Search results for: Environmental effect

Authors: I. M. Sujaul, M. A. Sobahan, A. A. Edriyana, F. M. Yahaya, R. M. Yunus

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This study was carried out to investigate the adverse effect of industrial wastewater on surface water quality in Gebeng industrial estate, Pahang, Malaysia. Surface water was collected from six sampling stations. Physicochemical parameters were characterized based on in-situ and ex-situ analysis according to standard methods by American Public Health Association (APHA). Selected heavy metals were determined by using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP MS). The results revealed that the concentration of heavy metals such as Pb, Cu, Cd, Cr and Hg were high in samples. The results also showed that the value of Pb and Hg were higher in the wet season in comparison to dry season. According to Malaysia National Water Quality Standard (NWQS) and Water Quality Index (WQI) all the sampling station were categorized as class IV (highly polluted). The present study revealed that the adverse effects of careless disposal of wastes and directly discharge of effluents affected on surface water quality. Therefore, the authorities should implement the laws to ensure the proper practices of wastewater management for environmental sustainability around the study area.

Keywords: Gebeng, heavy metals, waste water, water quality index.

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Authors: El Youssfi L., Choukr-Allah R., Zaafrani M., Mediouni T., Ba Samba M., Hirich A

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The purpose of this work was to study the effect of the irrigation using waste water with various electric conductivities (T(0,92ds/m), EC3 (3ds/m) and EC6 (6ds/m) on three varieties of quinoa cultivated in a field south of Morocco. The follow up of the evolution of the chemical and agronomic parameters throughout the culture made it possible to determine the responses to the saline stress in arid conditions. Results showed that the salinity caused the depression of plant-s height, and reduced the fresh and dry weight in the different parts of the three varieties plants. The increase of the irrigation water EC didn-t affect the yield for the varieties. Thus, quinoa resisted to salinity and proved a behavior of a facultative halophyte crop. In fact, the cultivation of this using treated wastewater is feasible especially in arid areas for a sustainable use of water resources.

Keywords: Quinoa, salinity, semi-arid, treated wastewater.

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Authors: Caihong Sun, Xizi Zhang

Abstract:

Rating prediction is an important problem for recommender systems. The task is to predict the rating for an item that a user would give. Most of the existing algorithms for the task ignore the effect of negative ratings rated by users on items, but the negative ratings have a significant impact on users’ purchasing decisions in practice. In this paper, we present a rating prediction algorithm based on factorization machines that consider the effect of negative ratings inspired by Loss Aversion theory. The aim of this paper is to develop a concave and a convex negative disgust function to evaluate the negative ratings respectively. Experiments are conducted on MovieLens dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods by comparing with other four the state-of-the-art approaches. The negative ratings showed much importance in the accuracy of ratings predictions.

Keywords: Factorization machines, feature engineering, negative ratings, recommendation systems.

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Authors: Kemalettin Eryeşil, Aykut Bedük, Mehtap Fındık

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The aim of this study is to determine the effect of strategic management implementations on the institutionalization levels. In this regard a field study has been made over 31 stone quarry enterprises in cement producing sector in Konya by using survey method. In this study, institutionalization levels of the enterprises have been evaluated regarding three dimensions: professionalization, management approach, participation in decisions and delegation of authority. According to the results of the survey, there is a highly positive and statistically significant relationship between the strategic management implementations and institutionalization levels of the enterprises. Additionally,-considering the results of regression analysis made for establishing the relationship between strategic management and institutionalization levels- it has been determined that strategic management implementations of the enterprises can be used as a variable to explain the institutionalization levels of them, and also strategic management implementations of the enterprises increase the institutionalization levels of them.

Keywords: Institutionalization, Management, Strategic Management.

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Authors: Ahmed M. Eltohamy

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In this paper, an experimental and numerical study was adopted to investigate the effect geogrid soil reinforcement pre-stressing on the pressure settlement relation of sand bed supporting a strip foundation. The studied parameters include foundation depth and pre-stress ratio for the cases of one and two pre-stressed reinforcement layers. The study reflected that pre-stressing of soil reinforcement resulted in a marked enhancement in reinforced bed soil stiffness compared to the reinforced soil without pre-stress. The best benefit of pre-stressing reinforcement was obtained as the overburden pressure and pre-straining ratio increase. Pre-stressing of double reinforcement topmost layers results in further enhancement of stress strain relation of bed soil.

Keywords: Geogrid reinforcement, strip footing, pre-stress, bearing capacity.

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Authors: Sansani Rungrattawatchai

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The White Kwao (Pueraria mirifica), a potent phytoestrogenic medicinal plant, has long been use in Thailand as a traditional folkmedicine. However, no scientific information of the direct effect of White Kwao on the development of mammalian embryo was available. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of White Kwao extract on the in vitro development and implantation rate of mouse embryos. This study was designed into two experiments. In the first experiment, the two-cell stage mouse embryos were collected from the oviduct of superovulated mature female mice, and randomly cultured in three different media, the M16, M16 supplemented with 0.52μg esthinylestradiol-17β, and M16 supplemented with 10 mg/ml White Kwao extract. The culture was incubated in CO2 incubator at 37 oC . After the embryos were cultivated, the developments of embryos were observed every 24 hours for 5 days. The development rate of embryos from the two-cell stage to blastocyst stage in the media was with White Kwao was significantly higher (p<0.05) than those of the control group (68.50% versus 43.50%) but did not differ from the positive control group (68.50% versus 57.66%). In the second experiment, hatched blastocysts, which obtained from three different media, were differently labeled the nuclei with two polynucleotide-specific fluorochromes, the propidium iodide (PI) and the bisbenzimide. The results showed that the number of trophectoderm cells in the blastocysts that cultivated in the media with White Kwao did not significantly differ from the control (80.00 versus 70 cells) and the positive control group (80.00 versus 112.50 cells). The average number of inner cell mass in the White Kwao treated group did not significantly differ from the control group (20.50 versus 16.00 cells) and the positive control group (20.50 versus 20.50 cells). The total cell number including the trophectoderm and the inner cell mass of the individual hatched blastocyst was evaluated. The cell number in the blastocysts obtained from the media with the White Kwao did not significantly differ from the control (94.25 + 9.50 versus 92.33 + 4.05) and the positive control group (94.25 + 9.50 versus 110.33 + 9.16). The results demonstrated that the White Kwao treatment group did have a stimulating effect on the in vitro development of mouse embryos. The exact mechanism that White Kwao stimulated mouse embryo development is not known. The suspect mechanism may in a manner similar to the mechanism that of estrogen stimulated the development of the mouse embryos. Futher studies are needed to transfer the blastocyst into the endometrium of pseudopreagnancy mice to evaluate the effect of White Kwao on implantation

Keywords: White Kwao (Pueraria mirifica), blastocyst.

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Authors: Reza Bazargan Lari, Mohammad H. Fattahi

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Natural resources management including water resources requires reliable estimations of time variant environmental parameters. Small improvements in the estimation of environmental parameters would result in grate effects on managing decisions. Noise reduction using wavelet techniques is an effective approach for preprocessing of practical data sets. Predictability enhancement of the river flow time series are assessed using fractal approaches before and after applying wavelet based preprocessing. Time series correlation and persistency, the minimum sufficient length for training the predicting model and the maximum valid length of predictions were also investigated through a fractal assessment.

Keywords: Wavelet, de-noising, predictability, time series fractal analysis, valid length, ANN.

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Authors: A.R.Nezamabadi, M.Mansouri Gavari, S.Mansouri, M.Mansouri Gavari

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This article considers the positional buckling of composite thick plates under thermal loading . For this purpose , the complex finite strip method is used . In analysis of complex finite strip, harmonic complex function in longitudinal direction , cubic functions in transversal direction and parabola distribution of transverse shear strain in thickness of thick plate based on higherorder shear deformation theory are used . In given examples , the effect of angles of stratification , number of layers , dimensions ratio and length – to – thick ratio across critical temperature are considered.

Keywords: Thermal buckling , Thick plate , Complex finite strip , Higher – order shear deformation theory.

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Authors: N. Zhang, J. S. Kuang, S. Mogili

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To investigate seismic performance of beam-column knee joints, four full-scale reinforced concrete beam-column knee joints, which were fabricated to simulate those in as-built RC frame buildings designed to ACI 318-14 and ACI-ASCE 352R-02, were tested under reversed cyclic loading. In the experimental programme, particular emphasis was given to the effect of horizontal reinforcement (in format of inverted U-shape bars) on the shear strength and ductility capacity of knee joints. Test results are compared with those predicted by four seismic design codes, including ACI 318-14, EC8, NZS3101 and GB50010. It is seen that the current design codes of practice cannot accurately predict the shear strength of seismically designed knee joints.

Keywords: Large-scale tests, RC beam-column knee joints, seismic performance, shear strength.

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Authors: Feng-Hao Hsu, Na-Fu Wang, Yu-Zen Tsai, Yu-Song Cheng, Cheng-Fu Yang, Mau-Phon Houng

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This study fabricates p-type Ni_1−xO:Li/n-Si heterojunction solar cells (P⁺/n HJSCs) by using radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering and investigates the effect of substrate temperature on photovoltaic cell properties. Grazing incidence x-ray diffraction, four point probe, and ultraviolet-visible-near infrared discover the optoelectrical properties of p-Ni_1-xO thin films. The results show that p-Ni_1-xO thin films deposited at 300 ^oC has the highest grain size (22.4 nm), average visible transmittance (~42%), and electrical resistivity (2.7 Ωcm). However, the conversion efficiency of cell is shown only 2.33% which is lower than the cell (3.39%) fabricated at room temperature. This result can be mainly attributed to interfacial layer thickness (SiO_x) reduces from 2.35 nm to 1.70 nm, as verified by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy.

Keywords: Heterojunction, nickel oxide, solar cells, sputtering.

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Authors: Seok Hong Min, Tae Kwon Ha

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With the increasing interest on Ti alloys, the extraction process of Ti from its typical ore, TiO₂, has long been and will be important issue. As an intermediate product for the production of pigment or titanium metal sponge, tetrachloride (TiCl₄) is produced by fluidized bed using high TiO₂ feedstock. The purity of TiCl₄ after chlorination is subjected to the quality of the titanium feedstock. Since the impurities in the TiCl₄ product are reported to final products, the purification process of the crude TiCl₄ is required. The purification process includes fractional distillation and chemical treatment, which depends on the nature of the impurities present and the required quality of the final product. In this study, thermodynamic analysis on the impurity effect in the chlorination process, which is the first step of extraction of Ti from TiO₂, has been conducted. All thermodynamic calculations were performed using the FactSage thermodynamical software.

Keywords: Rutile, titanium, chlorination process, impurities, thermodynamic calculation, FactSage.

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Authors: H. M. Mobarak, Helen Wu, Keqin Xiao

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In this work, a three-dimensional finite element model was developed to investigate the crack breathing behavior at different crack locations considering the effect of unbalance force. A two-disk rotor with a crack is simulated using ABAQUS. The duration of each crack status (open, closed and partially open/closed) during a full shaft rotation was examined to analyse the crack breathing behavior. Unbalanced shaft crack breathing behavior was found to be different at different crack locations. The breathing behavior of crack along the shaft length is divided into different regions depending on the unbalance force and crack location. The simulated results in this work can be further utilised to obtain the time-varying stiffness matrix of the cracked shaft element under the influence of unbalance force.

Keywords: Crack breathing, crack location, slant crack, unbalance force, rotating shaft.

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Authors: J. Fenianos, C. Khater, D. Brouillet

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Ecological projects are often faced with reluctance from local communities hosting the project, especially when this project involves variation from preset ideas or classical practices. This paper aims at appreciating the contribution of environmental psychology through cognitive flexibility exercises to improve the acceptability of local communities in adopting more ecological rehabilitation scenarios. The study is based on a quarry site located in Bekaa- Lebanon. Four groups were considered with different levels of involvement, as follows: Group 1 is Training (T) – 50 hours of on-site training over 8 months, Group 2 is Awareness (A) – 2 hours of awareness raising session, Group 3 is Flexibility (F) – 2 hours of flexibility exercises and Group 4 is the Control (C). The results show that individuals in Group 3 (F) who followed flexibility sessions accept comparably the ecological rehabilitation option over the more classical one. This is also the case for the people in Group 1 (T) who followed a more time-demanding “on-site training”. Another experience was conducted on a second quarry site combining flexibility with awareness-raising. This research confirms that it is possible to reduce resistance to change thanks to a limited in-time intervention using cognitive flexibility. This methodological approach could be transferable to other environmental problems involving local communities and changes in preset perceptions.

Keywords: Acceptability, ecological restoration, environmental psychology, Lebanon, local communities, resistance to change.

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Authors: Chun-Yao Lee, Yao-chen Lee

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This paper describes a method of signal process applied on an end effects of Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) to provide an improvement in the reality of spectrum. The method is based on back-propagation network (BPN). To improve the effect, the end extension of the original signal is obtained by back-propagation network. A full waveform including origin and its extension is decomposed by using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to obtain intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of the waveform. Then, the Hilbert transform (HT) is applied to the IMFs to obtain the Hilbert spectrum of the waveform. As a result, the method is superiority of the processing of end effect of HHT to obtain the real frequency spectrum of signals.

Keywords: Neural network, back-propagation network, Hilbert-Huang transform

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Authors: A. Nazeri, R. Ziaie Moayed, H. Ghiasinejad

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The present research has been performed to investigate the effect of base course application on load-settlement characteristics of sandy subgrade using plate load test. The main parameter investigated in this study was the subgrade reaction coefficient. The model tests were conducted in a 1.35 m long, 1 m wide, and 1 m deep steel test box of Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU Calibration Chamber). The base courses used in this research were in three different thicknesses of 15 cm, 20 cm, and 30 cm. The test results indicated that in the case of using base course over loose sandy subgrade, the values of subgrade reaction coefficient can be increased from 7  to 132 , 224 , and 396  in presence of 15 cm, 20 cm, and 30 cm base course, respectively.

Keywords: Base course, calibration chamber, plate load test, loose sand, subgrade reaction coefficient.

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Authors: Hyeondal Jeong, Yoonjung Baek

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This research examines the effects of positive psychological capital (or PsyCap) on employee’s outcomes (satisfaction, commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, innovation behavior and individual creativity). This study conducted a meta-analysis of articles published in the Republic of Korea. As a result, positive psychological capital has a positive effect on the behavior of employees. Heterogeneity was identified among the studies included in the analysis and the context factors were analyzed; the study proposes contextual factors such as team tenure. The moderating effect of team tenure was not statistically significant. The implications were discussed based on the analysis results.

Keywords: Positive psychological capital, satisfaction, commitment, OCB, creativity, meta-analysis.

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Authors: Majdi M. Alomari, Nafesah I. Alshdaifat, Mohammad S. Widyan

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Different countries have introduced different schemes and policies to counter global warming. The rationale behind the proposed policies and the potential barriers to successful implementation of the policies adopted by the countries were analyzed and estimated based on different models. It is argued that these models enhance the transparency and provide a better understanding to the policy makers. However, these models are underpinned with several structural and baseline assumptions. These assumptions, modeling features and future prediction of emission reductions and other implication such as cost and benefits of a transition to a low-carbon economy and its economy wide impacts were discussed. On the other hand, there are potential barriers in the form political, financial, and cultural and many others that pose a threat to the mitigation options.

Keywords: Economic wide impact, energy models, environmental policy instruments, mitigating CO2 emission.

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Authors: B. Chetti, W. A. Crosby

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This paper presents a numerical analysis for the dynamic performance of a finite journal bearing lubricated with couple stress fluid taking into account the effect of the deformation of the bearing liner. The modified Reynolds equation has been solved by using finite difference technique. The dynamic characteristics in terms of stiffness coefficients, damping coefficients, critical mass and whirl ratio are evaluated for different values of eccentricity ratio and elastic coefficient for a journal bearing lubricated with a couple stress fluids and a Newtonian fluid. The results show that the dynamic characteristics of journal bearings lubricated with couple stress fluids are improved compared to journal bearings lubricated with Newtonian fluids.

Keywords: Circular bearing, elastohydrodynamic, stability, couple stress.

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Authors: Weeraya Samnuknit, Apichat Boontawan

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A vacuum fractionation technique was introduced to remove ethanol from fermentation broth. The effect of initial glucose and ethanol concentrations were investigated for specific productivity. The inhibitory ethanol concentration was observed at 100 g/L. In order to increase the fermentation performance, the ethanol product was removed as soon as it is produced. The broth was boiled at 35^oC by reducing the pressure to 65 mBar. The ethanol/water vapor was fractionated for up to 90 wt% before leaving the column. Ethanol concentration in the broth was kept lower than 25 g/L, thus minimized the product inhibition effect to the yeast cells. For batch extractive fermentation, a high substrate utilization rate was obtained at 26.6 g/L.h and most of glucose was consumed within 21 h. For repeated-batch extractive fermentation, addition of glucose was carried out up to 9 times and ethanol was produced more than 8-fold higher than batch fermentation.

Keywords: Ethanol, Extractive fermentation, Product inhibition, Vacuum fractionation.

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Authors: Ioan Popa, Cristiana Tudor, Radu Lupu

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The interdependences among stock market indices were studied for a long while by academics in the entire world. The current financial crisis opened the door to a wide range of opinions concerning the understanding and measurement of the connections considered to provide the controversial phenomenon of market integration. Using data on the log-returns of 17 stock market indices that include most of the CEE markets, from 2005 until 2009, our paper studies the problem of these dependences using a new methodological tool that takes into account both the volatility clustering effect and the stochastic properties of these linkages through a Dynamic Conditional System of Simultaneous Equations. We find that the crisis is well captured by our model as it provides evidence for the high volatility – high dependence effect.

Keywords: Stock market interdependences, Dynamic System ofSimultaneous Equations, financial crisis

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Authors: Shwe Wut Hmon Aye, Kay Thi Lwin, Waing Waing Kay Khine Oo

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As the material used for fuselage structure must possess low density, high strength to weight ratio, the selection of appropriate materials for fuselage structure is one of the most important tasks. Aluminum metal itself is soft and low in strength. It can be made stronger by giving proper combination of suitable alloy addition, mechanical treatment and thermal treatment. The usual thermal treatment given to aluminum alloys is called age-hardening or precipitation hardening. In this paper, the studies are carried out on 7075 aluminum alloy which is how to improve strength level for fuselage structure. The marked effect of the strength on the ternary alloy is clearly demonstrated at several ageing times and temperatures. It is concluded that aluminum-zinc-magnesium alloy can get the highest strength level in natural ageing.

Keywords: Aluminum alloy, ageing, heat treatment, strength.

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Authors: Aref Ghafouri, Mohammad Javad Mollakazemi, Farhad Asadi

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In this paper, model order reduction method is used for approximation in linear and nonlinearity aspects in some experimental data. This method can be used for obtaining offline reduced model for approximation of experimental data and can produce and follow the data and order of system and also it can match to experimental data in some frequency ratios. In this study, the method is compared in different experimental data and influence of choosing of order of the model reduction for obtaining the best and sufficient matching condition for following the data is investigated in format of imaginary and reality part of the frequency response curve and finally the effect and important parameter of number of order reduction in nonlinear experimental data is explained further.

Keywords: Frequency response, Order of model reduction, frequency matching condition.

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Authors: Karina Natali, Wei-Hwa Chiang

Abstract:

This study examines the stack ventilation performance of an office building located in Taipei, Taiwan. Atriums in this building act as stacks that facilitate buoyancy-driven ventilation. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations are used to identify interior airflow patterns, and then used these patterns to assess the building’s heat expulsion efficiency. Ambient temperatures of 20°C were adopted as the typical seasonal spring temperature range in Taipei. Further, “zero-wind” conditions are established to ensure simulation results reflected only the buoyancy effect. After checking results against neutral pressure level (NPL) level, airflow, air velocity, and indoor temperature stratification, the lower stack is modified to reduce the NPL in order to remove heat accumulated on the top floor.

Keywords: Natural ventilation, side outlet, stack effect, thermal comfort.

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Authors: Zurriati Mohd Ali, Wahyu Kuntjoro, Wirachman Wisnoe

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The aerodynamics characteristics of a blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft were obtained in Universiti Teknologi MARA low speed wind tunnel. The scaled-down of BWB model consisted of a canard as its horizontal stabilizer. There were four canards with different aspect ratio used in the experiments. Canard setting angles were varied from -20q to 20q. All tests were conducted at velocity of 35 m/s, with Mach number 0.1. At low angles of attacks, the increment of lift slope for various canards aspect ratio is small and almost constant. Higher canard aspect ratio will cause higher drag. However, canard has a high effect to the moment at zero lift, CM,0.The visualization using mini tuff was performed to observe the airflow at the upper surface of canard. KeywordsAerodynamics,blended-wing body, canard, wind tunnel.

Keywords: Aerodynamics, blended-wing body, canard, wind tunnel.

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Authors: M. Izadi, S. Hossainpour, D. Jalali-Vahid

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Nanofluids are novel fluids that are going to have an important role in future industrial thermal device designs. Studies are being predominantly conducted on the mechanism of these heat transfers. The key to this attraction is in the increase in thermal conductivity brought about by the Nanofluids compared with the base fluid. Different models have been proposed for calculation of effective thermal conduction that has been gradually modified. In this investigation effect of nanolayer structure and Brownian motion of particles are studied and a new modified thermal conductivity model is proposed. Temperature, concentration, nanolayer thickness and particle size are taken as variables and their effect are studied simultaneously on the thermal conductivity of the fluids, showing the concentration of the nanoparticles to affect the nanolayer thickness which also affects the Brownian motion.

Keywords: Relative thermal conductivity, Brownian motion, Nanolayer structure.

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Authors: Motahar Reza, Rajni Chahal, Neha Sharma

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This article addresses the boundary layer flow and heat transfer of Casson fluid over a nonlinearly permeable stretching surface with chemical reaction in the presence of variable magnetic field. The effect of thermal radiation is considered to control the rate of heat transfer at the surface. Using similarity transformations, the governing partial differential equations of this problem are reduced into a set of non-linear ordinary differential equations which are solved by finite difference method. It is observed that the velocity at fixed point decreases with increasing the nonlinear stretching parameter but the temperature increases with nonlinear stretching parameter.

Keywords: Boundary layer flow, nonlinear stretching, Casson fluid, heat transfer, radiation.

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Authors: Hassan M. Alkomy, Hesham A. Elkaranshawy, Ahmed S. Ashour, Khaled T. Mohamed

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For a rigid body sliding on a rough surface, a range of uncertainty or non-uniqueness of solution could be found, which is termed: Painlevé paradox. Painlevé paradox is the reason of a wide range of bouncing motion, observed during sliding of robotic manipulators on rough surfaces. In this research work, the existence of the paradox zone during the sliding motion of a two-link (P-R) robotic manipulator with a unilateral constraint is investigated. Parametric study is performed to investigate the effect of friction, link-length ratio, total height and link-mass ratio on the paradox zone.

Keywords: Dynamical system, friction, multibody system, Painlevé paradox, robotic systems, sliding robots, unilateral constraint.

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Authors: Adriana Alexandru, Cristian Tantareanu, Elena Jitaru

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The paper presents the potential for RES in Romania and the results of the Romanian national research project “Romania contribution to the European targets regarding the development of renewable energy sources - PROMES". The objective of the project is the development of energy generation from renewable energy sources (RES) in Romania by drawing up scenarios and prognosis harmonized with national and European targets, RES development effects modeling (environmental, economic, social etc.), research of the impact of the penetration of RES into the main, implementation of an advanced software system tool for RES information recording and communication, experimental research based on demonstrative applications. The expected results are briefly presented, as well as the social, economic and environmental impact.

Keywords: Energy policy, Internet, renewable energy sources, potential.

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Authors: Waqqas-ur-Rehman Butt, Martin Servin, Marion Pause

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In recent years, object detection has gained much attention and very encouraging research area in the field of computer vision. The robust object boundaries detection in an image is demanded in numerous applications of human computer interaction and automated surveillance systems. Many methods and approaches have been developed for automatic object detection in various fields, such as automotive, quality control management and environmental services. Inappropriately, to the best of our knowledge, object detection under illumination with shadow consideration has not been well solved yet. Furthermore, this problem is also one of the major hurdles to keeping an object detection method from the practical applications. This paper presents an approach to automatic object detection in images under non-standardized environmental conditions. A key challenge is how to detect the object, particularly under uneven illumination conditions. Image capturing conditions the algorithms need to consider a variety of possible environmental factors as the colour information, lightening and shadows varies from image to image. Existing methods mostly failed to produce the appropriate result due to variation in colour information, lightening effects, threshold specifications, histogram dependencies and colour ranges. To overcome these limitations we propose an object detection algorithm, with pre-processing methods, to reduce the interference caused by shadow and illumination effects without fixed parameters. We use the Y CrCb colour model without any specific colour ranges and predefined threshold values. The segmented object regions are further classified using morphological operations (Erosion and Dilation) and contours. Proposed approach applied on a large image data set acquired under various environmental conditions for wood stack detection. Experiments show the promising result of the proposed approach in comparison with existing methods.

Keywords: Image processing, Illumination equalization, Shadow filtering, Object detection, Colour models, Image segmentation.

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Authors: A. A. M. Azoddein, R. M. Yunus, N. M. Sulaiman, A. B. Bustary, K. Sabar

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Microbes have been used to solve environmental problems for many years. The role of microorganism to sequester, precipitate or alter the oxidation state of various heavy metals has been extensively studied. Treatment using microorganism interacts with toxic metal are very diverse. The purpose of this research is to remove the mercury using Pseudomonas putida (P. putida), pure culture ATTC 49128 at optimum growth parameters such as techniques of culture, acclimatization time and speed of incubator shaker. Thus, in this study, the optimum growth parameters of P. putida were obtained to achieve the maximum of mercury removal. Based on the optimum parameters of P. putida for specific growth rate, the removal of two different mercury concentration, 1 ppm and 4 ppm were studied. From mercury nitrate solution, a mercuryresistant bacterial strain which is able to reduce from ionic mercury to metallic mercury was used to reduce ionic mercury. The overall levels of mercury removal in this study were between 80% and 89%. The information obtained in this study is of fundamental for understanding of the survival of P. putida ATTC 49128 in mercury solution. Thus, microbial mercury removal is a potential bioremediation for wastewater especially in petrochemical industries in Malaysia.

Keywords: Pseudomonas putida, growth kinetic, biosorption, mercury, petrochemical wastewater.

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