Abstract: Concrete strength evaluated from compression tests
on cores is affected by several factors causing differences from the
in-situ strength at the location from which the core specimen was
extracted. Among the factors, there is the damage possibly occurring
during the drilling phase that generally leads to underestimate the
actual in-situ strength. In order to quantify this effect, in this study
two wide datasets have been examined, including: (i) about 500 core
specimens extracted from Reinforced Concrete existing structures,
and (ii) about 600 cube specimens taken during the construction of
new structures in the framework of routine acceptance control. The
two experimental datasets have been compared in terms of
compression strength and specific weight values, accounting for the
main factors affecting a concrete property, that is type and amount of
cement, aggregates' grading, type and maximum size of aggregates,
water/cement ratio, placing and curing modality, concrete age. The
results show that the magnitude of the strength reduction due to
drilling damage is strongly affected by the actual properties of
concrete, being inversely proportional to its strength. Therefore, the
application of a single value of the correction coefficient, as generally
suggested in the technical literature and in structural codes, appears
inappropriate. A set of values of the drilling damage coefficient is
suggested as a function of the strength obtained from compressive
tests on cores.
Abstract: The highly nonlinear characteristics of drying
processes have prompted researchers to seek new nonlinear control
solutions. However, the relation between the implementation
complexity, on-line processing complexity, reliability control
structure and controller-s performance is not well established. The
present paper proposes high performance nonlinear fuzzy controllers
for a real-time operation of a drying machine, being developed under
a consistent match between those issues. A PCI-6025E data
acquisition device from National Instruments® was used, and the
control system was fully designed with MATLAB® / SIMULINK
language. Drying parameters, namely relative humidity and
temperature, were controlled through MIMOs Hybrid Bang-bang+PI
(BPI) and Four-dimensional Fuzzy Logic (FLC) real-time-based
controllers to perform drying tests on biological materials. The
performance of the drying strategies was compared through several
criteria, which are reported without controllers- retuning. Controllers-
performance analysis has showed much better performance of FLC
than BPI controller. The absolute errors were lower than 8,85 % for
Fuzzy Logic Controller, about three times lower than the
experimental results with BPI control.
Abstract: In this study, a synthetic pathway was created by
assembling genes from Clostridium butyricum and Escherichia coli
in different combinations. Among the genes were dhaB1 and dhaB2
from C. butyricum VPI1718 coding for glycerol dehydratase (GDHt)
and its activator (GDHtAc), respectively, involved in the conversion
of glycerol to 3-hydroxypropionaldehyde (3-HPA). The yqhD gene
from E.coli BL21 was also included which codes for an NADPHdependent
1,3-propanediol oxidoreductase isoenzyme (PDORI)
reducing 3-HPA to 1,3-propanediol (1,3-PD). Molecular modeling
analysis indicated that the conformation of fusion protein of YQHD
and DHAB1 was favorable for direct molecular channeling of the
intermediate 3-HPA. According to the simulation results, the yqhD
and dhaB1 gene were assembled in the upstream of dhaB2 to express
a fusion protein, yielding the recombinant strain E. coliBL21
(DE3)//pET22b+::yqhD-dhaB1_dhaB2 (strain BP41Y3). Strain
BP41Y3 gave 10-fold higher 1,3-PD concentration than E. coliBL21
(DE3)//pET22b+::yqhD-dhaB1_dhaB2 (strain BP31Y2) expressing
the recombinant enzymes simultaneously but in a non-fusion mode.
This is the first report using a gene fusion approach to enhance the
biological conversion of glycerol to the value added compound 1,3-
PD.
Abstract: In general, image-based 3D scenes can now be found in many popular vision systems, computer games and virtual reality tours. So, It is important to segment ROI (region of interest) from input scenes as a preprocessing step for geometric stricture detection in 3D scene. In this paper, we propose a method for segmenting ROI based on tensor voting and Dirichlet process mixture model. In particular, to estimate geometric structure information for 3D scene from a single outdoor image, we apply the tensor voting and Dirichlet process mixture model to a image segmentation. The tensor voting is used based on the fact that homogeneous region in an image are usually close together on a smooth region and therefore the tokens corresponding to centers of these regions have high saliency values. The proposed approach is a novel nonparametric Bayesian segmentation method using Gaussian Dirichlet process mixture model to automatically segment various natural scenes. Finally, our method can label regions of the input image into coarse categories: “ground", “sky", and “vertical" for 3D application. The experimental results show that our method successfully segments coarse regions in many complex natural scene images for 3D.
Abstract: The research object was wheat bread. Experiments
were carried out at the Faculty of Food Technology of the Latvia
University of Agriculture. An active packaging in combination with
modified atmosphere (MAP, CO2 60% and N2 40%) was examined
and compared with traditional packaging in air ambiance. Polymer
Multibarrier 60, PP and OPP bags were used. Influence of iron based
oxygen absorber in sachets of 100 cc obtained from Mitsubishi Gas
Chemical Europe Ageless® was tested on the quality during the shelf
of wheat bread. Samples of 40±4 g were packaged in polymer
pouches (110 mm x 120 mm), hermetically sealed by MULTIVAC
C300 vacuum chamber machine, and stored in room temperature
+21.0±0.5 °C. The physiochemical properties – weight losses,
moisture content, hardness, pH, colour, changes of atmosphere
content (CO2 and O2) in headspace of packs, and microbial
conditions were analysed before packaging and in the 7th, 14th, 21st
and 28th days of storage.
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) segmentation is necessary to help reduce the time consuming task of manually annotating ECG's. Several algorithms have been developed to segment the ECG automatically. We first review several of such methods, and then present a new single lead segmentation method based on Adaptive piecewise constant approximation (APCA) and Piecewise derivative dynamic time warping (PDDTW). The results are tested on the QT database. We compared our results to Laguna's two lead method. Our proposed approach has a comparable mean error, but yields a slightly higher standard deviation than Laguna's method.
Abstract: The use of hard and brittle material has become
increasingly more extensive in recent years. Therefore processing of
these materials for the parts fabrication has become a challenging
problem. However, it is time-consuming to machine the hard brittle
materials with the traditional metal-cutting technique that uses
abrasive wheels. In addition, the tool would suffer excessive wear as
well. However, if ultrasonic energy is applied to the machining
process and coupled with the use of hard abrasive grits, hard and
brittle materials can be effectively machined. Ultrasonic machining
process is mostly used for the brittle materials. The present research
work has developed models using finite element approach to predict
the mechanical stresses sand strains produced in the tool during
ultrasonic machining process. Also the flow behavior of abrasive
slurry coming out of the nozzle has been studied for simulation using
ANSYS CFX module. The different abrasives of different grit sizes
have been used for the experimentation work.
Abstract: The hydrogen peroxide treatment was able to
remediate chlorophenols, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, diesel
and transformer oil contaminated soil. Chemical treatment of
contaminants adsorbed in peat resulted in lower contaminants-
removal and required higher addition of chemicals than the treatment
of contaminants in sand. The hydrogen peroxide treatment was found
to be feasible for soil remediation at natural soil pH. Contaminants in
soil could degrade with the addition of hydrogen peroxide only
indicating the ability of transition metals ions and minerals of these
metals presented in soil to catalyse the reaction of hydrogen peroxide
decomposition.
Abstract: This paper proposes a smart design strategy for a sequential detector to reliably detect the primary user-s signal, especially in fast fading environments. We study the computation of the log-likelihood ratio for coping with a fast changing received signal and noise sample variances, which are considered random variables. First, we analyze the detectability of the conventional generalized log-likelihood ratio (GLLR) scheme when considering fast changing statistics of unknown parameters caused by fast fading effects. Secondly, we propose an efficient sensing algorithm for performing the sequential probability ratio test in a robust and efficient manner when the channel statistics are unknown. Finally, the proposed scheme is compared to the conventional method with simulation results with respect to the average number of samples required to reach a detection decision.
Abstract: Vehicle suspension design must fulfill
some conflicting criteria. Among those is ride comfort
which is attained by minimizing the acceleration
transmitted to the sprung mass, via suspension spring
and damper. Also good handling of a vehicle is a
desirable property which requires stiff suspension and
therefore is in contrast with a vehicle with good ride.
Among the other desirable features of a suspension is
the minimization of the maximum travel of suspension.
This travel which is called suspension working space in
vehicle dynamics literature is also a design constraint
and it favors good ride. In this research a full car 8
degrees of freedom model has been developed and the
three above mentioned criteria, namely: ride, handling
and working space has been adopted as objective
functions. The Multi Objective Programming (MOP)
discipline has been used to find the Pareto Front and
some reasoning used to chose a design point between
these non dominated points of Pareto Front.
Abstract: Historical monuments as architectural heritage are,
economically and culturally, considered one of the key aspects for
modern communities. Cultural heritage represents a country-s
national identity and pride and maintains and enriches that country-s
culture. Therefore, conservation of the monuments remained from
our ancestors requires everybody-s serious and unremitting effort.
Conservation, renewal, restoration, and technical study of cultural
and historical matters are issues which have a special status among
various forms of art and science in the present century and this is due
to two reasons: firstly, progress of humankind in this century has
created a factor called environmental pollution which not only has
caused new destructive processes of cultural/historical monuments
but also has accelerated the previous destructive processes by several
times, and secondly, the rapid advance of various sciences, especially
chemistry, has lead to the contribution of new methods and materials
to this significant issue.
Abstract: According to the statistics, the prevalence of congenital hearing loss in Taiwan is approximately six thousandths; furthermore, one thousandths of infants have severe hearing impairment. Hearing ability during infancy has significant impact in the development of children-s oral expressions, language maturity, cognitive performance, education ability and social behaviors in the future. Although most children born with hearing impairment have sensorineural hearing loss, almost every child more or less still retains some residual hearing. If provided with a hearing aid or cochlear implant (a bionic ear) timely in addition to hearing speech training, even severely hearing-impaired children can still learn to talk. On the other hand, those who failed to be diagnosed and thus unable to begin hearing and speech rehabilitations on a timely manner might lose an important opportunity to live a complete and healthy life. Eventually, the lack of hearing and speaking ability will affect the development of both mental and physical functions, intelligence, and social adaptability. Not only will this problem result in an irreparable regret to the hearing-impaired child for the life time, but also create a heavy burden for the family and society. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of computer-assisted predictive model that can accurately detect and help diagnose newborn hearing loss so that early interventions can be provided timely to eliminate waste of medical resources. This study uses information from the neonatal database of the case hospital as the subjects, adopting two different analysis methods of using support vector machine (SVM) for model predictions and using logistic regression to conduct factor screening prior to model predictions in SVM to examine the results. The results indicate that prediction accuracy is as high as 96.43% when the factors are screened and selected through logistic regression. Hence, the model constructed in this study will have real help in clinical diagnosis for the physicians and actually beneficial to the early interventions of newborn hearing impairment.
Abstract: Machining through turning was carried out in a lathe
to study the chip formation of Multiphase Ferrite
(F-B-M) microalloyed steel. Taguchi orthogonal array was employed
to perform the machining. Continuous and discontinuous chips were
formed for different cutting parameters like speed, feed and depth of
cut. Optical and scanning electron microscope was employed to
identify the chip morphology.
Abstract: This study was to investigate the performance of
hybrid solvents blended between primary, secondary, or tertiary
amines and piperazine (PZ) for CO2 removal from flue gas in terms
of CO2 absorption capacity and regeneration efficiency at 90 oC.
Alkanolamines used in this work were monoethanolamine (MEA),
diethanolamine (DEA), and triethanolamine (TEA). The CO2
absorption was experimentally examined under atmospheric pressure
and room temperature. The results show that MEA blend with PZ
provided the maximum CO2 absorption capacity of 0.50 mol
CO2/mol amine while TEA provided the minimum CO2 absorption
capacity of 0.30 mol CO2/mol amine. TEA was easier to regenerate
for both first cycle and second cycle with less loss of absorption
capacity. The regeneration efficiency of TEA was 95.09 and 92.89 %,
for the first and second generation cycles, respectively.
Abstract: The study was designed to develop a measurement of
the positive emotion regulation questionnaire (PERQ) that assesses
positive emotion regulation strategies through self-report. The 14
items developed for the surveying instrument of the study were based
upon literatures regarding elements of positive regulation strategies.
319 elementary students (age ranging from 12 to14) were recruited
among three public elementary schools to survey on their use of
positive emotion regulation strategies. Of 319 subjects, 20 invalid
questionnaire s yielded a response rate of 92%. The data collected
wasanalyzed through methods such as item analysis, factor analysis,
and structural equation models. In reference to the results from item
analysis, the formal survey instrument was reduced to 11 items. A
principal axis factor analysis with varimax was performed on
responses, resulting in a 2-factor equation (savoring strategy and
neutralizing strategy), which accounted for 55.5% of the total
variance. Then, the two-factor structure of scale was also identified by
structural equation models. Finally, the reliability coefficients of the
two factors were Cronbach-s α .92 and .74. Gender difference was
only found in savoring strategy. In conclusion, the positive emotion
regulation strategies questionnaire offers a brief, internally consistent,
and valid self-report measure for understanding the emotional
regulation strategies of children that may be useful to researchers and
applied professionals.
Abstract: Mining tailings represent a generating source of rich heavy metal material with a potential danger the public health and the environment, since these metals, under certain conditions, can leach and contaminate aqueous systems that serve like supplying potable water sources. The strategy for this work is based on the observation, experimentation and the simulation that can be obtained by binding real answers of the hydrodynamic behavior of metals leached from mining tailings, and the applied mathematics that provides the logical structure to decipher the individual effects of the general physicochemical phenomenon. The case of study presented herein focuses on mining tailings deposits located in Monte San Nicolas, Guanajuato, Mexico, an abandoned mine. This was considered the contamination source that under certain physicochemical conditions can favor the metal leaching, and its transport towards aqueous systems. In addition, the cartography, meteorology, geology and the hydrodynamics and hydrological characteristics of the place, will be helpful in determining the way and the time in which these systems can interact. Preliminary results demonstrated that arsenic presents a great mobility, since this one was identified in several superficial aqueous systems of the micro watershed, as well as in sediments in concentrations that exceed the established maximum limits in the official norms. Also variations in pH and potential oxide-reduction were registered, conditions that favor the presence of different species from this element its solubility and therefore its mobility.
Abstract: The aim of this research is to evaluate surface
roughness and develop a multiple regression model for surface roughness as a function of cutting parameters during the turning of
flame hardened medium carbon steel with TiN-Al2O3-TiCN coated inserts. An experimental plan of work and signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)
were used to relate the influence of turning parameters to the
workpiece surface finish utilizing Taguchi methodology. The effects
of turning parameters were studied by using the analysis of variance (ANOVA) method. Evaluated parameters were feed, cutting speed,
and depth of cut. It was found that the most significant interaction among the considered turning parameters was between depth of cut and feed. The average surface roughness (Ra) resulted by TiN-Al2O3-
TiCN coated inserts was about 2.44 μm and minimum value was 0.74 μm. In addition, the regression model was able to predict values for surface roughness in comparison with experimental values within
reasonable limit.
Abstract: The focus of this research is in the area of the soviet period and the mission of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan in the XIX century. There was close connection of national customs and traditions with religious practices, outlooks and attitudes. In particular, such an approach has alleged estimation by Kazakh historians of the process of Christianization of the local population. Some of them are inclined to consider the small number of Christening Kazakhs as evidence that the Russian Orthodox Church didn’t achieve its mission. The number of historians who think that the church didn’t achieve its mission has thousand over the last centuries, however our calculations of the number of Kazakhs who became Orthodox Christian is much more than other historians think. Such Christians can be divided into 3 groups: Some remained Christian until their deaths, others had two faiths and the third hid their true religions, having returned to their former belief. Therefore, to define the exact amount of Christening Kazakhs represented a challenge. Some data does not create a clear picture of the level of Christianization, constant and accurate was not collected. The data appearing in reports of spiritual attendants and civil authorities is not always authentic. Article purpose is illumination and the analysis missionary activity of Russian Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan.
Abstract: In this paper, we are presenting a new type of pointing interface for computers which provides mouse functionalities with near surface haptic feedback. Further, it can be configured as a haptic display where users may feel the basic geometrical shapes in the GUI by moving the finger on top of the device surface. These functionalities are achieved by tracking three dimensional positions of the neodymium magnet using Hall Effect sensors grid and generating like polarity haptic feedback using an electromagnet array. This interface brings the haptic sensations to the 3D space where previously it is felt only on top of the buttons of the haptic mouse implementations.
Abstract: Argument over the use of particular method in interlanguage pragmatics has increased recently. Researchers argued the advantages and disadvantages of each method either natural or elicited. Findings of different studies indicated that the use of one method may not provide enough data to answer all its questions. The current study investigated the validity of using multimethod approach in interlanguage pragmatics to understand the development of requests in Arabic as a second language (Arabic L2). To this end, the study adopted two methods belong to two types of data sources: the institutional discourse (natural data), and the role play (elicited data). Participants were 117 learners of Arabic L2 at the university level, representing four levels (beginners, low-intermediate, highintermediate, and advanced). Results showed that using two or more methods in interlanguage pragmatics affect the size and nature of data.