Search results for: real time control

Authors: K. Aloui, M. S. Naceur

Abstract:

The main objective of this paper is to provide an efficient tool for delineating brain tumors in three-dimensional magnetic resonance images and set up compression-transmit schemes to distribute result to the remote doctor. To achieve this goal, we use basically a level-sets approach to delineating brain tumors in threedimensional. Then introduce a new compression and transmission plan of 3D brain structures based for the meshes simplification, adapted for time to the specific needs of the telemedicine and to the capacities restricted by wireless network communication. We present here the main stages of our system, and preliminary results which are very encouraging for clinical practice.

Keywords: Medical imaging, level-sets, compression, meshessimplification, telemedicine, wireless transmission.

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Authors: C. C. D. Kulathilake, M. Jayatilake, T. Takahashi

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The myocardium is composed of specialized muscle which relies mainly on fatty acid and sugar metabolism and it is widely contribute to the heart functioning. The changes of the cardiac energy-producing system during heart failure have been proved using autoradiography techniques. This study focused on evaluating sugar and fatty acid metabolism in myocardium as cardiac energy getting system using heart-accumulated radiopharmaceuticals. Two sets of autoradiographs of heart cross sections of Lewis male rats were analyzed and the time- accumulation curve obtained with use of the MATLAB image processing software to evaluate fatty acid and sugar metabolic functions.

Keywords: Autoradiographs, fatty acid, radiopharmaceuticals and sugar.

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Authors: Mohanad Alhabo, Li Zhang, Naveed Nawaz

Abstract:

In this paper, a non-cooperative game method is formulated where all players compete to transmit at higher power. Every base station represents a player in the game. The game is solved by obtaining the Nash equilibrium (NE) where the game converges to optimality. The proposed method, named Power Efficient Handover Game Theoretic (PEHO-GT) approach, aims to control the handover in dense small cell networks. Players optimize their payoff by adjusting the transmission power to improve the performance in terms of throughput, handover, power consumption and load balancing. To select the desired transmission power for a player, the payoff function considers the gain of increasing the transmission power. Then, the cell selection takes place by deploying Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). A game theoretical method is implemented for heterogeneous networks to validate the improvement obtained. Results reveal that the proposed method gives a throughput improvement while reducing the power consumption and minimizing the frequent handover.

Keywords: Energy efficiency, game theory, handover, HetNets, small cells.

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Authors: Rajkishore Prasad, Hiroshi Saruwatari, Kiyohiro Shikano

Abstract:

This paper describes Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based fixed-point algorithm for the blind separation of the convolutive mixture of speech, picked-up by a linear microphone array. The proposed algorithm extracts independent sources by non- Gaussianizing the Time-Frequency Series of Speech (TFSS) in a deflationary way. The degree of non-Gaussianization is measured by negentropy. The relative performances of algorithm under random initialization and Null beamformer (NBF) based initialization are studied. It has been found that an NBF based initial value gives speedy convergence as well as better separation performance

Keywords: Blind signal separation, independent component analysis, negentropy, convolutive mixture.

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Authors: Sungjoon Sim, Soongyu Kwon, Dongjae Song, Jong Tae Kim

Abstract:

Flash memory has become an important storage device in many embedded systems because of its high performance, low power consumption and shock resistance. Multi-level cell (MLC) is developed as an effective solution for reducing the cost and increasing the storage density in recent years. However, most of flash file system cannot handle the error correction sufficiently. To correct more errors for MLC, we implement Reed-Solomon (RS) code to YAFFS, what is widely used for flash-based file system. RS code has longer computing time but the correcting ability is much higher than that of Hamming code.

Keywords: Reed-Solomon, NAND flash memory, YAFFS, ErrorCorrecting Code, Flash File System

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Authors: C. Sinescu, M. Negrutiu, M. Romînu, C. Haiduc, E. Petrescu, M. Leretter, A.G. Podoleanu

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Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) combined with the Confocal Microscopy, as a noninvasive method, permits the determinations of materials defects in the ceramic layers depth. For this study 256 anterior and posterior metal and integral ceramic fixed partial dentures were used, made with Empress (Ivoclar), Wollceram and CAD/CAM (Wieland) technology. For each investigate area 350 slices were obtain and a 3D reconstruction was perform from each stuck. The Optical Coherent Tomography, as a noninvasive method, can be used as a control technique in integral ceramic technology, before placing those fixed partial dentures in the oral cavity. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the capability of En face Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) combined with a fluorescent method in detection and analysis of possible material defects in metalceramic and integral ceramic fixed partial dentures. As a conclusion, it is important to have a non invasive method to investigate fixed partial prostheses before their insertion in the oral cavity in order to satisfy the high stress requirements and the esthetic function.

Keywords: Ceramic Fixed Partial Dentures, Material Defects, En face Optical Coherence Tomography, Fluorescence.

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Authors: Tomoko Fukuyama, Osamu Senbu

Abstract:

Prestressed concrete is used a lot in infrastructures such as roads or bridges. However, poor grout filling and PC steel corrosion are currently major issues of prestressed concrete structures. One of the problems with nondestructive corrosion detection of PC steel is a plastic pipe which covers PC steel. The insulative property of pipe makes a nondestructive diagnosis difficult; therefore a practical technology to detect these defects is necessary for the maintenance of infrastructures. The goal of the research is a development of an electrochemical technique which enables to detect internal defects from the surface of prestressed concrete nondestructively. Ideally, the measurements should be conducted from the surface of structural members to diagnose non-destructively. In the present experiment, a prestressed concrete member is simplified as a layered specimen to simulate a current path between an input and an output electrode on a member surface. The specimens which are layered by mortar and the prestressed concrete constitution materials (steel, polyethylene, stainless steel, or galvanized steel plates) were provided to the alternating current impedance measurement. The magnitude of an applied electric field was 0.01-volt or 1-volt, and the frequency range was from 106 Hz to 10-2 Hz. The frequency spectrums of impedance, which relate to charge reactions activated by an electric field, were measured to clarify the effects of the material configurations or the properties. In the civil engineering field, the Nyquist diagram is popular to analyze impedance and it is a good way to grasp electric relaxation using a shape of the plot. However, it is slightly not suitable to figure out an influence of a measurement frequency which is reciprocal of reaction time. Hence, Bode diagram is also applied to describe charge reactions in the present paper. From the experiment results, the alternating current impedance method looks to be applicable to the insulative material measurement and eventually prestressed concrete diagnosis. At the same time, the frequency spectrums of impedance show the difference of the material configuration. This is because the charge mobility reflects the variety of substances and also the measuring frequency of the electric field determines migration length of charges which are under the influence of the electric field. However, it could not distinguish the differences of the material thickness and is inferred the difficulties of prestressed concrete diagnosis to identify the amount of an air void or a layer of corrosion product by the technique.

Keywords: Prestressed concrete, electric charge, impedance, phase shift.

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Authors: Ε. Giovanis

Abstract:

In this paper we present, propose and examine additional membership functions for the Smoothing Transition Autoregressive (STAR) models. More specifically, we present the tangent hyperbolic, Gaussian and Generalized bell functions. Because Smoothing Transition Autoregressive (STAR) models follow fuzzy logic approach, more fuzzy membership functions should be tested. Furthermore, fuzzy rules can be incorporated or other training or computational methods can be applied as the error backpropagation or genetic algorithm instead to nonlinear squares. We examine two macroeconomic variables of US economy, the inflation rate and the 6-monthly treasury bills interest rates.

Keywords: Forecast , Fuzzy membership functions, Smoothingtransition, Time-series

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Authors: Kasthurirangan Gopalakrishnan, Siddhartha Khaitan, Anshu Manik

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Cluster analysis is the name given to a diverse collection of techniques that can be used to classify objects (e.g. individuals, quadrats, species etc). While Kohonen's Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOFM) or Self-Organizing Map (SOM) networks have been successfully applied as a classification tool to various problem domains, including speech recognition, image data compression, image or character recognition, robot control and medical diagnosis, its potential as a robust substitute for clustering analysis remains relatively unresearched. SOM networks combine competitive learning with dimensionality reduction by smoothing the clusters with respect to an a priori grid and provide a powerful tool for data visualization. In this paper, SOM is used for creating a toroidal mapping of two-dimensional lattice to perform cluster analysis on results of a chemical analysis of wines produced in the same region in Italy but derived from three different cultivators, referred to as the “wine recognition data" located in the University of California-Irvine database. The results are encouraging and it is believed that SOM would make an appealing and powerful decision-support system tool for clustering tasks and for data visualization.

Keywords: Artificial neural networks, cluster analysis, Kohonen maps, wine recognition.

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Authors: Fauzi Jarushi, S. AlKaabim, Paul Cosentino

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The Standard Penetration Test (SPT) is the most common in situ test for soil investigations. On the other hand, the Cone Penetration Test (CPT) is considered one of the best investigation tools. Due to the fast and accurate results that can be obtained it complaints the SPT in many applications like field explorations, design parameters, and quality control assessments. Many soil index and engineering properties have been correlated to both of SPT and CPT. Various foundation design methods were developed based on the outcome of these tests. Therefore it is vital to correlate these tests to each other so that either one of the tests can be used in the absence of the other, especially for preliminary evaluation and design purposes. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the SPT and CPT for different type of sandy soils in Florida. Data for this research were collected from number of projects sponsored by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), six sites served as the subject of SPT-CPT correlations. The correlations were established between the cone resistance (qc), sleeve friction (fs) and the uncorrected SPT blow counts (N) for various soils. A positive linear relationship was found between qc, fs and N for various sandy soils. In general, qc versus N showed higher correlation coefficients than fs versus N. qc/N ratios were developed for different soil types and compared to literature values, the results of this research revealed higher ratios than literature values.

Keywords: In situ tests, Correlation, SPT, CPT.

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Authors: C. Mallada Fernández

Abstract:

Economic development and globalization of international markets have created a favourable atmosphere for the emergence of new forms of crime such as money laundering or financing of terrorism, which may contribute to destabilized and damage economic systems. In particular, money laundering have acquired great importance since the 11S attacks, what has caused on the one hand, the establishment and development of preventive measures and, on the other hand, a progressive hardening of penal measures. Since then, the regulations imposed to fight against money laundering have been viewed as key components also in the fight against terrorist financing. Terrorism, at the beginning, was a “national” crime connected with internal problems of the State (for instance the RAF in Germany or ETA in Spain) but in the last 20 years has started to be an international problem that is connected with the defence and security of the States. Therefore, the new strategic concept for the defense and security of NATO has a comprehensive list of security threats to the Alliance, such as terrorism, international instability, money laundering or attacks on cyberspace, among others. With this new concept, money laundering and terrorism has become a priority in the national defense.

In this work we will analyze the methods to combat these new threats to the national security. We will study the preventive legislations to combat money laundering and financing of terrorism, the UIF that exchange information between States, and the hawala-Banking.

Keywords: Control of financial flows, money laundering, terrorism, financing of terrorism.

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Authors: Ranjan Sarukkalige, Joseph Sanjaya Ma

Abstract:

Flood management is one of the important fields in urban storm water management. Floods are influenced by the increase of huge storm event, or improper planning of the area. This study mainly provides the flood protection in four stages; planning, flood event, responses and evaluation. However it is most effective then flood protection is considered in planning/design and evaluation stages since both stages represent the land development of the area. Structural adjustments are often more reliable than nonstructural adjustments in providing flood protection, however structural adjustments are constrained by numerous factors such as political constraints and cost. Therefore it is important to balance both adjustments with the situation. The technical decisions provided will have to be approved by the higher-ups who have the power to decide on the final solution. Costs however, are the biggest factor in determining the final decision. Therefore this study recommends flood protection system should have been integrated and enforces more in the early stages (planning and design) as part of the storm water management plan. Factors influencing the technical decisions provided should be reduced as low as possible to avoid a reduction in the expected performance of the proposed adjustments.

Keywords: Urban Flood, flood protection, water management, storm water, cost,

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Authors: Suhas K, Sripadaraja K

Abstract:

This paper details few mechanical modeling and design issues of RF MEMS switches. We concentrate on an electrostatically actuated broad side series switch; surface micromachined with a crab leg membrane. The same results are extended to any complex structure. With available experimental data and fabrication results, we present the variation in dynamic performance and compliance of the switch with reference to few design issues, which we find are critical in deciding the dynamic behavior of the switch, without compromise on the RF characteristics. The optimization of pull in voltage, transient time and resonant frequency with regard to these critical design parameters are also presented.

Keywords: Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), RadioFrequency MEMS, Modeling, Actuators

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Authors: Mohamed E. Salem Abozaed

Abstract:

Detection and classification of power quality (PQ) disturbances is an important consideration to electrical utilities and many industrial customers so that diagnosis and mitigation of such disturbance can be implemented quickly. S-transform algorithm and continuous wavelet transforms (CWT) are time-frequency algorithms, and both of them are powerful in detection and classification of PQ disturbances. This paper presents detection and classification of PQ disturbances using S-transform and CWT algorithms. The results of detection and classification, provides that S-transform is more accurate in detection and classification for most PQ disturbance than CWT algorithm, where as CWT algorithm more powerful in detection in some disturbances like notching

Keywords: CWT, Disturbances classification, Disturbances detection, Power quality, S-transform.

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Authors: Mehdi Emadi, Masoud Rahgozar, Adel Ardalan, Alireza Kazerani, Mohammad Mahdi Ariyan

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The volume of XML data exchange is explosively increasing, and the need for efficient mechanisms of XML data management is vital. Many XML storage models have been proposed for storing XML DTD-independent documents in relational database systems. Benchmarking is the best way to highlight pros and cons of different approaches. In this study, we use a common benchmarking scheme, known as XMark to compare the most cited and newly proposed DTD-independent methods in terms of logical reads, physical I/O, CPU time and duration. We show the effect of Label Path, extracting values and storing in another table and type of join needed for each method's query answering.

Keywords: XML Data Management, XPath, DTD-IndependentXML Data

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Authors: Mehdi Emadi, Masoud Rahgozar, Adel Ardalan, Alireza Kazerani, Mohammad Mahdi Ariyan

Abstract:

The volume of XML data exchange is explosively increasing, and the need for efficient mechanisms of XML data management is vital. Many XML storage models have been proposed for storing XML DTD-independent documents in relational database systems. Benchmarking is the best way to highlight pros and cons of different approaches. In this study, we use a common benchmarking scheme, known as XMark to compare the most cited and newly proposed DTD-independent methods in terms of logical reads, physical I/O, CPU time and duration. We show the effect of Label Path, extracting values and storing in another table and type of join needed for each method-s query answering.

Keywords: XML Data Management, XPath, DTD-Independent XML Data.

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Authors: Ramon Santana

Abstract:

The use of biometric identifiers in the field of information security, access control to resources, authentication in ATMs and banking among others, are of great concern because of the safety of biometric data. In the general architecture of a biometric system have been detected eight vulnerabilities, six of them allow obtaining minutiae template in plain text. The main consequence of obtaining minutia templates is the loss of biometric identifier for life. To mitigate these vulnerabilities several models to protect minutiae templates have been proposed. Several vulnerabilities in the cryptographic security of these models allow to obtain biometric data in plain text. In order to increase the cryptographic security and ease of reversibility, a minutiae templates protection model is proposed. The model aims to make the cryptographic protection and facilitate the reversibility of data using two levels of security. The first level of security is the data transformation level. In this level generates invariant data to rotation and translation, further transformation is irreversible. The second level of security is the evaluation level, where the encryption key is generated and data is evaluated using a defined evaluation function. The model is aimed at mitigating known vulnerabilities of the proposed models, basing its security on the impossibility of the polynomial reconstruction.

Keywords: Fingerprint, template protection, bio-cryptography, minutiae protection.

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Authors: S. G. Ponnambalam, Low Seng Kiat

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In this paper, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to solve machine loading problem in flexible manufacturing system (FMS), with bicriterion objectives of minimizing system unbalance and maximizing system throughput in the occurrence of technological constraints such as available machining time and tool slots. A mathematical model is used to select machines, assign operations and the required tools. The performance of the PSO is tested by using 10 sample dataset and the results are compared with the heuristics reported in the literature. The results support that the proposed PSO is comparable with the algorithms reported in the literature.

Keywords: Machine loading problem, FMS, Particle Swarm Optimization.

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Authors: Tamara Kelly

Abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a good opportunities for city development schemes in UK. The government encouraged restoration of city centers to comprise mixed use developments with high density residential apartments. Investments in regeneration areas were doing well according to the analyses of Property Databank (IPD). However, more recent analysis by IPD has shown that since 2007, property in regeneration areas has been more vulnerable to the market downturn than other types of investment property. The early stages of a property market downturn may be felt most in regeneration where funding, investor confidence and occupier demand would dissipate because the sector was considered more marginal or risky when development costs rise. Moreover, the Bank of England survey shows that lenders have sequentially tightened the availability of credit for commercial real estate since mid-2007. A sharp reduction in the willingness of banks to lend on commercial property was recorded. The credit crunch has already affected commercial property but its impact has been particularly severe in certain kinds of properties where residential developments are extremely difficult, in particular city centre apartments and buy-to-let markets. Commercial property – retail, industrial leisure and mixed use were also pressed, in Birmingham; tens of mixed use plots were built to replace old factories in the heart of the city. The purpose of these developments was to enable young professionals to work and live in same place. Thousands of people lost their jobs during the recession, moreover lending was more difficult and the future of many developments is unknown. The recession casts its shadow upon the society due to cuts in public spending by government, Inflation, rising tuition fees and high rise in unemployment generated anger and hatred was spreading among youth causing vandalism and riots in many cities. Recent riots targeted many mixed used development in the UK where banks, shops, restaurants and big stores were robbed and set into fire leaving residents with horror and shock. This paper examines the impact of the recession and riots on mixed use development in UK.

Keywords: Diversity, mixed use development, outdoor comfort, public realm, safe places, safety by design.

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Authors: Moghadazadeh Zahra, Towfighi Jafar, Mofarahi Masoud

Abstract:

This article is presented an experimental and modeling study of a four-bed pressure swing adsorption process using zeolite13X to provide oxygen-enriched air. The binary mixture N2/O2 (79/21 vol %) was used as a feed stream. The effects of purge/feed ratio (P/F), adsorption pressure, cyclic time and product flow rate on product purity and recovery under nonisothermal condition were studied. The adsorption dynamics of process were determined using a mathematical model incorporated mass and energy balances. A Mathlab code using finite difference method was developed to solve the set of coupled differential-algebraic equations, and the simulation results are agreed well with experimental results.

Keywords: Pressure swing adsorption (PSA), Oxygen, Zeolite 13X.

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Authors: Meysam Mohamad pour, Fardad Farokhi

Abstract:

In this paper in consideration of each available techniques deficiencies for speech recognition, an advanced method is presented that-s able to classify speech signals with the high accuracy (98%) at the minimum time. In the presented method, first, the recorded signal is preprocessed that this section includes denoising with Mels Frequency Cepstral Analysis and feature extraction using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients; Then these features are fed to Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network for classification. Finally, after training of neural network effective features are selected with UTA algorithm.

Keywords: Multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) , Mels Scale Frequency Filter , UTA algorithm.

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Authors: M. Mashayekhi, H. H. Ardakani, A. Omidian

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Among various testing methodologies, Built-in Self- Test (BIST) is recognized as a low cost, effective paradigm. Also, full adders are one of the basic building blocks of most arithmetic circuits in all processing units. In this paper, an optimized testable 2- bit full adder as a test building block is proposed. Then, a BIST procedure is introduced to scale up the building block and to generate a self testable n-bit full adders. The target design can achieve 100% fault coverage using insignificant amount of hardware redundancy. Moreover, Overall test time is reduced by utilizing polymorphic gates and also by testing full adder building blocks in parallel.

Keywords: BIST, Full Adder, Polymorphic Gate

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Authors: Junghan Kim, Wonkyu Chung, Sunyoung Bu, Philsu Kim

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In this paper, we introduce a generalized Chebyshev collocation method (GCCM) based on the generalized Chebyshev polynomials for solving stiff systems. For employing a technique of the embedded Runge-Kutta method used in explicit schemes, the property of the generalized Chebyshev polynomials is used, in which the nodes for the higher degree polynomial are overlapped with those for the lower degree polynomial. The constructed algorithm controls both the error and the time step size simultaneously and further the errors at each integration step are embedded in the algorithm itself, which provides the efficiency of the computational cost. For the assessment of the effectiveness, numerical results obtained by the proposed method and the Radau IIA are presented and compared.

Keywords: Generalized Chebyshev Collocation method, Generalized Chebyshev Polynomial, Initial value problem.

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Authors: V. K. Bansal

Abstract:

Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computerbased tool used extensively to solve various engineering problems related to spatial data. In spite of growing popularity of GIS, its complete potential to construction industry has not been realized. In this paper, the summary of up-to-date work on spatial applications of GIS technologies in construction industry is presented. GIS technologies have the potential to solve space related problems of construction industry involving complex visualization, integration of information, route planning, E-commerce, cost estimation, etc. GISbased methodology to handle time and space issues of construction projects scheduling is developed and discussed in this paper.

Keywords: Construction, GIS in construction, Scheduling, Project Management.

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Authors: Ali Rabiee, Hessam Ghasemnejad

Abstract:

Extensive experimental investigation on the effect of stitching pattern on tubular composite structures was conducted. The effect of stitching reinforcement through thickness on using glass flux yarn on energy absorption of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) was investigated under high speed loading conditions at axial loading. Keeping the mass of the structure at 125 grams and applying different pattern of stitching at various locations in theory enables better energy absorption, and also enables the control over the behaviour of force-crush distance curve. The study consists of simple non-stitch absorber comparison with single and multi-location stitching behaviour and its effect on energy absorption capabilities. The locations of reinforcements are 10 mm, 20 mm, 30 mm, 10-20 mm, 10-30 mm, 20-30 mm, 10-20-30 mm and 10-15-20-25-30-35 mm from the top of the specimen. The effect of through the thickness reinforcements has shown increase in energy absorption capabilities and crushing load. The significance of this is that as the stitching locations are closer, the crushing load increases and consequently energy absorption capabilities are also increased. The implementation of this idea would improve the mean force by applying stitching and controlling the behaviour of force-crush distance curve.

Keywords: Through-thickness, stitching, reinforcement, Tulbular composite structures, energy absorption.

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Authors: Prakash Singh

Abstract:

For schools to be desirable places in which to work, it is necessary for principals to recognise their teachers’ emotions, and be sensitive to their needs. This necessitates that principals are capable to correctly identify their emotionally intelligent behaviours (EIBs) they need to use in order to be successful leaders. They also need to have knowledge of their emotional intelligence and be able to identify the factors and situations that evoke emotion at an interpersonal level. If a principal is able to do this, then the control and understanding of emotions and behaviours of oneself and others could improve vastly. This study focuses on the interpersonal EIBS of principals affecting the job satisfaction of teachers. The correlation coefficients in this quantitative study strongly indicate that there is a statistical significance between the respondents’ level of job satisfaction, the rating of their principals’ EIBs and how they believe their principals’ EIBs will affect their sense of job satisfaction. It can be concluded from the data obtained in this study that there is a significant correlation between the sense of job satisfaction of teachers and their principals’ interpersonal EIBs. This means that the more satisfied a teacher is at school, the more appropriate and meaningful a principal’s EIBs will be. Conversely, the more dissatisfied a teacher is at school the less appropriate and less meaningful a principal’s interpersonal EIBs will be. This implies that the leaders’ EIBs can be construed as one of the major factors affecting the job satisfaction of employees.

Keywords: Emotional intelligence, teachers’ emotions, teachers’ job satisfaction, principals’ emotionally intelligent behaviours.

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Authors: Shiferaw R. Jufar, Rong F. Huang, Ching M. Hsu

Abstract:

The spreading characteristics of acoustically excited swirling double-concentric jets were studied experimentally. The central jet was acoustically excited at low and high pulsation intensities. A smoke wire flow visualization and a hot-wire anemometer velocity measurement results show that excitation forces a vortex ring to roll-up from the edge of the central tube during each excitation period. At low pulsation intensities, the vortex ring evolves downstream, and eventually breaks up into turbulent eddies. At high pulsation intensities, the primary vortex ring evolves and a series of trailing vortex rings form during the same period of excitation. The trailing vortex rings accelerate while evolving downstream and overtake the primary vortex ring within the same cycle. In the process, the primary vortex ring becomes unstable and breaks up early. The effect of the fast traveling trailing vortex rings combined with the swirl motion of the annular flow improve jet spreading compared with the naturally evolving jets.

Keywords: Acoustic excitation, double–concentric jets, flow control, swirling jet.

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Authors: Ademola K. Aremu, Joseph. C. Igbeka

Abstract:

The performance of box-type solar cookers has been reported by several researchers but little attention was paid to the effect of the type of insulation material on the energy and exergy efficiency of these cookers. This research aimed at evaluating the energy and exergy efficiencies of the box-type cookers containing different insulation materials. Energy and exergy efficiencies of five box-type solar cookers insulated with maize cob, air (control), maize husk, coconut coir and polyurethane foam respectively were obtained over a period of three years. The cookers were evaluated using water heating test procedures in determining the energy and exergy analysis. The results were subjected to statistical analysis using ANOVA. The result shows that the average energy input for the five solar cookers were: 245.5, 252.2, 248.7, 241.5 and 245.5J respectively while their respective average energy losses were: 201.2, 212.7, 208.4, 189.1 and 199.8J. The average exergy input for five cookers were: 228.2, 234.4, 231.1, 224.4 and 228.2J respectively while their respective average exergy losses were: 223.4, 230.6, 226.9, 218.9 and 223.0J. The energy and exergy efficiency was highest in the cooker with coconut coir (37.35 and 3.90% respectively) in the first year but was lowest for air (11 and 1.07% respectively) in the third year. Statistical analysis showed significant difference between the energy and exergy efficiencies over the years. These results reiterate the importance of a good insulating material for a box-type solar cooker.

Keywords: Efficiency, energy, exergy, heating, insolation.

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Authors: Ε. Giovanis

Abstract:

In this paper we propose and examine an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) in Smoothing Transition Autoregressive (STAR) modeling. Because STAR models follow fuzzy logic approach, in the non-linear part fuzzy rules can be incorporated or other training or computational methods can be applied as the error backpropagation algorithm instead to nonlinear squares. Furthermore, additional fuzzy membership functions can be examined, beside the logistic and exponential, like the triangle, Gaussian and Generalized Bell functions among others. We examine two macroeconomic variables of US economy, the inflation rate and the 6-monthly treasury bills interest rates.

Keywords: Forecasting, Neuro-Fuzzy, Smoothing transition, Time-series

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Authors: Shimal Das, Dibyendu Ghoshal

Abstract:

The effect of directional search using iterated functional system has been studied on four images taken from databases. The images are portioned successively towards smaller dimension. Presented method provides the faster rate of convergence with respect to processing time in the flat region, but the same has been found to be slower at the border of the images and edges. It has also been revealed that the PSNR is lower at the edges and border portions of the image, and it is found to be higher in the uniform gray region, under the same external illumination and external noise environment.

Keywords: Iterated functional system, fractal compression, structural similarity index measure, fractal block coding, affine transformations.

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