Abstract: In this study, a semi-cylinder obstacle placed in a
channel is handled to determine the effect of flow and heat transfer
around the obstacle. Both faces of the semi-cylinder are used in the
numerical analysis. First, the front face of the semi-cylinder is stated
perpendicular to flow, than the rear face is placed. The study is
carried out numerically, by using commercial software ANSYS 11.0.
The well-known κ-ε model is applied as the turbulence model.
Reynolds number is in the range of 104 to 105 and air is assumed as
the flowing fluid. The results showed that, heat transfer increased
approximately 15 % in the front faze case, while it enhanced up to 28
% in the rear face case.
Abstract: Both the minimum energy consumption and
smoothness, which is quantified as a function of jerk, are generally
needed in many dynamic systems such as the automobile and the
pick-and-place robot manipulator that handles fragile equipments.
Nevertheless, many researchers come up with either solely
concerning on the minimum energy consumption or minimum jerk
trajectory. This research paper considers the indirect minimum Jerk
method for higher order differential equation in dynamics
optimization proposes a simple yet very interesting indirect jerks
approaches in designing the time-dependent system yielding an
alternative optimal solution. Extremal solutions for the cost functions
of indirect jerks are found using the dynamic optimization methods
together with the numerical approximation. This case considers the
linear equation of a simple system, for instance, mass, spring and
damping. The simple system uses two mass connected together by
springs. The boundary initial is defined the fix end time and end
point. The higher differential order is solved by Galerkin-s methods
weight residual. As the result, the 6th higher differential order shows
the faster solving time.
Abstract: The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time to achieve high quality responses. This paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measures for response quality evaluation and the call for new standard measures and related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of conversational agents, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research proposes a blackbox approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems, AnswerBus, START and AINI.
Abstract: As a result of the ever-changing environment and the demands of rganisations- customers, it is important to recognise the importance of some important managerial challenges. It is the sincere belief that failure to meet these challenges, will ultimately contribute to inevitable problems for organisations. This recognition
requires from managers and by implication organisations to be engaged in ethical behaviour, identity awareness and learning organisational behaviour. All these aspects actually reflect on the
importance of intellectual capital as the competitive weapons for
organisations in the future.
Abstract: Collaborative networked learning (hereafter CNL)
was first proposed by Charles Findley in his work “Collaborative
networked learning: online facilitation and software support" as part
of instructional learning for the future of the knowledge worker. His
premise was that through electronic dialogue learners and experts
could interactively communicate within a contextual framework to
resolve problems, and/or to improve product or process knowledge.
Collaborative learning has always been the forefront of educational
technology and pedagogical research, but not in the mainstream of
operations management. As a result, there is a large disparity in the
study of CNL, and little is known about the antecedents of network
collaboration and sharing of information among diverse employees in
the manufacturing environment. This paper presents a model to
bridge the gap between theory and practice. The objective is that
manufacturing organizations will be able to accelerate organizational
learning and sharing of information through various collaborative
Abstract: A new mechanism responsible for structural life
consumption due to resonant fatigue in turbine blades, or vanes, is
presented and explained. A rotating blade or vane in a gas turbine can
change its contour due to erosion and/or material build up, in any of
these instances, the surface pressure distribution occurring on the
suction and pressure sides of blades-vanes can suffer substantial
modification of their pressure and temperatures envelopes and flow
characteristics. Meanwhile, the relative rotation between the blade
and duct vane while the pressurized gas flows and the consequent
wake crossings, will induce a fluctuating thrust force or lift that will
excite the blade.
An actual totally used up set of vane-blade components in a HP
turbine power stage in a gas turbine is analyzed. The blade suffered
some material erosion mostly at the trailing edge provoking a
peculiar surface pressure envelope which evolved as the relative
position between the vane and the blade passed in front of each other.
Interestingly preliminary modal analysis for this eroded blade
indicates several natural frequencies within the aeromechanic power
spectrum, moreover, the highest frequency component is 94% of one
natural frequency indicating near resonant condition.
Independently of other simultaneously occurring fatigue cycles
(such as thermal, centrifugal stresses).
Abstract: Non-profit organizations, especially religious-based
institutions, have long played a very important role in society.
Nevertheless, scandals such as inefficient management and the use of
unlawful fundraising activities have raised questions regarding the
governance and accountability of these organizations. As such, the
issues have attracted considerable research interest. However, there is
still limited research on accountability in religious based
organizations, especially in the context of Islamic religious
organizations. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the
issues of accounting and accountability in religious organizations,
specifically in Islamic religious establishments. The paper starts by
looking at the conventional meaning and concept of accountability.
This is followed by a discussion of the principles of accountability
within the Islamic framework. In so doing, the history of the role of
accounting within Muslim society and also the differences between
the Islamic and conventional view of accountability are reviewed.
Insights gained from previous research on accountability in faith
based organizations are also discussed
Abstract: The effects of irrigation with dairy factory wastewater
on soil properties were investigated at two sites that had received
irrigation for > 60 years. Two adjoining paired sites that had never
received DFE were also sampled as well as another seven fields from
a wider area around the factory. In comparison with paired sites that
had not received effluent, long-term wastewater irrigation resulted in
an increase in pH, EC, extractable P, exchangeable Na and K and
ESP. These changes were related to the use of phosphoric acid,
NaOH and KOH as cleaning agents in the factory. Soil organic C
content was unaffected by DFE irrigation but the size (microbial
biomass C and N) and activity (basal respiration) of the soil
microbial community were increased. These increases were
attributed to regular inputs of soluble C (e.g. lactose) present as milk
residues in the wastewater. Principal component analysis (PCA) of
the soils data from all 11sites confirmed that the main effects of DFE
irrigation were an increase in exchangeable Na, extractable P and
microbial biomass C, an accumulation of soluble salts and a liming
effect. PCA analysis of soil bacterial community structure, using
PCR-DGGE of 16S rDNA fragments, generally separated individual
sites from one another but did not group them according to irrigation
history. Thus, whilst the size and activity of the soil microbial
community were increased, the structure and diversity of the
bacterial community remained unaffected.
Abstract: The application of the synchronous dynamic random
access memory (SDRAM) has gone beyond the scope of personal
computers for quite a long time. It comes into hand whenever a big
amount of low price and still high speed memory is needed. Most of
the newly developed stand alone embedded devices in the field of
image, video and sound processing take more and more use of it. The
big amount of low price memory has its trade off – the speed. In
order to take use of the full potential of the memory, an efficient
controller is needed. Efficient stands for maximum random accesses
to the memory both for reading and writing and less area after
implementation. This paper proposes a target device independent
DDR SDRAM pipelined controller and provides performance
comparison with available solutions.
Abstract: New advancement of technology and never satisfying demands of the civilization are putting huge pressure on the natural fuel resources and these resources are at a constant threat to its sustainability. To get the best out of the automobile, the optimum balance between performance and fuel economy is important. In the present state of art, either of the above two aspects are taken into mind while designing and development process which puts the other in the loss as increase in fuel economy leads to decrement in performance and vice-versa. In-depth observation of the vehicle dynamics apparently shows that large amount of energy is lost during braking and likewise large amount of fuel is consumed to reclaim the initial state, this leads to lower fuel efficiency to gain the same performance. Current use of Kinetic Energy Recovery System is only limited to sports vehicles only because of the higher cost of this system. They are also temporary in nature as power can be squeezed only during a small time duration and use of superior parts leads to high cost, which results on concentration on performance only and neglecting the fuel economy. In this paper Kinetic Energy Recovery System for storing the power and then using the same while accelerating has been discussed. The major storing element in this system is a Flat Spiral Spring that will store energy by compression and torsion.
The use of spring ensure the permanent storage of energy until used by the driver unlike present mechanical regeneration system in which the energy stored decreases with time and is eventually lost. A combination of internal gears and spur gears will be used in order to make the energy release uniform which will lead to safe usage. The system can be used to improve the fuel efficiency by assisting in overcoming the vehicle’s inertia after braking or to provide instant acceleration whenever required by the driver. The performance characteristics of the system including response time, mechanical efficiency and overall increase in efficiency are demonstrated. This technology makes the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) more flexible and economical allowing specific application while at the same time increasing the time frame and ease of usage.
Abstract: With the advent of emerging personal computing paradigms such as ubiquitous and mobile computing, Web contents are becoming accessible from a wide range of mobile devices. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities, Web contents need to be adapted for transparent access from a variety of client agents. Such content adaptation results in better rendering and faster delivery to the client device. Nevertheless, Web content adaptation sets new challenges for semantic markup. This paper presents an advanced components platform, called MorfeoSMC, enabling the development of mobility applications and services according to a channel model based on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. It then goes on to describe the potential for integration with the Semantic Web through a novel framework of external semantic annotation of mobile Web contents. The role of semantic annotation in this framework is to describe the contents of individual documents themselves, assuring the preservation of the semantics during the process of adapting content rendering, as well as to exploit these semantic annotations in a novel user profile-aware content adaptation process. Semantic Web content adaptation is a way of adding value to and facilitates repurposing of Web contents (enhanced browsing, Web Services location and access, etc).
Abstract: Solidarity and kinship has long been an intangible
emblem to Malay community especially in the rural area. It is visibly
seen through the dependability among each unit of the community
either in religious and social events including the matrimonial or
wedding. Nevertheless, the inevitable phenomenon, modernization
legitimately alters every facets of human life not only the routines,
traditions, rituals, norms but also to the daily activities and the
specific occasion. Using triangulation approach of interview and self
completed questionnaire this study empirically examine the level of
alteration of Malays wedding foodways which relate to the
preparation and consumption of it and its impact on the community
social bonding. Some meaningful insights were obtained whereby
modernization through technology (modern equipments) and social
factors (education, migration, and high disposal income) significantly
contribute to the alteration of wedding foodways from preparation up
to consumption stages. The domino effect of this alteration
consequently leads to the fragility of social kinship or somehow
reduced cohesiveness and interaction among the individual of Malay
society in the rural area.
Abstract: Random Access Memory (RAM) is an important
device in computer system. It can represent the snapshot on how the
computer has been used by the user. With the growth of its
importance, the computer memory has been an issue that has been
discussed in digital forensics. A number of tools have been developed
to retrieve the information from the memory. However, most of the
tools have their limitation in the ability of retrieving the important
information from the computer memory. Hence, this paper is aimed
to discuss the limitation and the setback for two main techniques such
as process signature search and process enumeration. Then, a new
hybrid approach will be presented to minimize the setback in both
individual techniques. This new approach combines both techniques
with the purpose to retrieve the information from the process block
and other objects in the computer memory. Nevertheless, the basic
theory in address translation for x86 platforms will be demonstrated
in this paper.
Abstract: Since 1992, year where Hugo de Garis has published
the first paper on Evolvable Hardware (EHW), a period of intense
creativity has followed. It has been actively researched, developed
and applied to various problems. Different approaches have been
proposed that created three main classifications: extrinsic, mixtrinsic
and intrinsic EHW. Each of these solutions has a real interest.
Nevertheless, although the extrinsic evolution generates some
excellent results, the intrinsic systems are not so advanced. This
paper suggests 3 possible solutions to implement the run-time
configuration intrinsic EHW system: FPGA-based Run-Time
Configuration system, JBits-based Run-Time Configuration system
and Multi-board functional-level Run-Time Configuration system.
The main characteristic of the proposed architectures is that they are
implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array. A comparison of
proposed solutions demonstrates that multi-board functional-level
run-time configuration is superior in terms of scalability, flexibility
and the implementation easiness.
Abstract: This paper sets forth the possibility and importance about applying Data Mining in Web logs mining and shows some problems in the conventional searching engines. Then it offers an improved algorithm based on the original AprioriAll algorithm which has been used in Web logs mining widely. The new algorithm adds the property of the User ID during the every step of producing the candidate set and every step of scanning the database by which to decide whether an item in the candidate set should be put into the large set which will be used to produce next candidate set. At the meantime, in order to reduce the number of the database scanning, the new algorithm, by using the property of the Apriori algorithm, limits the size of the candidate set in time whenever it is produced. Test results show the improved algorithm has a more lower complexity of time and space, better restrain noise and fit the capacity of memory.
Abstract: In the field of concepts, the measure of Wu and Palmer [1] has the advantage of being simple to implement and have good performances compared to the other similarity measures [2]. Nevertheless, the Wu and Palmer measure present the following disadvantage: in some situations, the similarity of two elements of an IS-A ontology contained in the neighborhood exceeds the similarity value of two elements contained in the same hierarchy. This situation is inadequate within the information retrieval framework. To overcome this problem, we propose a new similarity measure based on the Wu and Palmer measure. Our objective is to obtain realistic results for concepts not located in the same way. The obtained results show that compared to the Wu and Palmer approach, our measure presents a profit in terms of relevance and execution time.
Abstract: Air infiltration in mass scale industrial applications of
bio char production is inevitable. The presence of oxygen during the
carbonization process is detrimental to the production of biochar yield
and properties. The experiment was carried out on several wood
species in a fixed-bed pyrolyser under various fractions of oxygen
ranging from 0% to 11% by varying nitrogen and oxygen composition
in the pyrolysing gas mixtures at desired compositions. The bed
temperature and holding time were also varied. Process optimization
was carried out by Response Surface Methodology (RSM) by
employing Central Composite Design (CCD) using Design Expert 6.0
Software. The effect of oxygen ratio and holding time on biochar yield
within the range studied were statistically significant. From the
analysis result, optimum condition of 15.2% biochar yield of
mangrove wood was predicted at pyrolysis temperature of 403 oC,
oxygen percentage of 2.3% and holding time of two hours. This
prediction agreed well with the experiment finding of 15.1% biochar
yield.
Abstract: This study reports the preparation of soft magnetic
ribbons of Fe-based amorphous alloys using the single-roller melt-spinning technique. Ribbon width varied from 142 mm to 213
mm and, with a thickness of approximately 22 μm ± 2 μm. The microstructure and magnetic properties of the ribbons were
characterized by differential scanning calorimeter (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), and electrical resistivity measurements (ERM). The amorphous material
properties dependence of the cooling rate and nozzle pressure have uneven surface in ribbon thicknesses are investigated. Magnetic
measurement results indicate that some region of the ribbon exhibits good magnetic properties, higher saturation induction and lower coercivity. However, due to the uneven surface of 213 mm wide
ribbon, the magnetic responses are not uniformly distributed. To
understand the transformer magnetic performances, this study analyzes the measurements of a three-phase 2 MVA amorphous-cored transformer. Experimental results confirm that the transformer with a
ribbon width of 142 mm has better magnetic properties in terms of lower core loss, exciting power, and audible noise.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body
of knowledge in the area of management accounting, particularly
performance measurement systems within the BSC framework, by
investigating empirically the extent of multiple performance
measures usage and their effects on the financial performance of
Jordanian banks in the branches level. Nevertheless, the result of this
study shows that the non-financial measures usages, particularly,
customer oriented indicators and product/ service oriented indicators,
appears to be important as it enhances firm performance.
Remarkably, the findings reveal that there is positive relationship
between the usages of multiple performance measures via overall
BSC measures and financial performance in the branches level.
Abstract: Fundamental sensor-motor couplings form the backbone
of most mobile robot control tasks, and often need to be implemented
fast, efficiently and nevertheless reliably. Machine learning
techniques are therefore often used to obtain the desired sensor-motor
competences.
In this paper we present an alternative to established machine
learning methods such as artificial neural networks, that is very fast,
easy to implement, and has the distinct advantage that it generates
transparent, analysable sensor-motor couplings: system identification
through nonlinear polynomial mapping.
This work, which is part of the RobotMODIC project at the
universities of Essex and Sheffield, aims to develop a theoretical understanding
of the interaction between the robot and its environment.
One of the purposes of this research is to enable the principled design
of robot control programs.
As a first step towards this aim we model the behaviour of the
robot, as this emerges from its interaction with the environment, with
the NARMAX modelling method (Nonlinear, Auto-Regressive, Moving
Average models with eXogenous inputs). This method produces
explicit polynomial functions that can be subsequently analysed using
established mathematical methods.
In this paper we demonstrate the fidelity of the obtained NARMAX
models in the challenging task of robot route learning; we present a
set of experiments in which a Magellan Pro mobile robot was taught
to follow four different routes, always using the same mechanism to
obtain the required control law.