Search results for: Model order Reduction.

Authors: Joanna Peksa, Faith Dillon-Lee

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Current developments in the Western economies have turned some universities into corporate institutions driven by practices of production and commodity. Academia is increasingly becoming integrated into national economies as a result of students paying fees and is consequently using business practices in student retention and engagement. With these changes, pedagogy status as a priority within the institution has been changing in light of these new demands. New strategies have blurred the boundaries that separate a student from a client. This led to a change of the dynamic, disrupting the traditional idea of the knowledge market, and emphasizing the corporate aspect of universities. In some cases, where students are seen primarily as a customer, the purpose of academia is no longer to educate but sell a commodity and retain fee-paying students. This paper considers opposing viewpoints on the commodification of higher education, reflecting on the reality of maintaining a pedagogic grounding in an increasingly commercialized sector. By analysing a case study of the Student Success Festival, an event that involved academic and marketing teams, the differences are considered between the respective visions of the pedagogic arm of the university and the corporate. This study argues that the initial concept of the event, based on the principles of gamification, independent learning, and cognitive criticality, was more clearly linked to a grounded pedagogic approach. However, when liaising with the marketing team in a crucial step in the creative process, it became apparent that these principles were not considered a priority in terms of their remit. While the study acknowledges in the power of pedagogy, the findings show that a pact of concord is necessary between different stakeholders in order for students to benefit fully from their learning experience. Nevertheless, while issues of power prevail and whenever power is unevenly distributed, reaching a consensus becomes increasingly challenging and further research should closely monitor the developments in pedagogy in the UK higher education.

Keywords: Economic pressure, commodification, pedagogy, gamification, public service, marketization.

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Authors: Sayed M. Soleimani, Nader H. Ghareeb, Nourhan H. Shaker, Muhammad B. Siddiqui

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Honeycomb sandwich panels have been widely used as protective structural elements against blast loading. The main advantages of these panels include their light weight due to the presence of voids, as well as their energy absorption capability. Terrorist activities have imposed new challenges to structural engineers to design protective measures for vital structures. Since blast loading is not usually considered in the load combinations during the design process of a structure, researchers around the world have been motivated to study the behavior of potential elements capable of resisting sudden loads imposed by the detonation of explosive materials. One of the best candidates for this objective is the honeycomb sandwich panel. Studying the effects of explosive materials on the panels requires costly and time-consuming experiments. Moreover, these type of experiments need permission from defense organizations which can become a hurdle. As a result, modeling and simulation using an appropriate tool can be considered as a good alternative. In this research work, the finite element package ABAQUS® is used to study the behavior of hexagonal and squared honeycomb steel sandwich panels under the explosive effects of different amounts of trinitrotoluene (TNT). The results of finite element modeling of a specific honeycomb configuration are initially validated by comparing them with the experimental results from literature. Afterwards, several configurations including different geometrical properties of the honeycomb wall are investigated and the results are compared with the original model. Finally, the effectiveness of the core shape and wall thickness are discussed, and conclusions are made.

Keywords: Blast loading, finite element modeling, steel honeycomb sandwich panel.

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Authors: Alanoud Moraya Aldalan, Abdulaziz Almaleh

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A crucial part of maintaining a customer-oriented business in the telecommunications industry is understanding the reasons and factors that lead to customer churn. Competition between telecom companies has greatly increased in recent years, which has made it more important to understand customers’ needs in this strong market. For those who are looking to turn over their service providers, understanding their needs is especially important. Predictive churn is now a mandatory requirement for retaining customers in the telecommunications industry. Machine learning can be used to accomplish this. Churn Prediction has become a very important topic in terms of machine learning classification in the telecommunications industry. Understanding the factors of customer churn and how they behave is very important to building an effective churn prediction model. This paper aims to predict churn and identify factors of customers’ churn based on their past service usage history. Aiming at this objective, the study makes use of feature selection, normalization, and feature engineering. Then, this study compared the performance of four different machine learning algorithms on the Orange dataset: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Gradient Boosting. Evaluation of the performance was conducted by using the F1 score and ROC-AUC. Comparing the results of this study with existing models has proven to produce better results. The results showed the Gradients Boosting with feature selection technique outperformed in this study by achieving a 99% F1-score and 99% AUC, and all other experiments achieved good results as well.

Keywords: Machine Learning, Gradient Boosting, Logistic Regression, Churn, Random Forest, Decision Tree, ROC, AUC, F1-score.

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Authors: Chiung-Yun Chang, Po-Chou Chen, Jiun-Shiang Tzeng, Ka-Wai Mac, Chia-Chi Hsiao, Jo-Chi Jao

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This study was aimed to measure effective transverse relaxation rates (R2*) in the liver and muscle of normal New Zealand White (NZW) rabbits. R2* relaxation rate has been widely used in various hepatic diseases for iron overload by quantifying iron contents in liver. R2* relaxation rate is defined as the reciprocal of T2* relaxation time and mainly depends on the constituents of tissue. Different tissues would have different R2* relaxation rates. The signal intensity decay in Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be characterized by R2* relaxation rates. In this study, a 1.5T GE Signa HDxt whole body MR scanner equipped with an 8-channel high resolution knee coil was used to observe R2* values in NZW rabbit’s liver and muscle. Eight healthy NZW rabbits weighted 2 ~ 2.5 kg were recruited. After anesthesia using Zoletil 50 and Rompun 2% mixture, the abdomen of rabbit was landmarked at the center of knee coil to perform 3-plane localizer scan using fast spoiled gradient echo (FSPGR) pulse sequence. Afterwards, multi-planar fast gradient echo (MFGR) scans were performed with 8 various echo times (TEs) to acquire images for R2* measurements. Regions of interest (ROIs) at liver and muscle were measured using Advantage workstation. Finally, the R2* was obtained by a linear regression of ln(sı) on TE. The results showed that the longer the echo time, the smaller the signal intensity. The R2* values of liver and muscle were 44.8 ± 10.9 s-1 and 37.4 ± 9.5 s-1, respectively. It implies that the iron concentration of liver is higher than that of muscle. In conclusion, the more the iron contents in tissue, the higher the R2*. The correlations between R2* and iron content in NZW rabbits might be valuable for further exploration.

Keywords: Liver, MRI, multi-planar fast gradient echo, muscle, R2* relaxation rate.

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Authors: Mohanapriya Subramanian, V. Raj

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Direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) are considered to be one of the most promising candidates for portable and stationary applications in the view of their advantages such as high energy density, easy manipulation, high efficiency and they operate with liquid fuel which could be used without requiring any fuel-processing units. Electrolyte membrane of DMFC plays a key role as a proton conductor as well as a separator between electrodes. Increasing concern over environmental protection, biopolymers gain tremendous interest owing to their eco-friendly bio-degradable nature. Pectin is a natural anionic polysaccharide which plays an essential part in regulating mechanical behavior of plant cell wall and it is extracted from outer cells of most of the plants. The aim of this study is to develop and demonstrate pectin based polymer composite membranes as methanol impermeable polymer electrolyte membranes for DMFCs. Pectin based nanocomposites membranes are prepared by solution-casting technique wherein pectin is blended with chitosan followed by the addition of optimal amount of sulphonic acid modified Titanium dioxide nanoparticle (S-TiO2). Nanocomposite membranes are characterized by Fourier Transform-Infra Red spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscopy, and Energy dispersive spectroscopy analyses. Proton conductivity and methanol permeability are determined into order to evaluate their suitability for DMFC application. Pectin-chitosan blends endow with a flexible polymeric network which is appropriate to disperse rigid S-TiO2 nanoparticles. Resulting nanocomposite membranes possess adequate thermo-mechanical stabilities as well as high charge-density per unit volume. Pectin-chitosan natural polymeric nanocomposite comprising optimal S-TiO2 exhibits good electrochemical selectivity and therefore desirable for DMFC application.

Keywords: Biopolymers, fuel cells, nanocomposite, methanol crossover.

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Authors: S. Bouhouche, M. Lahreche, S. Ziani, J. Bast

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Modern manufacturing facilities are large scale, highly complex, and operate with large number of variables under closed loop control. Early and accurate fault detection and diagnosis for these plants can minimise down time, increase the safety of plant operations, and reduce manufacturing costs. Fault detection and isolation is more complex particularly in the case of the faulty analog control systems. Analog control systems are not equipped with monitoring function where the process parameters are continually visualised. In this situation, It is very difficult to find the relationship between the fault importance and its consequences on the product failure. We consider in this paper an approach to fault detection and analysis of its effect on the production quality using an adaptive centring and scaling in the pickling process in cold rolling. The fault appeared on one of the power unit driving a rotary machine, this machine can not track a reference speed given by another machine. The length of metal loop is then in continuous oscillation, this affects the product quality. Using a computerised data acquisition system, the main machine parameters have been monitored. The fault has been detected and isolated on basis of analysis of monitored data. Normal and faulty situation have been obtained by an artificial neural network (ANN) model which is implemented to simulate the normal and faulty status of rotary machine. Correlation between the product quality defined by an index and the residual is used to quality classification.

Keywords: Modeling, fault detection and diagnosis, parameters estimation, neural networks, Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD), pickling process.

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Authors: Victor Maldonado

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Recent concerns of the growing impact of aviation on climate change has prompted the emergence of a field referred to as Sustainable or “Green” Aviation dedicated to mitigating the harmful impact of aviation related CO2 emissions and noise pollution on the environment. In the current paper, a unique “green” business jet aircraft called the TransAtlantic was designed (using analytical formulation common in conceptual design) in order to show the feasibility for transatlantic passenger air travel with an aircraft weighing less than 10,000 pounds takeoff weight. Such an advance in fuel efficiency will require development and integration of advanced and emerging aerospace technologies. The TransAtlantic design is intended to serve as a research platform for the development of technologies such as active flow control. Recent advances in the field of active flow control and how this technology can be integrated on a sub-scale flight demonstrator are discussed in this paper. Flow control is a technique to modify the behavior of coherent structures in wall-bounded flows (over aerodynamic surfaces such as wings and turbine nozzles) resulting in improved aerodynamic cruise and flight control efficiency. One of the key challenges to application in manned aircraft is development of a robust high-momentum actuator that can penetrate the boundary layer flowing over aerodynamic surfaces. These deficiencies may be overcome in the current development and testing of a novel electromagnetic synthetic jet actuator which replaces piezoelectric materials as the driving diaphragm. One of the overarching goals of the TranAtlantic research platform include fostering national and international collaboration to demonstrate (in numerical and experimental models) reduced CO2/ noise pollution via development and integration of technologies and methodologies in design optimization, fluid dynamics, structures/ composites, propulsion, and controls.

Keywords: Aircraft Design, Sustainable “Green” Aviation, Active Flow Control, Aerodynamics.

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Authors: Marisa Catarina da Conceição Dinis

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The commercial companies’ management has suffered an important material and legal transformation in the last years, mainly related to the changes in the Portuguese legal framework and because of the fact they were recently object of great expansion. In fact, next to the smaller family businesses, whose management is regularly assumed by partners, companies with social investment highly scattered, whose owners are completely out from administration, are now arising. In those particular cases, the business transactions are much more complex and require from the companies’ managers a highly technical knowledge and some specific professionals’ skills and abilities. This kind of administration carries a high-level risk that can both result in great success or in great losses. Knowing that the administration performance can result in important losses to the companies, the Portuguese legislator has created a legal structure to impute them some responsibilities and sanctions. The main goal of this study is to analyze the Portuguese law and some jurisprudence about companies’ management rules and about the conflicts between the directors and the company. In order to achieve these purposes we have to consider, on the one hand, the legal duties directly connected to the directors’ functions and on the other hand the disrespect for those same rules. The Portuguese law in this matter, influenced by the common law, determines that the directors’ attitude should be guided by loyalty and honesty. Consequently, we must reflect in which cases the administrators should respond to losses that they might cause to companies as a result of their duties’ disrespect. In this way is necessary to study the business judgment rule wich is a rule that refers to a liability exclusion rule. We intend, in the same way, to evaluate if the civil liability that results from the directors’ duties disrespect can extend itself to those who have elected them ignoring or even knowing that they don´t have the necessary skills or appropriate knowledge to the position they hold. To charge directors’, without ruining entrepreneurship, charging, in the same way, those who select them reinforces the need for more responsible and cautious attitudes which will lead consequently to more confidence in the markets.

Keywords: Duty of loyalty, duty of care, business judgment rule, civil liability of directors.

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Authors: M. Alizadeh, M. Mahdavi, M.H. Jouri

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The rangelands, as one of the largest dynamic biomes in the world, have very capabilities. Regulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide as the main these gases, is one of these cases. The attention to rangeland, as cheep and reachable resources to sequestrate the carbon dioxide, increases after the Industrial Revolution. Rangelands comprise the large parts of Iran as a steppic area. Rudshur (Saveh), as area index of steppic area, was selected under three sites include long-term exclosure, medium-term exclosure, and grazable area in order to the capable of carbon dioxide’s sequestration of dominated species. Canopy cover’s percentage of two dominated species (Artemisia sieberi Besser & Stipa barbata Desf) was determined via establishing of random 1 square meter plot. The sampling of above and below ground biomass style was obtained by complete random. After determination of ash percentage in the laboratory; conversion ratio of plant biomass to organic carbon was calculated by ignition method. Results of the paired t-test showed that the amount of carbon sequestration in above ground and underground biomass of Artemisia sieberi Besser & Stipa barbata Desf is different in three regions. It, of course, hasn’t any difference between under and surface ground’s biomass of Artemisia sieberi Besser in long-term exclosure. The independent t-test results indicate differences between underground biomass corresponding each other in the studied sites. Carbon sequestration in the Stipa barbata Desf was totally more than Artemisia sieberi Besser. Altogether, the average sequestration of the long-term exclosure was 5.842gr/m², the medium-term exclosure was 4.115gr/m², and grazable area was 5.975gr/m² so that there isn’t valuable statistical difference in term of total amount of carbon sequestration to three sites.

Keywords: Carbon sequestration, the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gases, Artemisia sieberi Besser, Stipa barbata Desf, steppic rangelands

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Authors: A. Robbin

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In a multilingual setting like Nigeria, the success of service encounters is enhanced by the use of a language that ensures the linguistic and persuasive demands of the interlocutors. This study examined motivations for code switching as a negotiation strategy in bank-hall desk service encounters in Ìbàdàn metropolis using Myers-Scotton’s exploration on markedness in language use. The data consisted of transcribed audio recording of bank-hall service encounters, and direct observation of bank interactions in two purposively sampled commercial banks in Ìbàdàn metropolis. The data was subjected to descriptive linguistic analysis using Myers Scotton’s Markedness Model.  Findings reveal that code switching is frequently employed during different stages of service encounter: greeting, transaction and closing to fulfil relational, bargaining and referential functions. Bank staff and customers code switch to make unmarked, marked and explanatory choices. A strategy used to identify with customer’s cultural affiliation, close status gap, and appeal to begrudged customer; or as an explanatory choice with non-literate customers for ease of communication. Bankers select English to maintain customers’ perceptions of prestige which is retained or diverged from depending on their linguistic preference or ability.  Yoruba is seen as an efficient negotiation strategy with both bankers and their customers, making choices within conversation to achieve desired conversational and functional aims.

Keywords: Markedness, bilingualism, code switching, service encounter, banking.

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Authors: Saimir Heta, Kers Kapa, Rialda Xhizdari, Ilma Robo

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Despite the existence of different dental specialties, the dentist-patient relationship is unique, in the very fact that the treatment is performed by one doctor and the patient identifies the malpractice presented as part of that doctor's practice; this is in complete contrast to cases of medical treatments where the patient can be presented to a team of doctors, to treat a specific pathology. The rules of dental ethics are almost the same as the rules of medical ethics. The appearance of dental malpractice affects exactly this two-party relationship, created on the basis of professionalism, without deviations in this direction, between the dentist and the patient, but with very narrow individual boundaries, compared to cases of medical malpractice. Malpractice can have different reasons for its appearance, starting from professional negligence, but also from the lack of professional knowledge of the dentist who undertakes the dental treatment. It should always be seen in perspective that we are not talking about the individual - the dentist who goes to work with the intention of harming their patients. Malpractice can also be a consequence of the impossibility, for anatomical or physiological reasons of the tooth under dental treatment, to realize the predetermined dental treatment plan. On the other hand, the dentist himself is an individual who can be affected by health conditions, or have vices that affect the systemic health of the dentist as an individual, which in these conditions can cause malpractice. So, depending on the reason that led to the appearance of malpractice, the method of treatment from a legal point of view also varies, for the dentist who committed the malpractice, evaluating the latter if the malpractice came under the conditions of applying the rules of dental ethics. The deviation from the predetermined dental plan is the minimum sign of malpractice and the latter should not be definitively related only to cases of difficult dental treatments. The identification of the reason for the appearance of malpractice is the initial element, which makes the difference in the way of its treatment, from a legal point of view, and the involvement of the dentist in the assessment of the malpractice committed, must be based on the legislation in force, which must be said to have their specific changes in different states. Malpractice should be referred to, or included in the lectures or in the continuing education of professionals, because it serves as a method of obtaining professional experience in order not to repeat the same thing several times, by different professionals.

Keywords: Dental ethics, malpractice, negligence, legal basis, continuing education, dental treatments.

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Authors: Feng-Sheng Wang, Wu-Hsiung Wu, Kai-Cheng Hsu

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The optimization of biological systems, which is a branch of metabolic engineering, has generated a lot of industrial and academic interest for a long time. In the last decade, metabolic engineering approaches based on mathematical optimizations have been used extensively for the analysis and manipulation of metabolic networks. In practical optimization of metabolic reaction networks, designers have to manage the nature of uncertainty resulting from qualitative characters of metabolic reactions, e.g., the possibility of enzyme effects. A deterministic approach does not give an adequate representation for metabolic reaction networks with uncertain characters. Fuzzy optimization formulations can be applied to cope with this problem. A fuzzy multi-objective optimization problem can be introduced for finding the optimal engineering interventions on metabolic network systems considering the resilience phenomenon and cell viability constraints. The accuracy of optimization results depends heavily on the development of essential kinetic models of metabolic networks. Kinetic models can quantitatively capture the experimentally observed regulation data of metabolic systems and are often used to find the optimal manipulation of external inputs. To address the issues of optimizing the regulatory structure of metabolic networks, it is necessary to consider qualitative effects, e.g., the resilience phenomena and cell viability constraints. Combining the qualitative and quantitative descriptions for metabolic networks makes it possible to design a viable strain and accurately predict the maximum possible flux rates of desired products. Considering the resilience phenomena in metabolic networks can improve the predictions of gene intervention and maximum synthesis rates in metabolic engineering. Two case studies will present in the conference to illustrate the phenomena.

Keywords: Fuzzy multi-objective optimization problem, kinetic model, metabolic engineering.

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Authors: T. Aboumahboub, R. Brecha, H. B. Shrestha, U. F. Hutfilter, A. Geiges, W. Hare, M. Schaeffer, L. Welder, M. Gidden

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The proposed stringent mitigation targets require an immediate start for a drastic transformation of the whole energy system. The current Australian energy system is mainly centralized and fossil fuel-based in most states with coal and gas-fired plants dominating the total produced electricity over the recent past. On the other hand, the country is characterized by a huge, untapped renewable potential, where wind and solar energy could play a key role in the decarbonization of the Australia’s future energy system. However, integrating high shares of such variable renewable energy sources (VRES) challenges the power system considerably due to their temporal fluctuations and geographical dispersion. This raises the concerns about flexibility gap in the system to ensure the security of supply with increasing shares of such intermittent sources. One main flexibility dimension to facilitate system integration of high shares of VRES is to increase the cross-sectoral integration through coupling of electricity to other energy sectors alongside the decarbonization of the power sector and reinforcement of the transmission grid. This paper applies a multi-sectoral energy system optimization model for Australia. We investigate the cost-optimal configuration of a renewable-based Australian energy system and its transformation pathway in line with the ambitious range of proposed climate change mitigation targets. We particularly analyse the implications of linking the electricity and transport sectors in a prospective, highly renewable Australian energy system.

Keywords: Decarbonization, energy system modeling, sector coupling, variable renewable energies.

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Authors: Mohammed Agbali, Claudia Trillo, Yusuf Arayici, Terrence Fernando

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The wide-spread adoption of the Smart City concept has introduced a new era of computing paradigm with opportunities for city administrators and stakeholders in various sectors to re-think the concept of urbanization and development of healthy cities. With the world population rapidly becoming urban-centric especially amongst the emerging economies, social innovation will assist greatly in deploying emerging technologies to address the development challenges in core sectors of the future cities. In this context, sustainable health-care delivery and improved quality of life of the people is considered at the heart of the healthy city agenda. This paper examines the Boston innovation landscape from the perspective of smart services and innovation ecosystem for sustainable development, especially in transportation and healthcare. It investigates the policy implementation process of the Healthy City agenda and eHealth economy innovation based on the experience of Massachusetts’s City of Boston initiatives. For this purpose, three emerging areas are emphasized, namely the eHealth concept, the innovation hubs, and the emerging technologies that drive innovation. This was carried out through empirical analysis on results of public sector and industry-wide interviews/survey about Boston’s current initiatives and the enabling environment. The paper highlights few potential research directions for service integration and social innovation for deploying emerging technologies in the healthy city agenda. The study therefore suggests the need to prioritize social innovation as an overarching strategy to build sustainable Smart Cities in order to avoid technology lock-in. Finally, it concludes that the Boston example of innovation economy is unique in view of the existing platforms for innovation and proper understanding of its dynamics, which is imperative in building smart and healthy cities where quality of life of the citizenry can be improved.

Keywords: Smart city, social innovation, eHealth, innovation hubs, emerging technologies, equitable healthcare, healthy cities.

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Authors: Najmeh Bolbolamiri, Maryam Setayesh Sanai, Ahmad Mirabadi

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This paper deals with condition monitoring of electric switch machine for railway points. Point machine, as a complex electro-mechanical device, switch the track between two alternative routes. There has been an increasing interest in railway safety and the optimal management of railway equipments maintenance, e.g. point machine, in order to enhance railway service quality and reduce system failure. This paper explores the development of Kolmogorov- Smirnov (K-S) test to detect some point failures (external to the machine, slide chairs, fixing, stretchers, etc), while the point machine (inside the machine) is in its proper condition. Time-domain stator Current signatures of normal (healthy) and faulty points are taken by 3 Hall Effect sensors and are analyzed by K-S test. The test is simulated by creating three types of such failures, namely putting a hard stone and a soft stone between stock rail and switch blades as obstacles and also slide chairs- friction. The test has been applied for those three faults which the results show that K-S test can effectively be developed for the aim of other point failures detection, which their current signatures deviate parametrically from the healthy current signature. K-S test as an analysis technique, assuming that any defect has a specific probability distribution. Empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDF) are used to differentiate these probability distributions. This test works based on the null hypothesis that ECDF of target distribution is statistically similar to ECDF of reference distribution. Therefore by comparing a given current signature (as target signal) from unknown switch state to a number of template signatures (as reference signal) from known switch states, it is possible to identify which is the most likely state of the point machine under analysis.

Keywords: stator currents monitoring, railway points, point failures, fault detection and diagnosis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, time-domain analysis.

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Authors: Chaoyi Sun, Congxin Chen, Yun Zheng, Kaizong Xia, Wei Zhang

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Crest loads are often encountered in hydropower, highway, open-pit and other engineering rock slopes. Toppling failure is one of the most common deformation failure types of anti-dip bedding rock slopes. Analysis on such failure of anti-dip bedding rock slopes subjected to crest loads has an important influence on engineering practice. Based on the step-by-step analysis approach proposed by Goodman and Bray, a geo-mechanical model was developed, and the related analysis approach was proposed for the toppling failure of anti-dip bedding rock slopes subjected to crest loads. Using the transfer coefficient method, a formulation was derived for calculating the residual thrust of slope toe and the support force required to meet the requirements of the slope stability under crest loads, which provided a scientific reference to design and support for such slopes. Through slope examples, the influence of crest loads on the residual thrust and sliding ratio coefficient was investigated for cases of different block widths and slope cut angles. The results show that there exists a critical block width for such slope. The influence of crest loads on the residual thrust is non-negligible when the block thickness is smaller than the critical value. Moreover, the influence of crest loads on the slope stability increases with the slope cut angle and the sliding ratio coefficient of anti-dip bedding rock slopes increases with the crest loads. Finally, the theoretical solutions and numerical simulations using Universal Distinct Element Code (UDEC) were compared, in which the consistent results show the applicability of both approaches.

Keywords: Anti-dip slopes, crest loads, stability analysis, toppling failure.

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Authors: K. S. Sivakumaran, Bo Chen

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The floor beams of steel buildings, cold-formed steel floor joists in particular, often require large web openings, which may affect their shear capacities. A cost effective way to mitigate the detrimental effects of such openings is to weld/fasten reinforcements. A difficulty associated with an experimental investigation to establish suitable reinforcement schemes for openings in shear zone is that moment always coexists with the shear, and thus, it is impossible to create pure shear state in experiments, resulting in moment influenced results. However, Finite Element Method (FEM) based analysis can be conveniently used to investigate the pure shear behaviour of webs including webs with reinforced openings. This paper presents the details associated with the finite element analysis of thick/thin-plates (representing the web of hot-rolled steel beam, and the web of a cold-formed steel member) having a large reinforced opening. The study considered simply-supported rectangular plates subjected to in-plane shear loadings until failure (including post-buckling behaviour). The plate was modelled using geometrically non-linear quadrilateral shell elements, and non-linear stress-strain relationship based on experiments. Total Langrangian with large displacement/small strain formulation was used for such analyses. The model also considered the initial geometric imperfections. This study considered three reinforcement schemes, namely, flat, lip, and angle reinforcements. This paper discusses the modelling considerations and presents the results associated with the various reinforcement schemes under consideration.

Keywords: Cold-formed steel, finite element analysis, opening, reinforcement, shear resistance.

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Authors: Lars A. L. Giske, Ola J. Mork, Emil Bjoerlykhaug

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The design of fish processing equipment greatly impacts how easy the cleaning process for the equipment is. This is a critical issue in fish processing, as cleaning of fish processing equipment is a task that is both costly and time consuming, in addition to being very important with regards to product quality. Even more, poorly cleaned equipment could in the worst case lead to contaminated product from which consumers could get ill. This paper will elucidate how equipment design changes could improve the work for the cleaners and saving money for the fish processing facilities by looking at a case for product design improvements. The design of fish processing equipment largely determines how easy it is to clean. “Design for cleaning” is the new hype in the industry and equipment where the ease of cleaning is prioritized gets a competitive advantage over equipment in which design for cleaning has not been prioritized. Design for cleaning is an important research area for equipment manufacturers. SeaSide AS is doing continuously improvements in the design of their products in order to gain a competitive advantage. The focus in this paper will be conveyors for internal logistic and a product called the “electro stunner” will be studied with regards to “Design for cleaning”. Often together with SeaSide’s customers, ideas for new products or product improvements are sketched out, 3D-modelled, discussed, revised, built and delivered. Feedback from the customers is taken into consideration, and the product design is revised once again. This loop was repeated multiple times, and led to new product designs. The new designs sometimes also cause the manufacturing processes to change (as in going from bolted to welded connections). Customers report back that the concrete changes applied to products by SeaSide has resulted in overall more easily cleaned equipment. These changes include, but are not limited to; welded connections (opposed to bolted connections), gaps between contact faces, opening up structures to allow cleaning “inside” equipment, and generally avoiding areas in which humidity and water may gather and build up. This is important, as there will always be bacteria in the water which will grow if the area never dries up. The work of creating more cleanable design is still ongoing, and will “never” be finished as new designs and new equipment will have their own challenges.

Keywords: Cleaning, design, equipment, fish processing, innovation.

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Authors: Kung-Jen Tu

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Many public housing properties developed by local governments in Taiwan in the 1980s have deteriorated severely as these rental apartment buildings aged. The lack of building maintainability considerations during project design phase as well as insufficient maintenance funds have made it difficult and costly for local governments to maintain and keep public housing properties in good shape. In order to assist the local governments in achieving and delivering sustainable public housing, this paper intends to present a developed design evaluation method to be used to evaluate the presented design schemes from property management and financial feasibility perspectives during project design phase of public housing projects. The design evaluation results, i.e. the property management and financial implications of presented design schemes that could occur later during the building operation and maintenance phase, will be reported to the client (the government) and design schemes revised consequently. It is proposed that the design evaluation be performed from two main perspectives: (1) Operation and property management perspective: Three criteria such as spatial appropriateness, people and vehicle circulation and control, property management working spaces are used to evaluate the ‘operation and PM effectiveness’ of a design scheme. (2) Financial feasibility perspective: Four types of financial analyses are performed to assess the long term financial feasibility of a presented design scheme, such as operational and rental income analysis, management fund analysis, regular operational and property management service expense analysis, capital expense analysis. The ongoing Chung-Li Public Housing Project developed by the Taoyuan City Government will be used as a case to demonstrate how the presented design evaluation method is implemented. The results of property management assessment as well as the annual operational and capital expenses of a proposed design scheme are presented.

Keywords: Design evaluation method, management fund, operational and capital expenses, rental apartment buildings.

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Authors: Ghassan Kbar, Shady Aly, Ibraheem Elsharawy, Akshay Bhatia, Nur Alhasan, Ronaldo Enriquez

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The Smart Help for persons with disability (PWD) is a part of the project SMARTDISABLE which aims to develop relevant solution for PWD that target to provide an adequate workplace environment for them. It would support PWD needs smartly through smart help to allow them access to relevant information and communicate with other effectively and flexibly, and smart editor that assist them in their daily work. It will assist PWD in knowledge processing and creation as well as being able to be productive at the work place. The technical work of the project involves design of a technological scenario for the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) - based assistive technologies at the workplace consisting of an integrated universal smart solution that suits many different impairment conditions and will be designed to empower the Physically disabled persons (PDP) with the capability to access and effectively utilize the ICTs in order to execute knowledge rich working tasks with minimum efforts and with sufficient comfort level. The proposed technology solution for PWD will support voice recognition along with normal keyboard and mouse to control the smart help and smart editor with dynamic auto display interface that satisfies the requirements for different PWD group. In addition, a smart help will provide intelligent intervention based on the behavior of PWD to guide them and warn them about possible misbehavior. PWD can communicate with others using Voice over IP controlled by voice recognition. Moreover, Auto Emergency Help Response would be supported to assist PWD in case of emergency. This proposed technology solution intended to make PWD very effective at the work environment and flexible using voice to conduct their tasks at the work environment. The proposed solution aims to provide favorable outcomes that assist PWD at the work place, with the opportunity to participate in PWD assistive technology innovation market which is still small and rapidly growing as well as upgrading their quality of life to become similar to the normal people at the workplace. Finally, the proposed smart help solution is applicable in all workplace setting, including offices, manufacturing, hospital, etc.

Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, ICT, Persons with disability PWD, Smart application.

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Authors: Miguel A. Orellana, Sonia E. Ruiz, Juan Bojórquez

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Optimal load factors (dead, live and seismic) used for the design of buildings may be different, depending of the seismic ground motion characteristics to which they are subjected, which are closely related to the type of soil conditions where the structures are located. The influence of the type of soil on those load factors, is analyzed in the present study. A methodology that is useful for establishing optimal load factors that minimize the cost over the life cycle of the structure is employed; and as a restriction, it is established that the probability of structural failure must be less than or equal to a prescribed value. The life-cycle cost model used here includes different types of costs. The optimization methodology is applied to two groups of reinforced concrete buildings. One set (consisting on 4-, 7-, and 10-story buildings) is located on firm ground (with a dominant period Ts=0.5 s) and the other (consisting on 6-, 12-, and 16-story buildings) on soft soil (Ts=1.5 s) of Mexico City. Each group of buildings is designed using different combinations of load factors. The statistics of the maximums inter-story drifts (associated with the structural capacity) are found by means of incremental dynamic analyses. The buildings located on firm zone are analyzed under the action of 10 strong seismic records, and those on soft zone, under 13 strong ground motions. All the motions correspond to seismic subduction events with magnitudes M=6.9. Then, the structural damage and the expected total costs, corresponding to each group of buildings, are estimated. It is concluded that the optimal load factors combination is different for the design of buildings located on firm ground than that for buildings located on soft soil.

Keywords: Life-cycle cost, optimal load factors, reinforced concrete buildings, total costs, type of soil.

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Authors: A. Arockia Selvakumar, R. Sivaramakrishnan, Srinivasa Karthik.T.V, Valluri Siva Ramakrishna, B.Vinodh.

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Industrial robots play a vital role in automation however only little effort are taken for the application of robots in machining work such as Grinding, Cutting, Milling, Drilling, Polishing etc. Robot parallel manipulators have high stiffness, rigidity and accuracy, which cannot be provided by conventional serial robot manipulators. The aim of this paper is to perform the modeling and the workspace analysis of a 3 DOF Parallel Manipulator (3 DOF PM). The 3 DOF PM was modeled and simulated using 'ADAMS'. The concept involved is based on the transformation of motion from a screw joint to a spherical joint through a connecting link. This paper work has been planned to model the Parallel Manipulator (PM) using screw joints for very accurate positioning. A workspace analysis has been done for the determination of work volume of the 3 DOF PM. The position of the spherical joints connected to the moving platform and the circumferential points of the moving platform were considered for finding the workspace. After the simulation, the position of the joints of the moving platform was noted with respect to simulation time and these points were given as input to the 'MATLAB' for getting the work envelope. Then 'AUTOCAD' is used for determining the work volume. The obtained values were compared with analytical approach by using Pappus-Guldinus Theorem. The analysis had been dealt by considering the parameters, link length and radius of the moving platform. From the results it is found that the radius of moving platform is directly proportional to the work volume for a constant link length and the link length is also directly proportional to the work volume, at a constant radius of the moving platform.

Keywords: Three Degrees of freedom Parallel Manipulator (3DOF PM), ADAMS, Work volume, MATLAB, AUTOCAD, Pappus- Guldinus Theorem.

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Authors: Mehmet Altınöz

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Organizational communication is an administrative function crucial especially for executives in the implementation of organizational and administrative functions. Executives spend a significant part of their time on communicative activities. Doing his or her daily routine, arranging meeting schedules, speaking on the telephone, reading or replying to business correspondence, or fulfilling the control functions within the organization, an executive typically engages in communication processes. Efficient communication is the principal device for the adequate implementation of administrative and organizational activities. For this purpose, management needs to specify the kind of communication system to be set up and the kind of communication devices to be used. Communication is vital for any organization. In conventional offices, communication takes place within the hierarchical pyramid called the organizational structure, and is known as formal or informal communication. Formal communication is the type that works in specified structures within the organizational rules and towards the organizational goals. Informal communication, on the other hand, is the unofficial type taking place among staff as face-to-face or telephone interaction. Communication in virtual as well as conventional offices is essential for obtaining the right information in administrative activities and decision-making. Virtual communication technologies increase the efficiency of communication especially in virtual teams. Group communication is strengthened through an inter-group central channel. Further, ease of information transmission makes it possible to reach the information at the source, allowing efficient and correct decisions. Virtual offices can present as a whole the elements of information which conventional offices produce in different environments. At present, virtual work has become a reality with its pros and cons, and will probably spread very rapidly in coming years, in line with the growth in information technologies.

Keywords: Organization, conventional office, virtual office, communication, communication model, communication functions, communication methods, vertical communication, linear communication, diagonal communication

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Authors: Wanda Luen-Wun Siu, Xiaowen Zhang

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This paper offered the primary methodical proof on how director remuneration related to enterprise earnings in listed firms in China in light of most evidence focusing on cross-sectional data or data in a short span of time. Using full economic and business panel data on China’s publicly listed enterprise from 1999 to 2020 over two decades in the China Stock Market & Accounting Research database, we found statistically significant positive associations between director pay and firm performance in privately owned firms over this period, supporting the agency theory. In contrast, among the state-owned enterprises, there was a reverse relation between director compensation and firm financial performance, contributing to the existing literature. But the results also revealed that state-owned enterprises financially performed as well as private enterprises. Such findings suggested that state ownership might line up officials’ career incentives with party prime concern rather than pecuniary incentives. Also, CEO duality enhanced firm performance. As such, allegiance to the party and possible advancement to an upper-level political position would motivate company directors in state-owned enterprises. On the other hand, directors in privately owned enterprises might be motivated by monetary incentives. In addition, a statistical regression model was proposed and tested to get the results of the performance of state-owned enterprises. Finally, some suggestions were made about how to improve the institutional management of government-owned corporations in China.

Keywords: China’s listed Firm, director compensation, CEO duality, firm performance, panel analysis.

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Authors: Jalal Haghighat Monfared, Zahra Akbari

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Today, business executives need to have useful information to make better decisions. Banks have also been using information tools so that they can direct the decision-making process in order to achieve their desired goals by rapidly extracting information from sources with the help of business intelligence. The research seeks to investigate whether there is a relationship between the quality of decision making and the business intelligence capabilities of Mellat Bank. Each of the factors studied is divided into several components, and these and their relationships are measured by a questionnaire. The statistical population of this study consists of all managers and experts of Mellat Bank's General Departments (including 190 people) who use commercial intelligence reports. The sample size of this study was 123 randomly determined by statistical method. In this research, relevant statistical inference has been used for data analysis and hypothesis testing. In the first stage, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the normalization of the data was investigated and in the next stage, the construct validity of both variables and their resulting indexes were verified using confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, using the structural equation modeling and Pearson's correlation coefficient, the research hypotheses were tested. The results confirmed the existence of a positive relationship between decision quality and business intelligence capabilities in Mellat Bank. Among the various capabilities, including data quality, correlation with other systems, user access, flexibility and risk management support, the flexibility of the business intelligence system was the most correlated with the dependent variable of the present research. This shows that it is necessary for Mellat Bank to pay more attention to choose the required business intelligence systems with high flexibility in terms of the ability to submit custom formatted reports. Subsequently, the quality of data on business intelligence systems showed the strongest relationship with quality of decision making. Therefore, improving the quality of data, including the source of data internally or externally, the type of data in quantitative or qualitative terms, the credibility of the data and perceptions of who uses the business intelligence system, improves the quality of decision making in Mellat Bank.

Keywords: Business intelligence, business intelligence capability, decision making, decision quality.

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Authors: Foad Hassaninejadafarahani, Scott Ormiston

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Reflux condensation occurs in vertical channels and tubes when there is an upward core flow of vapour (or gas-vapour mixture) and a downward flow of the liquid film. The understanding of this condensation configuration is crucial in the design of reflux condensers, distillation columns, and in loss-of-coolant safety analyses in nuclear power plant steam generators. The unique feature of this flow is the upward flow of the vapour-gas mixture (or pure vapour) that retards the liquid flow via shear at the liquid-mixture interface. The present model solves the full, elliptic governing equations in both the film and the gas-vapour core flow. The computational mesh is non-orthogonal and adapts dynamically the phase interface, thus produces a sharp and accurate interface. Shear forces and heat and mass transfer at the interface are accounted for fundamentally. This modeling is a big step ahead of current capabilities by removing the limitations of previous reflux condensation models which inherently cannot account for the detailed local balances of shear, mass, and heat transfer at the interface. Discretisation has been done based on finite volume method and co-located variable storage scheme. An in-house computer code was developed to implement the numerical solution scheme. Detailed results are presented for laminar reflux condensation from steam-air mixtures flowing in vertical parallel plate channels. The results include velocity and gas mass fraction profiles, as well as axial variations of film thickness.

Keywords: Reflux Condensation, Heat Transfer, Channel, Laminar Flow

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Authors: Ajay Sharma, R.S. Jangid

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Analytical seismic response of multi-story building supported on base isolation system is investigated under real earthquake motion. The superstructure is idealized as a shear type flexible building with lateral degree-of-freedom at each floor. The force-deformation behaviour of the isolation system is modelled by the bi-linear behaviour which can be effectively used to model all isolation systems in practice. The governing equations of motion of the isolated structural system are derived. The response of the system is obtained numerically by step-by-method under three real recorded earthquake motions and pulse motions associated in the near-fault earthquake motion. The variation of the top floor acceleration, interstory drift, base shear and bearing displacement of the isolated building is studied under different initial stiffness of the bi-linear isolation system. It was observed that the high initial stiffness of the isolation system excites higher modes in base-isolated structure and generate floor accelerations and story drift. Such behaviour of the base-isolated building especially supported on sliding type of isolation systems can be detrimental to sensitive equipment installed in the building. On the other hand, the bearing displacement and base shear found to reduce marginally with the increase of the initial stiffness of the initial stiffness of the isolation system. Further, the above behaviour of the base-isolated building was observed for different parameters of the bearing (i.e. post-yield stiffness and characteristic strength) and earthquake motions (i.e. real time history as well as pulse type motion).

Keywords: base isolation, base shear, bi-linear, earthquake, floor accelerations, inter-story drift, multi-story building, pulsemotion, stiffness ratio.

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Authors: B. Golchin, N. Riahi

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One of the most significant issues as attended a lot in recent years is that of recognizing the sentiments and emotions in social media texts. The analysis of sentiments and emotions is intended to recognize the conceptual information such as the opinions, feelings, attitudes and emotions of people towards the products, services, organizations, people, topics, events and features in the written text. These indicate the greatness of the problem space. In the real world, businesses and organizations are always looking for tools to gather ideas, emotions, and directions of people about their products, services, or events related to their own. This article uses the Twitter social network, one of the most popular social networks with about 420 million active users, to extract data. Using this social network, users can share their information and opinions about personal issues, policies, products, events, etc. It can be used with appropriate classification of emotional states due to the availability of its data. In this study, supervised learning and deep neural network algorithms are used to classify the emotional states of Twitter users. The use of deep learning methods to increase the learning capacity of the model is an advantage due to the large amount of available data. Tweets collected on various topics are classified into four classes using a combination of two Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory network and a Convolutional network. The results obtained from this study with an average accuracy of 93%, show good results extracted from the proposed framework and improved accuracy compared to previous work.

Keywords: emotion classification, sentiment analysis, social networks, deep neural networks

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Authors: Natinee Thanajaro

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In the past few decades, international research on the country of origin of products has garnered significant interest, particularly in investigating the effects of consumers’ evaluation and perception. As globalization and market competition rise, international firms are seeking ways to control their labour costs and minimise taxes. Many products are outsourced and manufactured in countries with cheap labour. Consequently, the proliferation of ‘bi-national’ products has increased, raising important questions related to consumers’ perception. Moreover, the rapid growth in emerging markets, especially in Asia, has made these countries attractive options for international brands. Therefore, studying the country of origin allows firms and researchers to understand how customers perceive such information regarding the country of manufacture and the country of the brand. This study aims to investigate the influence of the country of manufacture (COM) and country of brand (COB) on Thai consumers’ perception of the brand. In addition, it embraces a different perspective on brand experience as a moderating factor. A sample of 403 Thai respondents was collected through face-to-face survey questionnaires in central Bangkok. This research employs an experiment using a factorial design to test the hypotheses. SPSS statistics software was adopted to analyse and validate the reliability of the testing of the constructs and model hypotheses. The results of this research show that the respondents positively respond to the COB more than the COM, and brand experience plays a moderating role in this research. This research provides a significant contribution to the existing literature and managerial practicality by using multi-dimensional information on the country and analyses the relationships between these dimensions.

Keywords: Brand experience, country of brand, country of manufacture, purchase intention.

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Authors: G. Disciglio, G. Gatta, F. Lops, A. Libutti, A. Tarantino, E. Tarantino

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The experimental trial was carried out in open field at Foggia district (Apulia Region, Southern Italy), during the spring-summer season 2014, in order to evaluate the effect of four biostimulant products (RadiconÒ, Viormon plusÒ, LysodinÒ and SiaptonÒ 10L), compared with a control (no biostimulant), on the infestation of processing tomato crop (cv Dres) by the chlorophyll-lacking root parasite Phelipanche ramosa. Biostimulants consist in different categories of products (microbial inoculants, humic and fulvic acids, hydrolyzed proteins and aminoacids, seaweed extracts) which play various roles in plant growing, including the improvement of crop resistance and quali-quantitative characteristics of yield. The experimental trial was arranged according to a complete randomized block design with five treatments, each of one replicated three times. The processing tomato seedlings were transplanted on 5 May 2014. Throughout the crop cycle, P. ramosa infestation was assessed according to the number of emerged shoots (branched plants) counted in each plot, at 66, 78 and 92 day after transplanting. The tomato fruits were harvested at full-stage of maturity on 8 August 2014. From each plot, the marketable yield was measured and the quali-quantitative yield parameters (mean weight, dry matter content, colour coordinate, colour index and soluble solids content of the fruits) were determined. The whole dataset was tested according to the basic assumptions for the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the differences between the means were determined using Tukey’s tests at the 5% probability level. The results of the study showed that none of the applied biostimulants provided a whole control of Phelipanche, although some positive effects were obtained from their application. To this respect, the RadiconÒ appeared to be the most effective in reducing the infestation of this root-parasite in tomato crop. This treatment also gave the higher tomato yield.

Keywords: Biostimulants, control methods, Phelipanche ramosa, processing tomato crop.

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