Mixed Convection in a Vertical Heated Channel: Influence of the Aspect Ratio

In mechanical and environmental engineering, mixed convection is a frequently encountered thermal fluid phenomenon which exists in atmospheric environment, urban canopy flows, ocean currents, gas turbines, heat exchangers, and computer chip cooling systems etc... . This paper deals with a numerical investigation of mixed convection in a vertical heated channel. This flow results from the mixing of the up-going fluid along walls of the channel with the one issued from a flat nozzle located in its entry section. The fluiddynamic and heat-transfer characteristics of vented vertical channels are investigated for constant heat-flux boundary conditions, a Rayleigh number equal to 2.57 1010, for two jet Reynolds number Re=3 103 and 2104 and the aspect ratio in the 8-20 range. The system of governing equations is solved with a finite volumes method and an implicit scheme. The obtained results show that the turbulence and the jet-wall interaction activate the heat transfer, as does the drive of ambient air by the jet. For low Reynolds number Re=3 103, the increase of the aspect Ratio enhances the heat transfer of about 3%, however; for Re=2 104, the heat transfer enhancement is of about 12%. The numerical velocity, pressure and temperature fields are post-processed to compute the quantities of engineering interest such as the induced mass flow rate, and average Nusselt number, in terms of Rayleigh, Reynolds numbers and dimensionless geometric parameters are presented.

Steady State Transpiration Cooling System in Ni-Cr Open-Cellular Porous Plate

The steady-state temperature for one-dimensional transpiration cooling system has been conducted experimentally and numerically to investigate the heat transfer characteristics of combined convection and radiation. The Nickel –Chrome (Ni-Cr) open-cellular porous material having porosity of 0.93 and pores per inch (PPI) of 21.5 was examined. The upper surface of porous plate was heated by the heat flux of incoming radiation varying from 7.7 - 16.6 kW/m2 whereas air injection velocity fed into the lower surface was varied from 0.36 - 1.27 m/s, and was then rearranged as Reynolds number (Re). For the report of the results in the present study, two efficiencies including of temperature and conversion efficiency were presented. Temperature efficiency indicating how close the mean temperature of a porous heat plate to that of inlet air, and increased rapidly with the air injection velocity (Re). It was then saturated and had a constant value at Re higher than 10. The conversion efficiency, which was regarded as the ability of porous material in transferring energy by convection after absorbed from heat radiation, decreased with increasing of the heat flux and air injection velocity. In addition, it was then asymptotic to a constant value at the Re higher than 10. The numerical predictions also agreed with experimental data very well.

Action Recognition in Video Sequences using a Mealy Machine

In this paper the use of sequential machines for recognizing actions taken by the objects detected by a general tracking algorithm is proposed. The system may deal with the uncertainty inherent in medium-level vision data. For this purpose, fuzzification of input data is performed. Besides, this transformation allows to manage data independently of the tracking application selected and enables adding characteristics of the analyzed scenario. The representation of actions by means of an automaton and the generation of the input symbols for finite automaton depending on the object and action compared are described. The output of the comparison process between an object and an action is a numerical value that represents the membership of the object to the action. This value is computed depending on how similar the object and the action are. The work concludes with the application of the proposed technique to identify the behavior of vehicles in road traffic scenes.

Post Elevated Temperature Effect on the Strength and Microstructure of Thin High Performance Cementitious Composites (THPCC)

Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures strengthened with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) lack in thermal resistance under elevated temperatures in the event of fire. This phenomenon led to the lining of strengthened concrete with thin high performance cementitious composites (THPCC) to protect the substrate against elevated temperature. Elevated temperature effects on THPCC, based on different cementitious materials have been studied in the past but high-alumina cement (HAC)-based THPCC have not been well characterized. This research study will focus on the THPCC based on HAC replaced by 60%, 70%, 80% and 85% of ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS). Samples were evaluated by the measurement of their mechanical strength (28 & 56 days of curing) after exposed to 400°C, 600°C and 28°C of room temperature for comparison and corroborated by their microstructure study. Results showed that among all mixtures, the mix containing only HAC showed the highest compressive strength after exposed to 600°C as compared to other mixtures. However, the tensile strength of THPCC made of HAC and 60% GGBS content was comparable to the THPCC with HAC only after exposed to 600°C. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) images of THPCC accompanying Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) microanalysis revealed that the microstructure deteriorated considerably after exposure to elevated temperatures which led to the decrease in mechanical strength.

Adsorption of Crystal Violet onto BTEA- and CTMA-bentonite from Aqueous Solutions

CTMA-bentonite and BTEA-Bentonite prepared by Na-bentonite cation exchanged with cetyltrimethylammonium(CTMA) and benzyltriethylammonium (BTEA). Products were characterized by XRD and IR techniques.The d001 spacing value of CTMA-bentonite and BTEA-bentonite are 7.54Å and 3.50Å larger than that of Na-bentonite at 100% cation exchange capacity, respectively. The IR spectrum showed that the intensities of OH stretching and bending vibrations of the two organoclays decreased greatly comparing to untreated Na-bentonite. Batch experiments were carried out at 303 K, 318 K and 333 K to obtain the sorption isotherms of Crystal violet onto the two organoclays. The results show that the sorption isothermal data could be well described by Freundlich model. The dynamical data for the two organoclays fit well with pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The adsorption capacity of CTMA-bentonite was found higher than that of BTEA-Bentonite. Thermodynamic parameters such as changes in the free energy (ΔG°), the enthalpy (ΔH°) and the entropy (ΔS°) were also evaluated. The overall adsorption process of Crystal violet onto the two organoclays were spontaneous, endothermic physisorption. The CTMA-bentonite and BTEA-Bentonite could be employed as low-cost alternatives to activated carbon in wastewater treatment for the removal of color which comes from textile dyes.

Low Air Velocity Measurement Characteristics- Variation Due to Flow Regime

The paper depicts air velocity values, reproduced by laser Doppler anemometer (LDA) and ultrasonic anemometer (UA), relations with calculated ones from flow rate measurements using the gas meter which calibration uncertainty is ± (0.15 – 0.30) %. Investigation had been performed in channel installed in aerodynamical facility used as a part of national standard of air velocity. Relations defined in a research let us confirm the LDA and UA for air velocity reproduction to be the most advantageous measures. The results affirm ultrasonic anemometer to be reliable and favourable instrument for measurement of mean velocity or control of velocity stability in the velocity range of 0.05 m/s – 10 (15) m/s when the LDA used. The main aim of this research is to investigate low velocity regularities, starting from 0.05 m/s, including region of turbulent, laminar and transitional air flows. Theoretical and experimental results and brief analysis of it are given in the paper. Maximum and mean velocity relations for transitional air flow having unique distribution are represented. Transitional flow having distinctive and different from laminar and turbulent flow characteristics experimentally have not yet been analysed.

Adaptation Learning Speed Control for a High- Performance Induction Motor using Neural Networks

This paper proposes an effective adaptation learning algorithm based on artificial neural networks for speed control of an induction motor assumed to operate in a high-performance drives environment. The structure scheme consists of a neural network controller and an algorithm for changing the NN weights in order that the motor speed can accurately track of the reference command. This paper also makes uses a very realistic and practical scheme to estimate and adaptively learn the noise content in the speed load torque characteristic of the motor. The availability of the proposed controller is verified by through a laboratory implementation and under computation simulations with Matlab-software. The process is also tested for the tracking property using different types of reference signals. The performance and robustness of the proposed control scheme have evaluated under a variety of operating conditions of the induction motor drives. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme system performances, both in steady state error in speed and dynamic conditions, was found to be excellent and those is not overshoot.

Surfactant Stabilized Nanoemulsion: Characterization and Application in Enhanced Oil Recovery

Nanoemulsions are a class of emulsions with a droplet size in the range of 50–500 nm and have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years because it is unique characteristics. The physicochemical properties of nanoemulsion suggests that it can be successfully used to recover the residual oil which is trapped in the fine pore of reservoir rock by capillary forces after primary and secondary recovery. Oil-in-water nanoemulsion which can be formed by high-energy emulsification techniques using specific surfactants can reduce oil-water interfacial tension (IFT) by 3-4 orders of magnitude. The present work is aimed on characterization of oil-inwater nanoemulsion in terms of its phase behavior, morphological studies; interfacial energy; ability to reduce the interfacial tension and understanding the mechanisms of mobilization and displacement of entrapped oil blobs by lowering interfacial tension both at the macroscopic and microscopic level. In order to investigate the efficiency of oil-water nanoemulsion in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), experiments were performed to characterize the emulsion in terms of their physicochemical properties and size distribution of the dispersed oil droplet in water phase. Synthetic mineral oil and a series of surfactants were used to prepare oil-in-water emulsions. Characterization of emulsion shows that it follows pseudo-plastic behaviour and drop size of dispersed oil phase follows lognormal distribution. Flooding experiments were also carried out in a sandpack system to evaluate the effectiveness of the nanoemulsion as displacing fluid for enhanced oil recovery. Substantial additional recoveries (more than 25% of original oil in place) over conventional water flooding were obtained in the present investigation.

Javanese Character Recognition Using Hidden Markov Model

Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a stochastic method which has been used in various signal processing and character recognition. This study proposes to use HMM to recognize Javanese characters from a number of different handwritings, whereby HMM is used to optimize the number of state and feature extraction. An 85.7 % accuracy is obtained as the best result in 16-stated vertical model using pure HMM. This initial result is satisfactory for prompting further research.

Research on Strategy for Automated Scaleless-Map Compilation

As a tool for human spatial cognition and thinking, the map has been playing an important role. Maps are perhaps as fundamental to society as language and the written word. Economic and social development requires extensive and in-depth understanding of their own living environment, from the scope of the overall global to urban housing. This has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges for traditional cartography . This paper first proposed the concept of scaleless-map and its basic characteristics, through the analysis of the existing multi-scale representation techniques. Then some strategies are presented for automated mapping compilation. Taking into account the demand of automated map compilation, detailed proposed the software - WJ workstation must have four technical features, which are generalization operators, symbol primitives, dynamically annotation and mapping process template. This paper provides a more systematic new idea and solution to improve the intelligence and automation of the scaleless cartography.

Modes of Collapse of Compress–Expand Member under Axial Loading

In this paper, a study on the modes of collapse of compress- expand members are presented. Compress- expand member is a compact, multiple-combined cylinders, to be proposed as energy absorbers. Previous studies on the compress- expand member have clarified its energy absorption efficiency, proposed an approximate equation to describe its deformation characteristics and also highlighted the improvement that it has brought. However, for the member to be practical, the actual range of geometrical dimension that it can maintain its applicability must be investigated. In this study, using a virtualized materials that comply the bilinear hardening law, Finite element Method (FEM) analysis on the collapse modes of compress- expand member have been conducted. Deformation maps that plotted the member's collapse modes with regards to the member's geometric and material parameters were then presented in order to determine the dimensional range of each collapse modes.

Optimal Parameters of Double Moving Average Control Chart

The objective of this paper is to present explicit analytical formulas for evaluating important characteristics of Double Moving Average control chart (DMA) for Poisson distribution. The most popular characteristics of a control chart are Average Run Length ( 0 ARL ) - the mean of observations that are taken before a system is signaled to be out-of control when it is actually still incontrol, and Average Delay time ( 1 ARL ) - mean delay of true alarm times. An important property required of 0 ARL is that it should be sufficiently large when the process is in-control to reduce a number of false alarms. On the other side, if the process is actually out-ofcontrol then 1 ARL should be as small as possible. In particular, the explicit analytical formulas for evaluating 0 ARL and 1 ARL be able to get a set of optimal parameters which depend on a width of the moving average ( w ) and width of control limit ( H ) for designing DMA chart with minimum of 1 ARL

Physico-chemical State of the Air at the Stagnation Point during the Atmospheric Reentry of a Spacecraft

Hypersonic flows around spatial vehicles during their reentry phase in planetary atmospheres are characterized by intense aerothermal phenomena. The aim of this work is to analyze high temperature flows around an axisymmetric blunt body taking into account chemical and vibrational non-equilibrium for air mixture species. For this purpose, a finite volume methodology is employed to determine the supersonic flow parameters around the axisymmetric blunt body, especially at the stagnation point and along the wall of spacecraft for several altitudes. This allows the capture shock wave before a blunt body placed in supersonic free stream. The numerical technique uses the Flux Vector Splitting method of Van Leer. Here, adequate time stepping parameter, along with CFL coefficient and mesh size level are selected to ensure numerical convergence, sought with an order of 10-8

Biometrical Comparison of Artemia urmiana Günther, 1899 (Crustacea: Anostraca) Cysts between Rainy and Drought Years (1994-2003/4) from Urmia Lake, Iran

Nowadays, biometrical characterizations of Artemia cysts are used as one of the most important factors in the study of Artemia populations and intraspecific particularity; meanwhile these characters can be used as economical indices. For example, typically high hatching efficiency is possible due to the small diameter of cysts (high number per gram); therefore small diameter of cysts show someway high quality of cysts. This study was performed during a ten year period, including two different ecological conditions: rainy and drought. It is important from two different aspects because it covers alteration of A. urmiana during ten years also its variation in the best and worst environmental situations in which salinity increased from 173.8 ppt in 1994 to 280.8 ppt in 2003/4. In this study the biometrical raw data of Artemia urmiana cysts at seven stations from the Urmia Lake in 1994 and their seven identical locations at 26 studied stations in 2003/4 were reanalyzed again and compared together. Biometrical comparison of untreated and decapsulated cysts in each of the seven similar stations showed a highly significant variation between 1994 and 2003/4. Based on this study, in whole stations the untreated and decapsulated cysts from 1994 were larger than cysts of 2003/4 without any exception. But there was no logical relationship between salinity and chorion thickness in the Urmia Lake. With regard to PCA analyses the stations of two different studied years certainly have been separated with factor 1 from each other. In conclusion, the interaction between genetic and environmental factors can determine and explain variation in the range of cysts diameter in Artemia.

Automatic Lip Contour Tracking and Visual Character Recognition for Computerized Lip Reading

Computerized lip reading has been one of the most actively researched areas of computer vision in recent past because of its crime fighting potential and invariance to acoustic environment. However, several factors like fast speech, bad pronunciation, poor illumination, movement of face, moustaches and beards make lip reading difficult. In present work, we propose a solution for automatic lip contour tracking and recognizing letters of English language spoken by speakers using the information available from lip movements. Level set method is used for tracking lip contour using a contour velocity model and a feature vector of lip movements is then obtained. Character recognition is performed using modified k nearest neighbor algorithm which assigns more weight to nearer neighbors. The proposed system has been found to have accuracy of 73.3% for character recognition with speaker lip movements as the only input and without using any speech recognition system in parallel. The approach used in this work is found to significantly solve the purpose of lip reading when size of database is small.

Finding Pareto Optimal Front for the Multi- Mode Time, Cost Quality Trade-off in Project Scheduling

Project managers are the ultimate responsible for the overall characteristics of a project, i.e. they should deliver the project on time with minimum cost and with maximum quality. It is vital for any manager to decide a trade-off between these conflicting objectives and they will be benefited of any scientific decision support tool. Our work will try to determine optimal solutions (rather than a single optimal solution) from which the project manager will select his desirable choice to run the project. In this paper, the problem in project scheduling notated as (1,T|cpm,disc,mu|curve:quality,time,cost) will be studied. The problem is multi-objective and the purpose is finding the Pareto optimal front of time, cost and quality of a project (curve:quality,time,cost), whose activities belong to a start to finish activity relationship network (cpm) and they can be done in different possible modes (mu) which are non-continuous or discrete (disc), and each mode has a different cost, time and quality . The project is constrained to a non-renewable resource i.e. money (1,T). Because the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem, a meta-heuristic is developed based on a version of genetic algorithm specially adapted to solve multi-objective problems namely FastPGA. A sample project with 30 activities is generated and then solved by the proposed method.

Some Biological and Molecular Characterization of Bean Common Mosaic Necrosis Virus Isolated from Soybean in Tehran Province, Iran

Bean common mosaic necrosis virus (BCMNV) is a potyvirus with a worldwide distribution. This virus causes serious economic losses in Iran in many leguminoses. During 20008, samples were collected from soybeans fields in Tehran Province. Four isolates (S1, S2 and S3) were inoculated on 15 species of Cucurbitaceae, Chenopodiaceae, Solanacae and Leguminosae. Chenopodium quinoa and C. amaranticolor. Did not developed any symptoms.all isolates caused mosaic symptoms on Phaseolus vulgaris cv. Red Kidney and P. vulgaris cv. Bountiful. The molecular weights of coat protein using SDS-PAGE and western blotting were estimated at 33 kDa. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed using one primer pairs designed by L. XU et al. An approximately 920 bp fragment was amplified with a specific primer.

Synthesis of Unconventional Materials Using Chitosan and Crown Ether for Selective Removal of Precious Metal Ions

The polyfunctional and highly reactive bio-polymer, the chitosan was first regioselectively converted into dialkylated chitosan using dimsyl anionic solution(NaH in DMSO) and bromodecane after protecting amino groups by phthalic anhydride. The dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether, on the other hand, was converted into its carbonyl derivatives via Duff reaction prior to incorporate into chitosan by Schiff base formation. Thus formed diformylated dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether was condensed with lipophilic chitosan to prepare the novel solvent extraction reagent. The products were characterized mainly by IR and 1H-NMR. Hence, the multidentate crown ether-embedded polyfunctional bio-material was tested for extraction of Pd(II) and Pt(IV) in aqueous solution.

New Approach for Manipulation of Stratified Programs

Negation is useful in the majority of the real world applications. However, its introduction leads to semantic and canonical problems. We propose in this paper an approach based on stratification to deal with negation problems. This approach is based on an extension of predicates nets. It is characterized with two main contributions. The first concerns the management of the whole class of stratified programs. The second contribution is related to usual operations optimizations on stratified programs (maximal stratification, incremental updates ...).

A File Splitting Technique for Reducing the Entropy of Text Files

A novel file splitting technique for the reduction of the nth-order entropy of text files is proposed. The technique is based on mapping the original text file into a non-ASCII binary file using a new codeword assignment method and then the resulting binary file is split into several subfiles each contains one or more bits from each codeword of the mapped binary file. The statistical properties of the subfiles are studied and it is found that they reflect the statistical properties of the original text file which is not the case when the ASCII code is used as a mapper. The nth-order entropy of these subfiles are determined and it is found that the sum of their entropies is less than that of the original text file for the same values of extensions. These interesting statistical properties of the resulting subfiles can be used to achieve better compression ratios when conventional compression techniques are applied to these subfiles individually and on a bit-wise basis rather than on character-wise basis.