Search results for: surface water quality

Authors: Samee Ullah Khan, Ishfaq Ahmad

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This paper proposes a novel game theoretical technique to address the problem of data object replication in largescale distributed computing systems. The proposed technique draws inspiration from computational economic theory and employs the extended Vickrey auction. Specifically, players in a non-cooperative environment compete for server-side scarce memory space to replicate data objects so as to minimize the total network object transfer cost, while maintaining object concurrency. Optimization of such a cost in turn leads to load balancing, fault-tolerance and reduced user access time. The method is experimentally evaluated against four well-known techniques from the literature: branch and bound, greedy, bin-packing and genetic algorithms. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the four techniques in both the execution time and solution quality.

Keywords: Auctions, data replication, pricing, static allocation.

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Authors: Hireni R. Mankodi, D. J. Chudasama

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The textile preforms play a key role in providing the mechanical properties and gives the idea about selection parameter of preforms to improve the quality and performance of laminates. The main objectives of this work are to study the effect of non-crimp fabric preform structure in final properties of laminates. It has been observed that the multi-axial preform give better mechanical properties of laminates as compared to woven and biaxial fabrics. This study investigated the effect of different non-crimp glass preform structure on tensile strength, bending and compression properties of glass laminates. The different woven, bi-axial and multi-axial fabrics with similar GSM used to manufacture the laminates using polyester resin. The structural and mechanical properties of preform and laminates were studied using standard methods. It has been observed that the glass fabric geometry, including type of weaves, warps and filling density and number of layer plays significant role in deciding mechanical properties of laminates.

Keywords: Preform, non-crimp, laminates, bi-axial, multiaxial.

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Authors: Aswin Kumar Krishnan, Yat Choy Wong, Reiza Mukhlis, Zipeng Zhang, Arul Arulrajah

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The continuous increase in vehicle uptake escalates the number of rubber tyres waste which need to be managed to avoid landfilling and stockpiling. The present research focused on the sustainable use of crumb rubber in clay roof tiles. The properties of roof tiles composed of clay, crumb rubber, NaOH, and Na2SiO3 with 10 wt.% alkaline activator were studied. Tile samples were fabricated by heating the compacted mixtures at 50 °C for 72 hours, followed by a higher heating temperature of 200 °C for 24 hours. The effect of crumb rubber aggregates as a substitution for the raw clay materials were investigated by varying their concentration from 0 wt.% to 2.5 wt.%. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analyses have been conducted to study the phases and microstructures of the samples. It was found that the optimum rubber crumbs concentration was at 0.5 wt.% and 1 wt.%, while cracks and larger porosity were found at higher crumbs concentration. Water absorption, and compressive strength test results demonstrated that rubber crumbs and clay satisfied the standard requirement for the roof tiles.

Keywords: Crumb rubber, clay, roof tiles, alkaline activators.

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Authors: W. F. Ribeiro, J. L. N. Góes

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The industrial process adds to engineering wood products features absent in solid wood, with homogeneous structure and reduced defects, improved physical and mechanical properties, bio-deterioration, resistance and better dimensional stability, improving quality and increasing the reliability of structures wood. These features combined with using fast-growing trees, make them environmentally ecological products, ensuring a strong consumer market. The wood I-joists are manufactured by the industrial profiles bonding flange and web, an important aspect of the production of wooden I-beams is the adhesive joint that bonds the web to the flange. Adhesives can effectively transfer and distribute stresses, thereby increasing the strength and stiffness of the composite. The objective of this study is to evaluate different resins in a shear strain specimens with the aim of analyzing the most efficient resin and possibility of using national products, reducing the manufacturing cost. First was conducted a literature review, where established the geometry and materials generally used, then established and analyzed 8 national resins and produced six specimens for each.

Keywords: Engineered wood products, structural resin, wood i-joist.

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Authors: Dimitrie Marinceu, Alan Murchison

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The Canadian Used Fuel Container (UFC) is a mid-size hemispherical headed copper coated steel container measuring 2.5 meters in length and 0.5 meters in diameter containing 48 used fuel bundles. The contained used fuel produces significant gamma radiation requiring automated assembly processes to complete the assembly. The design throughput of 2,500 UFCs per year places constraints on equipment and hot cell design for repeatability, speed of processing, robustness and recovery from upset conditions. After UFC assembly, the UFC is inserted into a Buffer Box (BB). The BB is made from adequately pre-shaped blocks (lower and upper block) and Highly Compacted Bentonite (HCB) material. The blocks are practically ‘sandwiching’ the UFC between them after assembly. This paper identifies one possible approach for the BB automatic assembly cell and processes. Automation of the BB assembly will have a significant positive impact on nuclear safety, quality, productivity, and reliability.

Keywords: Used fuel packing plant, automatic assembly cell, used fuel container, buffer box, deep geological repository.

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Authors: Salaheddin Odeh, Ibrahim O. Adwan

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This interdisciplinary study is an investigation to evaluate user-interfaces in business administration. The study is going to be implemented on two computerized business administration systems with two distinctive user-interfaces, so that differences between the two systems can be determined. Both systems, a commercial and a prototype developed for the purpose of this study, deal with ordering of supplies, tendering procedures, issuing purchase orders, controlling the movement of the stocks against their actual balances on the shelves and editing them on their tabulations. In the second suggested system, modern computer graphics and multimedia issues were taken into consideration to cover the drawbacks of the first system. To highlight differences between the two investigated systems regarding some chosen standard quality criteria, the study employs various statistical techniques and methods to evaluate the users- interaction with both systems. The study variables are divided into two divisions: independent representing the interfaces of the two systems, and dependent embracing efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, error rate etc.

Keywords: Evaluation and usability testing, software prototyping, statistical methods, user-interface design.

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Authors: Sidney A. Lima, Hermann J. H. Kux, Elcio H. Shiguemori

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The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) usually navigate through the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) associated with an Inertial Navigation System (INS). However, GNSS can have its accuracy degraded at any time or even turn off the signal of GNSS. In addition, there is the possibility of malicious interferences, known as jamming. Therefore, the image navigation system can solve the autonomy problem, because if the GNSS is disabled or degraded, the image navigation system would continue to provide coordinate information for the INS, allowing the autonomy of the system. This work aims to evaluate the accuracy of the positioning though photogrammetry concepts. The methodology uses orthophotos and Digital Surface Models (DSM) as a reference to represent the object space and photograph obtained during the flight to represent the image space. For the calculation of the coordinates of the perspective center and camera attitudes, it is necessary to know the coordinates of homologous points in the object space (orthophoto coordinates and DSM altitude) and image space (column and line of the photograph). So if it is possible to automatically identify in real time the homologous points the coordinates and attitudes can be calculated whit their respective accuracies. With the methodology applied in this work, it is possible to verify maximum errors in the order of 0.5 m in the positioning and 0.6º in the attitude of the camera, so the navigation through the image can reach values equal to or higher than the GNSS receivers without differential correction. Therefore, navigating through the image is a good alternative to enable autonomous navigation.

Keywords: Autonomy, navigation, security, photogrammetry, remote sensing, spatial resection, UAS.

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Authors: Derya Ören Duran, Şeyma Akalin Benderli

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Cold press technique is a traditional method to obtain oil. The cold-pressing procedure involves neither heat nor chemical treatments; therefore, cold press technique has low oil yield. The cold pressed herbal material residue still contains some oil after cold press. In this study, the oil that is remained in the cold pressed aniseed was extracted with hexane; and it was analyzed to determine physicochemical properties and quality parameters. It was found that the aniseed after cold press process still contained 10% oil. The values of other analysis parameters were 2.1 mgKOH/g for free fatty acid (FFA) and 7.6 meq0₂/kg for peroxide. Cold pressed aniseed oil values were determined as 2.1 mgKOH/g for FFA and 4.5 meq0₂/kg for peroxide, respectively. In addition, fatty acid composition was analyzed, and it was found that both types of oil had same fatty acid compositions. The main fatty acids were oleic, linoleic and palmitic acids.

Keywords: Aniseed oil, cold press, extraction, residue.

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Authors: Nuha Omran Abokhdair, Azizah Bt Abdul Manaf

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Reversible watermarking is a special branch of image watermarking, that is able to recover the original image after extracting the watermark from the image. In this paper, an adaptive prediction-based reversible watermarking scheme is presented, in order to increase the payload capacity of MRI medical images. The scheme divides the image into two parts, Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI). Two bits are embedded in each embeddable pixel of RONI and one bit is embedded in each embeddable pixel of ROI. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to achieve high embedding capacity. This is mainly caused by two reasons. First, the pixels that were excluded from data embedding due to overflow/underflow are used for data embedding. Second, large location map that need to be added to watermark data as overhead is eliminated and thus lower data embedding capacity is prevented. Moreover, the scheme provides good visual quality to the watermarked image.

Keywords: Medical image watermarking, reversible watermarking, Difference Expansion, Prediction-Error Expansion.

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Authors: Ahmed T. Farid, Khaled Z. Soliman

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Due to limited areas and excessive cost of land for projects, backfilling process has become necessary. Also, backfilling will be done to overcome the un-leveling depths or raising levels of site construction, especially near the sea region. Therefore, backfilling soil materials used under the foundation of structures should be investigated regarding its effect on ground motion characteristics, especially at regions subjected to earthquakes. In this research, 60-meter thickness of sandy fill material was used above a fixed 240-meter of natural clayey soil underlying by rock formation to predict the modified ground motion characteristics effect at the foundation level. Comparison between the effect of using three different situations of fill material compaction on the recorded earthquake is studied, i.e. peak ground acceleration, time history, and spectra acceleration values. The three different densities of the compacted fill material used in the study were very loose, medium dense and very dense sand deposits, respectively. Shake computer program was used to perform this study. Strong earthquake records, with Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) of 0.35 g, were used in the analysis. It was found that, higher compaction of fill material thickness has a significant effect on eliminating the earthquake ground motion properties at surface layer of fill material, near foundation level. It is recommended to consider the fill material characteristics in the design of foundations subjected to seismic motions. Future studies should be analyzed for different fill and natural soil deposits for different seismic conditions.

Keywords: Fill, material, density, compaction, earthquake, PGA.

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Authors: Y. Parvizi, M. Gorji, M.H. Mahdian, M. Omid

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Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a key role in soil fertility, hydrology, contaminants control and acts as a sink or source of terrestrial carbon content that can affect the concentration of atmospheric CO2. SOC supports the sustainability and quality of ecosystems, especially in semi-arid region. This study was conducted to determine relative importance of 13 different exploratory climatic, soil and geometric factors on the SOC contents in one of the semiarid watershed zones in Iran. Two methods canonical discriminate analysis (CDA) and feed-forward back propagation neural networks were used to predict SOC. Stepwise regression and sensitivity analysis were performed to identify relative importance of exploratory variables. Results from sensitivity analysis showed that 7-2-1 neural networks and 5 inputs in CDA models output have highest predictive ability that explains %70 and %65 of SOC variability. Since neural network models outperformed CDA model, it should be preferred for estimating SOC.

Keywords: Soil organic carbon, modeling, neural networks, CDA.

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Authors: Anselm L. Schüle, Thomas Rollmann, Reiner Anderl

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Within the collaborative research center 666 a new product development approach and the innovative manufacturing method of linear flow splitting are being developed. So far the design process is supported by 3D-CAD models utilizing User Defined Features in standard CAD-Systems. This paper now presents new functions for generating 3D-models of integral sheet metal products with bifurcations using Siemens PLM NX 6. The emphasis is placed on design and semi-automated insertion of User Defined Features. Therefore User Defined Features for both, linear flow splitting and its derivative linear bend splitting, were developed. In order to facilitate the modeling process, an application was developed that guides through the insertion process. Its usability and dialog layout adapt known standard features. The work presented here has significant implications on the quality, accurateness and efficiency of the product generation process of sheet metal products with higher order bifurcations.

Keywords: Linear Flow Splitting, CRC 666, User Defined Features.

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Authors: Neelam Bawane nee' Singhal, C. V. Srikrishna

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Many metrics were proposed to evaluate the characteristics of the analysis and design model of a given product which in turn help to assess the quality of the product. Function point metric is a measure of the 'functionality' delivery by the software. This paper presents an analysis of a set of programs of a project developed in Cµ through Function Points metric. Function points are measured for a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) of the case developed at initial stage. Lines of Codes (LOCs) and possible errors are calculated with the help of measured Function Points (FPs). The calculations are performed using suitable established functions. Calculated LOCs and errors are compared with actual LOCs and errors found at the time of analysis & design review, implementation and testing. It has been observed that actual found errors are more than calculated errors. On the basis of analysis and observations, authors conclude that function point provides useful insight and helps to analyze the drawbacks in the development process.

Keywords: Function Points, Data Flow Diagram, Lines ofCodes.

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Authors: Manvjeet Kaur, Mukhwinder Singh, Akshay Girdhar, Parvinder S. Sandhu

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Most fingerprint recognition techniques are based on minutiae matching and have been well studied. However, this technology still suffers from problems associated with the handling of poor quality impressions. One problem besetting fingerprint matching is distortion. Distortion changes both geometric position and orientation, and leads to difficulties in establishing a match among multiple impressions acquired from the same finger tip. Marking all the minutiae accurately as well as rejecting false minutiae is another issue still under research. Our work has combined many methods to build a minutia extractor and a minutia matcher. The combination of multiple methods comes from a wide investigation into research papers. Also some novel changes like segmentation using Morphological operations, improved thinning, false minutiae removal methods, minutia marking with special considering the triple branch counting, minutia unification by decomposing a branch into three terminations, and matching in the unified x-y coordinate system after a two-step transformation are used in the work.

Keywords: Biometrics, Minutiae, Crossing number, False Accept Rate (FAR), False Reject Rate (FRR).

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Authors: Tomasz Sapiński, Dorota Kamińska, Adam Pelikant, Egils Avots, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafari

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People express emotions through different modalities. Integration of verbal and non-verbal communication channels creates a system in which the message is easier to understand. Expanding the focus to several expression forms can facilitate research on emotion recognition as well as human-machine interaction. In this article, the authors present a Polish emotional database composed of three modalities: facial expressions, body movement and gestures, and speech. The corpora contains recordings registered in studio conditions, acted out by 16 professional actors (8 male and 8 female). The data is labeled with six basic emotions categories, according to Ekman’s emotion categories. To check the quality of performance, all recordings are evaluated by experts and volunteers. The database is available to academic community and might be useful in the study on audio-visual emotion recognition.

Keywords: Body movement, emotion recognition, emotional corpus, facial expressions, gestures, multimodal database, speech.

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Authors: Halleh Nejadriahi, Kamyar Arab

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Computer-aided design (CAD) tools have been extensively used by the architects for the several decades. It has evolved from being a simple drafting tool to being an intelligent architectural software and a powerful means of communication for architects. CAD plays an essential role in the profession of architecture and is a basic tool for any architectural firm. It is not possible for an architectural firm to compete without taking the advantage of computer software, due to the high demand and competition in the architectural industry. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impacts of CAD on the architectural design process from conceptual level to final product, particularly in architectural practice. It examines the range of benefits of integrating CAD into the industry and discusses the possible defects limiting the architects. Method of this study is qualitatively based on data collected from the professionals’ perspective. The identified benefits and limitations of CAD on the architectural design process will raise the awareness of professionals on the potentials of CAD and proper utilization of that in the industry, which would result in a higher productivity along with a better quality in the architectural offices.

Keywords: Architecture, architectural practice, computer aided design, CAD, design process.

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Authors: Bundit Pungnirund

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This research aimed to investigate the relationship between attitude towards marketing mix, brand image and consumer behavior of the passengers of low-cost airlines service. This study employed by quantitative research and the questionnaire was used to collect the data from 400 sampled of the passengers who have ever used the low-cost airline services based in Bangkok, Thailand. The descriptive statistics and Pearson’s correlation analysis were used to analyze data. The research results revealed that the attitude of the marketing mix of the low-cost airline services including product, price, place, promotion and process had related to the consumer behavior on the aspects of duration of service and frequency of service. While, the brand image of the low cost airline including the characteristics of organization, service quality and company identity had related to the consumer behavior on duration of service, frequency of service and cost of service at the significant statistically acceptable levels.

Keywords: Brand image, consumer behavior, low-cost airlines, marketing mix.

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Authors: Shahzad Hassan, Kamran Saeed

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People are always in search of Wi-Fi hotspots because Internet is a major demand nowadays. But like all other technologies, there is still room for improvement in the Wi-Fi technology with regards to the speed and quality of connectivity. In order to address these aspects, Harald Haas, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, proposed what we know as the Li-Fi (Light Fidelity). Li-Fi is a new technology in the field of wireless communication to provide connectivity within a network environment. It is a two-way mode of wireless communication using light. Basically, the data is transmitted through Light Emitting Diodes which can vary the intensity of light very fast, even faster than the blink of an eye. From the research and experiments conducted so far, it can be said that Li-Fi can increase the speed and reliability of the transfer of data. This paper pays particular attention on the assessment of the performance of this technology. In other words, it is a 5G technology which uses LED as the medium of data transfer. For coverage within the buildings, Wi-Fi is good but Li-Fi can be considered favorable in situations where large amounts of data are to be transferred in areas with electromagnetic interferences. It brings a lot of data related qualities such as efficiency, security as well as large throughputs to the table of wireless communication. All in all, it can be said that Li-Fi is going to be a future phenomenon where the presence of light will mean access to the Internet as well as speedy data transfer.

Keywords: Communication, LED, Li-Fi, Wi-Fi.

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Authors: Elias O. Tembe, Hussain A. Al-Salamin

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There is decagram of strategic decisions of operations and production/service management (POSM) within operational research (OR) which must collate, namely: design, inventory, quality, location, process and capacity, layout, scheduling, maintain ace, and supply chain. This paper presents an architectural configuration conceptual framework of a decagram of sets decisions in a form of mathematical complete graph and abelian graph. Mathematically, a complete graph is undirected (UDG), and directed (DG) a relationship where every pair of vertices is connected, collated, confluent, and holomorphic. There has not been any study conducted which, however, prioritizes the holomorphic sets which of POMS within OR field of study. The study utilizes OR structured technique known as The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis for organizing, sorting and prioritizing(ranking) the sets within the decagram of POMS according to their attribution (propensity), and provides an analysis how the prioritization has real-world application within the 21st century.

Keywords: AHP analysis, Decagram, Decagon, Holomorphic.

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Authors: Aye Sandar Win

Abstract:

This paper demonstrates design and construction of microcontroller-based telephone exchange system and the aims of this paper is to study telecommunication, connection with PIC16F877A and DTMF MT8870D. In microcontroller system, PIC 16F877 microcontroller is used to control the call processing. Dial tone, busy tone and ring tone are provided during call progress. Instead of using ready made tone generator IC, oscillator based tone generator is used. The results of this telephone exchange system are perfect for homes and small businesses needing the extensions. It requires the phone operation control system, the analog interface circuit and the switching circuit. This exchange design will contain eight channels. It is the best low cost, good quality telephone exchange for today-s telecommunication needs. It offers the features available in much more expensive PBX units without using high-priced phones. It is for long distance telephone services.

Keywords: Control software, DTMF receiver and decoder, hooksensing, microcontroller system, power supply, ring generator andoscillator based tone generator.

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Authors: N. Philipova

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The influence of the geometric parameters of trapezoidal labyrinth channel on the emitter discharge is investigated in this work. The impact of the dentate angle, the dentate spacing, and the dentate height are studied among the geometric parameters of the labyrinth channel. Numerical simulations of the water flow movement are performed according to central cubic composite design using Commercial codes GAMBIT and FLUENT. Inlet pressure of the dripper is set up to be 1 bar. The objective of this paper is to derive a mathematical model of the emitter discharge depending on the dentate angle, the dentate spacing, the dentate height of the labyrinth channel. As a result, the obtained mathematical model is a second-order polynomial reporting 2-way interactions among the geometric parameters. The dentate spacing has the most important and positive influence on the emitter discharge, followed by the simultaneous impact of the dentate spacing and the dentate height. The dentate angle in the observed interval has no significant effect on the emitter discharge. The obtained model can be used as a basis for a future emitter design.

Keywords: Drip irrigation, labyrinth channel hydrodynamics, numerical simulations, Reynolds stress model.

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Authors: Jaroslav Polec, Lenka Krulikovská, Natália Helešová, Tomáš Hirner

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In this paper we present a novel approach for face image coding. The proposed method makes a use of the features of video encoders like motion prediction. At first encoder selects appropriate prototype from the database and warps it according to features of encoding face. Warped prototype is placed as first I frame. Encoding face is placed as second frame as P frame type. Information about features positions, color change, selected prototype and data flow of P frame will be sent to decoder. The condition is both encoder and decoder own the same database of prototypes. We have run experiment with H.264 video encoder and obtained results were compared to results achieved by JPEG and JPEG2000. Obtained results show that our approach is able to achieve 3 times lower bitrate and two times higher PSNR in comparison with JPEG. According to comparison with JPEG2000 the bitrate was very similar, but subjective quality achieved by proposed method is better.

Keywords: Triangulation, H.264, Model-based coding, Average face

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Authors: Sedighe Arabameri, Nasser Salmasi

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In this researcha particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposedfor no-wait flowshopsequence dependent setuptime scheduling problem with weighted earliness-tardiness penalties as the criterion (
|, |Σ   " ).The smallestposition value (SPV) rule is applied to convert the continuous value of position vector of particles in PSO to job permutations.A timing algorithm is generated to find the optimal schedule and calculate the objective function value of a given sequence in PSO algorithm. Twodifferent neighborhood structures are applied to improve the solution quality of PSO algorithm.The first one is based on variable neighborhood search (VNS) and the second one is a simple one with invariable structure. In order to compare the performance of two neighborhood structures, random test problems are generated and solved by both neighborhood approaches.Computational results show that the VNS algorithmhas better performance than the other one especially for the large sized problems.

Keywords: minimization of summation of weighed earliness and tardiness, no-wait flowshop scheduling, particle swarm optimization, sequence dependent setup times

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Authors: Hamid Tavakolipour, Mohsen Mokhtarian, Ahmad Kalbasi Ashtari

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In this study, the effect of various drying methods (sun drying, shade drying and industrial drying) on final moisture content, shell splitting degree, shrinkage and color change were studied. Sun drying resulted higher degree of pistachio nuts shell splitting on pistachio nuts relative other drying methods. The ANOVA results showed that the different drying methods did not significantly effects on color change of dried pistachio nut. The results illustrated that pistachio nut dried by industrial drying had the lowest moisture content. After the end of drying process, initially, the experimental drying data were fitted with five famous drying models namely Newton, Page, Silva et al., Peleg and Henderson and Pabis. The results indicated that Peleg and Page models gave better results compared with other models to monitor the moisture ratio’s pistachio nut in industrial drying and open sun (or shade drying) methods, respectively.

Keywords: Industrial drying, Modeling, Pistachio, quality properties, Traditional drying.

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Authors: K. Ramasamy, B. Balamuralithara, Mohammad Umar Siddiqi

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We proposed a new class of asymmetric turbo encoder for 3G systems that performs well in both “water fall" and “error floor" regions in [7]. In this paper, a modified (optimal) power allocation scheme for the different bits of new class of asymmetric turbo encoder has been investigated to enhance the performance. The simulation results and performance bound for proposed asymmetric turbo code with modified Unequal Power Allocation (UPA) scheme for the frame length, N=400, code rate, r=1/3 with Log-MAP decoder over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel are obtained and compared with the system with typical UPA and without UPA. The performance tests are extended over AWGN channel for different frame size to verify the possibility of implementation of the modified UPA scheme for the proposed asymmetric turbo code. From the performance results, it is observed that the proposed asymmetric turbo code with modified UPA performs better than the system without UPA and with typical UPA and it provides a coding gain of 0.4 to 0.52dB.

Keywords: Asymmetric turbo code, Generator polynomial, Interleaver, UPA, WCDMA, cdma2000.

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Authors: Zeinab Galavani, Reza Rezaei-Nasirabad, Rasoul Sadighi-Bonabi

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Using a force balanced translational-radial dynamics, phase space of the moving single bubble sonoluminescence (m- SBSL) in 85% wt sulfuric acid has been numerically calculated. This phase space is compared with that of single bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL) in pure water which has been calculated by using the mere radial dynamics. It is shown that in 85% wt sulfuric acid, in a general agreement with experiment, the bubble-s positional instability threshold lays under the shape instability threshold. At the onset of spatial instability of moving sonoluminescing (SL) bubble in 85% wt sulfuric acid, temporal effects of the hydrodynamic force on the bubble translational-radial dynamics have been investigated. The appearance of non-zero history force on the moving SL bubble is because of proper condition which was produced by high viscosity of acid. Around the moving bubble collapse due to the rapid contraction of the bubble wall, the inertial based added mass force overcomes the viscous based history force and induces acceleration on the bubble translational motion.

Keywords: Bjerknes force, History force, Reynolds number, Sonoluminescence.

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Authors: Hunachew B. Mengesha, Biruck Y. Dessalegn

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Owing to the dramatic expansion of universities in Ethiopia, understanding the composition and nature of solid waste at the source of generation plays an important role in designing a program for an integrated waste management program. In this study, we report the quantity, quality and recycling potential of the waste generated in the three campuses of the Hawassa University, Southern Ethiopia. A total of 3.5 tons of waste was generated per day in the three campuses of the university. More than 95% of the waste constituents were with potential to be recovered. It was a lesson from the study that there was no source reduction, recycling, composting, proper land filling or incineration practices in-place. The considerably high waste generation associated with the expansion of educational programs in the university appears worthwhile requiring implementation of programs for an integrated solid waste management to minimize health risk to humans and reduce environmental implications as a result of improper handling and disposal of wastes.

Keywords: Hawassa University, integrated solid waste management, solid waste generation.

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Authors: Gangacharyulu Dasaroju, Sumeet Sharma, Sanjay Singh

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Heat pipe is characterised as superconductor of heat because of its excellent heat removal ability. The operation of several engineering system results in generation of heat. This may cause several overheating problems and lead to failure of the systems. To overcome this problem and to achieve desired rate of heat dissipation, there is need to study the performance of heat pipe with annular fins under free convection at different inclinations. This study demonstrates the effect of different mass flow rate of hot fluid into evaporator section on the condenser side heat transfer coefficient with annular fins under natural convection at different inclinations. In this study annular fins are used for the experimental work having dimensions of length of fin, thickness of fin and spacing of fin as 10 mm, 1 mm and 6 mm, respectively. The main aim of present study is to discover at what inclination angles the maximum heat transfer coefficient shall be achieved. The heat transfer coefficient on the external surface of heat pipe condenser section is determined by experimental method and then predicted by empirical correlations. The results obtained from experimental and Churchill and Chu relation for laminar are in fair agreement with not more than 22% deviation. It is elucidated the maximum heat transfer coefficient of 31.2 W/(m²-K) at 25˚ tilt angle and minimal condenser heat transfer coefficient of 26.4 W/(m²-K) is seen at 45˚ tilt angle and 200 ml/min mass flow rate. Inclination angle also affects the thermal performance of heat pipe. Beyond 25^o inclination, heat transport rate starts to decrease.

Keywords: Annular fins, condenser heat transfer coefficient, heat pipe, natural convection, tilt angle.

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Authors: Rumyana Peytcheva-Forsyth, Blagovesna Yovkova

Abstract:

This paper presents the outcomes of a qualitative study which aims to investigate the pedagogical potentials of serious games in the preparation of future teachers. The authors discuss the existing problems and barriers associated with the organization of teaching practices in Bulgaria as part of the pre-service teacher training, as well as the attitudes and perceptions of the interviewed academics, teachers and trainees concerning the integration of serious games in the teaching practicum. The study outcomes strongly confirm the positive attitudes of the respondents to the introduction of virtual learning environments for the development of professional skills of future teachers as a supplement to the traditional forms of education. Through the inclusion of serious games it is expected to improve the quality of practical training of pre-service teachers as they overcome many of the problems identified in the existing teaching practices. The outcomes of the study will inform the design of the educational simulation software which is part of the project SimAula Tomorrow's Teachers Training.

Keywords: pre-service teacher training, serious games, virtual practicum, simulations

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Authors: Chih-Hung Wu, Chih-Chin Lai, Chun-Yen Chen, Yan-He Chen

Abstract:

Interpretation of aerial images is an important task in various applications. Image segmentation can be viewed as the essential step for extracting information from aerial images. Among many developed segmentation methods, the technique of clustering has been extensively investigated and used. However, determining the number of clusters in an image is inherently a difficult problem, especially when a priori information on the aerial image is unavailable. This study proposes a support vector machine approach for clustering aerial images. Three cluster validity indices, distance-based index, Davies-Bouldin index, and Xie-Beni index, are utilized as quantitative measures of the quality of clustering results. Comparisons on the effectiveness of these indices and various parameters settings on the proposed methods are conducted. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Aerial imaging, image segmentation, machine learning, support vector machine, cluster validity index

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