Abstract: Technology transfer by international trade and
foreign direct investment is the most important positive
outcome of open economy. It is widely accepted that new
technology and knowledge have an important role in
enhancing economic growth. Human capital is the other
important factor assisting economic growth. In this study, the
role of human capital in the growth process is examined in a
view of new endogenous growth theory emphasizing on the
technology transfer resulting from international trade. Using
the panel data of 10 developed and 10 developing countries,
impact of human capital and openness on the rate of economic
growth of different countries is analysed. Evidence suggests
the view that human capital and openness contribute to the
economic growth in both developing and developed countries,
but with different rates.
Abstract: The aim of the work was to attenuate the vibration amplitude in CESNA 172 airplane wing by using Functionally Graded Material instead of uniform or composite material. Wing strength was achieved by means of stress analysis study, while wing vibration amplitudes and shapes were achieved by means of Modal and Harmonic analysis. Results were verified by applying the methodology in a simple cantilever plate to the simple model and the results were promising and the same methodology can be applied to the airplane wing model. Aluminum models, Titanium models, and functionally graded materials of Aluminum and titanium results were compared to show a great vibration attenuation after using the FGM. Optimization in FGM gradation satisfied our objective of reducing and attenuating the vibration amplitudes to show the effect of using FGM in vibration behavior. Testing the Aluminum rich models, and comparing it with the titanium rich model was an optimization in this paper. Results have shown a significant attenuation in vibration magnitudes when using FGM instead of Titanium Plate, and Aluminium wing with FGM Spurs instead of Aluminium wings. It was also recommended that in future, changing the graphical scale to 1:10 or even 1:1 when the computers- capabilities allow.
Abstract: The culture of riding heavy motorcycles originates
from advanced countries and mainly comes from Europe, North
America, and Japan. Heavy duty motorcycle riders are different from
people who view motorcycles as a convenient mean of transportation.
They regard riding them as a kind of enjoyment and high-level taste.
The activities of riding heavy duty motorcycles have formes a
distinctive landscape in domestic land in Taiwan. Previous studies
which explored motorcycle culture in Taiwan still focused on the
objects of motorcycle engine displacement under 50 cc.. The study
aims to study the heavy duty motorcycles of engine displacement over
550 cc. and explores where their attractiveness is. For finding the
attractiveness of heavy duty motorcycle, the study chooses Miryoku
Engineering (Preference-Based Design) approach. Two steps are
adopted to proceed the research. First, through arranging the letters
obtained from interviewing experts, EGM (The Evaluation Grid
Method) was applied to find out the structure of attractiveness. The
attractive styles are eye-dazzling, leisure, classic, and racing
competitive styles. Secondarily, Quantification Theory Type I analysis
was adopted as a tool for analyzing the importance of attractiveness.
The relationship between style and attractive parts was also discussed.
The results could contribute to the design and research development of
heavy duty motorcycle industry in Taiwan.
Abstract: Steel made pipelines with different diameters are used
for transmitting oil and gas which in many cases are buried in soil
under the sea bed or immersed in sea water. External corrosion of
pipes is an important form of deterioration due to the aggressive
environment of sea water. Corrosion normally results in pits. Hence,
using the finite element method, namely ABAQUS software, this
paper estimates the amount of pressure capacity reduction of a pipecontaining
a semi-elliptical pitting corrosion and the rate of corrosion
during the pipeline life of 25 years.
Abstract: A time-domain numerical model within the
framework of transmission line modeling (TLM) is developed to
simulate electromagnetic pulse propagation inside multiple
microcavities forming photonic crystal (PhC) structures. The model
developed is quite general and is capable of simulating complex
electromagnetic problems accurately. The field quantities can be
mapped onto a passive electrical circuit equivalent what ensures that
TLM is provably stable and conservative at a local level.
Furthermore, the circuit representation allows a high level of
hybridization of TLM with other techniques and lumped circuit
models of components and devices. A photonic crystal structure
formed by rods (or blocks) of high-permittivity dieletric material
embedded in a low-dielectric background medium is simulated as an
example. The model developed gives vital spatio-temporal
information about the signal, and also gives spectral information over
a wide frequency range in a single run. The model has wide
applications in microwave communication systems, optical
waveguides and electromagnetic materials simulations.
Abstract: This paper presents optimal based damping controllers of Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC) for improving the damping power system oscillations. The design problem of UPFC damping controller and system configurations is formulated as an optimization with time domain-based objective function by means of Adaptive Tabu Search (ATS) technique. The UPFC is installed in Single Machine Infinite Bus (SMIB) for the performance analysis of the power system and simulated using MATLAB-s simulink. The simulation results of these studies showed that designed controller has an tremendous capability in damping power system oscillations.
Abstract: Since hyaluronic acid (HA) receptor such as CD44 is
over-expressed at sites of cancer cells, HA can be used as a targeting
vehicles for anti-cancer drugs. The aim of this study is to synthesize
block copolymer composed of hyaluronic acid and
poly(ε-caprolactone) (HAPCL) and to fabricate polymeric micelles for
anticancer drug targeting against CD44 receptor of tumor cells.
Chemical composition of HAPCL was confirmed using 1H NMR
spectroscopy. Doxorubicin (DOX) was incorporated into polymeric
micelles of HAPCL. The diameters of HAPHS polymeric micelles
were changed around 80nm and have spherical shapes. Targeting
potential was investigated using CD44-overexpressing. When
DOX-incorporated polymeric micelles was added to KB cells, they
revealed strong red fluorescence color while blocking of CD44
receptor by pretreatment of free HA resulted in reduced intensity,
indicating that HAPCL polymeric micelles have targetability against
CD44 receptor.
Abstract: Selective harmonic elimination-pulse width modulation techniques offer a tight control of the harmonic spectrum of a given voltage waveform generated by a power electronic converter along with a low number of switching transitions. Traditional optimization methods suffer from various drawbacks, such as prolonged and tedious computational steps and convergence to local optima; thus, the more the number of harmonics to be eliminated, the larger the computational complexity and time. This paper presents a novel method for output voltage harmonic elimination and voltage control of PWM AC/AC voltage converters using the principle of hybrid Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm-Pattern Search (RGA-PS) method. RGA is the primary optimizer exploiting its global search capabilities, PS is then employed to fine tune the best solution provided by RGA in each evolution. The proposed method enables linear control of the fundamental component of the output voltage and complete elimination of its harmonic contents up to a specified order. Theoretical studies have been carried out to show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method of selective harmonic elimination. Theoretical results are validated through simulation studies using PSIM software package.
Abstract: In this study, the effect of greywater irrigation on airwater interfacial area is investigated. Several soil column experiments were conducted for different greywater irrigation to develop the pressure-saturation curves. Surface tension was measured for different greywater concentration and fitted for Gibbs adsorption equation. Pressure-saturation curves show that the reduction of capillary rise stops when it reaches its critical micelle concentration (CMC). A simple theory is derived from pressure-saturation curves for calculating air-water interfacial area in porous medium during greywater irrigation by introducing a term 'hydraulic radius' for the pores. This term diminishes any effect of pore shapes on the air-water interfacial area. The air-water interfacial area was calculated using the pressure-saturation curves and found that it decreases with increasing moisture content. But no significant effect was observed on air-water interfacial area for different greywater irrigation. A maximum of 10% variation in interfacial area was observed at the residual saturation zone.
Abstract: Array signal processing involves signal enumeration and source localization. Array signal processing is centered on the ability to fuse temporal and spatial information captured via sampling signals emitted from a number of sources at the sensors of an array in order to carry out a specific estimation task: source characteristics (mainly localization of the sources) and/or array characteristics (mainly array geometry) estimation. Array signal processing is a part of signal processing that uses sensors organized in patterns or arrays, to detect signals and to determine information about them. Beamforming is a general signal processing technique used to control the directionality of the reception or transmission of a signal. Using Beamforming we can direct the majority of signal energy we receive from a group of array. Multiple signal classification (MUSIC) is a highly popular eigenstructure-based estimation method of direction of arrival (DOA) with high resolution. This Paper enumerates the effect of missing sensors in DOA estimation. The accuracy of the MUSIC-based DOA estimation is degraded significantly both by the effects of the missing sensors among the receiving array elements and the unequal channel gain and phase errors of the receiver.
Abstract: The article presents a new method for detection of
artificial objects and materials from images of the environmental
(non-urban) terrain. Our approach uses the hue and saturation (or Cb
and Cr) components of the image as the input to the segmentation
module that uses the mean shift method. The clusters obtained as the
output of this stage have been processed by the decision-making
module in order to find the regions of the image with the significant
possibility of representing human. Although this method will detect
various non-natural objects, it is primarily intended and optimized for
detection of humans; i.e. for search and rescue purposes in non-urban
terrain where, in normal circumstances, non-natural objects shouldn-t
be present. Real world images are used for the evaluation of the
method.
Abstract: This study introduces a new method for detecting,
sorting, and localizing spikes from multiunit EEG recordings. The
method combines the wavelet transform, which localizes distinctive
spike features, with Super-Paramagnetic Clustering (SPC) algorithm,
which allows automatic classification of the data without assumptions
such as low variance or Gaussian distributions. Moreover, the method
is capable of setting amplitude thresholds for spike detection. The
method makes use of several real EEG data sets, and accordingly the
spikes are detected, clustered and their times were detected.
Abstract: Performance appraisal of employee is important in
managing the human resource of an organization. With the change
towards knowledge-based capitalism, maintaining talented
knowledge workers is critical. However, management classification
of “outstanding", “poor" and “average" performance may not be an
easy decision. Besides that, superior might also tend to judge the
work performance of their subordinates informally and arbitrarily
especially without the existence of a system of appraisal. In this
paper, we propose a performance appraisal system using
multifactorial evaluation model in dealing with appraisal grades
which are often express vaguely in linguistic terms. The proposed
model is for evaluating staff performance based on specific
performance appraisal criteria. The project was collaboration with
one of the Information and Communication Technology company in
Malaysia with reference to its performance appraisal process.
Abstract: In this paper a new approach for transmission pricing
is presented. The main idea is voltage angle allocation, i.e.
determining the contribution of each contract on the voltage angle of
each bus. DC power flow is used to compute a primary solution for
angle decomposition. To consider the impacts of system non-linearity
on angle decomposition, the primary solution is corrected in different
iterations of decoupled Newton-Raphson power flow. Then, the
contribution of each contract on power flow of each transmission line
is computed based on angle decomposition. Contract-related flows
are used as a measure for “extent of use" of transmission network
capacity and consequently transmission pricing. The presented
approach is applied to a 4-bus test system and IEEE 30-bus test
system.
Abstract: The Economic factors are leading to the rise of
infrastructures provides software and computing facilities as a
service, known as cloud services or cloud computing. Cloud services
can provide efficiencies for application providers, both by limiting
up-front capital expenses, and by reducing the cost of ownership over
time. Such services are made available in a data center, using shared
commodity hardware for computation and storage. There is a varied
set of cloud services available today, including application services
(salesforce.com), storage services (Amazon S3), compute services
(Google App Engine, Amazon EC2) and data services (Amazon
SimpleDB, Microsoft SQL Server Data Services, Google-s Data
store). These services represent a variety of reformations of data
management architectures, and more are on the horizon.
Abstract: This paper presents a new approach for intelligent agent communication based on ontology for agent community. DARPA agent markup language (DAML) is used to build the community ontology. This paper extends the agent management specification by the foundation for intelligent physical agents (FIPA) to develop an agent role called community facilitator (CF) that manages community directory and community ontology. CF helps build agent community. Precise description of agent service in this community can thus be achieved. This facilitates agent communication. Furthermore, through ontology update, agents with different ontology are capable of communicating with each other. An example of advanced traveler information system is included to illustrate practicality of this approach.
Abstract: This paper focuses on PSS/E modeling of wind farms
of Doubly-fed Induction Generator (DFIG) type and their impact on
issues of power system operation. Since Wind Turbine Generators
(WTG) don-t have the same characteristics as synchronous
generators, the appropriate modeling of wind farms is essential for
transmission system operators to analyze the best options of
transmission grid reinforcements as well as to evaluate the wind
power impact on reliability and security of supply. With the high
excepted penetration of wind power into the power system a
simultaneous loss of Wind Farm generation will put at risk power
system security and reliability. Therefore, the main wind grid code
requirements concern the fault ride through capability and frequency
operation range of wind turbines. In case of grid faults wind turbines
have to supply a definite reactive power depending on the
instantaneous voltage and to return quickly to normal operation.
Abstract: An experiment was conducted on the comparative
study of drip and furrow irrigation methods at the farmer-s field in
Umar Kot. The total area under experiment about 4000m2 was
divided into two equal portions. One portion about 40m X 50m was
occupied by drip and the other portion about 40m X 50m by furrow
irrigation method. Soil at the experimental site was clay loam in
texture for 0-60cm depth; average dry bulk density and field capacity
was 1.16g/cm3 and 28.5% respectively. The results reveal that the
drip irrigation method saved 56.4% water and gave 22% more yield
as compared to that of furrow irrigation method. Higher water use
efficiency about 4.87 was obtained in drip irrigation method; whereas
lower water used efficiency about 1.66 was obtained in furrow
irrigation method. The present study suggests farming community to
adopt drip irrigation method instead of old traditional flooding
methods.
Abstract: The concept of flexible manufacturing is highly
appealing in gaining a competitive edge in the market by quickly
adapting to the changing customer needs. Scheduling jobs on flexible
manufacturing systems (FMSs) is a challenging task of managing the
available flexibility on the shop floor to react to the dynamics of the
environment in real-time. In this paper, an agent-oriented scheduling
framework that can be integrated with a real or a simulated FMS is
proposed. This framework works in stochastic environments with a
dynamic model of job arrival. It supports a hierarchical cooperative
scheduling that builds on the available flexibility of the shop floor.
Testing the framework on a model of a real FMS showed the
capability of the proposed approach to overcome the drawbacks of
the conventional approaches and maintain a near optimal solution
despite the dynamics of the operational environment.
Abstract: Alkali treated oil palm empty fruit bunch (EFB) fibres
(TEFBF) and untreated EFBF fibers (UEFBF) were incorporated in
polypropylene (PP) with and without malic anhydride grafted PP
(MAPP) and magnesium hydroxide as flame retardant (FR) to
produce TEFBF-PP and UEFBF-PP composites by the melt casting
method. The composites were characterized by mechanical and
burning tests along with a scanning electron microscope and Fourier
transform infrared spectroscopy. The significant improvement in
flexural modulus (133%) and flame retardant property (60%) of
TEFBF-PP composite with MAPP and FR is observed. The improved
mechanical property is discussed by the development of encapsulated
textures.