Search results for: Energy Production & Consumption.

Authors: Hajar Mohammadpour Kachlami , Ghasem Javadzadeh Moghtader , Habib Mohammadpour Kachlami

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Nowadays due to globalization of economy and competition environment, innovation and technology plays key role at creation of wealth and economic growth of countries. In fact prompt growth of practical and technologic knowledge may results in social benefits for countries when changes into effective innovation. Considering the importance of innovation for the development of countries, this study addresses the radical technological innovation introduced by nanopapers at different stages of producing paper including stock preparation, using authorized additives, fillers and pigments, using retention, calender, stages of producing conductive paper, porous nanopaper and Layer by layer self-assembly. Research results show that in coming years the jungle related products will lose considerable portion of their market share, unless embracing radical innovation. Although incremental innovations can make this industry still competitive in mid-term, but to have economic growth and competitive advantage in long term, radical innovations are necessary. Radical innovations can lead to new products and materials which their applications in packaging industry can produce value added. However application of nanotechnology in this industry can be costly, it can be done in cooperation with other industries to make the maximum use of nanotechnology possible. Therefore this technology can be used in all the production process resulting in the mass production of simple and flexible papers with low cost and special properties such as facility at shape, form, easy transportation, light weight, recovery and recycle marketing abilities, and sealing. Improving the resistance of the packaging materials without reducing the performance of packaging materials enhances the quality and the value added of packaging. Improving the cellulose at nano scale can have considerable electron optical and magnetic effects leading to improvement in packaging and value added. Comparing to the specifications of thermoplastic products and ordinary papers, nanopapers show much better performance in terms of effective mechanical indexes such as the modulus of elasticity, tensile strength, and strain-stress. In densities lower than 640 kgm -3, due to the network structure of nanofibers and the balanced and randomized distribution of NFC in flat space, these specifications will even improve more. For nanopapers, strains are 1,4Gpa, 84Mpa and 17%, 13,3 Gpa, 214Mpa and 10% respectively. In layer by layer self assembly method (LbL) the tensile strength of nanopaper with Tio3 particles and Sio2 and halloysite clay nanotube are 30,4 ±7.6Nm/g and 13,6 ±0.8Nm/g and 14±0.3,3Nm/g respectively that fall within acceptable range of similar samples with virgin fiber. The usage of improved brightness and porosity index in nanopapers can create more competitive advantages at packaging industry.

Keywords: Innovation; NanoPaper; Nanofiber; Packaging

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Authors: Soroor Ghaziof, Wei Gao

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Sol-enhanced Zn-Ni-Al2O3 nanocomposite coatings were electroplated on mild steel by our newly developed solenhanced electroplating method. In this method, transparent Al2O3 sol was added into the acidic Zn-Ni bath to produced Zn-Ni-Al2O3nanocomposite coatings. The chemical composition, microstructure and mechanical properties of the composite and alloy coatings deposited at two different agitation speed were investigated. The structure of all coatings was single γ-Ni5Zn21 phase. The composite coatings possess refined crystals with higher microhardness compared to Zn-Ni alloy coatings. The wear resistance of Zn-Ni coatings was improved significantly by incorporation of alumina nano particles into the coatings. Higher agitation speed provided more uniform coatings with smaller grain sized and slightly higher microhardness. Considering composite coatings, high agitation speeds may facilitate co-deposition of alumina in the coatings.

Keywords: Microhardness, Sol-enhanced electro plating, Wear resistance, Zn-Ni-Al2O3 composite coatings.

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Authors: Nilson Barbieri, Bruno Matos Martins, Gabriel de Sant'Anna Vitor Barbieri

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In more complex systems, such as automotive gearbox, a rigorous treatment of the data is necessary because there are several moving parts (gears, bearings, shafts, etc.), and in this way, there are several possible sources of errors and also noise. The basic objective of this work is the detection of damage in automotive gearbox. The detection methods used are the wavelet method, the bispectrum; advanced filtering techniques (selective filtering) of vibrational signals and mathematical morphology. Gearbox vibration tests were performed (gearboxes in good condition and with defects) of a production line of a large vehicle assembler. The vibration signals are obtained using five accelerometers in different positions of the sample. The results obtained using the kurtosis, bispectrum, wavelet and mathematical morphology showed that it is possible to identify the existence of defects in automotive gearboxes.

Keywords: Automotive gearbox, mathematical morphology, wavelet, bispectrum.

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Authors: V.Fathipour, M. A. Malakootian, S. Fathipour, M. Fathipour

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In this paper we propose a novel RF LDMOS structure which employs a thin strained silicon layer at the top of the channel and the N-Drift region. The strain is induced by a relaxed Si0.8 Ge0.2 layer which is on top of a compositionally graded SiGe buffer. We explain the underlying physics of the device and compare the proposed device with a conventional LDMOS in terms of energy band diagram and carrier concentration. Numerical simulations of the proposed strained silicon laterally diffused MOS using a 2 dimensional device simulator indicate improvements in saturation and linear transconductance, current drivability, cut off frequency and on resistance. These improvements are however accompanied with a suppression in the break down voltage.

Keywords: High Frequency MOSFET, Design of RF LDMOS, Strained-Silicon, LDMOS.

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Authors: P. Parvasi, R. Janamiri, A. Sinkakarimi, I. Mahdavi, M. Safdari, M. H. Sedaghat, A. Hosseini, M. Karimi

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In this work study the location of interface in a stirred vessel with a Concave impeller by computational fluid dynamic was presented. To modeling rotating the impeller, sliding mesh (SM) technique was used and standard k-ε model was selected for turbulence closure. Mean tangential, radial and axial velocities and also turbulent kinetic energy (k) and turbulent dissipation rate (ε) in various points of tank was investigated. Results show sensitivity of system to location of interface and radius of 7 to 10cm for interface in the vessel with existence characteristics cause to increase the accuracy of simulation.

Keywords: CFD, Interface, Concave impeller, turbulence model.

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Authors: Thanawit Buafai, Siyathorn Khunon

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This paper aims to explore the satisfaction levels of tourism product components on the island of Samui by studying the cultural dimension relationships of Hofsted’s classic theory. Both the six Hofsted cultural dimensions and tourism production satisfaction measures have been of interest worldwide. Therefore, the challenge of this study is to re-confirm previous research results in the ever-changing current contexts of the modern globalized business era. Self-rated questionnaires were employed to collect data from six nationalities of tourists in Samui, totaling 386 samples. The reliability of this research methodology was 0.967. Correlation was applied to analyze the relationships. The results indicate that Masculinity is significantly related to tourism destination satisfaction for every factor, while the other five cultural dimensions are related to some factors of tourism satisfaction. Surprisingly, tourist satisfaction toward the bar/restaurant factor is significantly correlated with all six cultural dimensions.

Keywords: Cultural dimensions, tourism products, Samui, Thailand.

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Authors: P. P. Woyciechowski

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Calculation of the carbon footprint of cement concrete is a complex process including consideration of the phase of primary life (components and concrete production processes, transportation, construction works, maintenance of concrete structures) and secondary life, including demolition and recycling. Taking into consideration the effect of concrete carbonation can lead to a reduction in the calculated carbon footprint of concrete. In this paper, an example of CO₂ balance for small bridge elements made of Portland cement reinforced concrete was done. The results include the effect of carbonation of concrete in a structure and of concrete rubble after demolition. It was shown that important impact of carbonation on the balance is possible only when rubble carbonation is possible. It was related to the fact that only the sequestration potential in the secondary phase of concrete life has significant value.

Keywords: Carbon footprint, balance of carbon dioxide in nature, concrete carbonation, the sequestration potential of concrete.

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Authors: Saravana Kannan Thangavelu

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Fuel and oxidant gas delivery plate, or fuel cell plate, is a key component of a Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell. To manufacture low-cost and high performance fuel cell plates, advanced computer modeling and finite element structure analysis are used as virtual prototyping tools for the optimization of the plates at the early design stage. The present study examines thermal stress analysis of the fuel cell plates that are produced using a patented, low-cost fuel cell plate production technique based on screen-printing. Design optimization is applied to minimize the maximum stress within the plate, subject to strain constraint with both geometry and material parameters as design variables. The study reveals the characteristics of the printed plates, and provides guidelines for the structure and material design of the fuel cell plate.

Keywords: Design optimization, FEA, PEM fuel cell, Thermal stress

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Authors: Dušan Kravec, Ondrej Staš, Marián Tolnay, Michal Bachratý

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This article gives a short preview of the new software created especially for palletizing process in automated production systems. Each chapter of this article is about problem solving in development of modules in Java programming language. First part describes structure of the software, its modules and data flow between them. Second part describes all deployment methods, which are implemented in the software. Next chapter is about twodimensional editor created for manipulation with objects in each layer of the load and gives calculations for collision control. Module of virtual reality used for three-dimensional preview and creation of the load is described in the fifth chapter. The last part of this article describes communication and data flow between control system of the robot, vision system and software.

Keywords: Palletizing, deployment methods, palletizing software, virtual reality in palletizing.

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Authors: Monika Dwilinska

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Innovations, especially technological, are considered key-drivers for sustainable economic growth and competitiveness in the globalised world. As such they should also play an important role in the process of economical convergence inside the EU. Unfortunately, the problem of insufficient innovation performance concerns around half of the EU countries. Poland shows that a lack of a consistent high-tech financing system constitutes a serious obstacle for the development of innovative firms. In this article we will evaluate these questions referring to the example of Ammono S.A., a Polish company established to develop and commercialise an original technology for the production of bulk GaN crystals. We will focus on its efforts to accumulate the financial resources necessary at different stages of its development. The purpose of this article is to suggest possible ways to improve the national innovative system, which would make it more competent in generating high-tech leaders.

Keywords: High-tech financing, innovation, national innovative system

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Authors: L. Rozumová, J. Seidlerová

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The aim of this paper was to study the sorption properties of a blast furnace sludge used as the sorbent. The sorbent was utilized for reduction of content of lead and zinc ions. Sorbent utilized in this work was obtained from metallurgical industry from process of wet gas treatment in iron production. The blast furnace sludge was characterized by X-Ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and XRFS spectroscopy. Sorption experiments were conducted in batch mode. The sorption of metal ions in the sludge was determined by correlation of adsorption isotherm models. The adsorption of lead and zinc ions was best fitted with Langmuir adsorption isotherms. The adsorption capacity of lead and zinc ions was 53.8 mg.g^-1 and 10.7 mg.g^-1, respectively. The results indicated that blast furnace sludge could be effectively used as secondary material and could be also employed as a low-cost alternative for the removal of heavy metals ions from wastewater.

Keywords: Blast furnace sludge, lead, zinc, sorption.

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Authors: Aparna Viswanath

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Electricity spot prices are highly volatile under optimal generation capacity scenarios due to factors such as nonstorability of electricity, peak demand at certain periods, generator outages, fuel uncertainty for renewable energy generators, huge investments and time needed for generation capacity expansion etc. As a result market participants are exposed to price and volume risk, which has led to the development of risk management practices. This paper provides an overview of risk management practices by market participants in electricity markets using financial derivatives.

Keywords: Financial Derivatives, Forward, Futures, Options, Risk Management.

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Authors: K. Muthukannan, P. Latha

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In addition to environmental parameters like rain, temperature diseases on crop is a major factor which affects production quality & quantity of crop yield. Hence disease management is a key issue in agriculture. For the management of disease, it needs to be detected at early stage. So, treat it properly & control spread of the disease. Now a day, it is possible to use the images of diseased leaf to detect the type of disease by using image processing techniques. This can be achieved by extracting features from the images which can be further used with classification algorithms or content based image retrieval systems. In this paper, color image is used to extract the features such as mean and standard deviation after the process of region cropping. The selected features are taken from the cropped image with different image size samples. Then, the extracted features are taken in to the account for classification using Fuzzy Inference System (FIS).

Keywords: Image Cropping, Classification, Color, Fuzzy Rule, Feature Extraction.

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Authors: Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Somayyeh Jafarali Jassbi, Keivan Navi

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Residue Number System (RNS) is a modular representation and is proved to be an instrumental tool in many digital signal processing (DSP) applications which require high-speed computations. RNS is an integer and non weighted number system; it can support parallel, carry-free, high-speed and low power arithmetic. A very interesting correspondence exists between the concepts of Multiple Valued Logic (MVL) and Residue Number Arithmetic. If the number of levels used to represent MVL signals is chosen to be consistent with the moduli which create the finite rings in the RNS, MVL becomes a very natural representation for the RNS. There are two concerns related to the application of this Number System: reaching the most possible speed and the largest dynamic range. There is a conflict when one wants to resolve both these problem. That is augmenting the dynamic range results in reducing the speed in the same time. For achieving the most performance a method is considere named “One-Hot Residue Number System" in this implementation the propagation is only equal to one transistor delay. The problem with this method is the huge increase in the number of transistors they are increased in order m² . In real application this is practically impossible. In this paper combining the Multiple Valued Logic and One-Hot Residue Number System we represent a new method to resolve both of these two problems. In this paper we represent a novel design of an OHRNS-based adder circuit. This circuit is useable for Multiple Valued Logic moduli, in comparison to other RNS design; this circuit has considerably improved the number of transistors and power consumption.

Keywords: Computer Arithmetic, Residue Number System, Multiple Valued Logic, One-Hot, VLSI.

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Authors: Natalia Moreira, Trevor Wood-Harper

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The acceptance of sustainable products by the final consumer is still one of the challenges of the industry, which constantly seeks alternative approaches to successfully be accepted in the global market. A large set of methods and approaches have been discussed and analysed throughout the literature. Considering the current need for sustainable development and the current pace of consumption, the need for a combined solution towards the development of new products became clear, forcing researchers in product development to propose alternatives to the previous standard product development models. This paper presents, through a systemic analysis of the literature on product development, eco-design and consumer involvement, a set of alternatives regarding consumer involvement towards the development of sustainable products and how these approaches could help improve the sustainable industry’s establishment in the general market. Still being developed in the course of the author’s PhD, the initial findings of the research show that the understanding of the benefits of sustainable behaviour lead to a more conscious acquisition and eventually to the implementation of sustainable change in the consumer. Thus this paper is the initial approach towards the development of new sustainable products using the fashion industry as an example of practical implementation and acceptance by the consumers. By comparing the existing literature and critically analysing it, this paper concluded that the consumer involvement is strategic to improve the general understanding of sustainability and its features. The use of consumers and communities has been studied since the early 90s in order to exemplify uses and to guarantee a fast comprehension. The analysis done also includes the importance of this approach for the increase of innovation and ground breaking developments, thus requiring further research and practical implementation in order to better understand the implications and limitations of this methodology.

Keywords: Consumer involvement, Products development, Sustainability.

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Authors: Daniel Y. Abebe, Jaehyouk Choi

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From the past earthquake events, many people get hurt at the exit while they are trying to go out of the buildings because of the exit doors are unable to be opened. The door is not opened because it deviates from its the original position. The aim of this research is to develop and evaluate a new type safety door that keeps the door frame in its original position or keeps its edge angles perpendicular during and post-earthquake. The proposed door is composed of three components: outer frame joined to the wall, inner frame (door frame) and circular hollow section connected to the inner and outer frame which is used as seismic energy dissipating device.

Keywords: Earthquake disaster, FE analysis, Low yield point steel, Safety-doors.

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Authors: C. A. Barros, Ana P. Barroso

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Any industrial company needs to determine the amount of variation that exists within its measurement process and guarantee the reliability of their data, studying the performance of their measurement system, in terms of linearity, bias, repeatability and reproducibility and stability. This issue is critical for automotive industry suppliers, who are required to be certified by the 16949:2016 standard (replaces the ISO/TS 16949) of International Automotive Task Force, defining the requirements of a quality management system for companies in the automotive industry. Measurement System Analysis (MSA) is one of the mandatory tools. Frequently, the measurement system in companies is not connected to the equipment and do not incorporate the methods proposed by the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG). To address these constraints, an R&D project is in progress, whose objective is to develop a web and cloud-based MSA tool. This MSA tool incorporates Industry 4.0 concepts, such as, Internet of Things (IoT) protocols to assure the connection with the measuring equipment, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, statistical tools, and advanced mathematical algorithms. This paper presents the preliminary findings of the project. The web and cloud-based MSA tool is innovative because it implements all statistical tests proposed in the MSA-4 reference manual from AIAG as well as other emerging methods and techniques. As it is integrated with the measuring devices, it reduces the manual input of data and therefore the errors. The tool ensures traceability of all performed tests and can be used in quality laboratories and in the production lines. Besides, it monitors MSAs over time, allowing both the analysis of deviations from the variation of the measurements performed and the management of measurement equipment and calibrations. To develop the MSA tool a ten-step approach was implemented. Firstly, it was performed a benchmarking analysis of the current competitors and commercial solutions linked to MSA, concerning Industry 4.0 paradigm. Next, an analysis of the size of the target market for the MSA tool was done. Afterwards, data flow and traceability requirements were analysed in order to implement an IoT data network that interconnects with the equipment, preferably via wireless. The MSA web solution was designed under UI/UX principles and an API in python language was developed to perform the algorithms and the statistical analysis. Continuous validation of the tool by companies is being performed to assure real time management of the ‘big data’. The main results of this R&D project are: MSA Tool, web and cloud-based; Python API; New Algorithms to the market; and Style Guide of UI/UX of the tool. The MSA tool proposed adds value to the state of the art as it ensures an effective response to the new challenges of measurement systems, which are increasingly critical in production processes. Although the automotive industry has triggered the development of this innovative MSA tool, other industries would also benefit from it. Currently, companies from molds and plastics, chemical and food industry are already validating it.

Keywords: Automotive industry, Industry 4.0, internet of things, IATF 16949:2016, measurement system analysis.

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Authors: Sh. Hamada, N. Burtebayev, A. Amar, N. Amangieldy

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the aim of that work is to study the proton transfer phenomenon which takes place in the elastic scattering of 12C on 11B at energies near the coulomb barrier. This reaction was studied at four different energies 16, 18, 22, 24 MeV. The experimental data of the angular distribution at these energies were compared to the calculation prediction using the optical potential codes such as ECIS88 and SPIVAL. For the raising in the cross section at backward angles due to the transfer process we could use Distorted Wave Born Approximation (DWUCK5). Our analysis showed that SPIVAL code with l-dependent imaginary potential could be used effectively.

Keywords: Transfer reaction, DWBA, Elastic Scattering, Optical Potential Codes.

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Authors: G. Reinhart, S. Schindler

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Due to dynamic evolution, the ability of a manufacturing technology to produce a special product is changing. Therefore, it is essential to monitor the established techniques and processes to detect whether a company-s production will fit future circumstances. Concerning the manufacturing technology planning process, companies must decide when to change to a new technology for maintaining and increasing competitive advantages. In this context, the maturity assessment of the focused technologies is crucial. This article presents an approach for defining the maturity of a manufacturing technology from a strategic point of view. The concept is based on the approach of technology readiness level (TRL) according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), but also includes dynamic changes. Therefore, the model takes into account the concept of the technology life cycle. Furthermore, it enables a company to estimate the ideal date for implementation of a new manufacturing technology.

Keywords: Maturity Assessment, Manufacturing Technology Planning, Technology Life Cycle, Technology Readiness Level.

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Authors: Jailan Mohamed El Demerdash

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Millennials are a distinctive and dominant consumer group whose behavior, preferences and purchase decisions are broadly explored but not fully understood yet. Making up the largest market segment in the world, and in Egypt, they have the power to reinvent the hospitality industry and contribute to forming prospective demand for green hotels by showing willingness to adopting their environmental-friendly practices. The current study aims to enhance better understanding of Millennials' perception about sustainable initiatives and to increase the prediction power of their intentions regarding green hotel practices in Egypt. In doing so, the study is exploring the relation among different factors; Millennials' environmental awareness, their acceptance of green practices and their willingness to pay more for them. Millennials' profile, their preferences and environmental decision-making process are brought under light to stimulate actions of hospitality decision-makers and hoteliers. Bearing in mind that responsible consumerism is depending on understanding the different influences on consumption. The study questionnaire was composed of four sections and it was distributed to random Egyptian travelers' blogs and Facebook groups, with approximately 8000 members. Analysis of variance test (ANOVA) was used to examine the study variables. The findings indicated that Millennials' environmental awareness will not be a significant factor in their acceptance of hotel green practices, as well as, their willingness to pay more for them. However, Millennials' acceptance of the level of hotel green practices will have an impact on their willingness to pay more. Millennials were found to have a noticeable level of environmental awareness but lack commitment to tolerating hotel green practices and their associated high prices.

Keywords: Millennials, environment, awareness, green practices, paying more, Egypt.

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Authors: M. Meenasaranya, S. Saravanan

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Conditions corresponding to the unconditional stability of convection in a mechanically anisotropic fluid saturated porous medium of infinite horizontal extent are determined. The medium is heated from below and its bounding surfaces are subjected to temperature modulation which consists of a steady part and a time periodic oscillating part. The Brinkman model is employed in the momentum equation with the Bousinessq approximation. The stability region is found for arbitrary values of modulational frequency and amplitude using the energy method. Higher order numerical computations are carried out to find critical boundaries and subcritical instability regions more accurately.

Keywords: Convection, porous medium, anisotropy, temperature modulation, nonlinear stability.

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Authors: Ashraf S. Hakim, Randa M. Alarousy

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The consumption of food contaminated with molds (microscopic filamentous fungi) and their toxic metabolites results in the development of food-borne mycotoxicosis. The spores of molds are ubiquitously spread in the environment and can be detected everywhere. Ochratoxin A is a toxic and potentially carcinogenic fungal toxin found in a variety of food commodities. In this study, the mycological quality of various ready-to-eat local and imported pork meat and meat byproducts sold in Egyptian markets were assessed and the presence of various molds was determined in pork used as a raw material, edible organs as liver and kidney as well as in fermented raw meat by-products. The study assessed the mycological quality of pork raw meat and their by-products sold in commercial shops in Cairo, Egypt. Mycological analysis was conducted on (n=110) samples which included pig’s livers and kidneys from Egyptian Bassatin slaughter house; local and imported processed pork meat by-products from Egyptian pork markets. The isolates were identified using traditional mycological and biochemical tests. All kidney and liver samples were positive to molds growth while all byproducts were negative. Ochratoxin A levels were quantitatively analyzed using the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and the highest results were present in kidney 7.51 part per billion (ppb) followed by minced meat 6.19 ppb generally the local samples showed higher levels than the imported ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on mycotoxins detection and quantification from pork by-products in Egypt.

Keywords: Egypt, imported pork by-products, local, mycotoxins.

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Authors: Maryam Meftahi, Yashar Hamidzadeh

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In recent decades, the amount of solid waste production has been rising. In the meantime, plastic waste is one of the major parts of urban solid waste, so, recycling plastic waste from water bottles has become a serious challenge in the whole world. The experimental program includes the study of the effect of waste plastic fibers on maximum dry density (MDD), optimum moisture content (OMC) with different sizes and contents. Also, one dimensional consolidation tests were carried out to evaluate the benefit of utilizing randomly distributed waste plastics fiber to improve the engineering behavior of a tested soils. Silty soil specimens were prepared and tested at five different percentages of plastic waste content (i.e. 0.25%, 0.50%, 0.75%, 1% and 1.25% by weight of the parent soil). The size of plastic chips used, are 4 mm, 8 mm and 12 mm long and 4 mm in width. The results show that with the addition of waste plastic fibers, the MDD and OMC and also the compressibility of soil decrease significantly.

Keywords: Silty soil, waste plastic, compaction, consolidation, reinforcement.

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Authors: P. Bárta

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Increasing demand on the performance of Subsea Production Systems (SPS) suggests a need for more detailed investigation of fluid behavior taking place in subsea equipment. Complete CFD cool down analyses of subsea equipment are very time demanding. The objective of this paper is to investigate a Locked CFD approach, which enables significant reduction of the computational time and at the same time maintains sufficient accuracy during thermal cool down simulations. The result comparison of a dead leg simulation using the Full CFD and the three LCFD-methods confirms the validity of the locked flow field assumption for the selected case. For the tested case the LCFD simulation speed up by factor of 200 results in the absolute thermal error of 0.5 °C (3% relative error), speed up by factor of 10 keeps the LCFD results within 0.1 °C (0.5 % relative error) comparing to the Full CFD.

Keywords: CFD, Locked Flow Field, Speed up of CFD simulation time, Subsea

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Authors: Mansi Dhuria, Aalok Misra

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In the context of large volume Big Divisor (nearly) SLagy D3/D7 μ-Split SUSY [1], after an explicit identification of first generation of SM leptons and quarks with fermionic superpartners of four Wilson line moduli, we discuss the identification of gravitino as a potential dark matter candidate by explicitly calculating the decay life times of gravitino (LSP) to be greater than age of universe and lifetimes of decays of the co-NLSPs (the first generation squark/slepton and a neutralino) to the LSP (the gravitino) to be very small to respect BBN constraints. Interested in non-thermal production mechanism of gravitino, we evaluate the relic abundance of gravitino LSP in terms of that of the co-NLSP-s by evaluating their (co-)annihilation cross sections and hence show that the former satisfies the requirement for a potential Dark Matter candidate. We also show that it is possible to obtain a 125 GeV light Higgs in our setup.

Keywords: Split Supersymmetry, Large Volume Swiss-Cheese Calabi-Yau's, Dark Matter, (N)LSP decays, relic abundance.

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Authors: Dong Hun Kim, Won Kyu Lee, Sok Won Kim

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Small cracks or chips of a product appear very frequently in the course of continuous production of an automatic press process system. These phenomena become the cause of not only defective product but also damage of a press mold. In order to solve this problem AE system was introduced. AE system was expected to be very effective to real time detection of the defective product and to prevention of the damage of the press molds. In this study, for pick and analysis of AE signals generated from the press process, AE sensors/pre-amplifier/analysis and processing board were used as frequently found in the other similar cases. For analysis and processing the AE signals picked in real time from the good or bad products, specialized software called cdm8 was used. As a result of this work it was conformed that intensity and shape of the various AE signals differ depending on the weight and thickness of metal sheet and process type.

Keywords: press, acoustic emission, signal processing

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Authors: Nuran Bahar, Mehmet A. Akcayol

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In the aviation industry, many faults may occur frequently during the maintenance processes and assembly operations of complex structured aircrafts because of their high dependencies of components. These faults affect the quality of aircraft parts or developed modules adversely. Technical employee requires long time and high labor force while checking the correctness of each component. In addition, the person must be trained regularly because of the ever-growing and changing technology. Generally, the cost of this training is very high. Augmented Reality (AR) technology reduces the cost of training radically and improves the effectiveness of the training. In this study, the usage of AR technology in the aviation industry has been investigated and the effectiveness of AR with heads-up display glasses has been examined. An application has been developed for comparison of production process with AR and manual one.

Keywords: Aerospace, assembly quality, augmented reality, heads-up display.

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Authors: E. Nemati Lay, M. Peymani, E. Sanjari

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Prediction of viscosity of natural gas is an important parameter in the energy industries such as natural gas storage and transportation. In this study viscosity of different compositions of natural gas is modeled by using an artificial neural network (ANN) based on back-propagation method. A reliable database including more than 3841 experimental data of viscosity for testing and training of ANN is used. The designed neural network can predict the natural gas viscosity using pseudo-reduced pressure and pseudo-reduced temperature with AARD% of 0.221. The accuracy of designed ANN has been compared to other published empirical models. The comparison indicates that the proposed method can provide accurate results.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, Empirical correlation, Natural gas, Viscosity

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Authors: M. Ghazy, T. Dockhorn, N. Dichtl

Abstract:

The present disposal routes of sewage sludge represent a critical environmental issue in Egypt. Recently, there has been an increasing concern about sewage sludge management due to the environmental risks, which resulted from the fast expansion of wastewater treatment plants without equal attention in dealing with the produced sludge. This paper discusses the current situation of sewage sludge management in Egypt presenting a brief overview of the existing wastewater treatment plants, sludge production and characteristics as well as options of beneficial use and potential demand of sewage sludge under Egyptian conditions. The characteristics of sewage sludge are discussed considering the results of own sampling and analysis as well as previous studies. Furthermore, alternative treatment scenarios for sewage sludge, which have been recently developed in Egypt, are discussed and perspectives for a sustainable agricultural use are outlined.

Keywords: Beneficial use, Egypt, Monetary value, Stabilization processes, Sewage sludge, Sludge management

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Authors: B. Skrabic, N. Tomic-Plazibat

Abstract:

In this paper real money demand function is analyzed within multivariate time-series framework. Cointegration approach is used (Johansen procedure) assuming interdependence between money demand determinants, which are nonstationary variables. This will help us to understand the behavior of money demand in Croatia, revealing the significant influence between endogenous variables in vector autoregrression system (VAR), i.e. vector error correction model (VECM). Exogeneity of the explanatory variables is tested. Long-run money demand function is estimated indicating slow speed of adjustment of removing the disequilibrium. Empirical results provide the evidence that real industrial production and exchange rate explains the most variations of money demand in the long-run, while interest rate is significant only in short-run.

Keywords: Cointegration, Long-run equilibrium, Money demand function, Vector error correction model.

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