Abstract: Soil mechanics is a traditional course in any
university. Management of lab classes is one of the main issues to
deliver a proper outline. In Curtin University, different methods
applied to check the efficiency of these methods. One of them was
mainly rely on demonstration and the other one mainly on involving
students in running tests. Comparison between these delivery
methods also are outlined in summary section. The recommendation
also made that the more satisfaction is reachable while the students
engaged.
Abstract: Vinegar or sour wine is a product of alcoholic and
subsequent acetous fermentation of sugary precursors derived from
several fruits or starchy substrates. This delicious food additive and
supplement contains not less than 4 grams of acetic acid in 100 cubic
centimeters at 20°C. Among the large number of bacteria that are
able to produce acetic acid, only few genera are used in vinegar
industry most significant of which are Acetobacter and
Gluconobacter. In this research we isolated and identified an
Acetobacter strain from Iranian apricot, a very delicious and sensitive
summer fruit to decay, we gathered from fruit's stores in Isfahan,
Iran. The main culture media we used were Carr, GYC, Frateur and
an industrial medium for vinegar production. We isolated this strain
using a novel miniature fermentor we made at Pars Yeema
Biotechnologists Co., Isfahan Science and Technology Town (ISTT),
Isfahan, Iran. The microscopic examinations of isolated strain from
Iranian apricot showed gram negative rods to cocobacilli. Their
catalase reaction was positive and oxidase reaction was negative and
could ferment ethanol to acetic acid. Also it showed an acceptable
growth in 5%, 7% and 9% ethanol concentrations at 30°C using
modified Carr media after 24, 48 and 96 hours incubation
respectively. According to its tolerance against high concentrations of
ethanol after four days incubation and its high acetic acid production,
8.53%, after 144 hours, this strain could be considered as a suitable
industrial strain for a production of a new type of vinegar, apricot
vinegar, with a new and delicious taste. In conclusion this is the first
report of isolation and identification of an Acetobacter strain from
Iranian apricot with a very good tolerance against high ethanol
concentrations as well as high acetic acid productivity in an
acceptable incubation period of time industrially. This strain could be
used in vinegar industry to convert apricot spoilage to a beneficiary
product and mentioned characteristics have made it as an amenable
strain in food and agricultural biotechnology.
Abstract: Among the various cooling processes in industrial
applications such as: electronic devices, heat exchangers, gas
turbines, etc. Gas turbine blades cooling is the most challenging one.
One of the most common practices is using ribbed wall because of
the boundary layer excitation and therefore making the ultimate
cooling. Vortex formation between rib and channel wall will result in
a complicated behavior of flow regime. At the other hand, selecting
the most efficient method for capturing the best results comparing to
experimental works would be a fascinating issue. In this paper 4
common methods in turbulence modeling: standard k-e, rationalized
k-e with enhanced wall boundary layer treatment, k-w and RSM
(Reynolds stress model) are employed to a square ribbed channel to
investigate the separation and thermal behavior of the flow in the
channel. Finally all results from different methods which are used in
this paper will be compared with experimental data available in
literature to ensure the numerical method accuracy.
Abstract: Over Current Relays (OCRs) and Directional Over Current Relays (DOCRs) are widely used for the radial protection and ring sub transmission protection systems and for distribution systems. All previous work formulates the DOCR coordination problem either as a Non-Linear Programming (NLP) for TDS and Ip or as a Linear Programming (LP) for TDS using recently a social behavior (Particle Swarm Optimization techniques) introduced to the work. In this paper, a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO) technique is discussed for the optimal settings of DOCRs in power systems as a Non-Linear Programming problem for finding Ip values of the relays and for finding the TDS setting as a linear programming problem. The calculation of the Time Dial Setting (TDS) and the pickup current (Ip) setting of the relays is the core of the coordination study. PSO technique is considered as realistic and powerful solution schemes to obtain the global or quasi global optimum in optimization problem.
Abstract: This paper presents an analytical framework for an
effective online personal knowledge management (PKM) of
knowledge workers. The development of this framework is prompted
by our qualitative research on the PKM processes and cognitive
enablers of knowledge workers in eight organisations selected from
three main industries in Malaysia. This multiple-case research
identifies the relationships between the effectiveness of four online
PKM processes: get/retrieve, understand/analyse, share, and connect.
It also establishes the importance of cognitive enablers that mediate
this relationship, namely, method, identify, decide and drive.
Qualitative analysis is presented as the findings, supported by the
preceded quantitative analysis on an exploratory questionnaire
survey.
Abstract: Newton-Raphson State Estimation method using bus
admittance matrix remains as an efficient and most popular method to
estimate the state variables. Elements of Jacobian matrix are computed
from standard expressions which lack physical significance. In this
paper, elements of the state estimation Jacobian matrix are obtained
considering the power flow measurements in the network elements.
These elements are processed one-by-one and the Jacobian matrix H is
updated suitably in a simple manner. The constructed Jacobian matrix
H is integrated with Weight Least Square method to estimate the state
variables. The suggested procedure is successfully tested on IEEE
standard systems.
Abstract: Continuous measurements and multivariate methods are applied in researching the effects of energy consumption on indoor air quality (IAQ) in a Finnish one-family house. Measured data used in this study was collected continuously in a house in Kuopio, Eastern Finland, during fourteen months long period. Consumption parameters measured were the consumptions of district heat, electricity and water. Indoor parameters gathered were temperature, relative humidity (RH), the concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) and differential air pressure. In this study, self-organizing map (SOM) and Sammon's mapping were applied to resolve the effects of energy consumption on indoor air quality. Namely, the SOM was qualified as a suitable method having a property to summarize the multivariable dependencies into easily observable two-dimensional map. Accompanying that, the Sammon's mapping method was used to cluster pre-processed data to find similarities of the variables, expressing distances and groups in the data. The methods used were able to distinguish 7 different clusters characterizing indoor air quality and energy efficiency in the study house. The results indicate, that the cost implications in euros of heating and electricity energy vary according to the differential pressure, concentration of carbon dioxide, temperature and season.
Abstract: The globalization of the Indian economy has thrown a great challenge to the Indian industries in respect of productivity, quality, cost, delivery etc. Achieving success• the global market has required fundamental shift in the way business is conducted and has dramatically affected virtually every aspect of process industry. The internal manufacturing process and supporting infrastructure should be such that it can compete successfully in global markets with better flexibility and delivery. The paper deals with a case study of a reputed process industry, some changes in the process has been suggested, which leads to reduction in labor cost and production cost.
Abstract: This work presents a study on the abrasive water jet
(AWJ) machining. An explicit finite element analysis (FEA) of
single abrasive particle impact on stainless steel 1.4304 (AISI 304) is
conducted. The abrasive water jet machining is modeled by FEA
software ABAQUS/CAE. Shapes of craters in FEM simulation
results were used and compared with the previous experimental and
FEM works by means of crater sphericity. The influence of impact
angle and particle velocity was observed. Adaptive mesh domain is
used to model the impact zone. Results are in good agreement with
those obtained from the experimental and FEM simulation. The
crater-s depth is also obtained for different impact angle and abrasive
particle velocities.
Abstract: In this paper, novel statistical sampling based equalization techniques and CNN based detection are proposed to increase the spectral efficiency of multiuser communication systems over fading channels. Multiuser communication combined with selective fading can result in interferences which severely deteriorate the quality of service in wireless data transmission (e.g. CDMA in mobile communication). The paper introduces new equalization methods to combat interferences by minimizing the Bit Error Rate (BER) as a function of the equalizer coefficients. This provides higher performance than the traditional Minimum Mean Square Error equalization. Since the calculation of BER as a function of the equalizer coefficients is of exponential complexity, statistical sampling methods are proposed to approximate the gradient which yields fast equalization and superior performance to the traditional algorithms. Efficient estimation of the gradient is achieved by using stratified sampling and the Li-Silvester bounds. A simple mechanism is derived to identify the dominant samples in real-time, for the sake of efficient estimation. The equalizer weights are adapted recursively by minimizing the estimated BER. The near-optimal performance of the new algorithms is also demonstrated by extensive simulations. The paper has also developed a (Cellular Neural Network) CNN based approach to detection. In this case fast quadratic optimization has been carried out by t, whereas the task of equalizer is to ensure the required template structure (sparseness) for the CNN. The performance of the method has also been analyzed by simulations.
Abstract: In this paper, multiobjective design of multi-machine Power System Stabilizers (PSSs) using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is presented. The stabilizers are tuned to simultaneously shift the lightly damped and undamped electro-mechanical modes of all machines to a prescribed zone in the s-plane. A multiobjective problem is formulated to optimize a composite set of objective functions comprising the damping factor, and the damping ratio of the lightly damped electromechanical modes. The PSSs parameters tuning problem is converted to an optimization problem which is solved by PSO with the eigenvalue-based multiobjective function. The proposed PSO based PSSs is tested on a multimachine power system under different operating conditions and disturbances through eigenvalue analysis and some performance indices to illustrate its robust performance.
Abstract: The effect of muscle loss due to transfemoral
amputation, on energy expenditure of hip joint and individual
residual muscles was simulated. During swing phase of gait, with
each muscle as an ideal force generator, the lower extremity was
modeled as a two-degree of freedom linkage, for which hip and knee
were joints. According to results, muscle loss will not lead to higher
energy expenditure of hip joint, as long as other parameters of limb
remain unaffected. This finding maybe due to the role of biarticular
muscles in hip and knee joints motion. Moreover, if hip flexors are
removed from the residual limb, residual flexors, and if hip extensors
are removed, residual extensors will do more work. In line with the
common practice in transfemoral amputation, this result demonstrates
during transfemoral amputation, it is important to maintain the length
of residual limb as much as possible.
Abstract: The treatment of the industrial wastewater can be
particularly difficult in the presence of toxic compounds. Excessive
concentration of Chromium in soluble form is toxic to a wide variety
of living organisms. Biological removal of heavy metals using natural
and genetically engineered microorganisms has aroused great interest
because of its lower impact on the environment. Ralston
metallidurans, formerly known as Alcaligenes eutrophus is a LProteobacterium
colonizing industrial wastewater with a high content
of heavy metals. Tris-buffered mineral salt medium was used for
growing Alcaligenes eutrophus AE104 (pEBZ141). The cells were
cultivated for 18 h at 30 oC in Tris-buffered mineral salt medium
containing 3 mM disodium sulphate and 46 mM sodium gluconate as
the carbon source. The cells were harvested by centrifugation,
washed, and suspended in 10 mM Tris HCl, pH 7.0, containing 46
mM sodium gluconate, and 5 mM Chromium. Interaction among
induction of chr resistance determinant, and chromate reduction have
been demonstrated. Results of this study show that the above bacteria
can be very useful for bioremediation of chromium from industrial
wastewater.
Abstract: In non destructive testing by radiography, a perfect knowledge of the weld defect shape is an essential step to appreciate the quality of the weld and make decision on its acceptability or rejection. Because of the complex nature of the considered images, and in order that the detected defect region represents the most accurately possible the real defect, the choice of thresholding methods must be done judiciously. In this paper, performance criteria are used to conduct a comparative study of thresholding methods based on gray level histogram, 2-D histogram and locally adaptive approach for weld defect extraction in radiographic images.
Abstract: Interactive installations for public spaces are a
particular kind of interactive systems, the design of which has been
the subject of several research studies. Sensor-based applications are
becoming increasingly popular, but the human-computer interaction
community is still far from reaching sound, effective large-scale
interactive installations for public spaces. The 6DSpaces project is
described in this paper as a research approach based on studying the
role of multisensory interactivity and how it can be effectively used
to approach people to digital, scientific contents. The design of an
entire scientific exhibition is described and the result was evaluated
in the real world context of a Science Centre. Conclusions bring
insight into how the human-computer interaction should be designed
in order to maximize the overall experience.
Abstract: In this paper presents a technique for developing the
computational efficiency in simulating double output induction
generators (DOIG) with two rotor circuits where stator transients are
to be included. Iterative decomposition is used to separate the flux–
Linkage equations into decoupled fast and slow subsystems, after
which the model order of the fast subsystems is reduced by
neglecting the heavily damped fast transients caused by the second
rotor circuit using integral manifolds theory. The two decoupled
subsystems along with the equation for the very slowly changing slip
constitute a three time-scale model for the machine which resulted in
increasing computational speed. Finally, the proposed method of
reduced order in this paper is compared with the other conventional
methods in linear and nonlinear modes and it is shown that this
method is better than the other methods regarding simulation
accuracy and speed.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with exponential stability and stabilization of switched linear systems with interval time-varying delays. The time delay is any continuous function belonging to a given interval, in which the lower bound of delay is not restricted to zero. By constructing a suitable augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional combined with Leibniz-Newton-s formula, a switching rule for the exponential stability and stabilization of switched linear systems with interval time-varying delays and new delay-dependent sufficient conditions for the exponential stability and stabilization of the systems are first established in terms of LMIs. Numerical examples are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the results.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of how one can
improve the performance of a non-optimal filter. First the theoretical question on dynamical representation for a given time correlated
random process is studied. It will be demonstrated that for a wide class of random processes, having a canonical form, there exists
a dynamical system equivalent in the sense that its output has the
same covariance function. It is shown that the dynamical approach is more effective for simulating and estimating a Markov and non-
Markovian random processes, computationally is less demanding,
especially with increasing of the dimension of simulated processes.
Numerical examples and estimation problems in low dimensional
systems are given to illustrate the advantages of the approach. A very useful application of the proposed approach is shown for the
problem of state estimation in very high dimensional systems. Here a modified filter for data assimilation in an oceanic numerical model
is presented which is proved to be very efficient due to introducing
a simple Markovian structure for the output prediction error process
and adaptive tuning some parameters of the Markov equation.
Abstract: This study presents an investigation of
electrochemical variables and an application of the optimal
parameters in operating a continuous upflow electrocoagulation
reactor in removing dye. Direct red 23, which is azo-based, was used
as a representative of direct dyes. First, a batch mode was employed
to optimize the design parameters: electrode type, electrode distance,
current density and electrocoagulation time. The optimal parameters
were found to be iron anode, distance between electrodes of 8 mm
and current density of 30 A·m-2 with contact time of 5 min. The
performance of the continuous upflow reactor with these parameters
was satisfactory, with >95% color removal and energy consumption
in the order of 0.6-0.7 kWh·m-3.
Abstract: A numerical study is made of laminar, unsteady flow
behind a rotationally oscillating circular cylinder using a recently
developed higher order compact (HOC) scheme. The stream function
vorticity formulation of Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations in cylindrical
polar coordinates are considered as the governing equations. The
temporal behaviour of vortex formation and relevant streamline
patterns of the flow are scrutinized over broad ranges of two
externally specified parameters namely dimensionless forced
oscillating frequency Sf and dimensionless peak rotation rate αm for
the Reynolds-s number Re = 200. Excellent agreements are found
both qualitatively and quantitatively with the existing experimental
and standard numerical results.