Abstract: Taiwan was the first country in Asia to announce
“Nuclear-Free Homeland" in 2002. In 2008, the new government
released the Sustainable Energy Policy Guidelines to lower the
nationwide CO2 emissions some time between 2016 and 2020 back to
the level of year 2008, further abatement of CO2 emissions is planed in
year 2025 when CO2 emissions will decrease to the level of year 2000.
Besides, under consideration of the issues of energy, environment and
economics (3E), the new government declared that the nuclear power
is a carbon-less energy option. This study analyses the effects of
nuclear power generation for CO2 abatement scenarios in Taiwan. The
MARKAL-MACRO energy model was adopted to evaluate economic
impacts and energy deployment due to life extension of existing
nuclear power plants and build new nuclear power units in CO2
abatement scenarios. The results show that CO2 abatement effort is
expensive. On the other hand, nuclear power is a cost-effective choice.
The GDP loss rate in the case of building new nuclear power plants is
around two thirds of the Nuclear-Free Homeland case. Nuclear power
generation has the capacity to provide large-scale CO2 free electricity.
Therefore, the results show that nuclear power is not only an option for
Taiwan, but also a requisite for Taiwan-s CO2 reduction strategy.
Abstract: This study was conducted to evaluate the anti-diabetic
properties of ethanolic extract of two plants commonly used in folk
medicine, Mormodica charantia (bitter melon) and Trigonella
foenum-graecum (fenugreek). The study was performed on STZinduced
diabetic rats (DM type-I). Plant extracts of these two plants
were given to STZ diabetic rats at the concentration of 500 mg/kg
body weight ,50 mg/kg body weight respectively. Cidophage®
(metformin HCl) were administered to another group to support the
results at a dose of 500 mg/kg body weight, the ethanolic extracts and
Cidophage administered orally once a day for four weeks using a
stomach tube and; serum samples were obtained for biochemical
analysis. The extracts caused significant decreases in glucose levels
compared with diabetic control rats. Insulin secretions were increased
after 4 weeks of treatment with Cidophage® compared with the
control non-diabetic rats. Levels of AST and ALT liver enzymes were
normalized by all treatments. Decreases in liver cholesterol,
triglycerides, and LDL in diabetic rats were observed with all
treatments. HDL levels were increased by the treatments in the
following order: bitter melon, Cidophage®, and fenugreek. Creatinine
levels were reduced by all treatments. Serum nitric oxide and
malonaldehyde levels were reduced by all extracts. GSH levels were
increased by all extracts. Extravasation as measured by the Evans
Blue test increased significantly in STZ-induced diabetic animals.
This effect was reversed by ethanolic extracts of bitter melon or
fenugreek.
Abstract: A new Meta heuristic approach called "Randomized gravitational emulation search algorithm (RGES)" for solving large size set covering problems has been designed. This algorithm is found upon introducing randomization concept along with the two of the four primary parameters -velocity- and -gravity- in physics. A new heuristic operator is introduced in the domain of RGES to maintain feasibility specifically for the set covering problem to yield best solutions. The performance of this algorithm has been evaluated on a large set of benchmark problems from OR-library. Computational results showed that the randomized gravitational emulation search algorithm - based heuristic is capable of producing high quality solutions. The performance of this heuristic when compared with other existing heuristic algorithms is found to be excellent in terms of solution quality.
Abstract: In this paper, backstepping method (BM) is proposed for a single-link flexible mechanical manipulator. In each step of this method a positive value is obtained. Selections of the gain factor values are very important because controller will have different behavior for each different set of values. Improper selection of these gains can lead to instability of the system. In order to choose proper values for gains BELBIC method has been used in this work. Finally, to prove the efficiency of this method, the obtained results of proposed model are compared with robust controller one. Results show that the combination of backstepping and BELBIC that is presented here, can stabilized the system with higher speed, shorter settling time and lower overshoot in than robust controller.
Abstract: This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for vectored thrust aerial vehicle (VTAV). With the SA strategy, we proposed a flight control procedure to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference of flight trajectory for an unmanned helicopter model with vectored thrust configuration. This control strategy for chosen model of VTAV has been verified by simulation of take-off and forward maneuvers using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast stabilization of motors, consequently, fast SA with economy in energy can be asserted during search-and-rescue operations.
Abstract: MOSCAPs of various combinations of Hafnium
oxide and Titanium oxide of varying thickness with Aluminum as gate electrode have been fabricated and electrically characterized.
The effects of voltage stress on the I-V characteristics for prolonged time durations have been studied and compared. Results showed
hard breakdown and negligible degradation of reliability under stress.
Abstract: In this paper, the existence, multiplicity and
noexistence of positive solutions for a class of semipositone
discrete boundary value problems with two parameters is
studied by applying nonsmooth critical point theory and
sub-super solutions method.
Abstract: Thermite welding is mainly used in world. The
reasons why the thermite welding method is widely used are
that the equipment has good mobility and total working time
of that is shorter than that of the enclosed arc welding method
on site. Moreover, the operating skill, which required for
thermite welding, is less than that of for enclosed arc welding.
In the present research work, heat treatment and combined
'expulsion and heat treatment' techniques were used improve
the mechanical properties and weldment structure. The
specimens were cut in the transverse direction from expulsion
with Heat treated and heat treated Thermite Welded rails.
Specimens were prepared according to AWS standard and
subjected to tensile test, Impact test and hardness and their
results were tabulated. Microstructural analysis was carried
out with the help of SEM. Then analyze to effect of heat
treated and 'expulsion with heat treated' with the properties of
their thermite welded rails. Compare the mechanical and
microstructural properties of thermite welded rails between
heat expulsion with heat treated and heat treated. Mechanical
and microstructural response expulsion with heat treated
thermite welded rail is higher value as compared to heat
treatment.
Abstract: the research was accomplished on fresh in Latvia wild
growing cranberries and cranberry cultivars. The aim of the study
was to evaluate effect of pretreatment method and drying conditions
on the volatile compounds composition in cranberries. Berries
pre-treatment methods were: perforation, halving and
steam-blanching. The berries before drying in a cabinet drier were
pre-treated using all three methods, in microwave vacuum
drier – using a steam-blanching and halving. Volatile compounds in
cranberries were analysed using GC-MS of extracts obtained by
SPME. During present research 21 various volatile compounds were
detected in fresh cranberries: the cultivar 'Steven' - 15, 'Bergman'
and 'Early black' – 13, 'Ben Lear' and 'Pilgrim' – 11 and wild
cranberries – 14 volatile compounds. In dried cranberries 20 volatile
compounds were detected. Mathematical data processing allows
drawing a conclusion that there exists the significant influence of
cranberry cultivar, pre-treatment method and drying condition on
volatile compounds in berries and new volatile compound formation.
Abstract: This paper analyses the structural changes in
education sector since the introduction of liberalization policy in
India. This paper explains how the so-called non-profit trusts and
societies appropriated the liberalization policy and enhanced
themselves as new capitalist class in higher education sector. Over
the decades, the policy witnessed the role of private sector in terms
of maintaining market equilibrium. The state also witnessed the
incompatibility of the private sector in inculcating the values of
social justice. The most important consequence of the policy is to
witness the rise of new capitalist class and academic capitalism.
When the state came to realize that it no longer cope up with
market demands, it opens the entry of private sector in higher
education. Concessions and tax exemptions were provided to the
trusts and societies to establish higher education institutions. There
is a basic difference between western countries and India in
providing higher education by the trusts and societies. In western
countries the big business houses contributed their surplus
revenues to promote higher education and research as a
complementary service to society and nation. In India, several
entrepreneurs came up with business motive using education
sector. Over the period, they accumulated wealth at the cost of
students and concessions from the government. Four major results
can now be identified: production of manpower in view of market
demands; reduction of standards in higher education; bypassing the
values of social justice; and the rise of new capitalist class from the
business of education. This paper tries to substantiate these issues
with the inputs from case studies.
Abstract: Signature amortization schemes have been introduced
for authenticating multicast streams, in which, a single signature is
amortized over several packets. The hash value of each packet is
computed, some hash values are appended to other packets, forming
what is known as hash chain. These schemes divide the stream into
blocks, each block is a number of packets, the signature packet in
these schemes is either the first or the last packet of the block.
Amortization schemes are efficient solutions in terms of computation
and communication overhead, specially in real-time environment.
The main effictive factor of amortization schemes is it-s hash chain
construction. Some studies show that signing the first packet of each
block reduces the receiver-s delay and prevents DoS attacks, other
studies show that signing the last packet reduces the sender-s delay.
To our knowledge, there is no studies that show which is better, to
sign the first or the last packet in terms of authentication probability
and resistance to packet loss.
In th is paper we will introduce another scheme for authenticating
multicast streams that is robust against packet loss, reduces the
overhead, and prevents the DoS attacks experienced by the receiver
in the same time. Our scheme-The Multiple Connected Chain signing
the First packet (MCF) is to append the hash values of specific
packets to other packets,then append some hashes to the signature
packet which is sent as the first packet in the block. This scheme
is aspecially efficient in terms of receiver-s delay. We discuss and
evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme against those that
sign the last packet of the block.
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to examine the effects of laser
radiation on the skin wound healing using infrared thermography as
non-invasive method for the monitoring of the skin temperature
changes during laser treatment. Thirty Wistar rats were used in this
study. A skin lesion was performed at the leg on all rats. The animals
were exposed to laser radiation (λ = 670 nm, P = 15 mW, DP = 16.31
mW/cm2) for 600 s. Thermal images of wound were acquired before
and after laser irradiation. The results have demonstrated that the
tissue temperature decreases from 35.5±0.50°C in the first treatment
day to 31.3±0.42°C after the third treatment day. This value is close
to the normal value of the skin temperature and indicates the end of
the skin repair process. In conclusion, the improvements in the
wound healing following exposure to laser radiation have been
revealed by infrared thermography.
Abstract: The performance of the Optical Code Division Multiplexing/ Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM/OCDM) technique for Optical Packet Switch is investigated. The impact on the performance of the impairment due to both Multiple Access Interference and Beat noise is studied. The Packet Loss Probability due to output packet contentions is evaluated as a function of the main switch and traffic parameters when Gold coherent optical codes are adopted. The Packet Loss Probability of the OCDM/WDM switch can reach 10-9 when M=16 wavelengths, Gold code of length L=511 and only 24 wavelength converters are used in the switch.
Abstract: This study was an investigation on the suitability of Lahar/HDPE composite as a primary material for low-cost smallscale biogas digesters. While sources of raw materials for biogas are abundant in the Philippines, cost of the technology has made the widespread utilization of this resource an indefinite proposition. Aside from capital economics, another problem arises with space requirements of current digester designs. These problems may be simultaneously addressed by fabricating digesters on a smaller, household scale to reach a wider market, and to use materials that may accommodate optimization of overall design and fabrication cost without sacrificing operational efficiency. This study involved actual fabrication of the Lahar/HDPE composite at varying composition and geometry, subsequent mechanical and thermal characterization, and implementation of Statistical Analysis to find intrinsic relationships between variables. From the results, Lahar/HDPE composite was found to be feasible for use as digester material from both mechanical and economic standpoints.
Abstract: Mostly, pedestrian-car accidents occurred at a
signalized interaction is because pedestrians cannot across the
intersection safely within the green light. From the viewpoint of
pedestrian, there might have two reasons. The first one is pedestrians
cannot speed up to across the intersection, such as the elders. The other
reason is pedestrians do not sense that the signal phase is going to
change and their right-of-way is going to lose. Developing signal logic
to protect pedestrian, who is crossing an intersection is the first
purpose of this study. Another purpose of this study is improving the
reliability and reduce delay of public transportation service. Therefore,
bus preemption is also considered in the designed signal logic. In this
study, the traffic data of the intersection of Chong-Qing North Road
and Min-Zu West Road, Taipei, Taiwan, is employed to calibrate and
validate the signal logic by simulation. VISSIM 5.20, which is a
microscopic traffic simulation software, is employed to simulate the
signal logic. From the simulated results, the signal logic presented in
this study can protect pedestrians crossing the intersection
successfully. The design of bus preemption can reduce the average
delay. However, the pedestrian safety and bus preemptive signal will
influence the average delay of cars largely. Thus, whether applying the
pedestrian safety and bus preemption signal logic to an isolated
intersection or not should be evaluated carefully.
Abstract: The residue number system (RNS) is popular in high performance computation applications because of its carry-free nature. The challenges of RNS systems design lie in the moduli set selection and in the reverse conversion from residue representation to weighted representation. In this paper, we proposed a fully parallel reverse conversion algorithm for the moduli set {rn - 2, rn - 1, rn}, based on simple mathematical relationships. Also an efficient hardware realization of this algorithm is presented. Our proposed converter is very faster and results to hardware savings, compared to the other reverse converters.
Abstract: Nowadays, more engineering systems are using some
kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the development of their
processes. Some well-known AI techniques include artificial neural
nets, fuzzy inference systems, and neuro-fuzzy inference systems
among others. Furthermore, many decision-making applications base
their intelligent processes on Fuzzy Logic; due to the Fuzzy
Inference Systems (FIS) capability to deal with problems that are
based on user knowledge and experience. Also, knowing that users
have a wide variety of distinctiveness, and generally, provide
uncertain data, this information can be used and properly processed
by a FIS. To properly consider uncertainty and inexact system input
values, FIS normally use Membership Functions (MF) that represent
a degree of user satisfaction on certain conditions and/or constraints.
In order to define the parameters of the MFs, the knowledge from
experts in the field is very important. This knowledge defines the MF
shape to process the user inputs and through fuzzy reasoning and
inference mechanisms, the FIS can provide an “appropriate" output.
However an important issue immediately arises: How can it be
assured that the obtained output is the optimum solution? How can it
be guaranteed that each MF has an optimum shape? A viable solution
to these questions is through the MFs parameter optimization. In this
Paper a novel parameter optimization process is presented. The
process for FIS parameter optimization consists of the five simple
steps that can be easily realized off-line. Here the proposed process
of FIS parameter optimization it is demonstrated by its
implementation on an Intelligent Interface section dealing with the
on-line customization / personalization of internet portals applied to
E-commerce.
Abstract: Robust stability and performance are the two most
basic features of feedback control systems. The harmonic balance
analysis technique enables to analyze the stability of limit cycles
arising from a neural network control based system operating over
nonlinear plants. In this work a robust stability analysis based on the
harmonic balance is presented and applied to a neural based control
of a non-linear binary distillation column with unstructured
uncertainty. We develop ways to describe uncertainty in the form of
neglected nonlinear dynamics and high harmonics for the plant and
controller respectively. Finally, conclusions about the performance of
the neural control system are discussed using the Nyquist stability
margin together with the structured singular values of the uncertainty
as a robustness measure.
Abstract: Most known methods for measuring the structural similarity of document structures are based on, e.g., tag measures, path metrics and tree measures in terms of their DOM-Trees. Other methods measures the similarity in the framework of the well known vector space model. In contrast to these we present a new approach to measuring the structural similarity of web-based documents represented by so called generalized trees which are more general than DOM-Trees which represent only directed rooted trees.We will design a new similarity measure for graphs representing web-based hypertext structures. Our similarity measure is mainly based on a novel representation of a graph as strings of linear integers, whose components represent structural properties of the graph. The similarity of two graphs is then defined as the optimal alignment of the underlying property strings. In this paper we apply the well known technique of sequence alignments to solve a novel and challenging problem: Measuring the structural similarity of generalized trees. More precisely, we first transform our graphs considered as high dimensional objects in linear structures. Then we derive similarity values from the alignments of the property strings in order to measure the structural similarity of generalized trees. Hence, we transform a graph similarity problem to a string similarity problem. We demonstrate that our similarity measure captures important structural information by applying it to two different test sets consisting of graphs representing web-based documents.
Abstract: Value-based group decision is very complicated since many parties involved. There are different concern caused by differing preferences, experiences, and background. Therefore, a support system is required to enable each stakeholder to evaluate and rank the solution alternatives before engaging into negotiation with the other stakeholders. The support system is based on combination between value-based analysis, multi criteria group decision making based on satisfying options, and negotiation process based on coalition formation. This paper presents the group decision and negotiation on the selection of suitable material for a support bridge structure involving three decision makers, who are an estate manager, a project manager, and an engineer. There are three alternative solutions for the material of the support bridge structure, which are (a1) steel structure, (a2) reinforced concrete structure and (a3) wooden structure.