Tool Failure Detection Based on Statistical Analysis of Metal Cutting Acoustic Emission Signals

The analysis of Acoustic Emission (AE) signal generated from metal cutting processes has often approached statistically. This is due to the stochastic nature of the emission signal as a result of factors effecting the signal from its generation through transmission and sensing. Different techniques are applied in this manner, each of which is suitable for certain processes. In metal cutting where the emission generated by the deformation process is rather continuous, an appropriate method for analysing the AE signal based on the root mean square (RMS) of the signal is often used and is suitable for use with the conventional signal processing systems. The aim of this paper is to set a strategy in tool failure detection in turning processes via the statistic analysis of the AE generated from the cutting zone. The strategy is based on the investigation of the distribution moments of the AE signal at predetermined sampling. The skews and kurtosis of these distributions are the key elements in the detection. A normal (Gaussian) distribution has first been suggested then this was eliminated due to insufficiency. The so called Beta distribution was then considered, this has been used with an assumed β density function and has given promising results with regard to chipping and tool breakage detection.

Model and Control of Renewable Energy Systems

This paper presents a developed method for controlling multi-renewable energy generators. The control system depends basically on three sensors (wind anemometer, solar sensor, and voltage sensor). These sensors represent PLC-s analogue inputs. Controlling the output voltage supply can be achieved by an enhanced method of interlocking between the renewable energy generators, depending on those sensors and output contactors.

A Software Framework for Predicting Oil-Palm Yield from Climate Data

Intelligent systems based on machine learning techniques, such as classification, clustering, are gaining wide spread popularity in real world applications. This paper presents work on developing a software system for predicting crop yield, for example oil-palm yield, from climate and plantation data. At the core of our system is a method for unsupervised partitioning of data for finding spatio-temporal patterns in climate data using kernel methods which offer strength to deal with complex data. This work gets inspiration from the notion that a non-linear data transformation into some high dimensional feature space increases the possibility of linear separability of the patterns in the transformed space. Therefore, it simplifies exploration of the associated structure in the data. Kernel methods implicitly perform a non-linear mapping of the input data into a high dimensional feature space by replacing the inner products with an appropriate positive definite function. In this paper we present a robust weighted kernel k-means algorithm incorporating spatial constraints for clustering the data. The proposed algorithm can effectively handle noise, outliers and auto-correlation in the spatial data, for effective and efficient data analysis by exploring patterns and structures in the data, and thus can be used for predicting oil-palm yield by analyzing various factors affecting the yield.

A Framework for Identifying the Critical Factors Affecting the Decision to Adopt and Use Inter-Organizational Information Systems

The importance of inter-organizational system (IOS) has been increasingly recognized by organizations. However, IOS adoption has proved to be difficult and, at this stage, why this is so is not fully uncovered. In practice, benefits have often remained concentrated, primarily accruing to the dominant party, resulting in low rates of adoption and usage, and often culminating in the failure of the IOS. The main research question is why organizations initiate or join IOS and what factors influence their adoption and use levels. This paper reviews the literature on IOS adoption and proposes a theoretical framework in order to identify the critical factors to capture a complete picture of IOS adoption. With our proposed critical factors, we are able to investigate their relative contributions to IOS adoption decisions. We obtain findings that suggested that there are five groups of factors that significantly affect the adoption and use decision of IOS in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) context: 1) interorganizational context, 2) organizational context, 3) technological context, 4) perceived costs, and 5) perceived benefits.

Power Generation Scheduling of Thermal Units Considering Gas Pipelines Constraints

With the growth of electricity generation from gas energy gas pipeline reliability can substantially impact the electric generation. A physical disruption to pipeline or to a compressor station can interrupt the flow of gas or reduce the pressure and lead to loss of multiple gas-fired electric generators, which could dramatically reduce the supplied power and threaten the power system security. Gas pressure drops during peak loading time on pipeline system, is a common problem in network with no enough transportation capacity which limits gas transportation and causes many problem for thermal domain power systems in supplying their demand. For a feasible generation scheduling planning in networks with no sufficient gas transportation capacity, it is required to consider gas pipeline constraints in solving the optimization problem and evaluate the impacts of gas consumption in power plants on gas pipelines operating condition. This paper studies about operating of gas fired power plants in critical conditions when the demand of gas and electricity peak together. An integrated model of gas and electric model is used to consider the gas pipeline constraints in the economic dispatch problem of gas-fueled thermal generator units.

Impact of Reflectors on Solar Energy Systems

The paper aims to show that implementing different types of reflectors in solar energy systems, will dramatically improve energy production by means of concentrating and intensifying more sunlight onto a solar cell. The Solar Intensifier unit is designed to increase efficiency and performance of a set of solar panels. The unit was fabricated and tested. The experimental results show good improvement in the performance of the solar energy system.

Downlink Scheduling and Radio Resource Allocation in Adaptive OFDMA Wireless Communication Systems for User-Individual QoS

In this paper, we address the problem of adaptive radio resource allocation (RRA) and packet scheduling in the downlink of a cellular OFDMA system, and propose a downlink multi-carrier proportional fair (MPF) scheduler and its joint with adaptive RRA algorithm to distribute radio resources among multiple users according to their individual QoS requirements. The allocation and scheduling objective is to maximize the total throughput, while at the same time maintaining the fairness among users. The simulation results demonstrate that the methods presented provide for user more explicit fairness relative to RRA algorithm, but the joint scheme achieves the higher sum-rate capacity with flexible parameters setting compared with MPF scheduler.

Analysis of Foaming Flow Instabilities for Dynamic Liquid Saturation in Trickle Bed Reactor

The effects of different parameters on the hydrodynamics of trickle bed reactors were discussed for Newtonian and non-Newtonian foaming systems. The varying parameters are varying liquid velocities, gas flow velocities and surface tension. The range for gas velocity is particularly large, thanks to the use of dense gas to simulate very high pressure conditions. This data bank has been used to compare the prediction accuracy of the different trendlines and transition points from the literature. More than 240 experimental points for the trickle flow (GCF) and foaming pulsing flow (PF/FPF) regime were obtained for present study. Hydrodynamic characteristics involving dynamic liquid saturation significantly influenced by gas and liquid flow rates. For 15 and 30 ppm air-aqueous surfactant solutions, dynamic liquid saturation decreases with higher liquid and gas flow rates considerably in high interaction regime. With decrease in surface tension i.e. for 45 and 60 ppm air-aqueous surfactant systems, effect was more pronounced with decreases dynamic liquid saturation very sharply during regime transition significantly at both low liquid and gas flow rates.

A Nonoblivious Image Watermarking System Based on Singular Value Decomposition and Texture Segmentation

In this paper, a robust digital image watermarking scheme for copyright protection applications using the singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. In this scheme, an entropy masking model has been applied on the host image for the texture segmentation. Moreover, the local luminance and textures of the host image are considered for watermark embedding procedure to increase the robustness of the watermarking scheme. In contrast to all existing SVD-based watermarking systems that have been designed to embed visual watermarks, our system uses a pseudo-random sequence as a watermark. We have tested the performance of our method using a wide variety of image processing attacks on different test images. A comparison is made between the results of our proposed algorithm with those of a wavelet-based method to demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm.

Adaptive PID Controller based on Reinforcement Learning for Wind Turbine Control

A self tuning PID control strategy using reinforcement learning is proposed in this paper to deal with the control of wind energy conversion systems (WECS). Actor-Critic learning is used to tune PID parameters in an adaptive way by taking advantage of the model-free and on-line learning properties of reinforcement learning effectively. In order to reduce the demand of storage space and to improve the learning efficiency, a single RBF neural network is used to approximate the policy function of Actor and the value function of Critic simultaneously. The inputs of RBF network are the system error, as well as the first and the second-order differences of error. The Actor can realize the mapping from the system state to PID parameters, while the Critic evaluates the outputs of the Actor and produces TD error. Based on TD error performance index and gradient descent method, the updating rules of RBF kernel function and network weights were given. Simulation results show that the proposed controller is efficient for WECS and it is perfectly adaptable and strongly robust, which is better than that of a conventional PID controller.

Investigating the Effects of Sociotechnical Changes

Cognizant of the fact that enterprise systems involve organizational change and their implementation is over shadowed by a high failure rate, it is argued that there is the need to focus attention on employees- perceptions of such organizational change when explaining adoption behavior of enterprise systems. For this purpose, the research incorporates a conceptual constructo fattitude toward change that captures views about the need for organizational change. Centered on this conceptual construct, the research model includes beliefs regarding the system and behavioral intention as its consequences, and the personal characteristics of organizational commitment and perceived personal competence as its antecedents. Structural equation analysis using LISREL provides significant support for the proposed relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with limitations.

An HCI Template for Distributed Applications

Both software applications and their development environment are becoming more and more distributed. This trend impacts not only the way software computes, but also how it looks. This article proposes a Human Computer Interface (HCI) template from three representative applications we have developed. These applications include a Multi-Agent System based software, a 3D Internet computer game with distributed game world logic, and a programming language environment used in constructing distributed neural network and its visualizations. HCI concepts that are common to these applications are described in abstract terms in the template. These include off-line presentation of global entities, entities inside a hierarchical namespace, communication and languages, reconfiguration of entity references in a graph, impersonation and access right, etc. We believe the metaphor that underlies an HCI concept as well as the relationships between a bunch of HCI concepts are crucial to the design of software systems and vice versa.

Energy Consumption Analysis of Design Patterns

The importance of low power consumption is widely acknowledged due to the increasing use of portable devices, which require minimizing the consumption of energy. Energy dissipation is heavily dependent on the software used in the system. Applying design patterns in object-oriented designs is a common practice nowadays. In this paper we analyze six design patterns and explore the effect of them on energy consumption and performance.

Adequacy of Object-Oriented Framework System-Based Testing Techniques

An application framework provides a reusable design and implementation for a family of software systems. If the framework contains defects, the defects will be passed on to the applications developed from the framework. Framework defects are hard to discover at the time the framework is instantiated. Therefore, it is important to remove all defects before instantiating the framework. In this paper, two measures for the adequacy of an object-oriented system-based testing technique are introduced. The measures assess the usefulness and uniqueness of the testing technique. The two measures are applied to experimentally compare the adequacy of two testing techniques introduced to test objectoriented frameworks at the system level. The two considered testing techniques are the New Framework Test Approach and Testing Frameworks Through Hooks (TFTH). The techniques are also compared analytically in terms of their coverage power of objectoriented aspects. The comparison study results show that the TFTH technique is better than the New Framework Test Approach in terms of usefulness degree, uniqueness degree, and coverage power.

Comparison of Different Gas Turbine Inlet Air Cooling Methods

Gas turbine air inlet cooling is a useful method for increasing output for regions where significant power demand and highest electricity prices occur during the warm months. Inlet air cooling increases the power output by taking advantage of the gas turbine-s feature of higher mass flow rate when the compressor inlet temperature decreases. Different methods are available for reducing gas turbine inlet temperature. There are two basic systems currently available for inlet cooling. The first and most cost-effective system is evaporative cooling. Evaporative coolers make use of the evaporation of water to reduce the gas turbine-s inlet air temperature. The second system employs various ways to chill the inlet air. In this method, the cooling medium flows through a heat exchanger located in the inlet duct to remove heat from the inlet air. However, the evaporative cooling is limited by wet-bulb temperature while the chilling can cool the inlet air to temperatures that are lower than the wet bulb temperature. In the present work, a thermodynamic model of a gas turbine is built to calculate heat rate, power output and thermal efficiency at different inlet air temperature conditions. Computational results are compared with ISO conditions herein called "base-case". Therefore, the two cooling methods are implemented and solved for different inlet conditions (inlet temperature and relative humidity). Evaporative cooler and absorption chiller systems results show that when the ambient temperature is extremely high with low relative humidity (requiring a large temperature reduction) the chiller is the more suitable cooling solution. The net increment in the power output as a function of the temperature decrease for each cooling method is also obtained.

Application of PSO Technique for Seismic Control of Tall Building

In recent years, tuned mass damper (TMD) control systems for civil engineering structures have attracted considerable attention. This paper emphasizes on the application of particle swarm application (PSO) to design and optimize the parameters of the TMD control scheme for achieving the best results in the reduction of the building response under earthquake excitations. The Integral of the Time multiplied Absolute value of the Error (ITAE) based on relative displacement of all floors in the building is taken as a performance index of the optimization criterion. The problem of robustly TMD controller design is formatted as an optimization problem based on the ITAE performance index to be solved using the PSO technique which has a story ability to find the most optimistic results. An 11- story realistic building, located in the city of Rasht, Iran is considered as a test system to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method. The results analysis through the time-domain simulation and some performance indices reveals that the designed PSO based TMD controller has an excellent capability in reduction of the seismically excited example building.

Static and Dynamic Complexity Analysis of Software Metrics

Software complexity metrics are used to predict critical information about reliability and maintainability of software systems. Object oriented software development requires a different approach to software complexity metrics. Object Oriented Software Metrics can be broadly classified into static and dynamic metrics. Static Metrics give information at the code level whereas dynamic metrics provide information on the actual runtime. In this paper we will discuss the various complexity metrics, and the comparison between static and dynamic complexity.

Designing a Rescue System for Earthquake-Stricken Area with the Aim of Facilitation and Accelerating Accessibilities (Case Study: City of Tehran)

Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.

A Weighted Sum Technique for the Joint Optimization of Performance and Power Consumption in Data Centers

With data centers, end-users can realize the pervasiveness of services that will be one day the cornerstone of our lives. However, data centers are often classified as computing systems that consume the most amounts of power. To circumvent such a problem, we propose a self-adaptive weighted sum methodology that jointly optimizes the performance and power consumption of any given data center. Compared to traditional methodologies for multi-objective optimization problems, the proposed self-adaptive weighted sum technique does not rely on a systematical change of weights during the optimization procedure. The proposed technique is compared with the greedy and LR heuristics for large-scale problems, and the optimal solution for small-scale problems implemented in LINDO. the experimental results revealed that the proposed selfadaptive weighted sum technique outperforms both of the heuristics and projects a competitive performance compared to the optimal solution.

GODYS-PC: a Software Package for Modeling,Simulating and Analyzing Dynamic Systems

In this paper, we introduce GODYS-PC software package for modeling, simulating and analyzing dynamic systems. To illustrate the use of GODYS-PC we present a few examples which concern modeling and simulating of engineering systems. In order to compare GODYS-PC with widely used in academia and industry Simulink®, the same examples are provided both in GODYS-PC and Simulink®.