Search results for: normalized normal constraint method

Authors: Saeed Sayyad Hagh Shomar

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Traffic congestion pricing – as a strategy in travel demand management in urban areas to reduce traffic congestion, air pollution and noise pollution – has drawn many attentions towards itself. Unlike the satisfying findings in this method, there are still problems in determining the best functional congestion pricing scheme with regard to the situation. The so-called problems in this process will result in further complications and even the scheme failure. That is why having proper knowledge of the significance of congestion pricing schemes and the effective factors in choosing them can lead to the success of this strategy. In this study, first, a variety of traffic congestion pricing schemes and their components are introduced; then, their functional usage is discussed. Next, by analyzing and comparing the barriers, limitations and advantages, the selection criteria of pricing schemes are described. The results, accordingly, show that the selection of the best scheme depends on various parameters. Finally, based on examining the effective parameters, it is concluded that the implementation of area-based schemes (cordon and zonal) has been more successful in non-diversion of traffic. That is considering the topology of the cities and the fact that traffic congestion is often created in the city centers, area-based schemes would be notably functional and appropriate.

Keywords: Congestion pricing, demand management, flat toll, variable toll.

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Authors: E. Irankhah, M. Zarif, E. Mazrooei Rad, K. Ghandehari

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Alzheimer's prevalence is on the rise, and the disease comes with problems like cessation of treatment, high cost of treatment, and the lack of early detection methods. The pathology of this disease causes the formation of protein deposits in the brain of patients called plaque amyloid. Generally, the diagnosis of this disease is done by performing tests such as a cerebrospinal fluid, CT scan, MRI, and spinal cord fluid testing, or mental testing tests and eye tracing tests. In this paper, we tried to use the Medial Temporal Atrophy (MTA) method and the Leave One Out (LOO) cycle to extract the statistical properties of the three Fz, Pz, and Cz channels of ERP signals for early diagnosis of this disease. In the process of CT scan images, the accuracy of the results is 81% for the healthy person and 88% for the severe patient. After the process of ERP signaling, the accuracy of the results for a healthy person in the delta band in the Cz channel is 81% and in the alpha band the Pz channel is 90%. In the results obtained from the signal processing, the results of the severe patient in the delta band of the Cz channel were 89% and in the alpha band Pz channel 92%.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease, image and signal processing, medial temporal atrophy, LOO Cycle.

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Authors: Zoe Chang, Max Williams, Gautham Das

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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the incorporation of hemp fibers (HF) in concrete. Hemp fiber reinforced concrete (HFRC) is becoming more popular as an alternative for regular mix designs. This study was done to evaluate the compressive strength of HFRC regarding mix procedure. HF were obtained from the manufacturer and hand processed to ensure uniformity in width and length. The fibers were added to concrete as both wet and dry mix to investigate and optimize the mix design process. Results indicated that the dry mix had a compressive strength of 1157 psi compared to the wet mix of 985 psi. This dry mix compressive strength was within range of the standard mix compressive strength of 1533 psi. The statistical analysis revealed that the mix design process needs further optimization and uniformity concerning the addition of HF. Regression analysis revealed that the standard mix design had a coefficient of 0.9 as compared to the dry mix of 0.375 indicating a variation in the mixing process. While completing the dry mix, the addition of plain HF caused them to intertwine creating lumps and inconsistency. However, during the wet mixing process, combining water and HF before incorporation allows the fibers to uniformly disperse within the mix hence the regression analysis indicated a better coefficient of 0.55. This study concludes that HRFC is a viable alternative to regular mixes however more research surrounding its characteristics needs to be conducted.

Keywords: hemp fibers, hemp reinforced concrete, wet and dry, freeze thaw testing, compressive strength

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Authors: Jiann-Ming Wu, Hsiao-Chang Chen, Chun-Chang Wu, Pei-Hsun Hsu

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This work explores blind image deconvolution by recursive function approximation based on supervised learning of neural networks, under the assumption that a degraded image is linear convolution of an original source image through a linear shift-invariant (LSI) blurring matrix. Supervised learning of neural networks of radial basis functions (RBF) is employed to construct an embedded recursive function within a blurring image, try to extract non-deterministic component of an original source image, and use them to estimate hyper parameters of a linear image degradation model. Based on the estimated blurring matrix, reconstruction of an original source image from a blurred image is further resolved by an annealed Hopfield neural network. By numerical simulations, the proposed novel method is shown effective for faithful estimation of an unknown blurring matrix and restoration of an original source image.

Keywords: Blind image deconvolution, linear shift-invariant(LSI), linear image degradation model, radial basis functions (rbf), recursive function, annealed Hopfield neural networks.

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Authors: Gaddafi S. Shehu, T. Yalcinoz, Abdullahi B. Kunya

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Multilevel inverters such as flying capacitor, diodeclamped, and cascaded H-bridge inverters are very popular particularly in medium and high power applications. This paper focuses on a cascaded H-bridge module using a single direct current (DC) source in order to generate an 11-level output voltage. The noble approach reduces the number of switches and gate drivers, in comparison with a conventional method. The anticipated topology produces more accurate result with an isolation transformer at high switching frequency. Different modulation techniques can be used for the multilevel inverter, but this work features modulation techniques known as selective harmonic elimination (SHE).This modulation approach reduces the number of carriers with reduction in Switching Losses, Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), and thereby increasing Power Quality (PQ). Based on the simulation result obtained, it appears SHE has the ability to eliminate selected harmonics by chopping off the fundamental output component. The performance evaluation of the proposed cascaded multilevel inverter is performed using PSIM simulation package and THD of 0.94% is obtained.

Keywords: Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Inverter, Power Quality, Selective Harmonic Elimination.

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Authors: Sandip Sadhukhan, Arpita Sarkar, Debprasad Sinha, Goutam Kumar Ghorai, Gautam Sarkar, Ashis K. Dhara

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Accurate segmentation of the optic disc is very important for computer-aided diagnosis of several ocular diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and hypertensive retinopathy. The paper presents an accurate and fast optic disc detection and segmentation method using an attention based fully convolutional network. The network is trained from scratch using the fundus images of extended MESSIDOR database and the trained model is used for segmentation of optic disc. The false positives are removed based on morphological operation and shape features. The result is evaluated using three-fold cross-validation on six public fundus image databases such as DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1, DRIVE, AV-INSPIRE, CHASE DB1 and MESSIDOR. The attention based fully convolutional network is robust and effective for detection and segmentation of optic disc in the images affected by diabetic retinopathy and it outperforms existing techniques.

Keywords: Ocular diseases, retinal fundus image, optic disc detection and segmentation, fully convolutional network, overlap measure.

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Authors: Tomasz L. Nawrocki, Danuta Szwajca

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The growing importance of reputation in building enterprise value and achieving long-term competitive advantage creates the need for its measurement and evaluation for the management purposes (effective reputation and its risk management). The paper presents practical application of self-developed corporate reputation assessment model from the viewpoint of stock market investors. The model has a pioneer character and example analysis performed for selected industry is a form of specific test for this tool. In the proposed solution, three aspects - informational, financial and development, as well as social ones - were considered. It was also assumed that the individual sub-criteria will be based on public sources of information, and as the calculation apparatus, capable of obtaining synthetic final assessment, fuzzy logic will be used. The main reason for developing this model was to fulfill the gap in the scope of synthetic measure of corporate reputation that would provide higher degree of objectivity by relying on "hard" (not from surveys) and publicly available data. It should be also noted that results obtained on the basis of proposed corporate reputation assessment method give possibilities of various internal as well as inter-branch comparisons and analysis of corporate reputation impact.

Keywords: Corporate reputation, fuzzy logic, fuzzy model, stock market investors.

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Authors: Ratima Damkham, Natasha Dejdumrong, Priyakorn Pusawiro

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This paper explored the solution in game design to help game designers in the educational game designing using digital educational game model canvas (DEGMC) and digital educational game form (DEGF) based on Outcome-based Education program. DEGMC and DEGF can help designers develop an overview of the game while designing and planning their own game. The way to clearly assess players’ ability from learning outcomes and support their game learning design is by using the tools. Designers can balance educational content and entertainment in designing a game by using the strategies of the Business Model Canvas and design the gameplay and players’ ability assessment from learning outcomes they need by referring to the Constructive Alignment. Furthermore, they can use their design plan in this research to write their Game Design Document (GDD). The success of the research was evaluated by four experts’ perspectives in the education and computer field. From the experiments, the canvas and form helped the game designers model their game according to the learning outcomes and analysis of their own game elements. This method can be a path to research an educational game design in the future.

Keywords: Constructive alignment, constructivist theory, educational game, outcome-based education.

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Authors: Mohamed Gouskir, Belaid Bouikhalene, Hicham Aissaoui, Benachir Elhadadi

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In this paper, we present an application of Riemannian geometry for processing non-Euclidean image data. We consider the image as residing in a Riemannian manifold, for developing a new method to brain edge detection and brain extraction. Automating this process is a challenge due to the high diversity in appearance brain tissue, among different patients and sequences. The main contribution, in this paper, is the use of an edge-based anisotropic diffusion tensor for the segmentation task by integrating both image edge geometry and Riemannian manifold (geodesic, metric tensor) to regularize the convergence contour and extract complex anatomical structures. We check the accuracy of the segmentation results on simulated brain MRI scans of single T1-weighted, T2-weighted and Proton Density sequences. We validate our approach using two different databases: BrainWeb database, and MRI Multiple sclerosis Database (MRI MS DB). We have compared, qualitatively and quantitatively, our approach with the well-known brain extraction algorithms. We show that using a Riemannian manifolds to medical image analysis improves the efficient results to brain extraction, in real time, outperforming the results of the standard techniques.

Keywords: Riemannian manifolds, Riemannian Tensor, Brain Segmentation, Non-Euclidean data, Brain Extraction.

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Authors: Nagasamy Venkatesh Dhandapani, Amged Awad El-Gied

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Cefixime, a BCS class II drug, is insoluble in water but freely soluble in acetone and in alcohol. The aqueous solubility of cefixime in water is poor and exhibits exceptionally slow and intrinsic dissolution rate. In the present study, cefixime and β-Cyclodextrin (β-CD) solid dispersions were prepared with a view to study the effect and influence of β-CD on the solubility and dissolution rate of this poorly aqueous soluble drug. Phase solubility profile revealed that the solubility of cefixime was increased in the presence of β-CD and was classified as A_L-type. Effect of variable, such as drug:carrier ratio, was studied. Physical characterization of the solid dispersion was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). These studies revealed that a distinct loss of drug crystallinity in the solid molecular dispersions is ostensibly accounting for enhancement of dissolution rate in distilled water. The drug release from the prepared solid dispersion exhibited a first order kinetics. Solid dispersions of cefixime showed a 6.77 times fold increase in dissolution rate over the pure drug.

Keywords: Cefixime, β-Cyclodextrin, solid dispersions, kneading method, dissolution, release kinetics.

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Authors: Yuxuan Huang, Weixin Qian, Hongfang Ma, Haitao Zhang, Weiyong Ying

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Light olefins are important building blocks for chemical industry. Direct conversion of syngas to light olefins has been investigated for decades. Meanwhile, the limit for light olefins selectivity described by Anderson-Schulz-Flory (ASF) distribution model is still a great challenge to conventional Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The emerging strategy called oxide-zeolite concept (OX-ZEO) is a promising way to get rid of this limit. ZnCrO_x was prepared by co-precipitation method and (NH₄)₂CO₃ was used as precipitant. SAPO-34 was prepared by hydrothermal synthesis, and Tetraethylammonium hydroxide (TEAOH) was used as template, while silica sol, pseudo-boehmite, and phosphoric acid were Al, Si and P source, respectively. The bifunctional catalyst was prepared by mechanical mixing of ZnCrO_x and SAPO-34. Catalytic reactions were carried out under H₂/CO=2, 380 ℃, 1 MPa and 6000 mL·g_cat^-1·h^-1 in a fixed-bed reactor with a quartz lining. Catalysts were characterized by XRD, N₂ adsorption-desorption, NH₃-TPD, H₂-TPR, and CO-TPD. The addition of Al as structure promoter enhances CO conversion and selectivity to light olefins. Zn/Cr ratio, which decides the active component content and chemisorption property of the catalyst, influences CO conversion and selectivity to light olefins at the same time. C_2-4⁼ distribution of 86% among hydrocarbons at CO conversion of 14% was reached when Zn/Cr=1.5.

Keywords: Light olefins, OX-ZEO, syngas, ZnCrOx.

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Authors: H. Baskar, A. S. Chakravarthy, P. Garg, D. Goel, A. S. Raj, K. Kumar, Lakshya, R. Parvatham, V. Sushant, B. Kumar Rout

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In this paper, we present a computer vision task called nighttime dehaze-enhancement. This task aims to jointly perform dehazing and lightness enhancement. Our task fundamentally differs from nighttime dehazing – our goal is to jointly dehaze and enhance scenes, while nighttime dehazing aims to dehaze scenes under a nighttime setting. In order to facilitate further research on this task, we release a benchmark dataset called Reside-β Night dataset, consisting of 4122 nighttime hazed images from 2061 scenes and 2061 ground truth images. Moreover, we also propose a network called NDENet (Nighttime Dehaze-Enhancement Network), which jointly performs dehazing and low-light enhancement in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate our method on the proposed benchmark and achieve Structural Index Similarity (SSIM) of 0.8962 and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 26.25. We also compare our network with other baseline networks on our benchmark to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We believe that nighttime dehaze-enhancement is an essential task particularly for autonomous navigation applications, and hope that our work will open up new frontiers in research. The code for our network is made publicly available.

Keywords: Dehazing, image enhancement, nighttime, computer vision.

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Authors: Aaron A. R. Nwabude

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This study used positivist quantitative approach to examine the mathematical concepts acquisition of- KS4 (14-16) Special Education Needs (SENs) students within the school sector education in England. The research is based on a pilot study and the design is completely holistic in its approach with mixing methodologies. The study combines the qualitative and quantitative methods of approach in gathering formative data for the design process. Although, the approach could best be described as a mix method, fundamentally with a strong positivist paradigm, hence my earlier understanding of the differentiation of the students, student – teacher body and the various elements of indicators that is being measured which will require an attenuated description of individual research subjects. The design process involves four phases with five key stages which are; literature review and document analysis, the survey, interview, and observation; then finally the analysis of data set. The research identified the need for triangulation with Reid-s phases of data management providing scaffold for the study. The study clearly identified the ideological and philosophical aspects of educational research design for the study of mathematics by the special education needs (SENs) students in England using the virtual learning environment (VLE) platform.

Keywords: VLE, Special Education Needs, Key stage4, School, Mathematics, Concepts Acquisition

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Authors: Lalla Nezha Lakmiti, Abdelkahar Zahid

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Due to the setbacks on the international scene and the wave of cacophonic financial scandals affecting large international groups, the new Islamic finance industry is not immune despite its initial resistance. The purpose of this paper is to understand and analyze the meaning of the Corporate Governance (CG) concept in Moroccan Islamic banking systems with specific reference to their institutions. The research objective is to identify also the path taken and adopted by these banks recently set up in Morocco. The foundation is rooted in shari'a, in particular, no stakeholder (the shareholding approach) must be harmed, and the ethical value is reflected into these parties’ behavior. We chose a qualitative method, semi-structured interviews where six managers provided answers about their banking systems. Since these respondents held a senior position (directors) within their organizations, it is felt that they are well placed and have the necessary knowledge to provide us with information to answer the questions asked. The results identified the orientation of participating banks and assessing how governance works, while determining which party is fovoured: shareholders, stakeholders or both. This study discusses the favorable condition to the harmonization of the regulations and therefore a better integration between Islamic finance and conventional ones in the economic context of Morocco.

Keywords: Corporate governance, participating banks, stakeholders, shareholders, and interests.

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Authors: B. Dikici, I. Ozdemir, M. Topuz

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The corrosion behaviour of 316L stainless steel coatings obtained by cold spray method was investigated in this study. 316L powders were deposited onto Al5052 aluminum substrates. The coatings were produced using nitrogen (N₂) process gas. In order to further improve the corrosion and mechanical properties of the coatings, heat treatment was applied at 250 and 750 °C. The corrosion performances of the coatings were compared using the potentiodynamic scanning (PDS) technique under in-vitro conditions (in Ringer’s solution at 37 °C). In addition, the hardness and porosity tests were carried out on the coatings. Microstructural characterization of the coatings was carried out by using scanning electron microscopy attached with energy dispersive spectrometer (SEM-EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique. It was found that clean surfaces and a good adhesion were achieved for particle/substrate bonding. The heat treatment process provided both elimination of the anisotropy in the coating and resulting in healing-up of the incomplete interfaces between the deposited particles. It was found that the corrosion potential of the annealed coatings at 750 °C was higher than that of commercially 316 L stainless steel. Moreover, the microstructural investigations after the corrosion tests revealed that corrosion preferentially starts at inter-splat boundaries.

Keywords: 316L, biomaterials, cold spray, heat treatment.

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Authors: Leong Lee, Cyriac Kandoth, Jennifer L. Leopold, Ronald L. Frank

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Protein 3D structure prediction has always been an important research area in bioinformatics. In particular, the prediction of secondary structure has been a well-studied research topic. Despite the recent breakthrough of combining multiple sequence alignment information and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein secondary structure, the Q3 accuracy of various computational prediction algorithms rarely has exceeded 75%. In a previous paper [1], this research team presented a rule-based method called RT-RICO (Relaxed Threshold Rule Induction from Coverings) to predict protein secondary structure. The average Q3 accuracy on the sample datasets using RT-RICO was 80.3%, an improvement over comparable computational methods. Although this demonstrated that RT-RICO might be a promising approach for predicting secondary structure, the algorithm-s computational complexity and program running time limited its use. Herein a parallelized implementation of a slightly modified RT-RICO approach is presented. This new version of the algorithm facilitated the testing of a much larger dataset of 396 protein domains [2]. Parallelized RTRICO achieved a Q3 score of 74.6%, which is higher than the consensus prediction accuracy of 72.9% that was achieved for the same test dataset by a combination of four secondary structure prediction methods [2].

Keywords: data mining, protein secondary structure prediction, parallelization.

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Authors: Eu Tteum Ha, Kwang Ryel Ryu

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As smartphones are equipped with various sensors, there have been many studies focused on using these sensors to create valuable applications. Human activity recognition is one such application motivated by various welfare applications, such as the support for the elderly, measurement of calorie consumption, lifestyle and exercise patterns analyses, and so on. One of the challenges one faces when using smartphone sensors for activity recognition is that the number of sensors should be minimized to save battery power. In this paper, we show that a fairly accurate classifier can be built that can distinguish ten different activities by using only a single sensor data, i.e., the smartphone accelerometer data. The approach that we adopt to deal with this twelve-class problem uses various methods. The features used for classifying these activities include not only the magnitude of acceleration vector at each time point, but also the maximum, the minimum, and the standard deviation of vector magnitude within a time window. The experiments compared the performance of four kinds of basic multi-class classifiers and the performance of four kinds of ensemble learning methods based on three kinds of basic multi-class classifiers. The results show that while the method with the highest accuracy is ECOC based on Random forest.

Keywords: Ensemble learning, activity recognition, smartphone accelerometer.

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Authors: B. Bina, M.H. Mehdinejad, Gunnel Dalhammer, Guna RajaraoM. Nikaeen, H. Movahedian Attar

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Coagulation of water involves the use of coagulating agents to bring the suspended matter in the raw water together for settling and the filtration stage. Present study is aimed to examine the effects of aluminum sulfate as coagulant in conjunction with Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein as coagulant aid on turbidity, hardness, and bacteria in turbid water. A conventional jar test apparatus was employed for the tests. The best removal was observed at a pH of 7 to 7.5 for all turbidities. Turbidity removal efficiency was resulted between % 80 to % 99 by Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein as coagulant aid. Dosage of coagulant and coagulant aid decreased with increasing turbidity. In addition, Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein significantly has reduced the required dosage of primary coagulant. Residual Al+3 in treated water were less than 0.2 mg/l and meets the environmental protection agency guidelines. The results showed that turbidity reduction of % 85.9- % 98 paralleled by a primary Escherichia coli reduction of 1-3 log units (99.2 – 99.97%) was obtained within the first 1 to 2 h of treatment. In conclusions, Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein as coagulant aid can be used for drinking water treatment without the risk of organic or nutrient release. We demonstrated that optimal design method is an efficient approach for optimization of coagulation-flocculation process and appropriate for raw water treatment.

Keywords: MOCP, Coagulant aid, turbidity removal, E.coliremoval, water, treatment

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Authors: S. Kulsri, M. Jaroensutasinee, K. Jaroensutasinee

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We developed a method based on quasi-molecular modelling to simulate the fall of water drops on horizontally smooth and rough surfaces. Each quasi-molecule was a group of particles that interacted in a fashion entirely analogous to classical Newtonian molecular interactions. When a falling water droplet was simulated at low impact velocity on both smooth and rough surfaces, the droplets moved periodically (i.e. the droplets moved up and down for a certain period, finally they stopped moving and reached a steady state), spreading and recoiling without splash or break-up. Spreading rates of falling water droplets increased rapidly as time increased until the spreading rate reached its steady state at time t ~ 0.25 s for rough surface and t ~ 0.40 s for smooth surface. The droplet height above both surfaces decreased as time increased, remained constant after the droplet diameter attained a maximum value and reached its steady state at time t ~ 0.4 s. However, rough surface had higher spreading rates of falling water droplets and lower height on the surface than smooth one.

Keywords: Quasi-molecular modelling, particle modelling, molecular aggregate approach.

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Authors: E. Oskoueian, E. Maroufyan, Y.M. Goh, E. Ramezani-Fard, M. Ebrahimi

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The fish meat plays an important role in the human health as it contains high quality protein. The tilapia fish considered as the third largest group of farmed fish. The oxidative deterioration of fish meat may occur during the cooking process. The proper cooking process and using natural antioxidant to prevent oxidation and enhance the quality of the tilapia fish fillet is necessary. Hence, this research was carried out to evaluate the potential of clove essential oil to prevent lipid peroxidation and enhance the antioxidant activity of tilapia fish fillet cooked using microwaving and grilling methods. The results showed that cooking using microwave significantly (p<0.05) increased the lipid peroxidation and decreased the DPPH and ferric reducing activity power of the fish fillet as compared to grilling method. The fortification of fish fillet using clove essential oil prevented from lipid peroxidation and enhanced the antioxidant activity of the fish fillet significantly (p<0.05). Consequently, fortification of tilapia fish fillet using clove essential oil followed by cooking using griller to have high quality cooked fish meat is recommended.

Keywords: Antioxidant activity, fillet, fish, fortification, lipid peroxidation.

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Authors: Kwok Tak Kit

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The construction industry plays an important role in environmental and carbon emissions as it consumes a huge amount of natural resources and energy. Sustainable engineering involves the process of planning, design, procurement, construction and delivery in which the whole building and construction process resulting from building and construction can be effectively and sustainability managed to achieve the use of natural resources. Implementation of sustainable technology development and innovation, adoption of the advanced construction process and facilitate the facilities management to implement the energy and waste control more accurately and effectively. Study and research in the relationship of BIM and environment assessment tools lack a clear discussion. In this paper, we will focus on the synergy of BIM technology and sustainable engineering in the AEC industry and outline the key factors which enhance the use of advanced innovation, technology and method and define the role of stakeholders to achieve zero-carbon emission toward the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. A case study of the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and environmental assessment tools in Hong Kong will be discussed in this paper.

Keywords: sustainability, sustainable engineering, BIM, LEED

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Authors: Necati Içer

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Crop-hail insurance plays a vital role in managing risks and reducing the financial consequences of hail damage on crop production. Predicting insurance premium rates with short-term data is a major challenge in numerous nations because of the unique characteristics of hailstorms. This study aims to suggest a feasible approach for establishing equitable premium rates in crop-hail insurance for nations with short-term insurance data. The primary goal of the rate-making process is to determine premium rates for high and zero loss costs of villages and enhance their credibility. To do this, a technique was created using the author's practical knowledge of crop-hail insurance. With this approach, the rate-making method was developed using a range of temporal and spatial factor combinations with both hypothetical and real data, including extreme cases. This article aims to show how to incorporate the temporal and spatial elements into determining fair premium rates using short-term insurance data. The article ends with a suggestion on the ultimate premium rates for insurance contracts.

Keywords: Crop-hail insurance, premium rate, short-term insurance data, spatial and temporal parameters.

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Authors: Dehpour A. A., Eslami B., Rezaie S., Hashemian S. F., Shafie F., Kiaie M.

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The aims of study were investigation on chemical composition essential oil and the effect of extract of Coronilla varia on antimicrobial and cytotoxicity activity. The essential oils of Coronilla varia is obtained by hydrodistillation and analyzed by (GC/MS) for determining their chemical composition and identification of their components. Antibacterial activity of plant extract was determined by disc diffusion method and anticancer activity measured by MTT assay. The major components in essential oil were Caryophyllene Oxide (60.19%), Alphacadinol (4.13%) and Homoadantaneca Robexylic Acid (3.31%). The extracts from Coronilla varia had interesting activity against Proteus mirabilis in the concentration of 700 μg/disc and did not show any activity against Staphylococus aureus, Bacillus subtillis, Klebsiella pneumonia and Entrobacter cloacae. The positive control, Ampicillin, Chloramphenicol and Cenphalothin had shown zone of inhibition resistant all bacteria. The ethanol extract of Corohilla varia inhibited on MCF7 cell lines. IC50 0.6(mg/ml) was the optimum concentration of extract from Coronilla varia inhibition of cell line growth. The MCF7 cancer cell line and Proteus mirabilis were more sensitive to Coronilla varia ethanol extract.

Keywords: Coronilla varia, Essential oil, Antibacterial, Anticancer, HeLa cell line.

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Authors: Alireza Keshmiri, Shahriar Bagheri, Nan Wu

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This research presents an analytical model for the development of an energy harvester with piezoelectric rings stacked at the boundary of the structure based on the Adomian decomposition method. The model is applied to geometrically non-uniform beams to derive the steady-state dynamic response of the structure subjected to base motion excitation and efficiently harvest the subsequent vibrational energy. The in-plane polarization of the piezoelectric rings is employed to enhance the electrical power output. A parametric study for the proposed energy harvester with various design parameters is done to prepare the dataset required for optimization. Finally, simulation-based optimization technique helps to find the optimum structural design with maximum efficiency. To solve the optimization problem, an artificial neural network is first trained to replace the simulation model, and then, a genetic algorithm is employed to find the optimized design variables. Higher geometrical non-uniformity and length of the beam lowers the structure natural frequency and generates a larger power output.

Keywords: Piezoelectricity, energy harvesting, simulation-based optimization, artificial neural network, genetic algorithm.

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Authors: Muhammad Sollehhuddin A. Jalil, Mohd Ibrahim Shapiai, Rubiyah Yusof

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Nowadays, ontology is common in many areas like artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, e-commerce, education and many more. Ontology is one of the focus areas in the field of Information Retrieval. The purpose of an ontology is to describe a conceptual representation of concepts and their relationships within a particular domain. In other words, ontology provides a common vocabulary for anyone who needs to share information in the domain. There are several ontology domains in various fields including engineering and non-engineering knowledge. However, there are only a few available ontology for engineering knowledge. Fuzzy logic as engineering knowledge is still not available as ontology domain. In general, fuzzy logic requires step-by-step guidelines and instructions of lab experiments. In this study, we presented domain ontology for Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) knowledge. We give Table of Content (ToC) with middle strategy based on the Uschold and King method to develop FLC ontology. The proposed framework is developed using Protégé as the ontology tool. The Protégé’s ontology reasoner, known as the Pellet reasoner is then used to validate the presented framework. The presented framework offers better performance based on consistency and classification parameter index. In general, this ontology can provide a platform to anyone who needs to understand FLC knowledge.

Keywords: Engineering knowledge, fuzzy logic control ontology, ontology development, table of contents.

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Authors: Jamal R. Elbergali

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Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems are wireless systems with multiple antenna elements at both ends of the link. Wireless communication systems demand high data rate and spectral efficiency with increased reliability. MIMO systems have been popular techniques to achieve these goals because increased data rate is possible through spatial multiplexing scheme and diversity. Spatial Multiplexing (SM) is used to achieve higher possible throughput than diversity. In this paper, we propose a Zero- Forcing (ZF) detection using a combination of Ordered Successive Interference Cancellation (OSIC) and Zero Forcing using Interference Cancellation (ZF-IC). The proposed method used an OSIC based on Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) ordering to get the estimation of last symbol, then the estimated last symbol is considered to be an input to the ZF-IC. We analyze the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the proposed MIMO system over Rayleigh Fading Channel, using Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulation scheme. The results show better performance than the previous methods.

Keywords: SNR, BER, BPSK, MIMO, Modulation, Zero forcing (ZF), OSIC, ZF-IC, Spatial Multiplexing (SM).

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Authors: Nyambayar Davaadorj, Ichiro Koshijima

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Safety or the state of being safe can be described as a condition of being not dangerous or not harmful. It is necessary for an individual to avoid dangerous situations every day. Also, an organization is subject to legal requirements for the health and safety of persons inside and around the immediate workplace, or who are exposed to the workplace activities. Although it might be difficult to keep a situation where complete safety is ensured, efforts must nonetheless be made to consider ways of removing any potential danger within an organization. In order to ensure a safe working environment, the capability of responding (i.e., resilience) to signals (i.e., information concerning events that could pose future problems that must be taken into account) that occur in and around corporations is necessary. The ability to evaluate this essential point is thus one way in which safety and security can be managed. This study focuses on OHSAS18001, an internationally applied standard for the construction and operation of occupational health and safety management systems, by using IDEF0 for Function Modeling (IDEF0) and the Resilience Matrix originally made by Bracco. Further, this study discusses a method for evaluating a manner in which Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) systematically functions within corporations. Based on the findings, this study clarifies the potential structural objection for corporations when implementing and operating the OHSAS standard.

Keywords: OHSAS18001, IDEF0, safety culture, resilience engineering.

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Authors: Nickolay Jelev, Andy Keane, Carren Holden, András Sóbester

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In aircraft design, the jump from the conceptual to preliminary design stage introduces a level of complexity which cannot be realistically handled by a single optimiser, be that a human (chief engineer) or an algorithm. The design process is often partitioned along disciplinary lines, with each discipline given a level of autonomy. This introduces a number of challenges including, but not limited to: coupling of design variables; coordinating disciplinary teams; handling of large amounts of analysis data; reaching an acceptable design within time constraints. A number of classical Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) architectures exist in academia specifically designed to address these challenges. Their limited use in the industrial aircraft design process has inspired the authors of this paper to develop an alternative strategy based on well established ideas from Decision Support Systems. The proposed rule based architecture sacrifices possibly elusive guarantees of convergence for an attractive return in simplicity. The method is demonstrated on analytical and aircraft design test cases and its performance is compared to a number of classical distributed MDO architectures.

Keywords: Multidisciplinary design optimisation, rule based architecture, aircraft design, decision support system.

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Authors: Fatemeh Cheraghali, Saeedeh Shojaee-Aliabadi, Seyede Marzieh Hosseini, Leila Mirmoghtadaie

Abstract:

In recent years, the field of natural antimicrobial and antioxidant compounds is one of the main research topics in the food industry. Application of agricultural residues is mainly cheap, and available resources are receiving increased attention. Walnut green husk is one of the agricultural residues that is considered as natural compounds with biological properties because of phenolic compounds. In this study, maltodextrin 10% was used for microencapsulation of walnut green husk extract. At first, the extract was examined to consider extraction yield, total phenolic compounds, and antioxidant activation. The results showed the extraction yield of 81.43%, total phenolic compounds of 3997 [mg GAE/100 g], antioxidant activity [DPPH] of 84.85% for walnut green husk extract. Antioxidant activity is about 75%-81% and by DPPH. At the next stage, microencapsulation was done by spry-drying method. The microencapsulation efficiency was 72%-79%. The results of SEM tests confirmed this microencapsulation process. In addition, microencapsulated and free extract was more effective on gram-positive bacteria’s rather than the gram-negative ones. According to the study, walnut green husk can be used as a cheap antioxidant and antimicrobial compounds due to sufficient value of phenolic compounds.

Keywords: Biopolymer, microencapsulation, Spray-drying, Walnut green husk.

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Authors: Asma M. Milad, Mohammad B. Kassim, Wan R. Daud

Abstract:

Highly ordered TiO2 nanotube (TNT) arrays were fabricated onto a pre-treated titanium foil by anodic oxidation with a voltage of 20V in phosphoric acid/sodium fluoride electrolyte. A pretreatment of titanium foil involved washing with acetone, isopropanol, ethanol and deionized water. Carbon doped TiO2 nanotubes (C-TNT) was fabricated 'in-situ' with the same method in the presence of polyvinyl alcohol and urea as carbon sources. The affects of polyvinyl alcohol concentration and oxidation time on the composition, morphology and structure of the C-TN were studied by FE-SEM, EDX and XRD techniques. FESEM images of the nanotubes showed uniform arrays of C-TNTs. The density and microstructures of the nanotubes were greatly affected by the content of PVA. The introduction of the polyvinyl alcohol into the electrolyte increases the amount of C content inside TiO2 nanotube arrays uniformly. The influence of carbon content on the photo-current of C-TNT was investigated and the I-V profiles of the nanotubes were established. The preliminary results indicated that the 'in-situ' doping technique produced a superior quality nanotubes compared to post doping techniques.

Keywords: Anodization, photoelectrochemical cell, 'in-situ', post doping, thin film, and titania nanotube arrays.

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