Search results for: Finite difference time domain (FDTD) method

Authors: G. Sandhya Devi, G. Suvarna Kumar, S. Chandini

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This research work aims to develop a system that will analyze and identify students who indulge in malpractices/suspicious activities during the course of an academic offline examination. Automated Video Surveillance provides an optimal solution which helps in monitoring the students and identifying the malpractice event immediately. This work is organized into three modules. The first module deals with performing an impersonation check using a PCA-based face recognition method which is done by cross checking his profile with the database. The presence or absence of the student is even determined in this module by implementing an image registration technique wherein a grid is formed by considering all the images registered using the frontal camera at the determined positions. Second, detecting such facial malpractices in which a student gets involved in conversation with another, trying to obtain unauthorized information etc., based on the threshold range evaluated by considering his/her mouth state whether open or closed. The third module deals with identification of unauthorized material or gadgets used in the examination hall by training the positive samples of the object through various stages. Here, a top view camera feed is analyzed to detect the suspicious activities. The system automatically alerts the administration when any suspicious activities are identified, thereby reducing the error rate caused due to manual monitoring. This work is an improvement over our previous work published in identifying suspicious activities done by examinees in an offline examination.

Keywords: Impersonation, image registration, incrimination, object detection, threshold evaluation.

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Authors: Kuvshinov, D., Siswanto, A., Zimmerman, W. B.

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A phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate (TPA) is a synthetic analogue of phorbol ester (PE), a natural toxic compound of Euphorbiaceae plant. The oil extracted from plants of this family is useful source for primarily biofuel. However this oil might also be used as a foodstuff due to its significant nutrition content. The limitations for utilizing the oil as a foodstuff are mainly due to a toxicity of PE. Currently, a majority of PE detoxification processes are expensive as include multi steps alcohol extraction sequence.

Ozone is considered as a strong oxidative agent. It reacts with PE by attacking the carbon-carbon double bond of PE. This modification of PE molecular structure yields a non toxic ester with high lipid content.

This report presents data on development of simple and cheap PE detoxification process with water application as a buffer and ozone as reactive component. The core of this new technique is an application for a new microscale plasma unit to ozone production and the technology permits ozone injection to the water-TPA mixture in form of microbubbles.

The efficacy of a heterogeneous process depends on the diffusion coefficient which can be controlled by contact time and interfacial area. The low velocity of rising microbubbles and high surface to volume ratio allow efficient mass transfer to be achieved during the process. Direct injection of ozone is the most efficient way to process with such highly reactive and short lived chemical.

Data on the plasma unit behavior are presented and the influence of gas oscillation technology on the microbubble production mechanism has been discussed. Data on overall process efficacy for TPA degradation is shown.

Keywords: Microbubble, ozonolysis, synthetic phorbol ester.

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Authors: K. Majumdar, S. Datta

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Electricity is recognized as fundamental to industrialization and improving the quality of life of the people. Harnessing the immense untapped hydropower potential in Tripura region opens avenues for growth and provides an opportunity to improve the well-being of the people of the region, while making substantial contribution to the national economy. Gumti hydro power plant generates power to mitigate the crisis of power in Tripura, India. The first unit of hydro power plant (5MW) was commissioned in June 1976 & another two units of 5 MW was commissioned simultaneously. But out of 15MW capacity at present only 8MW- 9MW power is produced from Gumti hydro power plant during rainy season. But during lean season the production reduces to 0.5MW due to shortage of water. Now, it is essential to implement some mitigation measures so that the further atrocities can be prevented and originality will be possible to restore. The decision making ability of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Concordance Analysis Techniques (CAT) are utilized to identify the better decision or solution to the present problem. Some related attributes are identified by the method of surveying within the experts and the available reports and literatures. Similar criteria are removed and ultimately seven relevant ones are identified. All the attributes are compared with each other and rated accordingly to their importance over the other with the help of Pair wise Comparison Matrix. In the present investigation different mitigation measures are identified and compared to find the best suitable alternative which can solve the present uncertainties involving the existence of the Gumti Hydro Power Plant.

Keywords: Concordance Analysis Techniques, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Hydro Power.

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Authors: Othoman Elsayah, Naren Gupta, Binsheng Zhang

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The construction sector constitutes one of the most important sectors in the economy of any country. Contractor selection is a critical decision that is undertaken by client organizations and is central to the success of any construction project. Contractor selection (CS) is a process which involves investigating, screening and determining whether candidate contractors have the technical and financial capability to be accepted to formally tender for construction work. The process should be conducted prior to the award of contract, characterized by many factors such as: contactor’s skills, experience on similar projects, track- record in the industry, and financial stability. However, this paper evaluates the current state of knowledge in relation to contractor selection process and demonstrates the findings from the analysis of the data collected from the Delphi questionnaire survey. The survey was conducted with a group of 12 experts working in the Libyan construction industry (LCI). The paper starts by briefly explaining the general outline of the questionnaire including the survey participation rate, the different fields the experts came from, and the business titles of the participants. Then the paper describes the tests used to determine when the experts had reached consensus. The paper is based on research which aims to develop rank contractor selection criteria with specific application to make construction projects in the Libyan context. The findings of this study will be utilized to establish the scope of work that will be used as part of a PhD research.

Keywords: Contractor selection, Libyan construction industry, Decision experts and Delphi technique.

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Authors: Mohammed Sani Abdulai

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Ghana’s Public Financial Management reforms have been going on for some two decades now (1997/98 to 2017/18). Given this long period of reforms, Ghana in 2019 is putting together both a Public Financial Management (PFM) strategy and a Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) strategy for the next 5-years (2020-2024). The primary aim of these dual strategies is assisting the country in moving beyond reforms to consolidation and sustainability. In this paper we, first, examined the evolution of Ghana’s PFM reforms. We, secondly, reviewed the legal and institutional reforms undertaken to strengthen the country’s key PFM institutions. Thirdly, we summarized the strengths and weaknesses identified by the 2018 Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment of Ghana’s PFM system relating to its macro-fiscal framework, budget preparation and approval, budget execution, accounting and fiscal reporting as well as external scrutiny and audit. We, finally, considered what the country should be doing to achieve its intended goal of PFM consolidation and sustainability. Using a qualitative method of review and analysis of existing documents, we, through this paper, brought to the fore the lessons that could be learnt by other developing countries from Ghana’s PFM reforms experiences. These lessons included the need to: (a) undergird any PFM reform with a comprehensive PFM reform strategy; (b) undertake a legal and institutional reforms of the key PFM institutions; (c) assess the strengths and weaknesses of those reforms using PFM performance evaluation tools such as PEFA framework; and (d) move beyond reforms to consolidation and sustainability.

Keywords: Public financial management, public expenditure and financial accountability (PEFA), reforms, consolidation, sustainability.

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Authors: Hamid Mohammadi Makerani

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In recent years, “Bottom-up Planning Approach" has been widely accepted and expanded from planning theorists. Citizen participation becomes more important in decision-making in informal settlements. Many of previous projects and strategies due to ignorance of citizen participation, have been failed facing with informal settlements and in some cases lead physical expansion of these neighbourhoods. According to recent experiences, the new participatory approach was in somehow successful. This paper focuses on local experiences in Iran. A considerable amount of people live in informal settlements in Iran. With the previous methods, the government could not solve the problems of these settlements. It is time to examine new methods such as empowerment of the local citizens and involve them to solve the current physical, social, and economic problems. The paper aims to address the previous and new strategies facing with informal settlements, the conditions under which citizens could be involved in planning process, limits and potentials of this process, the main actors and issues and finally motivations that are able to promote citizen participation. Documentary studies, observation, interview and questionnaire have been used to achieve the above mentioned objectives. Nearly 80 percent of responder in Saadi Community are ready to participate in regularising their neighbourhoods, if pre-conditions of citizen involvement are being provided. These pre-conditions include kind of problem and its severity, the importance of issue, existence of a short-term solution, etc. Moreover, confirmation of dweller-s ownership can promote the citizen engagement in participatory projects.

Keywords: Bottom-up Planning, Citizen Participation, Informal Settlements, Local Resources.

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Authors: Sarah Motiee, Azadeh Nematzadeh, Mehrnoush Shamsfard

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Increasing growth of information volume in the internet causes an increasing need to develop new (semi)automatic methods for retrieval of documents and ranking them according to their relevance to the user query. In this paper, after a brief review on ranking models, a new ontology based approach for ranking HTML documents is proposed and evaluated in various circumstances. Our approach is a combination of conceptual, statistical and linguistic methods. This combination reserves the precision of ranking without loosing the speed. Our approach exploits natural language processing techniques to extract phrases from documents and the query and doing stemming on words. Then an ontology based conceptual method will be used to annotate documents and expand the query. To expand a query the spread activation algorithm is improved so that the expansion can be done flexible and in various aspects. The annotated documents and the expanded query will be processed to compute the relevance degree exploiting statistical methods. The outstanding features of our approach are (1) combining conceptual, statistical and linguistic features of documents, (2) expanding the query with its related concepts before comparing to documents, (3) extracting and using both words and phrases to compute relevance degree, (4) improving the spread activation algorithm to do the expansion based on weighted combination of different conceptual relationships and (5) allowing variable document vector dimensions. A ranking system called ORank is developed to implement and test the proposed model. The test results will be included at the end of the paper.

Keywords: Document ranking, Ontology, Spread activation algorithm, Annotation.

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Authors: Francis Chinweuba Eboh, Peter Ahlström, Tobias Richards

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Entropy, as an outcome of the second law of thermodynamics, measures the level of irreversibility associated with any process. The identification and reduction of irreversibility in the energy conversion process helps to improve the efficiency of the system. The entropy of pure substances known as absolute entropy is determined at an absolute reference point and is useful in the thermodynamic analysis of chemical reactions; however, municipal solid waste (MSW) is a structurally complicated material with unknown absolute entropy. In this work, an empirical model to calculate the absolute entropy of MSW based on the content of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and chlorine on a dry ash free basis (daf) is presented. The proposed model was derived from 117 relevant organic substances which represent the main constituents in MSW with known standard entropies using statistical analysis. The substances were divided into different waste fractions; namely, food, wood/paper, textiles/rubber and plastics waste and the standard entropies of each waste fraction and for the complete mixture were calculated. The correlation of the standard entropy of the complete waste mixture derived was found to be s^o_msw= 0.0101C + 0.0630H + 0.0106O + 0.0108N + 0.0155S + 0.0084Cl (kJ.K^-1.kg) and the present correlation can be used for estimating the absolute entropy of MSW by using the elemental compositions of the fuel within the range of 10.3% ≤ C ≤ 95.1%, 0.0% ≤ H ≤ 14.3%, 0.0% ≤ O ≤ 71.1%, 0.0 ≤ N ≤ 66.7%, 0.0% ≤ S ≤ 42.1%, 0.0% ≤ Cl ≤ 89.7%. The model is also applicable for the efficient modelling of a combustion system in a waste-to-energy plant.

Keywords: Absolute entropy, irreversibility, municipal solid waste, waste-to-energy.

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Authors: Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Aswathaman Vijayan

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In conventional seedling production, the seedlings are being grown in the open field under natural conditions. Here they are susceptible to sudden changes in climate were their quality and yield is affected. Quality seedlings are essential for good growth and performance of crops in main field; they serve as a foundation for the economic returns to the farmer. Producing quality seedling demands usage of hybrid seeds as they have the ability to result in better yield, greater uniformity, improved color, disease resistance, and so forth. Hybrid seed production poses major operational challenge and its seed use efficiency plays an important role. Thus in order to overcome the difficulties currently present in conventional seedling production and to efficiently use hybrid seeds, ITC Limited Agri Business Divisions - Sustainability Cell as conceptualized a novel method of seedling production unit for farmers in West Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. The “Green House based Float Seedling" methodology aims at a protected cultivation technique wherein the micro climate surrounding the plant/seedling body is controlled partially or fully as per the requirement of the species. This paper reports on the techno economic evaluation of green house for cultivation of float based seedling production with experimental results that was attained from the pilot implementation in West Godavari District, Rajahmundry region of India.

Keywords: Economic Assessment, Float Seedling, Green House, ITC Limited, Payback period.

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Authors: Hayam M. Ibrahim, Ferial M. Abu-Salem

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Medicinal plants are now gaining attractiveness in treatment of bacterial infections and food preservation. The objective of this study was to assess antibacterial activity of some medicinal plants on pathogenic bacteria. Screening of antibacterial activity of aqueous and methanol extracts of some plants: Jojoba, Ginger, Sage, Thyme and Clove against Bacillus cereus, Salmonella typhimurium, Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli were investigated. Antibacterial activity was performed by agar diffusion and disc diffusion method. Jatropha, Jojoba, Clove and Ginger extracts showed notable bacterial activity in the first screening step then selected to be tested against Bacillus cereus (Gram+), Staphylococcus aureus (Gram+) and Salmonella typhimurium (Gram−) and their effect was compared using antibiotics as control. Screening results showed potential antibacterial activity of the tested plant extracts against the screened bacterial strains. It was found that methanol extracts exhibited higher antibacterial activity than aqueous extracts. Methanol extract of Jatropha showed the highest inhibition zone against Staphylococcus aureus (Gram+) with 24.00 mm diameter, compared to the other plant extracts followed by clove. Meanwhile, the inhibition zones of methanol extracts of Jojoba and Ginger were the same (12mm).The Gram-positive bacteria were found to be more sensitive to aqueous and methanol extracts than Gram-negative bacteria.

Keywords: Antibacterial activity, Food-borne pathogenic bacteria, Medicinal plants, Plant extracts.

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Authors: Mohammed A. Elhaj, Jamal S. Yassin

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In the present time, energy crises is considered a severe problem across the world. For the protection of global environment and maintain ecological balance, energy saving is considered one of the most vital issues from the view point of fuel consumption. As the industrial sectors everywhere continue efforts to improve their energy efficiency, recovering waste heat losses provides an attractive opportunity for an emission free and less costly energy resource. In the other hand the using of solar energy has become more insistent particularly after the high gross of prices and running off the conventional energy sources. Therefore, it is essential that we should endeavor for waste heat recovery as well as solar energy by making significant and concrete efforts. For these reasons this investigation is carried out to study and analyze the performance of a power plant working by a combined cycle in which heat recovery system generator (HRSG) gets its energy from the waste heat of a gas turbine unit. Evaluation of the performance of the plant is based on different thermal efficiencies of the main components in addition to the second law analysis considering the exergy destructions for the whole components. The contribution factors including the solar as well as the wasted energy are considered in the calculations. The final results have shown that there is significant exergy destruction in solar concentrator and the combustion chamber of the gas turbine unit. Other components such as compressor, gas turbine, steam turbine and heat exchangers having insignificant exergy destruction. Also, solar energy can contribute by about 27% of the input energy to the plant while the energy lost with exhaust gases can contribute by about 64% at maximum cases.

Keywords: Solar energy, environment, efficiency, waste heat, steam generator, performance, exergy destruction.

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Authors: Pragya Paneru

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This paper explores altogether 10 primary teachers’ views on gender representation in primary level textbooks. Data were collected from the teachers who taught in private schools in the Kailali and Kathmandu districts. This research uses a semi-structured interview method to obtain information regarding teachers’ attitudes toward gender representations in textbook contents. The interview data were analysed by using critical skills of qualitative research. The findings revealed that most of the teachers were unaware and regarded gender issues as insignificant to discuss in primary-level classes. Most of them responded to the questions personally and claimed that there were no gender issues in their classrooms. Some of the teachers connected gender issues with contexts other than textbook representations such as school discrimination in the distribution of salary among male and female teachers, school practices of awarding girls rather than boys as the most disciplined students, following girls’ first rule in the assembly marching, encouraging only girls in the stage shows, and involving students in gender-specific activities such as decorating works for girls and physical tasks for boys. The interview also revealed teachers’ covert gendered attitudes in their remarks. Nevertheless, most of the teachers accepted that gender-biased contents have an impact on learners and this problem can be solved with more gender-centred research in the education field, discussions, and training to increase awareness regarding gender issues. Agreeing with the suggestion of teachers, this paper recommends proper training and awareness regarding how to confront gender issues in textbooks.

Keywords: Content analysis, gender equality, school education, critical awareness.

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Authors: Wanida Suwunniponth

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The objectives of this research paper were to study the expectation and satisfaction of tourists in five tourism service quality dimensions, namely, website quality, service ability, trust ability, customer empathy, and responsiveness to customer and also to study the influences of satisfaction affecting loyalty toward quality service of the online tourism enterprises located in Bangkok Thailand. This research utilized both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In terms of quantitative method, a questionnaire was used as a tool to collect data from 400 tourists who were using in online travel services. Statistics analysis included descriptive statistics, t-test and Multiple Regression Analysis. In terms of qualitative analysis, an in-depth interview and content analysis were used along with 10 individual management levels of e-commerce enterprises.

The results revealed that the respondents had higher expectations than their level of satisfaction in all five categories. However, the respondents were more satisfied with online travel services than without online service. The demographic factors such as gender and age had no influence on the level of satisfaction whereas the demographic factors of education, occupation, and income had influenced the level of satisfaction. The test results also indicated that the level of satisfaction from responsiveness to customer had the highest influence on the loyalty of tourists who used online travel. The level of satisfaction from customer empathy had the highest influence on the tourists to recommend others to use online travel services. Also, the level of satisfaction from service ability had the highest influence on tourists to take an actual trip.

Keywords: Satisfaction, Loyalty, Service Quality, Online Tourism Enterprises.

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Authors: Mylena McCoggle, Shyra Wilson, Andrea Rivera, Rocio Alba-Flores, Valentin Soloiu

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This work describes a system that uses electromyography (EMG) signals obtained from muscle sensors and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for signal classification and pattern recognition that is used to control a small unmanned aerial vehicle using specific arm movements. The main objective of this endeavor is the development of an intelligent interface that allows the user to control the flight of a drone beyond direct manual control. The sensor used were the MyoWare Muscle sensor which contains two EMG electrodes used to collect signals from the posterior (extensor) and anterior (flexor) forearm, and the bicep. The collection of the raw signals from each sensor was performed using an Arduino Uno. Data processing algorithms were developed with the purpose of classifying the signals generated by the arm’s muscles when performing specific movements, namely: flexing, resting, and motion of the arm. With these arm motions roll control of the drone was achieved. MATLAB software was utilized to condition the signals and prepare them for the classification. To generate the input vector for the ANN and perform the classification, the root mean square and the standard deviation were processed for the signals from each electrode. The neuromuscular information was trained using an ANN with a single 10 neurons hidden layer to categorize the four targets. The result of the classification shows that an accuracy of 97.5% was obtained. Afterwards, classification results are used to generate the appropriate control signals from the computer to the drone through a Wi-Fi network connection. These procedures were successfully tested, where the drone responded successfully in real time to the commanded inputs.

Keywords: Biosensors, electromyography, Artificial Neural Network, Arduino, drone flight control, machine learning.

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Authors: Blessing Ojeme, Frederick Quinn, Russell Karls, Shannon Quinn

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The detection and segmentation of mitochondria from fluorescence microscopy is crucial for understanding the complex structure of the nervous system. However, the constant fission and fusion of mitochondria and image distortion in the background make the task of detection and segmentation challenging. Although there exists a number of open-source software tools and artificial intelligence (AI) methods designed for analyzing mitochondrial images, the availability of only a few combined expertise in the medical field and AI required to utilize these tools poses a challenge to its full adoption and use in clinical settings. Motivated by the advantages of automated methods in terms of good performance, minimum detection time, ease of implementation, and cross-platform compactibility, this study proposes a fully automated framework for the detection and segmentation of mitochondria using both image shape information and descriptive statistics. Using the low-cost, open-source Python and OpenCV library, the algorithms are implemented in three stages: pre-processing; image binarization; and coarse-to-fine segmentation. The proposed model is validated using the fluorescence mitochondrial dataset. Ground truth labels generated using Labkit were also used to evaluate the performance of our detection and segmentation model using precision, recall and rand index. The study produces good detection and segmentation results and reports the challenges encountered during the image analysis of mitochondrial morphology from the fluorescence mitochondrial dataset. A discussion on the methods and future perspectives of fully automated frameworks concludes the paper.

Keywords: 2D, Binarization, CLAHE, detection, fluorescence microscopy, mitochondria, segmentation.

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Authors: Şemsettin Şahin, Ahmet Oğuz Aktürk, İsmail Çelik

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This study investigated the views of teachers, students and their parents on the FATIH (Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology) Project, which was put into service by the Ministry of National Education in cooperation with the Ministry of Transportation in Turkey in November 2010 for the purpose of increasing students’ success and planned to be completed within 5 years. The study group consisted of teachers employed in a pilot school in the province of Karaman in central Turkey included within the scope of the FATIH Project, students attending this school and parents whose children are students in that school. The research data were collected through forms developed by the researchers to determine the views of teachers, students and parents on the FATIH Project. The descriptive analysis method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. An analysis of the data revealed that a large majority of the teachers and the students believed that if computers were used to serve their set purpose, then they could make considerable contributions to education. A large majority of the parents, on the other hand, regard the use of computers in education as a great opportunity for the students. The views of the teachers, students and parents on the FATIH Project usually overlap. Most of the participants in the study pointed out that the FATIH Project was intended to use technology effectively in education. Moreover, each individual participant described their role in the FATIH Project in accordance with their relative position and stated that they could perform whatever was expected of them for the effective and efficient use and progress of the Project. The views of the participants regarding the FATIH Project vary according to the kind of the participants.

Keywords: Education, FATIH Project, technology.

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Authors: F. Kadioglu, M. Z. Polat, A. R. Gunay

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Correct measurement of a structural damping value is an important issue for the reliable design of the components exposed to vibratory and noise conditions. As far as a vibrating beam technique is concerned, the specimens under the test somehow are interacted with measuring and exciting devices, and also with boundary conditions of the test set-up. The aim of this study is to propose a vibrating beam method that offers a non-contact dynamic measurement of solid beam specimens. To evaluate the possible effects of the clamped portion of the specimens with clamped-free ends on the dynamic values (damping and the elastic modulus), the same measuring devices were used, and the results were compared to those with the free-free ends. First, the governing equations of beam specimens related to the free-free and clamped-free boundary conditions were expressed to be able to find their natural frequencies, flexural modulus and damping values. To get a clear idea of the sensitivity of the boundary conditions to the damping values at low, medium and high levels, representative materials were subjected to the tests. The results show that the specimens with low damping values are especially sensitive to the boundary conditions and that the most reliable structural damping values are obtained for the specimens with free-free ends. For the damping values at the low levels, a deviation of about 368% was obtained between the specimens with free-free and clamped-free ends, yet, for those having high inherent damping values, comparable results were obtained. It was obvious that the set-up with clamped-free boundary conditions was not able to produce correct/reliable damping values for the specimens with low inherent damping. 

Keywords: Boundary conditions, damping, dynamic values, non-contact measuring systems, vibrating beam technique.

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Authors: Tonislav Ivanov, Oleksii Nedashkivskyi, Denis Babeshko, Vadim Pinskiy, Matthew Putman

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Training a machine learning model for object detection that generalizes well is known to benefit from a training dataset with diverse examples. However, training datasets usually contain many repeats of common examples of a class and lack rarely seen examples. This is due to the process commonly used during human annotation where a person would proceed sequentially through a list of images labeling a sufficiently high total number of examples. Instead, the method presented involves an active process where, after the initial labeling of several images is completed, the next subset of images for labeling is selected by an algorithm. This process of algorithmic image selection and manual labeling continues in an iterative fashion. The algorithm used for the image selection is a deep learning algorithm, based on the U-shaped architecture, which quantifies the presence of unseen data in each image in order to find images that contain the most novel examples. Moreover, the location of the unseen data in each image is highlighted, aiding the labeler in spotting these examples. Experiments performed using semiconductor wafer data show that labeling a subset of the data, curated by this algorithm, resulted in a model with a better performance than a model produced from sequentially labeling the same amount of data. Also, similar performance is achieved compared to a model trained on exhaustive labeling of the whole dataset. Overall, the proposed approach results in a dataset that has a diverse set of examples per class as well as more balanced classes, which proves beneficial when training a deep learning model.

Keywords: Computer vision, deep learning, object detection, semiconductor.

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Authors: Ya-Hui Lee, Chien-Hung Hsieh, Ching-Yi Lu

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Demographic aging is the major problem that Taiwanese society is facing, and retirement life adaptation is the most concerning issue. In recent years, studies have suggested that in order to have successful aging and retirement planning, a view for the future is necessary. In Taiwan, civil servants receive better pensions and retirement benefits than do other industries. Therefore, their retirement preparation is considerably more significant than other senior groups in Taiwan. The purpose of this study is to understand the correlation of proactive coping and retirement planning of senior civil servants in Taiwan. The method is conducted by questionnaire surveys, with 342 valid questionnaires collected. The results of this study are: 1. The background variables of the interviewees, including age, perceived economic statuses, and retirement statuses, are all significantly related to their proactive coping and retirement planning. 2. Regarding age, the interviewees with ages 55 and above have better proactive coping and retirement planning than those with ages 45 and below. 3. In the aspect of perceived economic statuses, the participants who feel “very good” economic statuses have better proactive coping ability and retirement readiness than those who feel “bad” and “very bad”. 4. Retirees have better proactive coping and retirement planning than those who are still working. 5. Monthly income is significant in retirement planning only. The participants’ retirement planning would be better if they have higher incomes. Furthermore, the participants’ retirement planning would be better if their revenue were €1453~€1937, than if their revenue were below €968. 6. There are positive correlations between proactive coping and retirement planning. 7. Proactive coping can predict retirement planning. The result of this study will be provided as references to the Taiwan government for educational retirement planning policies.

Keywords: Civil servants, proactive coping, retirement planning.

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Authors: Patience Muchini, Electdom Matandiroya, Emmanuel Mashonjowa

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A ground-end manifestation of space weather phenomena is known as geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). GICs flow along the electric power transmission cables connecting the transformers and between the grounding points of power transformers during significant geomagnetic storms. Zimbabwe has no study that notes if grid failures have been caused by GICs. Research and monitoring are needed to investigate this possible relationship purpose of this paper is to characterize GICs with a power grid network. This paper analyses data collected, which are geomagnetic data, which include the Kp index, Disturbance storm time (DST) index, and the G-Scale from geomagnetic storms and also analyses power grid data, which includes reactive power, relay tripping, and alarms from high voltage substations and then correlates the data. This research analysis was first theoretically analyzed by studying geomagnetic parameters and then experimented upon. To correlate, MATLAB was used as the basic software to analyze the data. Latitudes of the substations were also brought into scrutiny to note if they were an impact due to the location as low latitudes areas like most parts of Zimbabwe, there are less severe geomagnetic variations. Based on theoretical and graphical analysis, it has been proven that there is a slight relationship between power system failures and GICs. Further analyses can be done by implementing measuring instruments to measure any currents in the grounding of high-voltage transformers when geomagnetic storms occur. Mitigation measures can then be developed to minimize the susceptibility of the power network to GICs.

Keywords: Adverse space weather, DST index, geomagnetically induced currents, Kp index, reactive power.

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Authors: Avishek Chanda, Nam Kyeun Kim, Debes Bhattacharyya

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The use of renewable substitutes in various semi-structural and structural applications has experienced an increase since the last few decades. Sandwich panels have been used for many decades, although research on understanding the effects of the core structures on the panels’ fire-reaction properties is limited. The current work investigates the fire-performance of a corrugated sandwich panel made from renewable, biodegradable, and sustainable material, plywood. The bench-scale fire testing apparatus, cone-calorimeter, was employed to evaluate the required fire-reaction properties of the sandwich core in a panel configuration, with three corrugated layers glued together with face-sheets under a heat irradiance of 50 kW/m². The study helped in documenting a unique heat release trend associated with the fire performance of the 3-layered corrugated sandwich panels and in understanding the structural stability of the samples in the event of a fire. Furthermore, the total peak heat release rate was observed to be around 421 kW/m², which is significantly low compared to many polymeric materials in the literature. The total smoke production was also perceived to be very limited compared to other structural materials, and the total heat release was also nominal. The time to ignition of 21.7 s further outlined the advantages of using the plywood component since polymeric composites, even with flame-retardant additives, tend to ignite faster. Overall, the corrugated plywood sandwich panels had significant fire-reaction properties and could have important structural applications. The possible use of structural panels made from bio-degradable material opens a new avenue for the use of similar structures in sandwich panel preparation.

Keywords: Corrugated sandwich panel, fire-reaction properties, plywood, renewable material.

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Authors: Ibrahim A. Al-Sulaihi, Khalid S. Al-Gahtani, Abdullah M. Al-Sugair, Aref A. Abadel

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Achieving environmental sustainability is one of the important issues considered in many countries’ vision. Green/Sustainable building is widely used terminology for describing a friendly environmental construction. Applying sustainable practices has a significant importance in various fields, including construction field that consumes an enormous amount of resource and causes a considerable amount of waste. The need for sustainability is increased in the regions that suffering from the limitation of natural resource and extreme weather conditions such as Saudi Arabia. Since buildings designs are getting sophisticated, the need for tools, which support decision-making for sustainability issues, is increasing, especially in the design and preconstruction stages. In this context, Building Information Modeling (BIM) can aid in performing complex building performance analyses to ensure an optimized sustainable building design. Accordingly, this paper introduces a roadmap towards developing a systematic approach for presenting the sustainability of buildings using BIM. The approach includes set of main processes including; identifying the sustainability parameters that can be used for sustainability assessment in Saudi Arabia, developing sustainability assessment method that fits the special circumstances in the Kingdom, identifying the sustainability requirements and BIM functions that can be used for satisfying these requirements, and integrating these requirements with identified functions. As a result, the sustainability-BIM approach can be developed which helps designers in assessing the sustainability and exploring different design alternatives at the early stage of the construction project.

Keywords: Green buildings, sustainability, BIM, rating systems, environment, Saudi Arabia.

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Authors: Hassan Masoumi, Rashed Alavi

Abstract:

Wheat is one of the strategic crops in Iran, on which the household food basket is highly dependent. Although this crop is cultivated and produced in almost all provinces of the country, its production efficiency is lower than the global and regional averages due to the lack of optimal use of allocated resources. In this research, which was carried out with a documentary and library method, first, the total and partial productivity indices of irrigated wheat production were calculated in large, medium and small exploitation scales in different provinces of the country, and then the provinces were clustered in terms of these indices. The results showed that the total productivity of production factors had a direct correlation with the scale of exploitation, so that with the increase in the size of exploitations, the total productivity index increased. On the scale of small exploitations, North Khorasan, Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, on a medium scale, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province and on the scale of large exploitations, Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari provinces, Kohkiloyeh and Boyer Ahmad and North Khorasan, with better use of production resources compared to other provinces, were placed in the best cluster in terms of total productivity index. The high total productivity index in Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province is related to the higher productivity of factors such as mechanization and land in these provinces. Finally, the methods of using these factors in productive provinces, along with technical and specialized regional guidelines, can facilitate the improvement of productivity in less productive provinces.

Keywords: Clustering, Irrigated wheat, Iran, total productivity.

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Authors: Francesco Ruscio, Paolo Paoletti, Jens Thomas, Paul Myers, Sebastiano Fichera

Abstract:

This paper presents the development of a low-cost monitoring system for a hydroponic urban vertical farm, enabling its automation and a quantitative assessment of the farm performance. Urban farming has seen increasing interest in the last decade thanks to the development of energy efficient and affordable LED lights; however, the optimal configuration of such systems (i.e. amount of nutrients, light-on time, ambient temperature etc.) is mostly based on the farmers’ experience and empirical guidelines. Moreover, even if simple, the maintenance of such systems is labor intensive as it requires water to be topped-up periodically, mixing of the nutrients etc. To unlock the full potential of urban farming, a quantitative understanding of the role that each variable plays in the growth of the plants is needed, together with a higher degree of automation. The low-cost monitoring system proposed in this paper is a step toward filling this knowledge and technological gap, as it enables collection of sensor data related to water and air temperature, water level, humidity, pressure, light intensity, pH and electric conductivity without requiring any human intervention. More sensors and actuators can also easily be added thanks to the modular design of the proposed platform. Data can be accessed remotely via a simple web interface. The proposed platform can be used both for quantitatively optimizing the setup of the farms and for automating some of the most labor-intensive maintenance activities. Moreover, such monitoring system can also potentially be used for high-level decision making, once enough data are collected.

Keywords: Automation, hydroponics, internet of things, monitoring system, urban farming.

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Authors: Virginia Bassily, Sherif Goubran

Abstract:

In heritage conservation and revival, much of the focus is placed on the techniques and methods to preserve, restore, and revive heritage structures and locations. However, more attention needs to be drawn to how deterioration happens and its effect on the area’s character and socio-economic status. To this end, this research aims to examine the decline and its effect in the El Korba area in Heliopolis, Cairo, Egypt. El Korba was designed with a unique architectural character to stimulate social and economic life. However, the area has been on a path of physical deterioration that is corroding the social life on its streets. This research uses diachronic analysis in Ibrahim El-Lakkani Boulevard of El Korba based on a previously developed framework that connects buildings’ architectural features to the degree of social interaction in the street to document the changes that the building deterioration could have caused. Architectural features of the street level during both the original state (1906) and the current state (2021) are broken down and categorized in those six parameters to understand their decline or improvement over time. We find that the parameters that have decreased over the years and caused the deterioration are complexity and architectural character, permeability, territoriality and personalization, and physical comfort.  Based on these findings, revival projects can focus on physical parameters that create synergistic benefits by preserving and renewing heritage locations and revitalizing their socio-economic potential.

Keywords: Architectural character, heritage building conservation, enclosure, ground-floor use, El Korba, visual and physical permeability, personalization, physical comfort, social life, territoriality.

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Authors: Mukul Shukla, Rasheedat M. Mahamood, Esther T. Akinlabi, Sisa. Pityana

Abstract:

Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) is an additive manufacturing process with capabilities that include: producing new part directly from 3 Dimensional Computer Aided Design (3D CAD) model, building new part on the existing old component and repairing an existing high valued component parts that would have been discarded in the past. With all these capabilities and its advantages over other additive manufacturing techniques, the underlying physics of the LMD process is yet to be fully understood probably because of high interaction between the processing parameters and studying many parameters at the same time makes it further complex to understand. In this study, the effect of laser power and powder flow rate on physical properties (deposition height and deposition width), metallurgical property (microstructure) and mechanical (microhardness) properties on laser deposited most widely used aerospace alloy are studied. Also, because the Ti6Al4V is very expensive, and LMD is capable of reducing buy-to-fly ratio of aerospace parts, the material utilization efficiency is also studied. Four sets of experiments were performed and repeated to establish repeatability using laser power of 1.8 kW and 3.0 kW, powder flow rate of 2.88 g/min and 5.67 g/min, and keeping the gas flow rate and scanning speed constant at 2 l/min and 0.005 m/s respectively. The deposition height / width are found to increase with increase in laser power and increase in powder flow rate. The material utilization is favoured by higher power while higher powder flow rate reduces material utilization. The results are presented and fully discussed.

Keywords: Laser Metal Deposition, Material Efficiency, Microstructure, Ti6Al4V.

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Authors: Krishna Kumar Singh, Praveen Jain

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Collection of storm water runoff and forcing it into the groundwater is the need of the hour to sustain the ground water table. However, the runoff entraps various types of sediments and other floating objects whose removal are essential to avoid pollution of ground water and blocking of pores of aquifer. However, it requires regular cleaning and maintenance due to problem of clogging. To evaluate the performance of filter system consisting of coarse sand (CS), gravel (G) and pebble (P) layers, a laboratory experiment was conducted in a rectangular column. The effect of variable thickness of CS, G and P layers of the filtration unit of the recharge shaft on the recharge rate and the sediment concentration of effluent water were evaluated. Medium sand (MS) of three particle sizes, viz. 0.150–0.300 mm (T1), 0.300–0.425 mm (T2) and 0.425–0.600 mm of thickness 25 cm, 30 cm and 35 cm respectively in the top layer of the filter system and having seven influent sediment concentrations of 250–3,000 mg/l were used for experimental study. The performance was evaluated in terms of recharge rates and clogging time. The results indicated that 100 % suspended solids were entrapped in the upper 10 cm layer of MS, the recharge rates declined sharply for influent concentrations of more than 1,000 mg/l. All treatments with higher thickness of MS media indicated recharge rate slightly more than that of all treatment with lower thickness of MS media respectively. The performance of storm water infiltration systems was highly dependent on the formation of a clogging layer at the filter. An empirical relationship has been derived between recharge rates, inflow sediment load, size of MS and thickness of MS with using MLR.

Keywords: Groundwater, medium sand-mixed storm water filter, inflow sediment load.

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Authors: Nooshin La'l Mohamadi

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Due to the fact that in the new century customers tend to express globally increasing demands, networks of interconnected businesses have been established in societies and the management of such networks seems to be a major key through gaining competitive advantages. Supply chain management encompasses such managerial activities. Within a supply chain, a critical role is played by quality. QFD is a widely-utilized tool which serves the purpose of not only bringing quality to the ultimate provision of products or service packages required by the end customer or the retailer, but it can also initiate us into a satisfactory relationship with our initial customer; that is the wholesaler. However, the wholesalers- cooperation is considerably based on the capabilities that are heavily dependent on their locations and existing circumstances. Therefore, it is undeniable that for all companies each wholesaler possesses a specific importance ratio which can heavily influence the figures calculated in the House of Quality in QFD. Moreover, due to the competitiveness of the marketplace today, it-s been widely recognized that consumers- expression of demands has been highly volatile in periods of production. Apparently, such instability and proneness to change has been very tangibly noticed and taking it into account during the analysis of HOQ is widely influential and doubtlessly required. For a more reliable outcome in such matters, this article demonstrates the application viability of Analytic Network Process for considering the wholesalers- reputation and simultaneously introduces a mortality coefficient for the reliability and stability of the consumers- expressed demands in course of time. Following to this, the paper provides further elaboration on the relevant contributory factors and approaches through the calculation of such coefficients. In the end, the article concludes that an empirical application is needed to achieve broader validity.

Keywords: Analytic Network Process, Quality Function Deployment, QFD flaws, Supply Chain Management

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Authors: Shahram Naghizadeh Raeisi, Ali Alghooneh

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Using membrane technology and modification of milk protein structural properties, a lactose free yogurt was developed. The functional, textural and structural properties of the sample were evaluated and compared with the commercial ones. Results showed that the modification of protein in high fat set yogurt resulted in 11.55%, 18%, 20.21% and 7.08% higher hardness, consistency, water holding capacity, and shininess values compared with the control one. Furthermore, these indices of modified low fat set yogurt were 21.40%, 25.41%, 28.15% & 10.58% higher than the control one, which could be related to the gel network microstructural properties in yogurt formulated with modified protein. In this way, in comparison with the control one, the index of linkage strength (A), the number of linkages (z), and time scale of linkages (λrel) of the high fat modified yogurt were 22.10%, 50.68%, 21.82% higher than the control one; whereas, the average linear distance between two adjacent crosslinks (ξ), was 16.77% lower than the control one. For low fat modified yogurt, A, z, λrel, and ξ indices were 34.30%, 61.70% and 42.60% higher and 19.20% lower than the control one, respectively. The shelf life of modified yogurt was extended to 10 weeks in the refrigerator, while, the control set yogurt had a 3 weeks shelf life. The acidity of high fat and low fat modified yogurts increased from 76 to 84 and 72 to 80 Dornic degrees during 10 weeks of storage, respectively, whereas for control high fat and low fat yogurts they increased from 82 to 122 and 77 to 112 Dornic degrees, respectively. This behavior could be due to the elimination of microorganism’s source of energy in modified yogurt. Furthermore, the calories of high fat and low fat lactose free yogurts were 25% and 40% lower than their control samples, respectively. Generally, results showed that the lactose free yogurt with modified protein, despite of 1% lower protein content than the control one, showed better functional properties, nutritional properties, network parameters, and shelf stability, which could be promising in the set yogurt industry.

Keywords: Lactose free, low calorie, network properties, protein modification.

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Authors: Mohammad Saeri, Noor Rizkiyah, Kambang Vetrani Asie, Titin Apung Atikah

Abstract:

The study aims to assess efficient specific-location soybean farming technology assembly by assisting the farmers in applying the suggested technology. Superimposed trial was conducted to know NPK fertilizer effect toward soybean growth and yield and soybean improved variety test for the dissemination of improved variety. The assessment was conducted at the farmers group of Sumber Rejeki, Kepulungan Village, Gempol Sub-district, Pasuruan Regency as the soybean central at Pasuruan area. The number of farmers involved in the study was 38 people with 25 ha soybean area. This study was held from July to October 2012.  The recommended technology package agreed at the socialization time and used in this research were: using Argomulyo variety seeds of 40 kg/ha, planting by drilling, planting by distance of 40x10 cm, deciding the seeds amount of 2-3 seeds per hole, and giving fertilization based on recommendation of East Java AIAT of 50 kg Urea, 100 kg SP-36 and 50 kg KCl.  Farmers around the research location were used as control group. Assessment on soybean farming system was considered effective because it could increase the production up to 38%. The farming analysis showed that the result collaborator farmers gained were positively higher than non-collaborator farmers with RC ratio of 2.03 and 1.54, respectively. Argomulyo variety has the prospect to be developed due to the high yield of about 2 tons/ha and the larger seeds. The NPK fertilization test at the soybean plants showed that the fertilization had minor effect on the yield.

Keywords: Farming system, soybean, variety, location specific farming.

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