Search results for: banana leaf extract

Authors: A. A. Salisu, M. Y. Yakasai, K. M. Aujara

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Sisal leaves were subjected to enzymatic retting method to extract the sisal fibre. A portion of the fibre was pretreated with alkali (NaOH), and further treated with benzoyl chloride and silane treatment reagents. Both the treated and untreated Sisal fibre composites were used to fabricate the composite by hand lay-up technique using unsaturated polyester resin. Tensile, flexural, water absorption, density, thickness swelling and chemical resistant tests were conducted and evaluated on the composites. Results obtained for all the parameters showed an increase in the treated fibre compared to untreated fibre. FT-IR spectra results ascertained the inclusion of benzoyl and silane groups on the fibre surface. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) result obtained showed variation in the morphology of the treated and untreated fibre. Chemical modification was found to improve adhesion of the fibre to the matrix, as well as physico-mechanical properties of the composites.

Keywords: chemical resistance, density test, polymer matrix sisal fibre, thickness swelling

Procedia PDF Downloads 435

Authors: Udomporn Pangnakorn, Settawut Prasatporn, Sombat Chuenchooklin

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The effect of biopesticide on growth, yield and pest infestation of maize (Zea mays Linn.) (variety DK 6818) was evaluated during the drought season. The experimental plots were located at research station of Faculty of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment, Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand. The extracted substance from plants was evaluated in the plots in 4 treatments: 1) water as control; 2) bitter bush (Chromolaena odorata L.); 3) neem (Azadirachta indica A. Juss), 4) golden shower (Cassia fistula Linn.). The experiment was followed a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with 4 treatments and 4 replications per treatment. The results showed that golden shower gave the highest growth of maize in term of height (203.29 cm), followed by neem and bitter bush with average height of 202.66 cm and 191.66 cm respectively with significance different. But neem treatment given significantly higher average of yield component in term of length, width, and weight of pod corn with 18.89 cm 13.91 cm and 166.46 g respectively. Also, treatment of neem showed the highest harvested yield at 284.06 kg/ha followed by the golden shower and bitter bush with harvested yield at 245.86 kg/ha and 235.52 kg/ha respectively. Additionally, treatment of neem and golden shower were the highest effectiveness for reducing insects pest infestation of maize: corn leaf aphid Rhopalosiphum maidis Fitch, corn borer Ostrinia fumacalis Guenee and corn armyworm Mythimna separata Walker. The treatment of neem, golden shower, and bitter bush given reduction insect infestation on maize with leaves area were infested at 5,412 mm², 6,827 mm² and 8,910 mm² respectively with significance different when compared to control.

Keywords: maize, Zea mays Linn., biopesticide, bitter bush, Chromolaena odorata L.), neem, Azadirachta indica A. Juss, golden shower, Cassia fistula Linn.

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Authors: Granch Berhe Tseghai, Lodrick Wangatia Makokha

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Cotton dyeing using reactive dyes is one of the major water polluter; this is due to large amount of dye and salt remaining in effluent. Recent adverse climate change and its associated effect to human life have lead to search for more sustainable industrial production. Cationization of cotton to improve its affinity for reactive dye has been earmarked as a major solution for dyeing of cotton with no or less salt. Synthetic cationizing agents of ammonium salt have already been commercialized. However, in nature there are proteinous products which are rich in amino and ammonium salts which can be carefully harnessed to be used as cationizing agent for cotton. The hoofs and horns have successfully been used to cationize cotton so as to improve cotton affinity to the dye. The cationization action of the hoof and horn extract on cotton was confirmed by dyeing the pretreated fabric without salt and comparing it with conventionally dyed and untreated salt free dyed fabric. UV-VIS absorption results showed better dye absorption (62.5% and 50% dye bath exhaustion percentage for cationized and untreated respectively) while K/S values of treated samples were similar to conventional sample.

Keywords: cationization, cotton, proteinous products, reactive dyes

Procedia PDF Downloads 339

Authors: Elmahdi Elgharbaoui, Tamou Nasser, Ahmed Essadki

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In the era of sustainable development, photovoltaic (PV) technology has shown significant potential as a renewable energy source. Photovoltaic generators (GPV) have a non-linear current-voltage characteristic, with a maximum power point (MPP) characterized by an optimal voltage, and depends on environmental factors such as temperature and irradiation. To extract each time the maximum power available at the terminals of the GPV and transfer it to the load, an adaptation stage is used, consisting of a boost chopper controlled by a maximum power point tracking technique (MPPT) through a stage of pulse width modulation (PWM). Our choice has focused on three techniques which are: the perturbation and observation method (P&O), the incremental conductance method (InCond) and the last is that of control using the fuzzy logic. The implementation and simulation of the system (photovoltaic generator, chopper boost, PWM and MPPT techniques) are then performed in the Matlab/Simulink environment.

Keywords: photovoltaic generator, technique MPPT, boost chopper, PWM, fuzzy logic, P&O, InCond

Procedia PDF Downloads 323

Authors: Damandeep Kaur, O.P. Pandey, M.S. Reddy

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In the present research, bio-synthesisation of silica particles has been carried out successfully. For this purpose, agriculture waste rice husk (RH) has been utilized. Among several types of agriculture waste, RH is considered to be cost-effective and easily accessible. In the present investigation, a chemical approach has been followed to extract silica nanoparticles. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) patterns indicated the amorphous nature of silica at lower temperature range. Silica and other mineral contents have been found using energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). Morphological and structural studies have been carried out with the use of Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM) and Fourier Transform Infrared Transmission (FTIR) spectroscopy. Further, extracted silica from RH has been used for preparation of the glasses. The appearance of broad humps in XRD patterns confirmed the amorphous nature of prepared glasses. These glasses exhibited enhanced antibacterial effect against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. The as-synthesized glass samples can be further used for physical and structural studies for drug loading applications.

Keywords: rice husk, biosynthesized silica, bioactive glasses, antibacterial studies

Procedia PDF Downloads 113

Authors: Pattaramon Pongjetpong

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In recent years, infectious diseases have increased considerably, and they are amongst the most common leading causes of death all over the world. Several medicinal plants are well known to contain active constituents such as flavonoids, carotenoids, and phenolic compounds, which are plausible candidates for therapeutic purposes. This study aimed to examine the antimicrobial activities of M. cochinchinensis and P. kesiya extracts using the agar disk diffusion method and broth microdilution to determine the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) value. In this study, Momordica cochinchinensis and Pinus kesiya extracts are investigated for antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus. The results showed that S. aureus was susceptible to P. kesiya extracts with an MIC value of 62.5 µg/ml, while M. cochinchinensis showed MIC against S. aureus was greater than 2000 µg/ml. In summary, P. kesiya extract showed potent antibacterial activity against S. aureus, which could greatly value developing as adjuvant therapy for infectious diseases. However, further investigation regarding purification of the active constituents as well as a determination of the mechanism of antimicrobial action of P. kesiya active compound should be performed to identify the molecular target of the active compounds.

Keywords: antimicrobial activity, Momordica cochinchinensis, Pinus kesiya, Staphylococcus aureus

Procedia PDF Downloads 203

Authors: Sarah M. Bolger

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There is a clear recognition that humanitarian and development workers are operating more and more frequently in situations of protracted crises, with conflict and violence undermining long-term development efforts. First coined at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, the humanitarian-development-peacebuilding nexus – or 'Triple Nexus' - seeks to promote greater cooperation and policy and program coherence amongst organizations working within and across the nexus. However, despite the clear need for such an approach, the Triple Nexus has failed to gain much traction. This is largely due to the lack of conceptual clarity for actors on the ground and the disconnect between the theory of the Triple Nexus and what that means in practice. This paper seeks to identify the key challenges in shifting from the conceptual definition of the Triple Nexus and what that can look like, particularly for multi-mandated organizations, to the operationalization of the Triple Nexus approach. It adopts a case study approach, examining a selection of organizations and programs and their approaches to the Triple Nexus in order to extract key challenges and lessons learned. Finally, key recommendations are provided on how these challenges can be overcome, allowing for the operationalization of the Triple Nexus and ultimately for a more integrated and sustainable approach to humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding work.

Keywords: development, humanitarian, peacebuilding, triple nexus

Procedia PDF Downloads 144

Authors: Shaoying Guo, Yanyun Xu, Meng Zhang, Weiqing Huang

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The wireless communication network is developing rapidly, thus the wireless security becomes more and more important. Specific emitter identification (SEI) is an vital part of wireless communication security as a technique to identify the unique transmitters. In this paper, a SEI method based on multiscale dispersion entropy (MDE) and refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy (RCMDE) is proposed. The algorithms of MDE and RCMDE are used to extract features for identification of five wireless devices and cross-validation support vector machine (CV-SVM) is used as the classifier. The experimental results show that the total identification accuracy is 99.3%, even at low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) of 5dB, which proves that MDE and RCMDE can describe the communication signal series well. In addition, compared with other methods, the proposed method is effective and provides better accuracy and stability for SEI.

Keywords: cross-validation support vector machine, refined com- posite multiscale dispersion entropy, specific emitter identification, transient signal, wireless communication device

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Authors: Diego Roberto Goncalves De Pontes, Sergio Donizetti Zorzo

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Studies show that most users do not read privacy policies from the online services they use. Some authors claim that one of the main causes of this is that policies are long and usually hard to understand, which make users lose interest in reading them. In this scenario, users may agree with terms without knowing what kind of data is being collected and why. Given that, we aimed to develop a model that would present the privacy policies contents in an easy and graphical way for the user to understand. We call it the Privacy Label. Using information recovery techniques, we propose an architecture that is able to extract information about what kind of data is being collected and to what end in the policies and show it to the user in an automated way. To assess our model, we calculated the precision, recall and f-measure metrics on the information extracted by our technique. The results for each metric were 68.53%, 85.61% e 76,13%, respectively, making it possible for the final user to understand which data was being collected without reading the whole policy. Also, our proposal can facilitate the notice-and-choice by presenting privacy policy information in an alternative way for online users.

Keywords: privacy, policies, user behavior, computer human interaction

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Authors: Weiliang Wen, Xinyu Guo, Ying Zhang, Jianjun Du, Boxiang Xiao

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Reconstructing and analyzing three-dimensional (3D) models from situ measured data is important for a number of researches and applications in plant science, including plant phenotyping, functional-structural plant modeling (FSPM), plant germplasm resources protection, agricultural technology popularization. It has many scales like cell, tissue, organ, plant and canopy from micro to macroscopic. The techniques currently used for data capture, feature analysis, and 3D reconstruction are quite different of different scales. In this context, morphological data acquisition, 3D analysis and modeling of plants on different scales are introduced systematically. The commonly used data capture equipment for these multiscale is introduced. Then hot issues and difficulties of different scales are described respectively. Some examples are also given, such as Micron-scale phenotyping quantification and 3D microstructure reconstruction of vascular bundles within maize stalks based on micro-CT scanning, 3D reconstruction of leaf surfaces and feature extraction from point cloud acquired by using 3D handheld scanner, plant modeling by combining parameter driven 3D organ templates. Several application examples by using the 3D models and analysis results of plants are also introduced. A 3D maize canopy was constructed, and light distribution was simulated within the canopy, which was used for the designation of ideal plant type. A grape tree model was constructed from 3D digital and point cloud data, which was used for the production of science content of 11th international conference on grapevine breeding and genetics. By using the tissue models of plants, a Google glass was used to look around visually inside the plant to understand the internal structure of plants. With the development of information technology, 3D data acquisition, and data processing techniques will play a greater role in plant science.

Keywords: plant, three dimensional modeling, multi-scale, plant phenotyping, three dimensional data acquisition

Procedia PDF Downloads 275

Authors: Urvah-Til-Vusqa, Unsa Noreen, Ayesha Hussain, Abdul Hafeez, Rafia Asghar, Sidrat Nasir

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Natural dyes offer an alternative better application in textiles than synthetic ones. The present study will be aimed to employ natural dye extracted from Cordyline terminalis plant and its application into viscose under the influence of gamma radiations. The colorant extraction will be done by boiling dracaena leaves powder in aqueous, alkaline and ethyl acetate mediums. Both dye powder and fabric will be treated with different doses (5-20 kGy) of gamma radiations. The antioxidant, antimicrobial and hemolytic activities of the extracts will also be determined. Different tests of fabric characterization (before and after radiations treatment) will be employed. Dyeing variables just as time, temperature and M: L will be applied for optimization. Standard methods for ISO to evaluate color fastness to light, washing and rubbing will be employed for improvement of color strength 1.5-15.5% of Al, Fe, Cr, and Cu as mordants will be employed through pre, post and meta mordanting. Color depth % & L*, a*, b* and L*, C*, h values will be recorded using spectra flash SF650.

Keywords: natural dyes, gamma radiations, Cordyline terminalis, ecofriendly dyes

Procedia PDF Downloads 595

Authors: Soheil Zorofchian Moghadamtousi, Habsah Abdul Kadir, Mohammadjavad Paydar, Elham Rouhollahi, Hamed Karimian

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The present study was designed to evaluate the molecular mechanisms of Annona muricata leaves ethyl acetate extract (AMEAE) against lung cancer A549 cells. Cell viability analysis revealed the selective cytotoxic effect of AMEAE towards A549 cells. Treatment of A549 cells with AMEAE significantly elevated the reactive oxygen species formation, followed by attenuation of mitochondrial membrane potential via upregulation of Bax and downregulation of Bcl-2, accompanied by cytochrome c release to the cytosol. The released cytochrome c triggered the activation of caspase-9 followed by caspase-3. In addition, AMEAE-induced apoptosis was accompanied by cell cycle arrest at G1 phase. Our data showed for the first time that AMEAE inhibited the proliferation of A549 cells, leading to cell cycle arrest and programmed cell death through activation of the mitochondrial-mediated signaling pathway.

Keywords: Annona muricata, lung cancer, apoptosis, mitochondria

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Authors: Muhammad Usman

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Pattern extraction has been done in past to extract hidden and interesting patterns from large datasets. Recently, advancements are being made in these techniques by providing the ability of multi-level mining, effective dimension reduction, advanced evaluation and visualization support. This paper focuses on reviewing the current techniques in literature on the basis of these parameters. Literature review suggests that most of the techniques which provide multi-level mining and dimension reduction, do not handle mixed-type data during the process. Patterns are not extracted using advanced algorithms for large datasets. Moreover, the evaluation of patterns is not done using advanced measures which are suited for high-dimensional data. Techniques which provide visualization support are unable to handle a large number of rules in a small space. We present a theoretical model to handle these issues. The implementation of the model is beyond the scope of this paper.

Keywords: association rule mining, data mining, data warehouses, visualization of association rules

Procedia PDF Downloads 222

Authors: Mozhgan Sabzehparvar, Mohammad Montazeri, Mahdie Jafarnejad Shahri, Neda Boroumandi, Shakib Alipour, Hamide Torabi, Zahra Dehghani

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In this article, the aesthetic criteria, which are regarded as the key factors in the product development, and design process are carefully taken into account and an attempt has been made to extract the influential concepts in successful product design. This review article was conducted from 22.05.2021 to 22.06.2021, recent published paper in English (2017-2021) in three search engines of JSTOR, IEEE, and EMERALD were selected. The selected main keywords in our search were "Customer, Behavior, Aesthetics, Marketing and Product". During the screenings, 21 articles were analyzed. The aesthetic criteria play a role in increasing the power of choice, loyalty, satisfaction and purchase intention of the customers. Also, product design has a positive effect on the customers’ perception of aesthetics and acts effectively on customer behavior. Aesthetics has a significant relationship with the customer's intention to buy products and can make the product popular and satisfy people.

Keywords: product design, design process, customer behaviour, aesthetic, marketing

Procedia PDF Downloads 88

Authors: Amir Hajian, Sepehr Damavandinejadmonfared

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In this paper the issue of dimensionality reduction is investigated in finger vein recognition systems using kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). One aspect of KPCA is to find the most appropriate kernel function on finger vein recognition as there are several kernel functions which can be used within PCA-based algorithms. In this paper, however, another side of PCA-based algorithms -particularly KPCA- is investigated. The aspect of dimension of feature vector in PCA-based algorithms is of importance especially when it comes to the real-world applications and usage of such algorithms. It means that a fixed dimension of feature vector has to be set to reduce the dimension of the input and output data and extract the features from them. Then a classifier is performed to classify the data and make the final decision. We analyze KPCA (Polynomial, Gaussian, and Laplacian) in details in this paper and investigate the optimal feature extraction dimension in finger vein recognition using KPCA.

Keywords: biometrics, finger vein recognition, principal component analysis (PCA), kernel principal component analysis (KPCA)

Procedia PDF Downloads 363

Authors: Badr M. Alshammari, A. Rabeh, A. K. Mohamed

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This paper presents the modeling and the control of a grid-connected photovoltaic system (PVS). Firstly, the MPPT control of the PVS and its associated DC/DC converter has been analyzed in order to extract the maximum of available power. Secondly, the control system of the grid side converter (GSC) which is a three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI) has been presented. A special attention has been paid to the control algorithms of the GSC converter during grid voltages imbalances. Especially, three different control objectives are to achieve; the mitigation of the grid imbalance adverse effects, at the point of common coupling (PCC), on the injected currents, the elimination of double frequency oscillations in active power flow, and the elimination of double frequency oscillations in reactive power flow. Simulation results of two control strategies have been performed via MATLAB software in order to demonstrate the particularities of each control strategy according to power quality standards.

Keywords: renewable energies, photovoltaic systems, dc link, voltage source inverter, space vector SVPWM, unbalanced voltage dips, symmetrical components

Procedia PDF Downloads 376

Authors: Aviv Yaniv, Ron Ben Arosh, Nadav Gasner, Michael Konviser, Arbel Yaniv

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This paper introduces two methods for the evaluation of Question Decomposition Meaning Representation (QDMR) as predicted by sequence-to-sequence model and COPYNET parser for natural language questions processing, motivated by the fact that previous evaluation metrics used for this task do not take into account some characteristics of the representation, such as partial ordering structure. To this end, several heuristics to extract such partial dependencies are formulated, followed by the hereby proposed evaluation methods denoted as Proportional Graph Matcher (PGM) and Conversion to Normal String Representation (Nor-Str), designed to better capture the accuracy level of QDMR predictions. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed evaluation methods and show the added value suggested by one of them- the Nor-Str, for better distinguishing between high and low-quality QDMR when predicted by models such as COPYNET. This work represents an important step forward in the development of better evaluation methods for QDMR predictions, which will be critical for improving the accuracy and reliability of natural language question-answering systems.

Keywords: NLP, question answering, question decomposition meaning representation, QDMR evaluation metrics

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Authors: Omvati Verma, Shyamashrre Roy

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A field experiment was conducted with three basal nitrogen levels (90, 120 and 150 kg N/ha) and five foliar application of urea (absolute control, water spray, 3% urea spray at anthesis, 7 and 14 days after anthesis) at G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, Pantnagar, U.S. Nagar (Uttarakhand) during rabi season in a factorial randomized block design with three replications. Results revealed that nitrogen application of 150 kg/ha produced the highest seed yield, straw and biological yield and it was significantly superior to 90 kg N/ha and was at par with 120 kg N/ha. The number of tillers increased significantly with increase in nitrogen doses up to 150 kg N/ha. Spike length, number of grains per spike, grain weight per spike and thousand seed weight showed significantly higher values with 120 kg N/ha than 90 kg N/ha and were at par with that of 150 kg N/ha. Also, plant height showed similar trend. Leaf area index and chlorophyll content showed significant increase with an increase in nitrogen levels at different stages. In the case of foliar spray treatments, urea spray at anthesis showed highest value for yield and yield attributes. In case of spike length and thousand seed weight, it was similar with the urea spray at 7 and 14 days after anthesis, but for rest of the yield attributes, it was significantly higher than rest of the treatments. Among seed quality parameters protein and sedimentation value showed significant increase due to increase in nitrogen rates whereas, starch and hectolitre weight had a decreasing trend. Wet gluten content was not influenced by nitrogen levels. Foliar urea spray at anthesis resulted in highest value of protein and hectolitre weight whereas, urea spray at 7 days after anthesis showed highest value of sedimentation value and wet gluten content.

Keywords: foliar application, nitrogenous fertilizer, seed quality, yield

Procedia PDF Downloads 277

Authors: Rashini Maduka, C. R. Wijesinghe, A. R. Weerasinghe

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Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) can happen when two or more drugs are taken together. Today DDIs have become a serious health issue due to adverse drug effects. In vivo and in vitro methods for identifying DDIs are time-consuming and costly. Therefore, in-silico-based approaches are preferred in DDI identification. Most machine learning models for DDI prediction are used chemical and biological drug properties as features. However, some drug features are not available and costly to extract. Therefore, it is better to make automatic feature engineering. Furthermore, people who have diabetes already suffer from other diseases and take more than one medicine together. Then adverse drug effects may happen to diabetic patients and cause unpleasant reactions in the body. In this study, we present a model with a graph convolutional autoencoder and a graph decoder using a dataset from DrugBank version 5.1.3. The main objective of the model is to identify unknown interactions between antidiabetic drugs and the drugs taken by diabetic patients for other diseases. We considered automatic feature engineering and used Known DDIs only as the input for the model. Our model has achieved 0.86 in AUC and 0.86 in AP.

Keywords: drug-drug interaction prediction, graph embedding, graph convolutional networks, adverse drug effects

Procedia PDF Downloads 99

Authors: Zayneb Kthiri, Walid Hamada

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The application of organic fertilizers is generally known to be useful to sustain soil fertility and plant growth, especially in poor soils, with less than 1% of organic matter, as it is very common in our Tunisian fields. Therefore, we focused on evaluating the effect of a new released liquid organic fertilizer named Solorga (with 5% of organic matter) compared to a reference product (Espartan: Kimitec, Spain) on tomato plant growth and physiology. Both fertilizers, derived from plant decomposition, were applied at an early stage in hydroponic system and under greenhouse. In hydroponic system, after 14 days of their application by root feeding, a significant difference was observed between treatments. Indeed, Solorga improved shoots and roots length, as well as the biomass respectively, by 45%, 27%, and 27.8% increase rate, while compared to control plants. However, Espartan induced less the measured parameters while compared to untreated control. Moreover, Solorga significantly increased the chlorophyll content by 42% compared to control and by 32% compared to Espartan. In the greenhouse, after 20 days of treatments, the results showed a significant effect of both fertilizers on SPAD index and the number of flowers blossom. Solorga increased the amount of chlorophyll present in the leaf by 7% compared to Espartan as well as the plant height under greenhouse. Moreover, the number of flowers blossom increased by 15% in plants treated with Solorga while compared to Espartan. Whereas, there is no notable difference between both organic fertilizers on the fruits blossom and the number of fruits per blossom. In conclusion, even though there is a difference in the organic matter between both fertilizers, Solorga improved better the plant growth in controlled conditions in hydroponic system while compared to Espartan. Altogether the obtained results are encouraging for the use of Solorga as a soil enriching source of organic matter to help plants to boost their growth and help them to overcome abiotic stresses linked to soil fertility.

Keywords: tomato, plant growth, organic fertilizer, hydroponic system, greenhouse

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Authors: Zahra Mohagheghian, Fatema Agharebparast

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Professional ethic is a subject that has been an issue today, so most of the businesses, including the teaching profession, understand the need and importance of it. So they need to develop a code of professional ethics for their own. In this regard, this study seeks to answer the question, with respect to the integrity of the Qur'an (Nahl / 89), is it possible to contemplate the divine teachers conduct to extract the divine pattern for teaching and training? In the code of conduct for divine teachers what are the most important moral obligations and duties of the teaching professionals? The results of this study show that the teaching of Khidr, according to the Quran’s verses, Abundant and subtle hints emphasized that it can be as comprehensive and divine pattern used in teaching and in the drafting of the charter of professional ethics of teachers used it. Also, the results show that in there have been many ethical principles in prophet Khidr’s teaching pattern.The most important ethical principles include: Student assessment, using objective and not subjective examples, assessment during teaching, flexibility, and others. According to each of these principles can help teachers achieve their educational goals and lead human being in their path toward spiritual evaluation.

Keywords: professional ethics, teaching-learning process, teacher, student, Quran

Procedia PDF Downloads 297

Authors: N. Drir, L. Barazane, M. Loudini

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It is well known that photovoltaic (PV) cells are an attractive source of energy. Abundant and ubiquitous, this source is one of the important renewable energy sources that have been increasing worldwide year by year. However, in the V-P characteristic curve of GPV, there is a maximum point called the maximum power point (MPP) which depends closely on the variation of atmospheric conditions and the rotation of the earth. In fact, such characteristics outputs are nonlinear and change with variations of temperature and irradiation, so we need a controller named maximum power point tracker MPPT to extract the maximum power at the terminals of photovoltaic generator. In this context, the authors propose here to study the modeling of a photovoltaic system and to find an appropriate method for optimizing the operation of the PV generator using two intelligent controllers respectively to track this point. The first one is based on artificial neural networks and the second on fuzzy logic. After the conception and the integration of each controller in the global process, the performances are examined and compared through a series of simulation. These two controller have prove by their results good tracking of the MPPT compare with the other method which are proposed up to now.

Keywords: maximum power point tracking, neural networks, photovoltaic, P&O

Procedia PDF Downloads 338

Authors: Maram Saleh

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Knowledge has become an essential resource in today’s economy and become the most important asset of maintaining competition advantage in organizations. The importance of knowledge has made organizations to manage their knowledge assets and resources through all multiple knowledge management stages such as: Knowledge Creation, knowledge storage, knowledge sharing and knowledge use. Researches on data mining are continues growing over recent years on both business and educational fields. Data mining is one of the most important steps of the knowledge discovery in databases process aiming to extract implicit, unknown but useful knowledge and it is considered as significant subfield in knowledge management. Data miming have the great potential to help organizations to focus on extracting the most important information on their data warehouses. Data mining tools and techniques can predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. This review paper explores the applications of data mining techniques in supporting knowledge management process as an effective knowledge discovery technique. In this paper, we identify the relationship between data mining and knowledge management, and then focus on introducing some application of date mining techniques in knowledge management for some real life domains.

Keywords: Data Mining, Knowledge management, Knowledge discovery, Knowledge creation.

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Authors: Yanwen Li, Shuguo Xie

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In electromagnetic imaging, because of the diffraction limited system, the pixel values could change slowly near the edge of the image targets and they also change with the location in the same target. Using traditional digital image segmentation methods to segment electromagnetic gradient images could result in lots of errors because of this change in pixel values. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel image segmentation and extraction algorithm based on Mean-Shift and dictionary learning. Firstly, the preliminary segmentation results from adaptive bandwidth Mean-Shift algorithm are expanded, merged and extracted. Then the overlap rate of the extracted image block is detected before determining a segmentation region with a single complete target. Last, the gradient edge of the extracted targets is recovered and reconstructed by using a dictionary-learning algorithm, while the final segmentation results are obtained which are very close to the gradient target in the original image. Both the experimental results and the simulated results show that the segmentation results are very accurate. The Dice coefficients are improved by 70% to 80% compared with the Mean-Shift only method.

Keywords: gradient image, segmentation and extract, mean-shift algorithm, dictionary iearning

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Authors: Arash Jafari, Somaye Bahrami, Mohammad Hossein Razi Jalali

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The aim of this study was the isolation and identification of excretory-secretory and somatic antigens from D. dendriticum by SDS-PAGE and evaluation of humeral immune response against these antigens. The sera of infected sheep with different infection degrees were collected. Somatic and ES proteins were isolated with SDS PAGE. Immunogenicity properties of the resulting proteins were determined using western blot analysis. The total extract of somatic antigens analysed by SDS-PAGE revealed 21 proteins. In mild infection, bands of 130 KDa were immune dominant. In moderate infections 48, 80 and 130 KDa and in heavy infections 48, 60, 80, 130 KDa were detected as immune dominant bands. In ES antigens, mild infection 130 KDa, in moderate infection 100, 120 and 130 KDa and in heavy infection 45, 80, 85, 100, 120 and 130 KDa were immune dominant bands. The most immunogenic protein band during different degrees of infection was 130KDa.

Keywords: Dicrocoelium dendriticum excretory-secretory antigens, somatic antigens, western blot

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Authors: Doni Dermawan

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Hypertension is a disease with a high prevalence in Indonesia. The prevalence of hypertension in Indonesia is based on the Basic Health Research (Riskesdas) in 2013 which amounted to 25.8%. Medicinal plants have been widely used to treat hypertension including roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) and garlic (Allium sativum L.) by a mechanism as angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. The purpose of this research is to analyze the in silico (molecular studies) of pharmacological effects and toxicity of roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) and garlic (Allium sativum L.) as well as a combination of both are used as antihypertensive herbs. The results of study showed that roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) and garlic (Allium sativum L.) have great potential as antihypertensive herbs based on the affinity and stability of active substances to specific receptor with a much better value than a of antihypertensive drugs (lisinopril). Toxicity values determined by the method of AST, ALT and ALP in which the three values obtained indicate the presence of acute toxic effects that need to be considered in determining the dose of the extract of roselle and garlic as antihypertensives.

Keywords: Allium sativum, antihypertensive, Hibiscus sabdariffa, in silico, toxicity

Procedia PDF Downloads 340

Authors: S. Biondi, V. Catania, R. Di Natale, A. R. Intilisano, D. Panno

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One of the major goals of Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS) is to understand what the user utters. In the SDS domain, the Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Module classifies user utterances by means of a pre-definite conceptual knowledge. The SLU module is able to recognize only the meaning previously included in its knowledge base. Due the vastity of that knowledge, the information storing is a very expensive process. Updating and managing the knowledge base are time-consuming and error-prone processes because of the rapidly growing number of entities like proper nouns and domain-specific nouns. This paper proposes a solution to the problem of Name Entity Recognition (NER) applied to a SDS domain. The proposed solution attempts to automatically recognize the meaning associated with an utterance by using the PANKOW (Pattern based Annotation through Knowledge On the Web) method at runtime. The method being proposed extracts information from the Web to increase the SLU knowledge module and reduces the development effort. In particular, the Google Search Engine is used to extract information from the Facebook social network.

Keywords: spoken dialog system, spoken language understanding, web semantic, name entity recognition

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Authors: Samiah Rehman, Kashmira J. Gohil

Abstract:

Objective: Dracaena trifascaita extract (DTE) possesses strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that play a vital role in the treatment of mental disorders like depression. The present study was designed to evaluate the antidepressant effects of hydroalcoholic extracts of DT on behavioral models of depression. Methodology: Animals were randomly divided into 6 groups of 5 each: Group 1 and 2 received distilled water and standard drug, imipramine: 25mg/kg, respectively. Groups 4, 5 and 6 received DTE treatment orally at doses of 200 ,400 and 600mg/ kg, respectively, for 14 days. Time of immobility was noted by force swimming test (FST)and tail suspension test (TST) on the 1st,7th and 14th days. Results: The time of immobility was reduced in the treatment group as compared to the control and standard. DTE600 mg/kg showed the highest and most significant antidepressant effects as compared to the standard drug imipramine. (25mg/kg). Conclusion: DTE has good potential as an alternative therapy for depression.

Keywords: Dracaena trifasciata, antidepressants, force swimming test, tail suspension test, herbal drug of depression

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Authors: Rini Jarial, Puranjan Mishra, Lakhveer Singh, Sveta Thakur, A. W. Zularisam, Mimi Sakinah

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The aim of the present study was to assess the biological properties of Camellia sinensis and to identify its functional compounds. The methanolic leaves-extract (MLE) of commercial green tea (Camellia sinensis) was assessed for anti-bacterial activities by measuring inhibition zones against a panel of pathogenic bacterial strains using agar diffusion method. The flavonoid (5.0 to 8.0 mg/ml) and protein content (10 to 15 mg/ml) of the MLE were recorded. MLE at a concentration of 25 μg/ml showed marked anti-bacterial activity against all bacterial strains (11-30 mm zone of inhibition) and was maximum against Staphylococcus aureus (30 mm). The MLE of Camellia sinensis had the best MIC values of 2.25 and 0.56 mg/ml against S. aureus and Enterobacter sp., respectively. The MLE also possessed good anti-lipolytic activity (65%) against a Porcine pancreatic lipase (PPL) and cholesterol oxidase inhibition (79%). The present study provided strong experimental evidences that the MLE of Camellia sinensis is not only a potent source of natural anti-oxidants and anti-bacterial activity but also possesses efficient cholesterol degradation and anti-lipolytic activities that might be beneficial in the body weight management.

Keywords: anti-oxidant, anti-bacterial activity, anti-lipolytic activity, Camellia sinensis, phyto-chemicals

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Authors: Khamael M. Abualnaja, Lidija Šiller, Benjamin R. Horrocks

Abstract:

Alkylated silicon nanocrystals (C11-SiNCs) were prepared successfully by galvanostatic etching of p-Si(100) wafers followed by a thermal hydrosilation reaction of 1-undecene in refluxing toluene in order to extract C11-SiNCs from porous silicon. Erbium trichloride was added to alkylated SiNCs using a simple mixing chemical route. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first investigation on mixing SiNCs with erbium ions (III) by this chemical method. The chemical characterization of C11-SiNCs and their mixtures with Er3+ (Er/C11-SiNCs) were carried out using X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS). The optical properties of C11-SiNCs and their mixtures with Er3+ were investigated using Raman spectroscopy and photoluminescence (PL). The erbium-mixed alkylated SiNCs shows an orange PL emission peak at around 595 nm that originates from radiative recombination of Si. Er/C11-SiNCs mixture also exhibits a weak PL emission peak at 1536 nm that originates from the intra-4f transition in erbium ions (Er3+). The PL peak of Si in Er/C11-SiNCs mixture is increased in the intensity up to three times as compared to pure C11-SiNCs. The collected data suggest that this chemical mixing route leads instead to a transfer of energy from erbium ions to alkylated SiNCs.

Keywords: photoluminescence, silicon nanocrystals, erbium, Raman spectroscopy

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