Search results for: short time scale variation

Authors: T. Hussain, A. Iqbal, M. W. Siddiqi

Abstract:

The objective of this study is to examine the validity of Wagner-s law and relationship between economic growth, population and export for Pakistan. The ARDL Bounds cointegration and ECM are utilized for long and short run equilibrium for the period of 1972-2007. Population has considerable role in an economy and exports are the main source to raise the GDP. With the increase in GDP, the government expenditures may or may not increase. The empirical results indicate that the Wagner-s Law does hold, as economic growth is significantly and positively correlated with government expenditures. However, population and exports have also significant and positive impact on government expenditures both in short and long run. The significant and negative coefficient of error correction term in ECM indicates that after a shock, the long rum equilibrium will again converge towards equilibrium about 70.82 percent within a year.

Keywords: ARDL Cointegration, Growth, Pakistan, Wagner's law.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1454

Authors: S. V. Yendiyarov

Abstract:

Pattern discovery from time series is of fundamental importance. Particularly, when information about the structure of a pattern is not complete, an algorithm to discover specific patterns or shapes automatically from the time series data is necessary. The dynamic time warping is a technique that allows local flexibility in aligning time series. Because of this, it is widely used in many fields such as science, medicine, industry, finance and others. However, a major problem of the dynamic time warping is that it is not able to work with structural changes of a pattern. This problem arises when the structure is influenced by noise, which is a common thing in practice for almost every application. This paper addresses this problem by means of developing a novel technique called adaptive dynamic time warping.

Keywords: Pattern recognition, optimal control, quadratic programming, dynamic programming, dynamic time warping, sintering control.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2022

Authors: Ala'eddin A. Saif , Z. A. Z. Jamal, Z. Sauli, P. Poopalan

Abstract:

The ferroelectric behavior of barium strontium titanate (BST) in thin film form has been investigated in order to study the possibility of using BST for ferroelectric gate-field effect transistor (FeFET) for memory devices application. BST thin films have been fabricated as Al/BST/Pt/SiO2/Si-gate configuration. The variation of the dielectric constant (ε) and tan δ with frequency have been studied to ensure the dielectric quality of the material. The results show that at low frequencies, ε increases as the Ba content increases, whereas at high frequencies, it shows the opposite variation, which is attributed to the dipole dynamics. tan δ shows low values with a peak at the mid-frequency range. The ferroelectric behavior of the Al/BST/Pt/SiO2/Si has been investigated using C-V characteristics. The results show that the strength of the ferroelectric hysteresis loop increases as the Ba content increases; this is attributed to the grain size and dipole dynamics effect.

Keywords: BST thin film, Electrical properties, Ferroelectrichysteresis, Ferroelectric FET.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1516

Authors: Amit Kr. Happy

Abstract:

This paper is motivated by the importance of multi-sensor image fusion with specific focus on Infrared (IR) and Visible image (VI) fusion for various applications including military reconnaissance. Image fusion can be defined as the process of combining two or more source images into a single composite image with extended information content that improves visual perception or feature extraction. These images can be from different modalities like Visible camera & IR Thermal Imager. While visible images are captured by reflected radiations in the visible spectrum, the thermal images are formed from thermal radiation (IR) that may be reflected or self-emitted. A digital color camera captures the visible source image and a thermal IR camera acquires the thermal source image. In this paper, some image fusion algorithms based upon Multi-Scale Transform (MST) and region-based selection rule with consistency verification have been proposed and presented. This research includes implementation of the proposed image fusion algorithm in MATLAB along with a comparative analysis to decide the optimum number of levels for MST and the coefficient fusion rule. The results are presented, and several commonly used evaluation metrics are used to assess the suggested method's validity. Experiments show that the proposed approach is capable of producing good fusion results. While deploying our image fusion algorithm approaches, we observe several challenges from the popular image fusion methods. While high computational cost and complex processing steps of image fusion algorithms provide accurate fused results, but they also make it hard to become deployed in system and applications that require real-time operation, high flexibility and low computation ability. So, the methods presented in this paper offer good results with minimum time complexity.

Keywords: Image fusion, IR thermal imager, multi-sensor, Multi-Scale Transform.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 395

Authors: M. Akhlaque Ahmed, Sidra A. Shaikh, Maliha A. Siddiqui

Abstract:

Global and diffuse solar radiation on horizontal surface of Lower Sindh, namely Karachi, Hyderabad, Nawabshah were carried out using sunshine hour data of the area to assess the feasibility of solar energy utilization for power generation in Sindh province. The results obtained show a large variation in the direct and diffuse component of solar radiation in summer and winter months in Lower Sindh (50% direct and 50% diffuse for Karachi and Hyderabad). In Nawabshah area, the contribution of diffuse solar radiation is low during the monsoon months, July and August. The K_T value of Nawabshah indicates a clear sky throughout almost the entire year. The percentage of diffuse radiation does not exceed more than 20%. In Nawabshah, the appearance of cloud is rare even during the monsoon months. The estimated values indicate that Nawabshah has high solar potential, whereas Karachi and Hyderabad have low solar potential. During the monsoon months the Lower part of Sindh can utilize the hybrid system with wind power. Near Karachi and Hyderabad, the wind speed ranges between 6.2 m/sec to 6.9 m/sec. A wind corridor exists near Karachi, Hyderabad, Gharo, Keti Bander and Shah Bander. The short fall of solar can be compensated by wind because in the monsoon months of July and August, wind speeds are higher in the Lower region of Sindh.

Keywords: Hybrid power system, power generation, solar and wind energy potential, Lower Sindh.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1777

Authors: M. Kumpugdee-Vollrath, M. Tabatabaeifar, M. Helmis

Abstract:

Shellac is a natural polyester resin secreted by insects. Pectins are natural, non-toxic and water-soluble polysaccharides extracted from the peels of citrus fruits or the leftovers of apples. Both polymers are allowed for the use in the pharmaceutical industry and as a food additive. SSB Aquagold® is the aqueous solution of shellac and can be used for a coating process as an enteric or controlled drug release polymer. In this study, tablets containing 10 mg methylene blue as a model drug were prepared with a rotary press. Those tablets were coated with mixtures of shellac and one of the pectin different types (i.e. CU 201, CU 501, CU 701 and CU 020) mostly in a 2:1 ratio or with pure shellac in a small scale fluidized bed apparatus. A stable, simple and reproducible three-stage coating process was successfully developed. The drug contents of the coated tablets were determined using UV-VIS spectrophotometer. The characterization of the surface and the film thickness were performed with the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and the light microscopy. Release studies were performed in a dissolution apparatus with a basket. Most of the formulations were enteric coated. The dissolution profiles showed a delayed or sustained release with a lagtime of at least 4 h. Dissolution profiles of coated tablets with pure shellac had a very long lagtime ranging from 13 to 17.9 h and the slopes were quite high. The duration of the lagtime and the slope of the dissolution profiles could be adjusted by adding the proper type of pectin to the shellac formulation and by variation of the coating amount. In order to apply a coating formulation as a colon delivery system, the prepared film should be resistant against gastric fluid for at least 2 h and against intestinal fluid for 4-6 h. The required delay time was gained with most of the shellac-pectin polymer mixtures. The release profiles were fitted with the modified model of the Korsmeyer-Peppas equation and the Hixson-Crowell model. A correlation coefficient (R²)> 0.99 was obtained by Korsmeyer-Peppas equation.

Keywords: Shellac, pectin, coating, fluidized bed, release, colon delivery system, kinetic, SEM, methylene blue.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 4947

Authors: Mohammed Sharif, Donald Burn

Abstract:

Large scale climate signals and their teleconnections can influence hydro-meteorological variables on a local scale. Several extreme flow and timing measures, including high flow and low flow measures, from 62 hydrometric stations in Canada are investigated to detect possible linkages with several large scale climate indices. The streamflow data used in this study are derived from the Canadian Reference Hydrometric Basin Network and are characterized by relatively pristine and stable land-use conditions with a minimum of 40 years of record. A composite analysis approach was used to identify linkages between extreme flow and timing measures and climate indices. The approach involves determining the 10 highest and 10 lowest values of various climate indices from the data record. Extreme flow and timing measures for each station were examined for the years associated with the 10 largest values and the years associated with the 10 smallest values. In each case, a re-sampling approach was applied to determine if the 10 values of extreme flow measures differed significantly from the series mean. Results indicate that several stations are impacted by the large scale climate indices considered in this study. The results allow the determination of any relationship between stations that exhibit a statistically significant trend and stations for which the extreme measures exhibit a linkage with the climate indices.

Keywords: flood analysis, low-flow events, climate change, trend analysis, Canada

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1574

Authors: Jeerapa Sappakitkamjorn, Sa-aat Niwitpong

Abstract:

In many practical applications in various areas, such as engineering, science and social science, it is known that there exist bounds on the values of unknown parameters. For example, values of some measurements for controlling machines in an industrial process, weight or height of subjects, blood pressures of patients and retirement ages of public servants. When interval estimation is considered in a situation where the parameter to be estimated is bounded, it has been argued that the classical Neyman procedure for setting confidence intervals is unsatisfactory. This is due to the fact that the information regarding the restriction is simply ignored. It is, therefore, of significant interest to construct confidence intervals for the parameters that include the additional information on parameter values being bounded to enhance the accuracy of the interval estimation. Therefore in this paper, we propose a new confidence interval for the coefficient of variance where the population mean and standard deviation are bounded. The proposed interval is evaluated in terms of coverage probability and expected length via Monte Carlo simulation.  

Keywords: Bounded parameters, coefficient of variation, confidence interval, Monte Carlo simulation.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 4195

Authors: Samuel O. Alamu, Seong W. Lee, Blaise Kalmia, Marc J. Louise Caballes, Xuejun Qian

Abstract:

The application of combustion technologies for thermal conversion of biomass and solid wastes to energy has been a major solution to the effective handling of wastes over a long period of time. Lab-scale biomass combustion systems have been observed to be economically viable and socially acceptable, but major concerns are the environmental impacts of the process and deviation of temperature distribution within the combustion chamber. Both high and low combustion chamber temperature may affect the overall combustion efficiency and gaseous emissions. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a control system which measures the deviations of chamber temperature from set target values, sends these deviations (which generates disturbances in the system) in the form of feedback signal (as input), and control operating conditions for correcting the errors. In this research study, major components of the feedback control system were determined, assembled, and tested. In addition, control algorithms were developed to actuate operating conditions (e.g., air velocity, fuel feeding rate) using ladder logic functions embedded in the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The developed control algorithm having chamber temperature as a feedback signal is integrated into the lab-scale swirling fluidized bed combustor (SFBC) to investigate the temperature distribution at different heights of the combustion chamber based on various operating conditions. The air blower rates and the fuel feeding rates obtained from automatic control operations were correlated with manual inputs. There was no observable difference in the correlated results, thus indicating that the written PLC program functions were adequate in designing the experimental study of the lab-scale SFBC. The experimental results were analyzed to study the effect of air velocity operating at 222-273 ft/min and fuel feeding rate of 60-90 rpm on the chamber temperature. The developed temperature-based feedback control system was shown to be adequate in controlling the airflow and the fuel feeding rate for the overall biomass combustion process as it helps to minimize the steady-state error.

Keywords: Air flow, biomass combustion, feedback control system, fuel feeding, ladder logic, programmable logic controller, temperature.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 557

Authors: Rallapalli Revanth, Shivakumar Bhavi, Vijay Kumar Turaga

Abstract:

Dispensing powders manually can be difficult as it requires to gradually pour and check the amount on the scale to be dispensed. Current systems are manual and non-continuous in nature and is user dependent and it is also difficult to control powder dispensation. Recurrent dosing of powdered medicines in precise amounts quickly and accurately has been an all-time challenge. Various powder dispensing mechanisms are being designed to overcome these challenges. Battery operated screw conveyor mechanism is being innovated to overcome above problems faced. These inventions are numerically evaluated at concept development level by employing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) of gas-solids multiphase flow systems. CFD has been very helpful in the development of such devices, saving time and money by reducing the number of prototypes and testing. In this study, powder dispensation from the trocar's end is simulated by using the Dense Discrete Phase Model technique along with Kinetic Theory of Granular Flow. The powder is viewed as a secondary flow in air (DDPM-KTGF). By considering the volume fraction of powder as 50%, the transportation side is done by rotation of the screw conveyor. The performance is calculated for 1 sec time frame in an unsteady computation manner. This methodology will help designers in developing design concepts to improve the dispensation and the effective area within a quick turnaround time frame.

Keywords: Multiphase flow, screw conveyor, transient, DDPM - KTGF.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 348

Authors: Appanah Rao Appadu, Muhammad Zaid Dauhoo

Abstract:

In this paper, we have combined some spatial derivatives with the optimised time derivative proposed by Tam and Webb in order to approximate the linear advection equation which is given by = 0. Ôêé Ôêé + Ôêé Ôêé x f t u These spatial derivatives are as follows: a standard 7-point 6 th -order central difference scheme (ST7), a standard 9-point 8 th -order central difference scheme (ST9) and optimised schemes designed by Tam and Webb, Lockard et al., Zingg et al., Zhuang and Chen, Bogey and Bailly. Thus, these seven different spatial derivatives have been coupled with the optimised time derivative to obtain seven different finite-difference schemes to approximate the linear advection equation. We have analysed the variation of the modified wavenumber and group velocity, both with respect to the exact wavenumber for each spatial derivative. The problems considered are the 1-D propagation of a Boxcar function, propagation of an initial disturbance consisting of a sine and Gaussian function and the propagation of a Gaussian profile. It is known that the choice of the cfl number affects the quality of results in terms of dissipation and dispersion characteristics. Based on the numerical experiments solved and numerical methods used to approximate the linear advection equation, it is observed in this work, that the quality of results is dependent on the choice of the cfl number, even for optimised numerical methods. The errors from the numerical results have been quantified into dispersion and dissipation using a technique devised by Takacs. Also, the quantity, Exponential Error for Low Dispersion and Low Dissipation, eeldld has been computed from the numerical results. Moreover, based on this work, it has been found that when the quantity, eeldld can be used as a measure of the total error. In particular, the total error is a minimum when the eeldld is a minimum.

Keywords: Optimised time derivative, dissipation, dispersion, cfl number, Nomenclature: k : time step, h : spatial step, β :advection velocity, r: cfl/Courant number, hkrβ= , w =θ, h : exact wave number, n :time level, RPE : Relative phase error per unit time step, AFM :modulus of amplification factor

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1617

Authors: Prakash G L, Thejaswini M, S H Manjula, K R Venugopal, L M Patnaik

Abstract:

Computing and maintaining network structures for efficient data aggregation incurs high overhead for dynamic events where the set of nodes sensing an event changes with time. Moreover, structured approaches are sensitive to the waiting time that is used by nodes to wait for packets from their children before forwarding the packet to the sink. An optimal routing and data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper. We propose Tree on DAG (ToD), a semistructured approach that uses Dynamic Forwarding on an implicitly constructed structure composed of multiple shortest path trees to support network scalability. The key principle behind ToD is that adjacent nodes in a graph will have low stretch in one of these trees in ToD, thus resulting in early aggregation of packets. Based on simulations on a 2,000-node Mica2- based network, we conclude that efficient aggregation in large-scale networks can be achieved by our semistructured approach.

Keywords: Aggregation, Packet Merging, Query Processing.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1915

Authors: E. Binaeian, SH. Soroushnia

Abstract:

Acute toxicity of nano SiO2, ZnO, MCM-41 (Meso pore silica), Cu, Multi Wall Carbon Nano Tube (MWCNT), Single Wall Carbon Nano Tube (SWCNT) , Fe (Coated) to bacteria Vibrio fischeri using a homemade luminometer , was evaluated. The values of the nominal effective concentrations (EC), causing 20% and 50% inhibition of biouminescence, using two mathematical models at two times of 5 and 30 minutes were calculated. Luminometer was designed with Photomultiplier (PMT) detector. Luminol chemiluminescence reaction was carried out for the calibration graph. In the linear calibration range, the correlation coefficients and coefficient of Variation (CV) were 0.988 and 3.21% respectively which demonstrate the accuracy and reproducibility of the instrument that are suitable. The important part of this research depends on how to optimize the best condition for maximum bioluminescence. The culture of Vibrio fischeri with optimal conditions in liquid media, were stirring at 120 rpm at a temperature of 150C to 180C and were incubated for 24 to 72 hours while solid medium was held at 180C and for 48 hours. Suspension of nanoparticles ZnO, after 30 min contact time to bacteria Vibrio fischeri, showed the highest toxicity while SiO2 nanoparticles showed the lowest toxicity. After 5 min exposure time, the toxicity of ZnO was the strongest and MCM-41 was the weakest toxicant component.

Keywords: Bioluminescence, effective concentration, nanomaterials, toxicity, Vibrio fischeri.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2943

Authors: Giuseppe Spampinato, Salvatore Curti, Ivana Guarneri, Arcangelo Bruna

Abstract:

This document describes an advanced system and methodology for Cross Traffic Alert (CTA), able to detect vehicles that move into the vehicle driving path from the left or right side. The camera is supposed to be not only on a vehicle still, e.g. at a traffic light or at an intersection, but also moving slowly, e.g. in a car park. In all of the aforementioned conditions, a driver’s short loss of concentration or distraction can easily lead to a serious accident. A valid support to avoid these kinds of car crashes is represented by the proposed system. It is an extension of our previous work, related to a clustering system, which only works on fixed cameras. Just a vanish point calculation and simple optical flow filtering, to eliminate motion vectors due to the car relative movement, is performed to let the system achieve high performances with different scenarios, cameras and resolutions. The proposed system just uses as input the optical flow, which is hardware implemented in the proposed platform and since the elaboration of the whole system is really speed and power consumption, it is inserted directly in the camera framework, allowing to execute all the processing in real-time.

Keywords: Clustering, cross traffic alert, optical flow, real time, vanishing point.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 797

Authors: Frank C. Pan, Che-Long Su, Ching-Hsuen Chen

Abstract:

Background, measuring an individual-s Health Literacy is gaining attention, yet no appropriate instrument is available in Taiwan. Measurement tools that were developed and used in western countries may not be appropriate for use in Taiwan due to a different language system. Purpose of this research was to develop a Health Literacy measurement instrument specific for Taiwan adults. Methods, several experts of clinic physicians; healthcare administrators and scholars identified 125 common used health related Chinese phrases from major medical knowledge sources that easy accessible to the public. A five-point Likert scale is used to measure the understanding level of the target population. Such measurement is then used to compare with the correctness of their answers to a health knowledge test for validation. Samples, samples under study were purposefully taken from four groups of people in the northern Pingtung, OPD patients, university students, community residents, and casual visitors to the central park. A set of health knowledge index with 10 questions is used to screen those false responses. A sample size of 686 valid cases out of 776 was then included to construct this scale. An independent t-test was used to examine each individual phrase. The phrases with the highest significance are then identified and retained to compose this scale. Result, a Taiwan Health Literacy Scale (THLS) was finalized with 66 health-related phrases under nine divisions. Cronbach-s alpha of each division is at a satisfactory level of 89% and above. Conclusions, factors significantly differentiate the levels of health literacy are education, female gender, age, family members of stroke victims, experience with patient care, and healthcare professionals in the initial application in this study..

Keywords: Health literacy, health knowledge, REALM, THLS.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2489

Authors: Chakkrit Snae

Abstract:

Names are important in many societies, even in technologically oriented ones which use e.g. ID systems to identify individual people. Names such as surnames are the most important as they are used in many processes, such as identifying of people and genealogical research. On the other hand variation of names can be a major problem for the identification and search for people, e.g. web search or security reasons. Name matching presumes a-priori that the recorded name written in one alphabet reflects the phonetic identity of two samples or some transcription error in copying a previously recorded name. We add to this the lode that the two names imply the same person. This paper describes name variations and some basic description of various name matching algorithms developed to overcome name variation and to find reasonable variants of names which can be used to further increasing mismatches for record linkage and name search. The implementation contains algorithms for computing a range of fuzzy matching based on different types of algorithms, e.g. composite and hybrid methods and allowing us to test and measure algorithms for accuracy. NYSIIS, LIG2 and Phonex have been shown to perform well and provided sufficient flexibility to be included in the linkage/matching process for optimising name searching.

Keywords: Data mining, name matching algorithm, nominaldata, searching system.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 11061

Authors: H. Panahi, S. Asadi

Abstract:

In this paper, the estimation of the stress-strength parameter R = P(Y < X), when X and Y are independent and both are Lomax distributions with the common scale parameters but different shape parameters is studied. The maximum likelihood estimator of R is derived. Assuming that the common scale parameter is known, the bayes estimator and exact confidence interval of R are discussed. Simulation study to investigate performance of the different proposed methods has been carried out.

Keywords: Stress-Strength model; maximum likelihoodestimator; Bayes estimator; Lomax distribution

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1776

Authors: Noor A. Auzairy, Rubi Ahmad, Catherine S.F. Ho, Ros Z. Z. Sapian

Abstract:

This paper is to explore the relationship and the level of stock market integration of the Asian countries, primarily concentrating on Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea, with the world from January 1997 to December 2009. The degree of short-run and long-run stock market integration of those Asian countries are analyzed in order to determine the significance of series of regional and world financial crises, liberalization policies and other financial reforms in influencing the level of stock market integration. To test for cointegration, this paper applies coefficient correlation, univariate regression analyses, cointegration tests, and vector autoregressive models (VAR) by using the four Asian stock markets main indices and the MSCI World index. The empirical findings from this work reveal that there is no long-run stock market integration for the four countries and the world market. However, there is short run integration.

Keywords: Asia, integration, relationship, stock market.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2460

Authors: Somayeh Komeylian

Abstract:

Array signal processing techniques have been recently developing in a variety application of the performance enhancement of receivers by refraining the power of jamming and interference signals. In this scenario, biases induced to the antenna array receiver degrade significantly the accurate estimation of the carrier phase. Owing to the integration of frequency becomes the carrier phase, we have obtained the unbiased doppler frequency for the high precision estimation of carrier phase. The unbiased characteristic of Doppler frequency to the power jamming and the other interference signals allows achieving the highly accurate estimation of phase carrier. In this study, we have rigorously investigated the unbiased characteristic of Doppler frequency to the variation of the antenna array geometries. The simulation results have efficiently verified that the Doppler frequency remains also unbiased and accurate to the variation of antenna array geometries.

Keywords: Array signal processing, unbiased Doppler frequency, GNSS, carrier phase, slowly fluctuating point target.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 872

Authors: Kamil Ďurana, Robert Černý

Abstract:

An electrical apparatus for measuring moisture content was developed by our laboratory and uses dependence of electrical properties on water content in studied material. Error analysis of the apparatus was run by measuring different volumes of water in a simplified specimen, i.e. hollow plexiglass block, in order to avoid as many side-effects as possible. Obtained data were processed using both basic and advanced statistics and results were compared with each other. The influence of water content on accuracy of measured data was studied as well as the influence of variation of apparatus' proper arrangement or factual methodics of its usage. The overall coefficient of variation was 4%. There was no trend found in results of error dependence on water content. Comparison with current surveys led to a conclusion, that the studied apparatus can be used for indirect measurement of water content in porous materials, with expectable error and under known conditions. Factual experiments with porous materials are not involved, but are currently under investigation.

Keywords: device, capacitance method, error analysis, moisture meter

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1371

Authors: Heejung Lee

Abstract:

In a highly competitive environment, it becomes more important to shorten the whole business process while delivering or even enhancing the business value to the customers and suppliers. Although the workflow management systems receive much attention for its capacity to practically support the business process enactment, the effective workflow modeling method remain still challenging and the high degree of process complexity makes it more difficult to gain the short lead time. This paper presents a workflow structuring method in a holistic way that can reduce the process complexity using activity-needs and formal concept analysis, which eventually enhances the key performance such as quality, delivery, and cost in business process.

Keywords: Workflow management, reengineering, formal concept analysis.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1925

Authors: Ahmed Mohammed Youssef Mohammed, Mohammad Reza Okhovat, Koichi Maekawa

Abstract:

Small-scale RC models of both piles and tunnel ducts were produced as mockups of reality and loaded under soil confinement conditionsto investigate the damage evolution of structural RC interacting with soil. Experimental verifications usinga 3D nonlinear FE analysis program called COM3D, which was developed at the University of Tokyo, are introduced. This analysis has been used in practice for seismic performance assessment of underground ducts and in-ground LNG storage tanks in consideration of soil-structure interactionunder static and dynamic loading. Varying modes of failure of RCpilessubjected to different magnitudes of soil confinement were successfully reproduced in the proposed small-scale experiments and numerically simulated as well. Analytical simulation was applied to RC tunnel mockups under a wide variety of depth and soil confinement conditions, and reasonable matching was confirmed.

Keywords: Soil-Structure Interaction, RC pile, RC Tunnel

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2263

Authors: K. Varesi, A. Radan

Abstract:

In this paper, a new Genetic Algorithm (GA) based methodology is proposed to optimize the Degree of Hybridization (DOH) in a passenger parallel hybrid car. At first step, target parameters for the vehicle are decided and then using ADvanced VehIcle SimulatOR (ADVISOR) software, the variation pattern of these target parameters, across the different DOHs, is extracted. At the next step, a suitable cost function is defined and is optimized using GA. In this paper, also a new technique has been proposed for deciding the number of battery modules for each DOH, which leads to a great improvement in the vehicle performance. The proposed methodology is so simple, fast and at the same time, so efficient.

Keywords: Degree of Hybridization (DOH), Electric Motor, Emissions, Fuel Economy, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Hybrid ElectricVehicle (HEV), Vehicle Performance

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1827

Authors: Sen-Chi Yu, Wei-Hsin Hsu, Min-Ning Yu, Hao-Yi Hsu

Abstract:

The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between Facebook involvement and internet addiction. We sampled 577 university students in Taiwan and administered a survey of Facebook usage, Facebook involvement scale (FIS), and internet addiction scale. The FIS comprises three factors (salience, emotional support, and amusement). Results showed that the Facebook involvement scale had good reliability and validity. The correlation between Facebook involvement and internet addiction was measured at .395. This means that a higher degree of Facebook involvement indicates a greater degree of psychological dependency on the internet, and a greater propensity towards social withdrawal and other negative psychological consequences associated with internet addiction. Besides, the correlations between three factors of FIS (salience, emotional support, and amusement) and internet addiction ranged from .313-372, indicating that these neither of these factors (salience, emotional support, and amusement) is more effective than the others in predicting internet dependency.

Keywords: Social networking sites, Facebook, Facebook Involvement, Internet Addiction

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2474

Authors: Ayman A. El-Saleh, Mahamod Ismail, Mohd. A. M. Ali, Ahmed N. H. Alnuaimy

Abstract:

The dynamic spectrum allocation solutions such as cognitive radio networks have been proposed as a key technology to exploit the frequency segments that are spectrally underutilized. Cognitive radio users work as secondary users who need to constantly and rapidly sense the presence of primary users or licensees to utilize their frequency bands if they are inactive. Short sensing cycles should be run by the secondary users to achieve higher throughput rates as well as to provide low level of interference to the primary users by immediately vacating their channels once they have been detected. In this paper, the throughput-sensing time relationship in local and cooperative spectrum sensing has been investigated under two distinct scenarios, namely, constant primary user protection (CPUP) and constant secondary user spectrum usability (CSUSU) scenarios. The simulation results show that the design of sensing slot duration is very critical and depends on the number of cooperating users under CPUP scenario whereas under CSUSU, cooperating more users has no effect if the sensing time used exceeds 5% of the total frame duration.

Keywords: Capacity, cognitive radio, optimization, spectrumsensing.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1597

Authors: J. Hrabovský, M. Chabičovský, J. Horský

Abstract:

Water spray cooling is a technique typically used in heat treatment and other metallurgical processes where controlled temperature regimes are required. Water spray cooling is used in static (without movement) or dynamic (with movement of the steel plate) regimes. The static regime is notable for the fixed position of the hot steel plate and fixed spray nozzle. This regime is typical for quenching systems focused on heat treatment of the steel plate. The second application of spray cooling is the dynamic regime. The dynamic regime is notable for its static section cooling system and moving steel plate. This regime is used in rolling and finishing mills. The fixed position of cooling sections with nozzles and the movement of the steel plate produce nonhomogeneous water distribution on the steel plate. The length of cooling sections and placement of water nozzles in combination with the nonhomogeneity of water distribution lead to discontinued or interrupted cooling conditions. The impact of static and dynamic regimes on cooling intensity and the heat transfer coefficient during the cooling process of steel plates is an important issue. Heat treatment of steel is accompanied by oxide scale growth. The oxide scale layers can significantly modify the cooling properties and intensity during the cooling. The combination of static and dynamic (section) regimes with the variable thickness of the oxide scale layer on the steel surface impact the final cooling intensity. The study of the influence of the oxide scale layers with different cooling regimes was carried out using experimental measurements and numerical analysis. The experimental measurements compared both types of cooling regimes and the cooling of scale-free surfaces and oxidized surfaces. A numerical analysis was prepared to simulate the cooling process with different conditions of the section and samples with different oxide scale layers.

Keywords: Heat transfer coefficient, numerical analysis, oxide layer, spray cooling.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2960

Authors: B. Manshoor, N. Ihsak, Amir Khalid

Abstract:

The sensitivity of orifice plate metering to disturbed flow (either asymmetric or swirling) is a subject of great concern to flow meter users and manufacturers. The distortions caused by pipe fittings and pipe installations upstream of the orifice plate are major sources of this type of non-standard flows. These distortions can alter the accuracy of metering to an unacceptable degree. In this work, a multi-scale object known as metal foam has been used to generate a predetermined turbulent flow upstream of the orifice plate. The experimental results showed that the combination of an orifice plate and metal foam flow conditioner is broadly insensitive to upstream disturbances. This metal foam demonstrated a good performance in terms of removing swirl and producing a repeatable flow profile within a short distance downstream of the device. The results of using a combination of a metal foam flow conditioner and orifice plate for non-standard flow conditions including swirling flow and asymmetric flow show this package can preserve the accuracy of metering up to the level required in the standards.

Keywords: Metal foam flow conditioner, flow measurement, orifice plate.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2041

Authors: Shahab Kavehkar, Mohammad Ali Ghorbani, Valeriy Khokhlov, Afshin Ashrafzadeh, Sabereh Darbandi

Abstract:

Water level forecasting using records of past time series is of importance in water resources engineering and management. For example, water level affects groundwater tables in low-lying coastal areas, as well as hydrological regimes of some coastal rivers. Then, a reliable prediction of sea-level variations is required in coastal engineering and hydrologic studies. During the past two decades, the approaches based on the Genetic Programming (GP) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were developed. In the present study, the GP is used to forecast daily water level variations for a set of time intervals using observed water levels. The measurements from a single tide gauge at Urmia Lake, Northwest Iran, were used to train and validate the GP approach for the period from January 1997 to July 2008. Statistics, the root mean square error and correlation coefficient, are used to verify model by comparing with a corresponding outputs from Artificial Neural Network model. The results show that both these artificial intelligence methodologies are satisfactory and can be considered as alternatives to the conventional harmonic analysis.

Keywords: Water-Level variation, forecasting, artificial neural networks, genetic programming, comparative analysis.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2318

Authors: Sally Naji, Julie Gwilliam

Abstract:

Climate change remains a challenging matter for the human and the built environment in the 21st century, where the need to consider adaptation to climate change in the development process is paramount. However, there remains a lack of information regarding how we should prepare responses to this issue, such as through developing organized and sophisticated tools enabling the adaptation process. This study aims to build a systematic framework approach to investigate the potentials that Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment tools (NSA) might offer in enabling both the analysis of the emerging adaptive capacity to climate change. The analysis of the framework presented in this paper aims to discuss this issue in three main phases. The first part attempts to link sustainability and climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity. It is argued that in deciding to promote sustainability in the context of climate change, both the resilience and vulnerability processes become central. However, there is still a gap in the current literature regarding how the sustainable development process can respond to climate change. As well as how the resilience of practical strategies might be evaluated. It is suggested that the integration of the sustainability assessment processes with both the resilience thinking process, and vulnerability might provide important components for addressing the adaptive capacity to climate change. A critical review of existing literature is presented illustrating the current lack of work in this field, integrating these three concepts in the context of addressing the adaptive capacity to climate change. The second part aims to identify the most appropriate scale at which to address the built environment for the climate change adaptation. It is suggested that the neighborhood scale can be considered as more suitable than either the building or urban scales. It then presents the example of NSAs, and discusses the need to explore their potential role in promoting the adaptive capacity to climate change. The third part of the framework presents a comparison among three example NSAs, BREEAM Communities, LEED-ND, and CASBEE-UD. These three tools have been selected as the most developed and comprehensive assessment tools that are currently available for the neighborhood scale. This study concludes that NSAs are likely to present the basis for an organized framework to address the practical process for analyzing and yet promoting Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change. It is further argued that vulnerability (exposure & sensitivity) and resilience (Interdependence & Recovery) form essential aspects to be addressed in the future assessment of NSA’s capability to adapt to both short and long term climate change impacts. Finally, it is acknowledged that further work is now required to understand impact assessment in terms of the range of physical sectors (Water, Energy, Transportation, Building, Land Use and Ecosystems), Actor and stakeholder engagement as well as a detailed evaluation of the NSA indicators, together with a barriers diagnosis process.

Keywords: Adaptive capacity, climate change, NSA tools, resilience, vulnerability.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2144

Authors: K. Mahmoud, T. Shalahmetova, B. Umbayev, Sh. Deraz

Abstract:

Biochemical investigations were carried out to assess the effect of different exposure regimes of Kazakhstan crude oil (KCO) on hepatic antioxidant defense system in albino rats. Contaminants were delivered under two different dosing regimes, with all treatments receiving the same total contaminant load by the end of the exposure period. Rats in regime A injected with KCO once at a dose of 6 ml/kg bw while in regime B injected multiply at a dose of 1.5 ml/kg bw on day 1, 3, 5 and 8. Antioxidant biomarkers were measured in hepatic tissue after 1, 3, 5 and 8 days. Significant induction was observed in serum aminotransferases (ALT, AST) (p<0.01) and hepatic Glutathione-S-transferase (GST) (p<0.05) in the two exposure regimes, with the majority of significant induction occurring in regime A. Superoxide dismutase (SOD) increased 1-d after injection (p<0.01) but the increase was reduced time dependently thereafter while after 8-d induced again (p<0.01). Malondialdehyde (MDA) significantly induced after 3 and 5-d (p<0.05) in regime A while in regime B was not changed significantly (p>0.05) at short time after exposure. However, there was significant increase after 8-d (p<0.01). Histological examination indicates that crude oil induced pathologic changes from inflammatory cells infiltration to hemorrhage and necrosis of hepatocytes. Acute exposure to crude oil adversely affect hepatic cell so human must avoid such exposure.

Keywords: Kazakhstan crude oil, Antioxidant biomarkers, Histological examination, Dose regime, Rats

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1944