system relies on the assumption that profiling human immune systems requires the analysis of various variables (e.g., demographic data, treatments, pre-existing conditions, immune cell response, or HLA-typing) rather than only one. However, the values of these variables are collected independently. They are presented in a myriad of formats, e.g., excel files, textual descriptions, lab book notes, and images of flow cytometry dot plots. Additionally, patients can be identified differently in these analyses. This heterogeneity complicates the integration of variables, as data management techniques are needed to create a unified view in which individual formats and identifiers are transparent when profiling the human immune systems. The proposed study (HBsRE) aims at integrating heterogeneous data sets of 87 chronically HBV-infected patients, e.g., clinical data, immune cell response, and HLA-typing, with knowledge encoded in biomedical ontologies and open-source databases into a knowledge-driven framework. This new technique enables us to harmonize and standardize heterogeneous datasets in the defined modeling of the data integration system, which will be evaluated in the knowledge graph (KG). KGs are data structures that represent the knowledge and data as factual statements using a graph data model. Finally, the analytic data model will be applied on top of KG in order to develop a deeper understanding of the immune profiles among various patients and to evaluate factors playing a role in a holistic profile of patients with HBsAg level loss. Additionally, our objective is to utilize this unified approach to stratify patients for new effective treatments. This study is developed in the context of the project “Transforming big data into knowledge: for deep immune profiling in vaccination, infectious diseases, and transplantation (ImProVIT)”, which is a multidisciplinary team composed of computer scientists, infection biologists, and immunologists.

Keywords: chronic hepatitis B infection, immune response, knowledge graphs, ontology

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Authors: Xueqing Ivy Chen, Christo De Coning

Abstract:

It is clear from practice that a gap exists between Result-Based Monitoring and Evaluation (RBME) as a discipline, and Knowledge Management (KM) on the other hand. Whereas various government departments have institutionalised these functions, KM and M&E has functioned in isolation from each other in a practical sense in the public sector. It’s therefore necessary to explore the relationship between KM and M&E and the necessity for integration, so that a convergence of these disciplines can be established. An integration of KM and M&E will lead to integration and improvement of evidence-based information and policy decision-making. M&E and KM process models are available but the complementarity between specific process steps of these process models are not exploited. A need exists to clarify the relationships between these functions in order to ensure evidence based information and policy decision-making. This paper will depart from the well-known policy process models, such as the generic model and consider recent on the interface between policy, M&E and KM.

Keywords: result-based monitoring and evaluation, RBME, knowledge management, KM, evident based decision making, public policy, information systems, institutional arrangement

Procedia PDF Downloads 146