Search results for: lifetime of a component

Authors: Abonyi, Emmanuel Ebuka, Amina Jafaru O.

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Background: Illicit substance use among students is a phenomenon that has been widely studied, but it remains of interest due to its high prevalence and potential consequences. It is a major mental health concern among university students which may result in behavioral and academic problems, psychiatric disorders, and infectious diseases. Thus, this study was done to ascertain the prevalence and factors associated with the use of illicit drugs among these groups of people. Methods: A cross-sectional and descriptive survey was conducted among undergraduate students of the University of Lagos for the duration of three(3) months (August to October 2021). A total number of 938 undergraduate students were selected from seventeen faculties in the university. Pretested questionnaires were administered, completed, and returned. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis. Results: From the data collected, it was observed that out of 938 undergraduate students of the University of Lagos that completed and returned the questionnaires, 56.3% were female and 43.7% were male. No gender differences were observed in the prevalence of use of any of the illicit substances. The result showed that the majority of the students that participated in the research were females(56.6%); it was observed that there were a total of 541 2nd-year students(57.7%) and 397 final-year students(42.3). Students between the age brackets of 20- 24 years had the highest frequency of 648(69.1%) of illicit drug use and students in none health-related disciplines. The result also showed that the majority of the students reported that they use Marijuana (31.7%), while lifetime use of LSD (6.3%), Heroin(4.8%), Cocaine (4.7%), and Ecstasy(4.5), Ketamine (3.4%). Besides, the use of alcohol was below average(44.1%). Additionally, Marijuana was among the ones that were mostly taken by students having a higher percentage and most of these respondents had experienced relationship problems with their family and intentions (50.9%). From the responses obtained, major reasons students indulge in illicit drug use were; curiosity to experiment, relief of stress after rigorous academic activities, social media influence, and peer pressure. Most Undergraduate students are in their most hyperactive stage in life, which makes them vulnerable to always want to explore practically every adventure. Hence, individual factors and social media influence are identified as major contributors to the prevalence of illicit drug use among undergraduate students at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. Conclusion: Control programs are most needed among the students. They should be comprehensive and focused on students' psycho-education about substances and their related negative consequences, plus the promotion of students' life skills, and integration into the family – and peer-based preventive interventions.

Keywords: illicit drugs, addiction, undergraduate students, prevalence, substances

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Authors: Suttipong Phosuksirikul, Rawichar Chaipojjana, Arunsri Leejeerajumnean

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The aim of research was to define the relations between volatile compounds, some parameters (pH, titratable acidity (TA), total soluble solid (TSS), lactic acid bacteria count) and consumer preference of commercial fermented milks. These relations tend to be used for controlling and developing new fermented milk product. Three leading commercial brands of fermented milks in Thailand were evaluated by consumers (n=71) using hedonic scale for four attributes (sweetness, sourness, flavour, and overall liking), volatile compounds using headspace-solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) GC-MS, pH, TA, TSS and LAB count. Then the relations were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA data showed that all of four attributes liking scores were related to each other. They were also related to TA, TSS and volatile compounds. The related volatile compounds were mainly on fermented produced compounds including acetic acid, furanmethanol, furfural, octanoic acid and the volatiles known as artificial fruit flavour (beta pinene, limonene, vanillin, and ethyl vanillin). These compounds were provided the information about flavour addition in commercial fermented milk in Thailand.

Keywords: fermented milk, volatile compounds, preference, PCA

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Authors: Elizabeth Latham

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Aquinas has long been revered by the Catholic Church as one of the greatest theologians of all time. His most well-known and widely respected theological work, the Summa Theologica has been referenced by countless members of the clergy in support of arguments for and about the existence of God. It is surprising, then, and important that one component in his ontological arguments seems to contradict a precept upheld by the Catechism, the Catholic Church’s comprehensive document detailing their theological positions and laws. In Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas argued that God’s eternal existence is both an observable and necessary quality. In the Catechism, the Catholic Church argues that souls in Hell are separated from God, and only souls in Heaven are like him. After introducing research on Philosophical Psychology and the natures of consciousness and pain, this paper comes to the conclusion that in order to reconcile the theology of the Catholic Church at large with that of Thomas Aquinas, one must somehow solve the following problem: if a soul must exist eternally to suffer eternally, it must be like God; and, if a soul is in Hell, it is completely separate from God and not like him at all. Thomas Aquinas deviates at this point from the current theological holdings of the Catholic Church, and this apparent discrepancy must be resolved if the Church hopes to use him going forward as a standard for natural theology.

Keywords: aquinas, catholic catechism, consciousness, philosophical psychology, summa theologica

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Authors: Vimal Jasoliya, Purnank Bhatt, Mit Shah

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The Injection Moulding is one of the principle methods of conversions of plastics into various end products using a very wide range of plastics materials from commodity plastics to specialty engineering plastics. Injection Moulding Machines are rated as per the tonnage force applied. The work present includes Design & Finite Element Analysis of a structure component of injection moulding machine i.e. clamp cylinder. The work of the project is to upgrade the 1300T clamp cylinder to 1500T clamp cylinder for injection moulding machine. The design of existing clamp cylinder of 1300T is checked. Finite Element analysis is carried out for 1300T clamp cylinder in ANSYS Workbench, and the stress values are compared with acceptance criteria and theoretical calculation. The relation between the clamp cylinder diameter and the tonnage capacity has been derived and verified for 1300T clamp cylinder. The same correlation is used to find out the thickness for 1500T clamp cylinder. The detailed design of 1500T cylinder is carried out based on calculated thickness.

Keywords: clamp cylinder, fatigue analysis, finite element analysis, injection moulding machines

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Authors: Milad Nooshadi, Alessandro Manzardo

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CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere continue to rise, mostly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels. CO₂ injection into the oceans and geological formation as a process of physical carbon capture are two of the most promising emerging strategies for mitigating climate change and global warming. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the two mentioned methods of CO₂ sequestration and to assess information on previous and current advancements, limitations, and uncertainties associated with carbon sequestration in order to identify possible prospects for ensuring the timely implementation of the technology, such as determining how governments and companies can gain a better understanding of CO₂ storage in terms of which media have the most applicable capacity, which type of injection has the fewer environmental impact, and how much carbon sequestration and storage will cost. The behavior of several forms is characterized as a near field, a far field, and a see-floor in ocean storage, and three medias in geological formations as an oil and gas reservoir, a saline aquifer, and a coal bed. To determine the capacity of various forms of media, an analysis of some models and practical experiments are necessary. Additionally, as a major component of sequestration, the various injection methods into diverse media and their monitoring are associated with a variety of environmental impacts and financial consequences.

Keywords: carbon sequestration, ocean storage, geologic storage, carbon transportation

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Authors: Glenn Guira

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Domestic violence is an international pandemic that has affected women from all walks of life. The World Health Organization (2016), announced that recent global prevalence of violence against women indicates that 1 in 3 (35 %) women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner violence in their lifetime. It further said that violence against women is a major public health problem and violations of women’s human rights. Furthermore, the agency said that the factors associated in an increased risk of experiencing intimate partner and sexual violence include low education, child maltreatment or exposure to violence between parents, abuse during childhood, attitudes accepting violence and gender inequality. This is an integrative review of domestic violence focusing on four themes namely types of domestic violence against women, predictors of domestic violence against women, effects of domestic violence against women and strategies in addressing domestic violence against women. This integrative research study was conducted to identify relevant themes on domestic violence that was conducted and published. This study is geared toward understanding further domestic violence as a public health concern. Using the keywords domestic violence, Google Scholar, MEDLINE PLUS, and Ingenta Connect were searched to identify relevant studies. This resulted in 3,467 studies that fall within the copyright year 2006 – 2016. The studies were delimited to domestic violence against women because there are other types of violence that can be committed such as senior citizens abuse, child abuse, violence against males and gay/lesbian abuse. The significant findings of the research study are the following: the forms of domestic violence against women include physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, economic, spiritual and conflict-related violence against, the predictors of domestic violence against women include demographic, health-related, psychological, behavioral, partner-related and social-stress factors, the effects of domestic violence against women include victim-related factors and child-related factors and the strategies addressing domestic violence against women include personal-related strategies, education-related strategies, health-related strategies, legal-related strategies and judicial-related strategies. Consequent to the foregoing findings, the following conclusions are drawn by the researcher that there are published researches that presented different forms, predictors, effects and strategies addressing domestic violence committed by perpetrators against women. The researcher recommended that the summarized comprehensive data should be use to educate people who are potential victims of domestic violence and that future researchers should continue to conduct research for the development of pragmatic programs aimed at reducing domestic violence.

Keywords: domestic violence, physical abuse, intimate partner violence, sexual violence

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Authors: Vishnu Nair, Rohan Kapoor

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Recent commercial aircraft crashes demand a paradigm shift in how the CVDRs are located and recovered, particularly if the aircraft crashes in the sea. CVDR (Cockpit Voice and Data Recorder) is most vital component out of the entire wreckage that can be obtained in order to investigate the sequence of events leading to the crash. It has been a taxing and exorbitantly expensive process locating and retrieving the same in the massive water bodies as it was seen in the air crashes in the recent past, taking the unfortunate Malaysia airlines MH-370 crash into account. The study aims to provide an aid to the persisting problem by improving the buoyant as-well-as the aerodynamic properties of the proposed CVDR encasing. Alongside this the placement of the deployable CVDR on the surface of the aircraft and floatability in case of water submersion are key factors which are taken into consideration for a better resolution to the problem. All of which results into the Deployable-CVDR emerging to the surface of the water-body. Also the whole system is designed such that it can be seamlessly integrated with the current crop of commercial aircraft. The work is supported by carrying out a computational study with the help Ansys-Fluent combination.

Keywords: encasing, buoyancy, deployable CVDR, floatability, water submersion

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Authors: Azrul Azlan Iskandar Mirza

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The purpose of Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP) for Islamic Bank is to promote prudent liquidity risk-taking behavior of business units. The acquirer of stable deposits will be rewarded whilst a business unit that generates long-term assets will be charged for added liquidity funding risks. In the end, it promotes risk-adjusted pricing by incorporating profit rate risk and liquidity risk component in the product pricing. However, in the event of Shariah non-compliant (SNCE), FTP components will be examined in the rectification plan especially when Islamic banks need to purify the non-compliance income. The finding shows that the determination between actual and provision cost will defer the decision among Shariah committee in Islamic banks. This paper will review each of FTP components to ensure the classification of actual and provision costs reflect the decision on rectification process on SNCE. This will benefit future decision and its consistency of Islamic banks.

Keywords: fund transfer pricing, Islamic banking, Islamic finance, shariah non-compliant event

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Authors: P. Pasomboon, P. Chumnanpuen, T. E-kobon

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Hyaluronic acid (HA) consists of linear heteropolysaccharides repeat of D-glucuronic acid and N-acetyl-D-glucosamine. HA has various useful properties to maintain skin elasticity and moisture, reduce inflammation, and lubricate the movement of various body parts without causing immunogenic allergy. HA can be found in several animal tissues as well as in the capsule component of some bacteria including Pasteurella multocida. This study aimed to modify a genome-scale metabolic model of Escherichia coli using computational simulation and flux analysis methods to predict HA productivity under different carbon sources and nitrogen supplement by the addition of two enzymes (GLMU2 and HYAD) from P. multocida to improve the HA production under the specified amount of carbon sources and nitrogen supplements. Result revealed that threonine and aspartate supplement raised the HA production by 12.186%. Our analyses proposed the genome-scale metabolic model is useful for improving the HA production and narrows the number of conditions to be tested further.

Keywords: Pasteurella multocida, Escherichia coli, hyaluronic acid, genome-scale metabolic model, bioinformatics

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Authors: B. Kenny

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There is currently no literature comparing undercasts in fracture care. This study is a randomised trial comparing the 4 commonly used undercasts in Australia. These are Webril, Sofban, Goretech and Delta-dry. The ideal undercast should be comfortable for the patient and not cause itchiness. It should be durable enough to withstand daily activities. The clinician/technician should find the undercast easy to apply and remove. It should provide adequate padding without compromising cast mouldability to obtain a good cast index and air index. 18 volunteering medical students were randomly allocated to receive 4 angular casts, one over each elbow and ankle(total of 72 casts). They were blinded to cast type. After an hour their casts were stressed by pouring 20ml Normal Saline onto the skin beneath. Each student filled a questionnaire about comfort, itchiness, weight and water resistance. Subsequently they ranked each cast 1 to 4 based on preference. Our preliminary results show Delta-dry is the most preferred undercast followed by Webril, Sofban and Goretech in that order. Underlay selection is important component of patient care with long immobilsation. Webril or Deltra-dry are by far the most preferred undercasts in our study.

Keywords: casts, fracture, treatment modality, patient compliance

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Authors: Rani Abro, Ali Ata Moazzami, Jan Erik Lindberg, Torbjörn Lundh

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The effect of dietary starch level on liver metabolism in Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) and tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) was studied using 1H-NMR based metabolomics. Fingerlings were fed iso-nitrogenous diets containing 0, 10 and 20 % starch for two months before liver samples were collected for metabolite analysis. Metabolite profiling was performed using 600 MHz NMR Chenomx software. In total, 48 metabolites were profiled in liver extracts from both fish species. Following the profiling, principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least square discriminant analysis (OPLC-DA) were performed. These revealed that differences in the concentration of significant metabolites were correlated to the dietary starch level in both species. The most prominent difference in metabolic response to starch feeding between the omnivorous tilapia and the carnivorous Arctic charr was an indication of higher anaerobic metabolism in Arctic charr. The data also indicated that amino acid and pyrimidine metabolism was higher in Artic charr than in tilapia.

Keywords: arctic charr, metabolomics, starch, tilapia

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Authors: Vijay H. Ingole, Efthimia Lioliou

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Indirubin, a key bioactive component of traditional Chinese medicine, has gained increasing recognition for its potential in modern biomedical applications, particularly in pharmacology and therapeutics. The present work aimed to harness the potential by engineering an Escherichia coli strain capable of high-yield indirubin production. Through meticulous genetic engineering, we optimized the metabolic pathways in E. coli to enhance indirubin synthesis. Further, to explored the optimization of culture media and indirubin yield via batch and fed-batch fermentation techniques. By fine-tuning upstream process (USP) parameters, including nutrient composition, pH, temperature, and aeration, we established conditions that maximized both cell growth and indirubin production. Additionally, significant efforts were dedicated to refining downstream process (DSP) conditions for the extraction, purification, and quantification of indirubin. Utilizing advanced biochemical methods and analytical techniques such as UHPLC, we ensured the production of high purity indirubin. This approach not only improved the economic viability of indirubin bioproduction but also aligned with the principles of green production and sustainability.

Keywords: indirubin, bacterial strain, fermentation, HPLC

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Authors: Cemil Akcay, Goksun Yerlikaya

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Buildings are the living spaces of people with an active role in every aspect of life in today's world. While some structures have survived from the early ages, most of the buildings that completed their lifetime have not transported to the present day. Nowadays, buildings that do not meet the social, economic, and safety requirements of the age return to life with a transformation process. This transformation is called urban transformation. Urban transformation is the renewal of the areas with a risk of disaster and the technological infrastructure required by the structure. The transformation aims to prevent damage to earthquakes and other disasters by rebuilding buildings that have completed their non-earthquake-resistant economic life. It is essential to decide on other issues related to conversion and transformation in places where most of the building stock should transform into the first-degree earthquake belt, such as Istanbul. In urban transformation, property owners, local authority, and contractor must deal at a common point. Considering that hundreds of thousands of property owners are sometimes in the areas of transformation, it is evident how difficult it is to make the deal and decide. For the optimization of these decisions, the use of game theory is foreseeing. The main problem in this study is that the urban transformation is carried out in place, or the building or buildings are transport to a different location. There are many stakeholders in the Istanbul University Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty Campus, which is planned to be carried out in the process of urban transformation, was tried to solve the game theory applications. An analysis of the decisions given on a real urban transformation project and the logical suitability of decisions taken without the use of game theory were also supervised using game theory. In each step of this study, many decision-makers are classifying according to a specific logical sequence, and in the game trees that emerged as a result of this classification, Nash balances were tried to observe, and optimum decisions were determined. All decisions taken for this project have been subjected to two significant differentiated comparisons using game theory, and as decisions are taken without the use of game theory, and according to the results, solutions for the decision phase of the urban transformation process introduced. The game theory model developed from beginning to the end of the urban transformation process, particularly as a solution to the difficulty of making rational decisions in large-scale projects with many participants in the decision-making process. The use of a decision-making mechanism can provide an optimum answer to the demands of the stakeholders. In today's world for the construction sector, it is also seeing that the game theory is a non-surprising consequence of the fact that it is the most critical issues of planning and making the right decision in future years.

Keywords: urban transformation, the game theory, decision making, multi-actor project

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Authors: Guilherme F. Guimaraes, Alfredo R. De Faria, Ronnie R. Rego, Andre L. R. D'Oliveira

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The development of methods for predicting manufacturing phenomena steadily grows due to their high potential to contribute to the component’s performance and durability. One of the most relevant phenomena in manufacturing is the residual stress state development through the manufacturing chain. In most cases, the residual stresses have their origin due to heterogenous plastifications produced by the processes. Although a few manufacturing processes have been successfully approached by numerical modeling, there is still a lack of understanding on how these processes' interactions will affect the final stress state. The objective of this work is to analyze the influence of previous stresses on the residual stress state induced by plastic deformation of a quasi-static indentation. The model consists of a simplified approach of shot peening, modeling four cases with variations in indenter size and force. This model was validated through topography, measured by optical 3D focus-variation, and residual stress, measured with the X-ray diffraction technique. The validated model was then exposed to several initial stress states, and the effect on the final residual stress was analyzed.

Keywords: plasticity, residual stress, finite element method, manufacturing

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Authors: Daniel James Pitchforth, Timothy James Rogers, Ulf Tyge Tygesen, Elizabeth Jane Cross

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Wave loading is a primary cause of fatigue within offshore structures and its quantification presents a challenging and important subtask within the SHM framework. The accurate representation of physics in such environments is difficult, however, driving the development of data-driven techniques in recent years. Within many industrial applications, empirical laws remain the preferred method of wave loading prediction due to their low computational cost and ease of implementation. This paper aims to develop an approach that combines data-driven Gaussian process models with physical empirical solutions for wave loading, including Morison’s Equation. The aim here is to incorporate physics directly into the covariance function (kernel) of the Gaussian process, enforcing derived behaviors whilst still allowing enough flexibility to account for phenomena such as vortex shedding, which may not be represented within the empirical laws. The combined approach has a number of advantages, including improved performance over either component used independently and interpretable hyperparameters.

Keywords: offshore structures, Gaussian processes, Physics informed machine learning, Kernel design

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Authors: Pawan Kumar Mishra, Ganesh Singh Bisht

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Super-resolution is the technique that is being used in computer vision to construct high-resolution images from a single low-resolution image. It is used to increase the frequency component, recover the lost details and removing the down sampling and noises that caused by camera during image acquisition process. High-resolution images or videos are desired part of all image processing tasks and its analysis in most of digital imaging application. The target behind super-resolution is to combine non-repetition information inside single or multiple low-resolution frames to generate a high-resolution image. Many methods have been proposed where multiple images are used as low-resolution images of same scene with different variation in transformation. This is called multi-image super resolution. And another family of methods is single image super-resolution that tries to learn redundancy that presents in image and reconstruction the lost information from a single low-resolution image. Use of deep learning is one of state of art method at present for solving reconstruction high-resolution image. In this research, we proposed Deep Denoising Super Resolution (DDSR) that is a deep neural network for effectively reconstruct the high-resolution image from low-resolution image.

Keywords: resolution, deep-learning, neural network, de-blurring

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Authors: Lela Mirtskhulava, Mariam Khunjgurua, Nino Lomineishvili, Koba Bakuria

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Software reliability prediction gives a great opportunity to measure the software failure rate at any point throughout system test. A software reliability prediction model provides with the technique for improving reliability. Software reliability is very important factor for estimating overall system reliability, which depends on the individual component reliabilities. It differs from hardware reliability in that it reflects the design perfection. Main reason of software reliability problems is high complexity of software. Various approaches can be used to improve the reliability of software. We focus on software reliability model in this article, assuming that there is a time redundancy, the value of which (the number of repeated transmission of basic blocks) can be an optimization parameter. We consider given mathematical model in the assumption that in the system may occur not only irreversible failures, but also a failure that can be taken as self-repairing failures that significantly affect the reliability and accuracy of information transfer. Main task of the given paper is to find a time distribution function (DF) of instructions sequence transmission, which consists of random number of basic blocks. We consider the system software unreliable; the time between adjacent failures has exponential distribution.

Keywords: exponential distribution, conditional mean time to failure, distribution function, mathematical model, software reliability

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Authors: Fekadu L. Bayisa, Elvan Ceyhan, Todd D. Steury

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Interaction between individuals within the same species is an important component of population dynamics. An interaction can be either static (based on spatial overlap) or dynamic (based on movement interactions). Using GPS collar data, we can quantify both static and dynamic interactions between black bears. The goal of this work is to determine the level of black bear interactions using the 95% and 50% home ranges, as well as to model black bear spatial interactions, which could be attraction, avoidance/repulsion, or a lack of interaction at all, to gain new insights and improve our understanding of ecological processes. Recent methodological developments in home range estimation, inhomogeneous multitype/cross-type summary statistics, and envelope testing methods are explored to study the nature of black bear interactions. Our findings, in general, indicate that the black bears of one type in our data set tend to cluster around another type.

Keywords: autocorrelated kernel density estimator, cross-type summary function, inhomogeneous multitype Poisson process, kernel density estimator, minimum convex polygon, pointwise and global envelope tests

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Authors: Ismail Halijah, Abdullah Rusli

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Introduction: This systematic literature review aims to identify the Knowledge Management Best Practice components in the Knowledge Management Model for Higher Learning Institutions environment. Study design: Systematic literature review. Methods: A systematic literature re-view of Knowledge Management Best Practice to identify and define the components of Best Practice from the Knowledge Management models was conducted recently. Results: This review of published papers of conference and journals’ articles shows the components of Best Practice in Knowledge Management are basically divided into two aspect which is the soft aspect and the hard aspect. The lacks of combination of these two aspects into an integrated model decelerate Knowledge Management Best Practice to fully throttle. Evidence from the literature shows the lack of integration of this two aspects leads to the immaturity of the Higher Learning Institution (HLI) towards the implementation of Knowledge Management System. Conclusion: The first steps of identifying the attributes to measure the Knowledge Management Best Practice components from the models in the literature will led to the definition of the Knowledge Management Best Practice component for the higher learning environment.

Keywords: knowledge management, knowledge management system, knowledge management best practice, knowledge management higher learning institution

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Authors: Benarous Khedidja, Yousfi Mohamed

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Infections caused by Candida species manifest in a number of diseases, including candidemia, vulvovaginal candidiasis, endocarditis, and peritonitis. These Candida species have been reported to have lipolytic activity by secretion of lipolytic enzymes such as esterases, lipases and phospholipases. These Extracellular hydrolytic enzymes seem to play an important role in Candida overgrowth. Candidiasis is commonly treated with antimycotics such as clotrimazole and nystatin, which bind to a major component of the fungal cell membrane (ergosterol). This binding forms pores in the membrane that lead to death of the fungus. Due to their secondary effects, scientists have thought of another treatment basing on lipase inhibition but we haven’t found any lipase inhibitors used as candidiasis treatment. In this work, we are interested to lipases inhibitors such as alkaloids as another candidiasis treatment. In the first part, we have proceeded to optimize the alkaloid structures and protein 3D structure using Hyperchem software. Secondly, we have docked inhibitors using Genetic algorithm with GOLD software. The results have shown ten possibilities of binding inhibitor to Candida rugosa lipase (CRL) but only one possibility has been accepted depending on the weakest binding energy.

Keywords: marrubiin, candida rugosa lipase, docking, gold

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Authors: A. Deswal, N. S. Deora, H. N. Mishra

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The aim of the present study was to develop a rapid method for electronic nose for online quality control of oat milk. Analysis by electronic nose and bacteriological measurements were performed to analyse spoilage kinetics of oat milk samples stored at room temperature and refrigerated conditions for up to 15 days. Principal component analysis (PCA), discriminant factorial analysis (DFA) and soft independent modelling by class analogy (SIMCA) classification techniques were used to differentiate the samples of oat milk at different days. The total plate count (bacteriological method) was selected as the reference method to consistently train the electronic nose system. The e-nose was able to differentiate between the oat milk samples of varying microbial load. The results obtained by the bacteria total viable counts showed that the shelf-life of oat milk stored at room temperature and refrigerated conditions were 20 hours and 13 days, respectively. The models built classified oat milk samples based on the total microbial population into “unspoiled” and “spoiled”.

Keywords: electronic-nose, bacteriological, shelf-life, classification

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Authors: Hisham Mughrabi

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Osteoporosis is one of the most common diseases in the world and, its seriousness lies in the lack of clear symptoms. The researcher aims to identify the impact of sports activities on osteoporosis and the body component of those with mild intellectual disabilities of students in the schools in Saudi Arabia -Medina. The research sample was selected in an intentional manner and consisted of 45 students and they were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 23 individuals participate in sports and the second group consisted of 22 individuals does not participate in sports. The researcher used the descriptive method and collected the data by measuring osteoporosis using and ultrasound osteoporosis screening device (OSTEO PRO B.M. Tech) and measured the body composition by using a Tanita devise (Body Composition Analyzer TBF- 300 Tanita). The results indicated that there was a statistical significant difference between the two comparing groups in osteoporosis measurement and body composition for the benefit of the group of sport participants. The researcher recommended the need to involve individuals with mild intellectual disabilities in physical activities to improve their rate of osteoporosis and body composition as well as to develop sports programs for individuals with mild intellectual disabilities.

Keywords: body composition, mild intellectual disabilities, osteoporosis, physical activities

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Authors: Ahmed Kamil Hasan Al-Ali, Bouchra Senadji, Ganesh Naik

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We propose a system to real environmental noise and channel mismatch for forensic speaker verification systems. This method is based on suppressing various types of real environmental noise by using independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm. The enhanced speech signal is applied to mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) or MFCC feature warping to extract the essential characteristics of the speech signal. Channel effects are reduced using an intermediate vector (i-vector) and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) approach for classification. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by using an Australian forensic voice comparison database, combined with car, street and home noises from QUT-NOISE at a signal to noise ratio (SNR) ranging from -10 dB to 10 dB. Experimental results indicate that the MFCC feature warping-ICA achieves a reduction in equal error rate about (48.22%, 44.66%, and 50.07%) over using MFCC feature warping when the test speech signals are corrupted with random sessions of street, car, and home noises at -10 dB SNR.

Keywords: noisy forensic speaker verification, ICA algorithm, MFCC, MFCC feature warping

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Authors: Khalid Alasim

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This study investigated Saudi Arabian elementary school teachers’ knowledge of strategies to teach reading components to hard-of-hearing students. The study focused on four of the five reading components the National Reading Panel (NPR, 2000) identified: phonemic awareness; phonics; vocabulary, and reading comprehension, and explored the relationship between teachers’ demographic characteristics and their knowledge of the strategies as well. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was used that included two phases. The quantitative phase examined the knowledge of these Arabic reading components among 89 elementary school teachers of hard-of-hearing students, and the qualitative phase consisted of interviews with 10 teachers. The results indicated that the teachers have a great deal of knowledge (above the mean score) of strategies to teach reading components. Specifically, teachers’ knowledge of strategies to teach the vocabulary component was the highest. The results also showed no significant association between teachers’ demographic characteristics and their knowledge of strategies to teach reading components. The qualitative analysis revealed two themes: 1) teachers’ lack of basic knowledge of strategies to teach reading components, and 2) the absence of in-service courses and training programs in reading for teachers.

Keywords: knowledge, reading, components, hard-of-hearing, phonology, vocabulary

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Authors: Selen Unaldi, Emmanuel Richaud, Matthieu Gervais, Laurent Berthe

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Aircrafts are painted with several layers to guarantee their protection from external attacks. For aluminum AA 2024-T3 (metallic structural part of the plane), a protective primer is applied to ensure its corrosion protection. On top of this layer, the top coat is applied for aesthetic aspects. During the lifetime of an aircraft, top coat stripping has an essential role which should be operated as an average of every four years. However, since conventional stripping processes create hazardous disposals and need long hours of labor work, alternative methods have been investigated. Amongst them, laser stripping appears as one of the most promising techniques not only because of the reasons mentioned above but also its controllable and monitorable aspects. The application of a laser beam from the coated side provides stripping, but the depth of the process should be well controlled in order to prevent damage to a substrate and the anticorrosion primer. Apart from that, thermal effects should be taken into account on the painted layers. As an alternative, we worked on developing a process that includes the usage of shock wave propagation to create the stripping via mechanical effects with the application of the beam from the substrate side (back face) of the samples. Laser stripping was applied on thickness-specified samples with a thickness deviation of 10-20%. First, the stripping threshold is determined as a function of power density which is the first flight off of the top coats. After obtaining threshold values, the same power densities were applied to specimens to create large stripping zones with a spot overlap of 10-40%. Layer characteristics were determined on specimens in terms of physicochemical properties and thickness range both before and after laser stripping in order to validate the substrate material health and coating properties. The substrate health is monitored by measuring the roughness of the laser-impacted zones and free surface energy tests (both before and after laser stripping). Also, Hugoniot Elastic Limit (HEL) is determined from VISAR diagnostic on AA 2024-T3 substrates (for the back face surface deformations). In addition, the coating properties are investigated as a function of adhesion levels and anticorrosion properties (neutral salt spray test). The influence of polyurethane top-coat thickness is studied in order to verify the laser stripping process window for industrial aircraft applications.

Keywords: aircraft coatings, laser stripping, laser adhesion tests, epoxy, polyurethane

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Authors: Syed Zameer, Mohamed Haneef

Abstract:

Hip joint plays very important role in human beings as it takes up the whole body forces generated due to various activities. These loads are repetitive and fluctuating depending on the activities such as standing, sitting, jogging, stair casing, climbing, etc. which may lead to failure of Hip joint. Hip joint modification and replacement are common in old aged persons as well as younger persons. In this research study static and Fatigue analysis of Hip joint model was carried out using finite element software ANSYS. Stress distribution obtained from result of static analysis, material properties and S-N curve data of fabricated Ultra High molecular weight polyethylene / 50 wt% short E glass fibres + 40 wt% TiO2 Polymer matrix composites specimens were used to estimate fatigue life of Hip joint using stiffness Degradation model for polymer matrix composites. The stress distribution obtained from static analysis was found to be within the acceptable range.The factor of safety calculated from linear Palmgren linear damage rule is less than one, which indicates the component is safe under the design.

Keywords: hip joint, polymer matrix composite, static analysis, fatigue analysis, stress life approach

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Authors: Ramkumar Gunasekaran, John Cater, Vinod Suresh, Haribalan Kumar

Abstract:

The main objective of this project is to develop a statistical shape model using principal component analysis that could be used for analyzing the shape of the human airway. The ultimate goal of this project is to identify geometric risk factors for diagnosis and management of Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). Anonymous CBCT scans of 25 individuals were obtained from the Otago Radiology Group. The airways were segmented between the hard-palate and the aryepiglottic fold using snake active contour segmentation. The point data cloud of the segmented images was then fitted with a bi-cubic mesh, and pseudo landmarks were placed to perform PCA on the segmented airway to analyze the shape of the airway and to find the relationship between the shape and OSA risk factors. From the PCA results, the first four modes of variation were found to be significant. Mode 1 was interpreted to be the overall length of the airway, Mode 2 was related to the anterior-posterior width of the retroglossal region, Mode 3 was related to the lateral dimension of the oropharyngeal region and Mode 4 was related to the anterior-posterior width of the oropharyngeal region. All these regions are subjected to the risk factors of OSA.

Keywords: medical imaging, image processing, FEM/BEM, statistical modelling

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Authors: A. Talaei, M. Ahiduzzaman, A. Kumar

Abstract:

In Canada, an increase in the production of iron and steel is anticipated for satisfying the increasing demand of iron and steel in the oil sands and automobile industries. It is predicted that GHG emissions from iron and steel sector will show a continuous increase till 2030 and, with emissions of 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the sector will account for more than 2% of total national GHG emissions, or 12% of industrial emissions (i.e. 25% increase from 2010 levels). Therefore, there is an urgent need to improve the energy intensity and to implement energy efficiency measures in the industry to reduce the GHG footprint. This paper analyzes the current energy consumption in the Canadian iron and steel industries and identifies energy efficiency opportunities to improve the energy intensity and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from this industry. In order to do this, a demand tree is developed representing different iron and steel production routs and the technologies within each rout. The main energy consumer within the industry is found to be flared heaters accounting for 81% of overall energy consumption followed by motor system and steam generation each accounting for 7% of total energy consumption. Eighteen different energy efficiency measures are identified which will help the efficiency improvement in various subsector of the industry. In the sintering process, heat recovery from coolers provides a high potential for energy saving and can be integrated in both new and existing plants. Coke dry quenching (CDQ) has the same advantages. Within the blast furnace iron-making process, injection of large amounts of coal in the furnace appears to be more effective than any other option in this category. In addition, because coal-powered electricity is being phased out in Ontario (where the majority of iron and steel plants are located) there will be surplus coal that could be used in iron and steel plants. In the steel-making processes, the recovery of Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) gas and scrap preheating provides considerable potential for energy savings in BOF and Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) steel-making processes, respectively. However, despite the energy savings potential, the BOF gas recovery is not applicable in existing plants using steam recovery processes. Given that the share of EAF in steel production is expected to increase the application potential of the technology will be limited. On the other hand, the long lifetime of the technology and the expected capacity increase of EAF makes scrap preheating a justified energy saving option. This paper would present the results of the assessment of the above mentioned options in terms of the costs and GHG mitigation potential.

Keywords: Iron and Steel Sectors, Energy Efficiency Improvement, Blast Furnace Iron-making Process, GHG Mitigation

Procedia PDF Downloads 400

Authors: Hatem Hajri, Mohamed-Cherif Rahal

Abstract:

Both Lidars and Radars are sensors for obstacle detection. While Lidars are very accurate on obstacles positions and less accurate on their velocities, Radars are more precise on obstacles velocities and less precise on their positions. Sensor fusion between Lidar and Radar aims at improving obstacle detection using advantages of the two sensors. The present paper proposes a real-time Lidar/Radar data fusion algorithm for obstacle detection and tracking based on the global nearest neighbour standard filter (GNN). This algorithm is implemented and embedded in an automative vehicle as a component generated by a real-time multisensor software. The benefits of data fusion comparing with the use of a single sensor are illustrated through several tracking scenarios (on a highway and on a bend) and using real-time kinematic sensors mounted on the ego and tracked vehicles as a ground truth.

Keywords: ground truth, Hungarian algorithm, lidar Radar data fusion, global nearest neighbor filter

Procedia PDF Downloads 176

Authors: Rute Faria, Digo Moraes, Amanda Santos, Dione Morais, Maria Sartori

Abstract:

Seed vigor is a fundamental component for the good performance of the entire soybean production process. Seeds with mechanical damage at harvest time will be more susceptible to fungal and insect attack during storage, which will invariably reduce their vigor to the field, compromising uniformity and final stand performance. Harvesters, even the most modern ones, when not properly regulated or operated, can cause irreversible damages to the seeds, compromising even their commercialization. Therefore, the control of an efficient harvest is necessary in order to guarantee a good quality final product. In this work, the damage caused by two different harvesters (one rented, and another one) was evaluated, traveling in two speeds (4 and 8 km / h). The design was completely randomized in 2 x 2 factorial, with four replications. To evaluate the physiological quality seed germination and vigor tests were carried out over a period of six months. A multivariate analysis of Principal Components (PCA) and clustering allowed us to verify that the leased machine had better performance in the incidence of immediate damages in the seeds, but after a storage period of 6 months the vigor of these seeds reduced more than own machine evidencing that such a machine would bring more damages to the seeds.

Keywords: Glycine max (L.), cluster analysis, PCA, vigor

Procedia PDF Downloads 260