Search results for: line loss reduction index

Authors: M. Fette, J. P. Wulfsberg, A. Herrmann, R.-H. Ladstaetter

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Lightweight design represents an important key to successful implementation of energy-saving, fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly means of transport in the aerospace and automotive industry. In this context the use of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) which are distinguished by their outstanding mechanical properties at relatively low weight, promise significant improvements. Due to the reduction of the total mass, with the resulting lowered fuel or energy consumption and CO2 emissions during the operational phase, commercial aircraft will increasingly be made of CFRP. An auspicious technology for the efficient and economic production of high performance thermoset composites and hybrid structures for future lightweight applications is the combination of carbon fibre sheet moulding compound, tailored continuous carbon fibre reinforcements and metallic components in a one-shot pressing and curing process. This paper deals with a hybrid composite technology for aerospace industries, which was developed with the help of a special innovation and development system.

Keywords: Composite, development, hybrid, innovation, system.

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Authors: J. P. Dubois

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Stochastic modeling of network traffic is an area of significant research activity for current and future broadband communication networks. Multimedia traffic is statistically characterized by a bursty variable bit rate (VBR) profile. In this paper, we develop an improved model for uniform activity level video sources in ATM using a doubly stochastic autoregressive model driven by an underlying spatial point process. We then examine a number of burstiness metrics such as the peak-to-average ratio (PAR), the temporal autocovariance function (ACF) and the traffic measurements histogram. We found that the former measure is most suitable for capturing the burstiness of single scene video traffic. In the last phase of this work, we analyse statistical multiplexing of several constant scene video sources. This proved, expectedly, to be advantageous with respect to reducing the burstiness of the traffic, as long as the sources are statistically independent. We observed that the burstiness was rapidly diminishing, with the largest gain occuring when only around 5 sources are multiplexed. The novel model used in this paper for characterizing uniform activity video was thus found to be an accurate model.

Keywords: AR, ATM, burstiness, doubly stochastic, statisticalmultiplexing.

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Authors: Mariann Veresne Somosi, Zoltan Nagy, Krisztina Varga

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Innovation is the key element of economic development and a key factor in social processes. Technical innovations can be identified as prerequisites and causes of social change and cannot be created without the renewal of society. The study of social innovation can be characterised as one of the significant research areas of our day. The study’s aim is to identify the process of social innovation, which can be defined by input, transformation, and output factors. This approach divides the social innovation process into three parts: situation analysis, implementation, follow-up. The methods associated with each stage of the process are illustrated by the chronological line of social innovation. In this study, we have sought to present methodologies that support long- and short-term decision-making that is easy to apply, have different complementary content, and are well visualised for different user groups. When applying the methods, the reference objects are different: county, district, settlement, specific organisation. The solution proposed by the study supports the development of a methodological combination adapted to different situations. Having reviewed metric and conceptualisation issues, we wanted to develop a methodological combination along with a change management logic suitable for structured support to the generation of social innovation in the case of a locality or a specific organisation. In addition to a theoretical summary, in the second part of the study, we want to give a non-exhaustive picture of the two counties located in the north-eastern part of Hungary through specific analyses and case descriptions.

Keywords: Factors of social innovation, methodological combination, social innovation process, supporting decision-making.

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Authors: Shakil M. Rifaat, Md. H. Rahman, Mohammed, Mosabbir Pasha

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Road crashes not only claim lives and inflict injuries but also create economic burden to the society due to loss of productivity. The problem of deaths and injuries as a result of road traffic crashes is now acknowledged to be a global phenomenon with authorities in virtually all countries of the world concerned about the growth in the number of people killed and seriously injured on their roads. However, the road crash scenario of a developing country like Bangladesh is much worse comparing with this of developed countries. For developing proper countermeasures it is necessary to identify the factors affecting crash occurrences. The objectives of the study is to examine the effect of district wise road infrastructure, socioeconomic and demographic features on crash occurrence .The unit of analysis will be taken as individual district which has not been explored much in the past. Reported crash data obtained from Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) from the year 2004 to 2010 are utilized to develop negative binomial model. The model result will reveal the effect of road length (both paved and unpaved), road infrastructure and several socio economic characteristics on district level crash frequency in Bangladesh.

Keywords: Demographic, Negative Binomial Model, Road Infrastructure, Socio-economic, Traffic Safety.

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Authors: Michael Lissack

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We depend upon explanation in order to “make sense" out of our world. And, making sense is all the more important when dealing with change. But, what happens if our explanations are wrong? This question is examined with respect to two types of explanatory model. Models based on labels and categories we shall refer to as “representations." More complex models involving stories, multiple algorithms, rules of thumb, questions, ambiguity we shall refer to as “compressions." Both compressions and representations are reductions. But representations are far more reductive than compressions. Representations can be treated as a set of defined meanings – coherence with regard to a representation is the degree of fidelity between the item in question and the definition of the representation, of the label. By contrast, compressions contain enough degrees of freedom and ambiguity to allow us to make internal predictions so that we may determine our potential actions in the possibility space. Compressions are explanatory via mechanism. Representations are explanatory via category. Managers are often confusing their evocation of a representation (category inclusion) as the creation of a context of compression (description of mechanism). When this type of explanatory error occurs, more errors follow. In the drive for efficiency such substitutions are all too often proclaimed – at the manager-s peril..

Keywords: Coherence, Emergence, Reduction, Model

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Authors: Rehab F. Abdel-Kader, Rabab M. Ramadan, Rawya Y. Rizk

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The recognition of human faces, especially those with different orientations is a challenging and important problem in image analysis and classification. This paper proposes an effective scheme for rotation invariant face recognition using Log-Polar Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform combined features. The rotation invariant feature extraction for a given face image involves applying the logpolar transform to eliminate the rotation effect and to produce a row shifted log-polar image. The discrete cosine transform is then applied to eliminate the row shift effect and to generate the low-dimensional feature vector. A PSO-based feature selection algorithm is utilized to search the feature vector space for the optimal feature subset. Evolution is driven by a fitness function defined in terms of maximizing the between-class separation (scatter index). Experimental results, based on the ORL face database using testing data sets for images with different orientations; show that the proposed system outperforms other face recognition methods. The overall recognition rate for the rotated test images being 97%, demonstrating that the extracted feature vector is an effective rotation invariant feature set with minimal set of selected features.

Keywords: Discrete Cosine Transform, Face Recognition, Feature Extraction, Log Polar Transform, Particle SwarmOptimization.

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Authors: S. F. H. Tasfy, N. A. M. Zabidi, M. S. Shaharun

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Carbon dioxide is highly thermochemical stable molecules where it is very difficult to activate the molecule and achieve higher catalytic conversion into alcohols or other hydrocarbon compounds. In this paper, series of the bimetallic Cu/ZnO-based catalyst supported by SBA-15 were systematically prepared via impregnation technique with different Cu: Zn ratio for hydrogenation of CO₂ to methanol. The synthesized catalysts were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), temperature programmed desorption, reduction, oxidation and pulse chemisorption (TPDRO), and surface area determination was also performed. All catalysts were tested with respect to the hydrogenation of CO₂ to methanol in microactivity fixed-bed reactor at 250^oC, 2.25 MPa, and H₂/CO₂ ratio of 3. The results demonstrate that the catalytic structure, activity, and methanol selectivity was strongly affected by the ratio between Cu: Zn, Where higher catalytic activity of 14 % and methanol selectivity of 92 % was obtained over Cu/ZnO-SBA-15 catalyst with Cu:Zn ratio of 7:3 wt. %. Comparing with the single catalyst, the synergetic between Cu and Zn provides additional active sites to adsorb more H₂ and CO₂ and accelerate the CO₂ conversion, resulting in higher methanol production under mild reaction conditions.

Keywords: Hydrogenation of carbon dioxide, methanol synthesis, Cu/ZnO-based catalyst, mesoporous silica (SBA-15), and metal ratio.

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Authors: Mary L. G. S. Senna, Afonso R. Aquino

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The development of tourism causes negative impacts on the environment. It is in this context, through the Ecological Footprint (EF) method that this study aimed to characterize the impacts of ecotourism on the community of Mateiros, Jalapão, Brazil. The EF, which consisted in its original a method to construct a land use matrix, considering some major categories of human consumption such as food, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services, and six other categories from the main land use which are divided into the topics: land use, degraded environment, gardens, fertile land, pasture and forests protected by the government. The main objective of this index is to calculate the land area required for the production and maintenance of goods and services consumed by a community. The field research was conducted throughout the year of 2014 until July 2015. After the calculations of each category, these components were added according to the presented method in order to determine the annual EF of the tourism sector in Mateiros. The results show that the EF resulting from tourism in Mateiros is 2,194.22 hectares of land required for tourism activities in the region. The EF of tourism was considered high, nevertheless, if it is added the total of hectares needed annually for tourism activities, the result found would be 2,194.22 hectares needed to absorb the CO₂ emissions generated in the region directly from the tourism sector.

Keywords: Sustainable tourism, tourism ecological footprint, Jalapão/TO/Brazil.

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Authors: N. A. Zainuddin, I. Norhuda, I. S. Adeib, A. N. Mustapa, S. H. Sarijo

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Recently, RESS (Rapid Expansion Supercritical Solution) method has been used by researchers to produce fine particles for pharmaceutical drug substances. Since RESS technology acknowledges a lot of benefits compare to conventional method of ginger extraction, it is suggested to use this method to explore particle formation of bioactive compound from powder ginger. The objective of this research is to produce direct solid oil particles formation from ginger rhizome which contains valuable compounds by using RESS-CO₂ process. RESS experiments were carried using extraction pressure of 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000 and 7000psi and at different extraction temperature of 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 and 70°C for 40 minutes extraction time and contant flowrate (24ml/min). From the studies conducted, it was found that at extraction pressure 5000psi and temperature 40°C, the smallest particle size obtained was 2.22μm on 99 % reduction from the original size of 370μm.

Keywords: Particle size, RESS, solid oil particle, supercritical carbon dioxide.

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Authors: E. Gnapowski, S. Gnapowski

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This study examined the effect of porous dielectric silica gel the discharge ignition voltage and input power in a plasma reactor. For the experiment was used a plasma reactor with two mesh electrodes made of stainless steel with a mesh size of 0.1x0.1mm. The study analyzed and compared with parameters such as power, ignition and operation voltage of the reactor for two dielectrics a porous and glass. During experiment were observed several new phenomena conducted for porous dielectric. The first phenomenon was the reduction the ignition voltage discharge to volume around few hundred volts. Second it was increase input power six times more compared with power those obtained for the glass dielectric. Thirdly difference it is ΔV between ignition voltage V_i and operating voltage reactor V_m for porous dielectric it was 11%, while ΔV for the glass dielectric it was 60%. Also change the discharge characteristics from DBD for glass dielectric to the streamer resistance discharge for the porous dielectric.

Keywords: Input power, mesh electrodes, onset voltage, porous dielectric.

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Authors: Reza Mokhtari Malekabadi, Leila Jalalabadi, Zahra Kiyani Ghaleh No

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Today, systems of management and urban planning, attempt to reach more sustainable development through monitoring developments, urban development and development plans. Monitoring of changes in the urban places and sustainable urban development accounted a base for the realization of worthy goals urban sustainable development. The importance of women in environmental protection programs is high enough that in 21 agenda has been requested from all countries to allocate more shares to women in their policies. On the other hand, urban waste landfill has become one of the environmental concerns in modern cities. This research assumes that the impact of women on recycling, reduction and proper waste landfill is much more than men. For this reason, three districts; Yousef Abad, Heshmatieh & Nezam Abad are gauged through questionnaire and using the analytical research hypothesis model. This research will be categorized as functional research. The results have shown that noticing the power of women, their participation towards realization of the development objectives and programs can be used in solving their problems.

Keywords: Citizens (Urban), Environmental, Sustainability, Solid waste, Tehran.

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Authors: H. Madi, L. Mouzai, M. Bouhadef

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The purpose of this article is to study the effects of plants cover on overland flow and, therefore, its influences on the amount of eroded and transported soil. In this investigation, all the experiments were conducted in the LEGHYD laboratory using a rainfall simulator and a soil tray. The experiments were conducted using an experimental plot (soil tray) which is 2m long, 0.5 m wide and 0.15 m deep. The soil used is an agricultural sandy soil (62,08% coarse sand, 19,14% fine sand, 11,57% silt and 7,21% clay). Plastic rods (4 mm in diameter) were used to simulate the plants at different densities: 0 stem/m2 (bared soil), 126 stems/m², 203 stems/m², 461 stems/m² and 2500 stems/m²). The used rainfall intensity is 73mm/h and the soil tray slope is fixed to 3°. The results have shown that the overland flow velocities decreased with increasing stems density, and the density cover has a great effect on sediment concentration. Darcy–Weisbach and Manning friction coefficients of overland flow increased when the stems density increased. Froude and Reynolds numbers decreased with increasing stems density and, consequently, the flow regime of all treatments was laminar and subcritical. From these findings, we conclude that increasing the plants cover can efficiently reduce soil loss and avoid denuding the roots plants.

Keywords: Soil erosion, vegetation, stems density, overland flow.

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Authors: Irena Palić

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The main objective of the research in this paper is to empirically assess the causal relationship of private savings and economic growth in the Republic of Croatia. Households’ savings are approximated by household deposits in banks, while domestic income is approximated by industrial production volume indices. Vector Autoregression model and Granger causality tests are used to in order to analyse the relationship among private savings and economic growth. Since ADF unit root tests have shown that both mentioned series are non stationary at levels, series are first differenced in order to become stationary. Therefore, VAR model is estimated with percentage change in private savings and percentage change in domestic income, which can be interpreted as economic growth in case of positive percentage change in domestic income. The Granger causality test has shown that there is no causal relationship among private savings and economic growth in Croatia. The impulse response functions have shown that the impact of shock in domestic income on private savings change is stronger than the impact of private saving on growth. Variance decompositions show that both economic growth and private saving change explain the largest part of its own forecast variance. The research has shown that the link between private savings economic and growth in Croatia is weak, what is in line with relevant empirical research in small open economies.

Keywords: Economic growth, Granger causality, innovation analysis, private savings, Vector Autoregression model.

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Authors: Haider H. Aodah, Yassir Nashaat A. Kareem, Satish Chandra

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The present study explains the effect of aggregate gradation on moisture damage in bituminous mixes. Three types of aggregate gradation and two types of binder; VG-30 and Polymer modified bitumen (PMB-40) are used. Moisture susceptibility tests like retained stability and tensile strength ratio (TSR) and static creep test are conducted on Marshall specimens. The creep test was also conducted for conditioned and unconditioned specimens to observe the effect of moisture on creep behaviour. The results indicate that Marshall stability value is higher in PMB-40 mix than VG-30 mixes. Moisture susceptibility of PMB-40 mixes is low when compared with mix using VG-30. The reduction in retained stability, and indirect tensile strength and increase in creep are evaluated for finer, coarser and normal gradation of aggregate to observe the effect of gradation on moisture susceptibility of mixes. The retained stability is least affected when compared with other moisture susceptibility parameters

Keywords: Aggregate gradation, Creep ratio, Retained stability, Stripping, Tensile strength ratio.

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Authors: S. Suwannasri, R. Sirovetnukul

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The effective machine-job assignment of injection molding machines is very important for industry because it is not only directly affects the quality of the product but also the performance and lifetime of the machine as well. The phase of machine selection was mostly done by professionals or experienced planners, so the possibility of matching a job with an inappropriate machine might occur when it was conducted by an inexperienced person. It could lead to an uneconomical plan and defects. This research aimed to develop a machine selection system for plastic injection machines as a tool to help in decision making of the user. This proposed system could be used both in normal times and in times of emergency. Fuzzy logic principle is applied to deal with uncertainty and mechanical factors in the selection of both quantity and quality criteria. The six criteria were obtained from a plastic manufacturer's case study to construct a system based on fuzzy logic theory using MATLAB. The results showed that the system was able to reduce the defects of Short Shot and Sink Mark to 24.0% and 8.0% and the total defects was reduced around 8.7% per month.

Keywords: Injection molding machine, machine selection, fuzzy logic, defects in injection molding, matlab.

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Authors: Malik I. Al-Amayreh, Mohammad I. Kilani, Ahmed S. Al-Salaymeh

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This work presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of a butterfly valve used to control the flow of combustible gas mixture in an industrial process setting.The work uses CFD simulation to analyze the flow characteristics in the vicinity of the valve, including the pressure distributions and Frequency spectrum of the pressure pulsations downstream the valves and the vortex shedding allow predicting the torque fluctuations acting on the valve shaft and the possibility of generating mechanical vibration and resonance.These fluctuations are due to aerodynamic torque resulting from fluid turbulence and vortex shedding in the valve vicinity. The valve analyzed is located in a pipeline between two opposing 90o elbows, which exposes the valve and the surrounding structure to the turbulence generated upstream and downstream the elbows at either end of the pipe.CFD simulations show that the best location for the valve from a vibration point of view is in the middle of the pipe joining the elbows.

Keywords: Butterfly Valve Vibration Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Fluid Flow Circuit Design, Fluid Mechanics.

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Authors: Megumi Shibuya, Tomohiko Ogishi

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Recently, content delivery services have grown rapidly over the Internet. For ASPs (Application Service Provider) providing content delivery services, P2P architecture is beneficial to reduce outgoing traffic from content servers. On the other hand, ISPs are suffering from the increase in P2P traffic. The P2P traffic is unnecessarily redundant because the same content or the same fractions of content are transferred through an inter-ISP link several times. Subscriber ISPs have to pay a transit fee to upstream ISPs based on the volume of inter-ISP traffic. In order to solve such problems, several works have been done for the purpose of P2P traffic reduction. However, these existing works cannot control the traffic volume of a certain link. In order to solve such an ISP-s operational requirement, we propose a method to control traffic volume for a link within a preconfigured upper bound value. We evaluated that the proposed method works well by conducting a simulation on a 1,000-user scale. We confirm that the traffic volume could be controlled at a lower level than the upper bound for all evaluated conditions. Moreover, our method could control the traffic volume at 98.95% link usage against the target value.

Keywords: P2P, traffic control, traffic localization, ALTO.

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Authors: Me. Sistaninia, G.H.Farrahi, Ma. Sistaninia

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Thermoelastic temperature, displacement, and stress in heat transfer during laser surface hardening are solved in Eulerian formulation. In Eulerian formulations the heat flux is fixed in space and the workpiece is moved through a control volume. In the case of uniform velocity and uniform heat flux distribution, the Eulerian formulations leads to a steady-state problem, while the Lagrangian formulations remains transient. In Eulerian formulations the reduction to a steady-state problem increases the computational efficiency. In this study also an analytical solution is developed for an uncoupled transient heat conduction equation in which a plane slab is heated by a laser beam. The thermal result of the numerical model is compared with the result of this analytical model. Comparing the results shows numerical solution for uncoupled equations are in good agreement with the analytical solution.

Keywords: Coupled thermoelasticity, Finite element, Laser surface hardening, Eulerian formulation.

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Authors: Nickson Kipng’etich Lang’at, Thomas Thoruwa, John Abraham, John Wanyoko

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Green tea is made from the top two leaves and buds of a shrub, Camellia sinensis, of the family Theaceae and the order Theales. The green tea leaves are picked and immediately sent to be dried or steamed to prevent fermentation. Fluid bed drying technique is a common drying method used in drying green tea because of its ease in design and construction and fluidization of fine tea particles. Major problems in this method are significant loss of chemical content of the leaf and green appearance of tea, retention of high moisture content in the leaves and bed channeling and defluidization. The energy associated with the drying technology has been shown to be a vital factor in determining the quality of green tea. As part of the implementation, prototype dryer was built that facilitated sequence of operations involving steaming, cooling, pre-drying and final drying. The major findings of the project were in terms of quality characteristics of tea leaves and energy consumption during processing. The optimal design achieved a moisture content of 4.2 ± 0.84%. With the optimum drying temperature of 100 ºC, the specific energy consumption was 1697.8 kj.Kg^-1 and evaporation rate of 4.272 x 10^-4 Kg.m^-2.s^-1. The energy consumption in a fluidized system can be further reduced by focusing on energy saving designs.

Keywords: Evaporation rate, fluid bed dryer, maceration, specific energy consumption.

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Authors: Apetsi K. Ampiah, Zhao Xin

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Earthquakes over the years have been known to cause devastating damage on buildings and induced huge loss on human life and properties. It is for this reason that engineers have devised means of protecting buildings and thus protecting human life. Since the invention of devices such as the viscous and friction dampers, scientists/researchers have been able to incorporate these devices into buildings and other engineering structures. The viscous damper is a hydraulic device which dissipates the seismic forces by pushing fluid through an orifice, producing a damping pressure which creates a force. In the friction damper, the force is mainly resisted by converting the kinetic energy into heat by friction. Devices such as viscous and friction dampers are able to absorb almost all the earthquake energy, allowing the structure to remain undamaged (or with some amount of damage) and ready for immediate reuse (with some repair works). Comparing these two devices presents the engineer with adequate information on the merits and demerits of these devices and in which circumstances their use would be highly favorable. This paper examines the performance of both viscous and friction dampers under different ground motions. A two-storey frame installed with both devices under investigation are modeled in commercial computer software and analyzed under different ground motions. The results of the performance of the structure are then tabulated and compared. Also included in this study is the ease of installation and maintenance of these devices.

Keywords: Friction damper, seismic, slip load, viscous damper.

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Authors: Saeed Mian Qaisar, Laurent Fesquet, Marc Renaudin

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Mostly the systems are dealing with time varying signals. The Power efficiency can be achieved by adapting the system activity according to the input signal variations. In this context an adaptive rate filtering technique, based on the level crossing sampling is devised. It adapts the sampling frequency and the filter order by following the input signal local variations. Thus, it correlates the processing activity with the signal variations. Interpolation is required in the proposed technique. A drastic reduction in the interpolation error is achieved by employing the symmetry during the interpolation process. Processing error of the proposed technique is calculated. The computational complexity of the proposed filtering technique is deduced and compared to the classical one. Results promise a significant gain of the computational efficiency and hence of the power consumption.

Keywords: Level Crossing Sampling, Activity Selection, Rate Filtering, Computational Complexity, Interpolation Error.

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Authors: S. P. Singh

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This paper measures technical and scale efficiencies of 40 Indian sugar companies for the period from 2004-05 to 2013-14. The efficiencies are estimated through input-oriented DEA models using one output variable—value of output (VOP) and five input variables—capital cost (CA), employee cost (EMP), raw material (RW), energy & fuel (E&F) and other manufacturing expenses (OME). The sugar companies are classified into integrated and non-integrated categories to know which one achieves higher level of efficiency. Sources of inefficiency in the industry are identified through decomposing the overall technical efficiency (TE) into pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE). The paper also estimates input-reduction targets for relatively inefficient companies and suggests measures to improve their efficiency level. The findings reveal that the TE does not evince any trend rather it shows fluctuations across years, largely due to erratic and cyclical pattern of sugar production. Further, technical inefficiency in the industry seems to be driven more by the managerial inefficiency than the scale inefficiency, which implies that TE can be improved through better conversion of inputs into output.

Keywords: Sugar industry, companies, technical efficiency, data envelopment analysis, targets.

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Authors: Imana Shahrin Tania, Mohammad Ali

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The present study reports the synthesis, characterization and application of nano-sized zinc-oxide (ZnO) particles on a cotton fabric surface. The aim of the investigations is to impart the antimicrobial activity on textile cloth. Nanoparticle is synthesized by wet chemical method from zinc sulphate and sodium hydroxide. SEM (scanning electron micrograph) images are taken to demonstrate the surface morphology of nanoparticles. XRD analysis is done to determine the crystal size of the nanoparticle. With the conformation of nanoformation, the cotton woven fabric is treated with ZnO nanoparticle by mechanical thermo-fixation (pad-dry-cure) technique. To increase the wash durability of nano treated fabric, an acrylic binder is used as a fixing agent. The treated fabric shows up to 90% bacterial reduction for S. aureus (Staphylococcus aureus) and 87% for E. coli (Escherichia coli) which is appreciable for bacteria protective clothing.

Keywords: Nanoparticle, zinc oxide, cotton fabric, antibacterial activity, binder.

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Authors: H. M. El-Zomor, M. Hany

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Recycling of aluminum beverage cans is an important issue due to its economic and environmental effect. One of the significant factors in aluminum cans recycling process is the transportation cost from the landfill space. An automatic compression baler (ACB) machine has been designed and built to densify the aluminum beverage cans. It has been constructed using numerous fabricated components. Two types of control methodology have been introduced in this ACB machine to achieve its goal. The first is a semi-automatic system, and the second is a mechatronic system by using a Programmable Logic Control (PLC). The effect of single and double pre-compression for the beverage cans have been evaluated by using the PLC control. Comparisons have been performed between the two types of control methodologies by operating this ACB machine in different working conditions. The double pre-compression in PLC control proves that there is an enhancement in the ACB performance by 133% greater than the direct compression in the semi-automatic control. In addition, the percentage of the reduction ratio in volume reaches 77%, and the compaction ratio reaches about four times of the initial volume.

Keywords: Aluminum can recycling, Fully automatic machine, Hydraulic system control, Multi-compression.

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Authors: Anabel Fernandez, Leandro Rodriguez-Ortiz, Rosa Rodríguez

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Due to the negative impact of fossil fuels, renewable energies are promising sources to limit global temperature rise and damage to the environment. Also, the development of technology is focused on obtaining energetic products from renewable sources. In this study, a thermodynamic model including exergy balance and a subsequent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) were carried out for four subsystems of the integrated gasification-combustion of pinewood. Results of exergy analysis and LCA showed the process feasibility in terms of exergy efficiency and global energy efficiency of the life cycle (GEELC). Moreover, the energy return on investment (EROI) index was calculated. The global exergy efficiency resulted in 67%. For pretreatment, reaction, cleaning, and electric generation subsystems, the results were 85%, 59%, 87%, and 29%, respectively. Results of LCA indicated that the emissions from the electric generation caused the most damage to the atmosphere, water, and soil. GEELC resulted in 31.09% for the global process. This result suggested the environmental feasibility of an integrated gasification-combustion system. EROI resulted in 3.15, which determines the sustainability of the process.

Keywords: Exergy analysis, Life Cycle Assessment, LCA, renewability, sustainability.

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Authors: R. Ziaie Moayed, H. Keshavarz Hedayati

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Over recent years, due to increased population and increased waste production, groundwater protection has become more important, therefore, designing engineered barrier systems such as landfill liners to prevent the entry of leachate into groundwater should be done with greater accuracy. These measures generally involve the application of low permeability soils such as clays. Bentonite is a natural clay with low permeability which makes it a suitable soil for using in liners. Also zeolite with high cation exchange capacity can help to reduce of hazardous materials risk. Bentonite expands when wet, absorbing as much as several times its dry mass in water. This property may effect on some structural properties of soil such as shear strength. In present study, shear strength parameters are determined by both leachates polluted and not polluted bentonite-amended zeolite soil with mixing rates (B/Z) of 5%-10% and 20% with unconfined compression test to obtain the differences. It is shown that leachate presence causes reduction in resistance in general.

Keywords: Bentonite, zeolite, leachate, shear strength parameters, unconfined compression tests.

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Authors: Lae-Jeong Park, Jung-Ho Moon

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People detection from images has a variety of applications such as video surveillance and driver assistance system, but is still a challenging task and more difficult in crowded environments such as shopping malls in which occlusion of lower parts of human body often occurs. Lack of the full-body information requires more effective features than common features such as HOG. In this paper, new features are introduced that exploits global self-symmetry (GSS) characteristic in head-shoulder patterns. The features encode the similarity or difference of color histograms and oriented gradient histograms between two vertically symmetric blocks. The domain-specific features are rapid to compute from the integral images in Viola-Jones cascade-of-rejecters framework. The proposed features are evaluated with our own head-shoulder dataset that, in part, consists of a well-known INRIA pedestrian dataset. Experimental results show that the GSS features are effective in reduction of false alarmsmarginally and the gradient GSS features are preferred more often than the color GSS ones in the feature selection.

Keywords: Pedestrian detection, cascade of rejecters, feature extraction, self-symmetry, HOG.

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Authors: Carolin Lutz, Jörg Matthes, Patrick Waibel, Ulrich Precht, Krassimir Garbev, Günter Beuchle, Uwe Schweike, Peter Stemmermann, Hubert B. Keller

Abstract:

Online measurement of the product quality is a challenging task in cement production, especially in the production of Celitement, a novel environmentally friendly hydraulic binder. The mineralogy and chemical composition of clinker in ordinary Portland cement production is measured by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF), where only crystalline constituents can be detected. But only a small part of the Celitement components can be measured via XRD, because most constituents have an amorphous structure. This paper describes the development of algorithms suitable for an on-line monitoring of the final processing step of Celitement based on NIR-data. For calibration intermediate products were dried at different temperatures and ground for variable durations. The products were analyzed using XRD and thermogravimetric analyses together with NIR-spectroscopy to investigate the dependency between the drying and the milling processes on one and the NIR-signal on the other side. As a result, different characteristic parameters have been defined. A short overview of the Celitement process and the challenging tasks of the online measurement and evaluation of the product quality will be presented. Subsequently, methods for systematic development of near-infrared calibration models and the determination of the final calibration model will be introduced. The application of the model on experimental data illustrates that NIR-spectroscopy allows for a quick and sufficiently exact determination of crucial process parameters.

Keywords: Calibration model, celitement, cementitious material, NIR spectroscopy.

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Authors: Gomaa N. Abdel-Rahman, Nadia R. A. Nassar, Yehia A. Heikal, Mahmoud A. M. Abou-Donia, Mohamed M. Naguib, Mohamed Fadel

Abstract:

Cane molasses is used as a raw material for the production of baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in Egypt. The high levels of heavy metals in molasses cause a critical problem during fermentation and cause various kinds of technological difficulties (yield and quality of yeast become lower). The aim of the present study was to determine heavy metal concentrations (cadmium, nickel, lead, and copper) in crude and treated molasses obtained from the storage tanks of the baker’s yeast factory through four seasons. Also, the effect of crude molasses treatment by different methods (at laboratory scale) on heavy metals reduction and its comparison with factory treated molasses were conducted. The molasses samples obtained at autumn season had the highest values of all the studied heavy metals. The molasses treated by cation exchange resin then sulfuric acid had the lowest concentrations of heavy metals compared with other treatments.

Keywords: Molasses, baker’s yeast, heavy metals, treatment.

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Authors: Payel Ghosh, Rama Chandra Pradhan, Sabyasachi Mishra

Abstract:

Jamun (Syzygium cuminii L.) is one of the important indigenous minor fruit with high medicinal value. The jamun cultivation is unorganized and there is huge loss of this fruit every year. The perishable nature of the fruit makes its postharvest management further difficult. Due to the strong cell wall structure of pectin-protein bonds and hard seeds, extraction of juice becomes difficult. Enzymatic treatment has been commercially used for improvement of juice quality with high yield. The objective of the study was to optimize the best treatment method for juice extraction. Enzymes (Pectinase and Tannase) from different stains had been used and for each enzyme, best result obtained by using response surface methodology. Optimization had been done on the basis of physicochemical property, nutritional property, sensory quality and cost estimation. According to quality aspect, cost analysis and sensory evaluation, the optimizing enzymatic treatment was obtained by Pectinase from Aspergillus aculeatus strain. The optimum condition for the treatment was 44 ^oC with 80 minute with a concentration of 0.05% (w/w). At these conditions, 75% of yield with turbidity of 32.21NTU, clarity of 74.39%T, polyphenol content of 115.31 mg GAE/g, protein content of 102.43 mg/g have been obtained with a significant difference in overall acceptability.

Keywords: Jamun, enzymatic treatment, physicochemical property, sensory analysis, optimization.

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