Abstract: Despite the wide spread use of synthetic dyes, natural
dyes are still exploited and used to enhance its inherent aesthetic
qualities as a major material for beautification of the body. Centuries
before the discovery of synthetic dyes, natural dyes were the only
source of dye open to mankind. Dyes are extracted from plant -
leaves, roots and barks, insect secretions, and minerals. However,
research findings have made it clear that of all, plants- leaves, roots,
barks or flowers are the most explored and exploited in which henna
(Lawsonia innermis L.) is one of those plants. Experiment has also
shown that henna is used in body painting in conjunction with an
alkaline (Ammonium Sulphate) as a fixing agent. This of course
gives a clue that if colour derived from henna is properly
investigated, it may not only be used for body decoration but
possibly, may have affinity to fiber substrate. This paper investigates
the dyeing potentials – dye ability and fastness qualities of henna dye
extracts on cotton and linen fibers using mordants like ammonium
sulphate and other alkalis (hydrosulphate and caustic soda, potash,
common salt, potassium alum). Hot and cold water and ethanol
solvent were used in the extraction of the dye to investigate the most
effective method, dye ability, and fastness qualities of these extracts
under room temperature. The results of the experiment show that
cotton have a high rate of dye intake than other fiber. On a similar
note, the colours obtained depend most on the solvent used. In
conclusion, hot water extraction appears more effective. While the
colours obtained from ethanol and both cold hot methods of
extraction range from light to dark yellow, light green to army green
and to some extent shades of brown hues.
Abstract: This research work is an experimental study, through
development of an adhesive from Prosopis africana endosperm. The
prosopis seed for this work were obtained from Enugu State in the
South East part of Nigeria. The seeds were prepared by separating the
endosperm from the seed coat and cotyledon. Three methods were
used to separate them, which are acidic method, roasting method and
boiling method. 20g of seed were treated with different
concentrations (25, 40, 55, 70, and 85% w/w) at 100°C and constant
time (30 minutes), under continuous stirring with magnetic stirrer.
Also 20g of seed were treated with sulphuric acid of concentrations
40% w/w at 100°C with different time (10, 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes),
under continuous stirring with magnetic stirrer. Finally, 20g of seed
were treated with sulphuric acid of concentrations 40% w/w at
different temperature (20°C, 40°C, 60°C, 80°C, and 100°C) with
constant time (30 minutes), under continuous stirring with magnetic
stirrer. The whole endosperm extracted was adhesive. The physical
properties of the adhesive were determined (appearance, odour, taste,
solubility, pH, size, and binding strength). The percentage of the
adhesive yield makes the commercialization of the seed in Nigeria
possible and profitable. The very high viscosity attained at low
concentrations makes prosopis adhesive an excellent thickener in the
food industry.
Abstract: Journal bearings used in IC engines are prone to premature
failures and are likely to fail earlier than the rated life due to
highly impulsive and unstable operating conditions and frequent
starts/stops. Vibration signature extraction and wear debris analysis
techniques are prevalent in industry for condition monitoring of
rotary machinery. However, both techniques involve a great deal of
technical expertise, time, and cost. Limited literature is available on
the application of these techniques for fault detection in reciprocating
machinery, due to the complex nature of impact forces that
confounds the extraction of fault signals for vibration-based analysis
and wear prediction. In present study, a simulation model was developed to investigate
the bearing wear behaviour, resulting because of different operating
conditions, to complement the vibration analysis. In current
simulation, the dynamics of the engine was established first, based on
which the hydrodynamic journal bearing forces were evaluated by
numerical solution of the Reynold’s equation. In addition, the
essential outputs of interest in this study, critical to determine wear
rates are the tangential velocity and oil film thickness between the
journals and bearing sleeve, which if not maintained appropriately,
have a detrimental effect on the bearing performance. Archard’s wear prediction model was used in the simulation to
calculate the wear rate of bearings with specific location information
as all determinative parameters were obtained with reference to crank
rotation. Oil film thickness obtained from the model was used as a
criterion to determine if the lubrication is sufficient to prevent contact
between the journal and bearing thus causing accelerated wear. A
limiting value of 1 μm was used as the minimum oil film thickness
needed to prevent contact. The increased wear rate with growing
severity of operating conditions is analogous and comparable to the
rise in amplitude of the squared envelope of the referenced vibration
signals. Thus on one hand, the developed model demonstrated its
capability to explain wear behaviour and on the other hand it also
helps to establish a co-relation between wear based and vibration
based analysis. Therefore, the model provides a cost effective and
quick approach to predict the impending wear in IC engine bearings
under various operating conditions.
Abstract: This article discusses the passage of RDB to XML
documents (schema and data) based on metadata and semantic
enrichment, which makes the RDB under flattened shape and is
enriched by the object concept. The integration and exploitation of
the object concept in the XML uses a syntax allowing for the
verification of the conformity of the document XML during the
creation. The information extracted from the RDB is therefore
analyzed and filtered in order to adjust according to the structure of
the XML files and the associated object model. Those implemented
in the XML document through a SQL query are built dynamically. A
prototype was implemented to realize automatic migration, and so
proves the effectiveness of this particular approach.
Abstract: In this paper, de Laval rotor system has been
characterized by a hinge model and its transient response numerically
treated for a dynamic solution. The effect of the ensuing non-linear
disturbances namely rub and breathing crack is numerically
simulated. Subsequently, three analysis methods: Orbit Analysis, Fast
Fourier Transform (FFT), and Wavelet Transform (WT) are
employed to extract features of the vibration signal of the faulty
system. An analysis of the system response orbits clearly indicates
the perturbations due to the rotor-to-stator contact. The sensitivities
of WT to the variation in system speed have been investigated by
Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). The analysis reveals that
features of crack, rubs and unbalance in vibration response can be
useful for condition monitoring. WT reveals its ability to detect nonlinear
signal, and obtained results provide a useful tool method for
detecting machinery faults.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a general
framework for storing, analyzing, and extracting knowledge from
two-dimensional echocardiographic images, color Doppler images,
non-medical images, and general data sets. A number of high
performance data mining algorithms have been used to carry out this
task. Our framework encompasses four layers namely physical
storage, object identification, knowledge discovery, user level.
Techniques such as active contour model to identify the cardiac
chambers, pixel classification to segment the color Doppler echo
image, universal model for image retrieval, Bayesian method for
classification, parallel algorithms for image segmentation, etc., were
employed. Using the feature vector database that have been
efficiently constructed, one can perform various data mining tasks
like clustering, classification, etc. with efficient algorithms along
with image mining given a query image. All these facilities are
included in the framework that is supported by state-of-the-art user
interface (UI). The algorithms were tested with actual patient data
and Coral image database and the results show that their performance
is better than the results reported already.
Abstract: Sentiment analysis means to classify a given review
document into positive or negative polar document. Sentiment
analysis research has been increased tremendously in recent times
due to its large number of applications in the industry and academia.
Sentiment analysis models can be used to determine the opinion of
the user towards any entity or product. E-commerce companies can
use sentiment analysis model to improve their products on the basis
of users’ opinion. In this paper, we propose a new One-class Support
Vector Machine (One-class SVM) based sentiment analysis model
for movie review documents. In the proposed approach, we initially
extract features from one class of documents, and further test the
given documents with the one-class SVM model if a given new test
document lies in the model or it is an outlier. Experimental results
show the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment analysis model.
Abstract: This paper introduces an effective method of
segmenting Korean text (place names in Korean) from a Korean road
sign image. A Korean advanced directional road sign is composed of
several types of visual information such as arrows, place names in
Korean and English, and route numbers. Automatic classification of
the visual information and extraction of Korean place names from the
road sign images make it possible to avoid a lot of manual inputs to a
database system for management of road signs nationwide. We
propose a series of problem-specific heuristics that correctly segments
Korean place names, which is the most crucial information, from the
other information by leaving out non-text information effectively. The
experimental results with a dataset of 368 road sign images show 96%
of the detection rate per Korean place name and 84% per road sign
image.
Abstract: A seizure prediction method is proposed by extracting
global features using phase correlation between adjacent epochs for
detecting relative changes and local features using fluctuation/
deviation within an epoch for determining fine changes of different
EEG signals. A classifier and a regularization technique are applied
for the reduction of false alarms and improvement of the overall
prediction accuracy. The experiments show that the proposed method
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and provides high prediction
accuracy (i.e., 97.70%) with low false alarm using EEG signals in
different brain locations from a benchmark data set.
Abstract: Wind energy is rapidly emerging as the primary
source of electricity in the Philippines, although developing an
accurate wind resource model is difficult. In this study, Weather
Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, an open source mesoscale
Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model, was used to produce a
1-year atmospheric simulation with 4 km resolution on the Ilocos
Region of the Philippines. The WRF output (netCDF) extracts the
annual mean wind speed data using a Python-based Graphical User
Interface. Lastly, wind resource assessment was produced using a
GIS software. Results of the study showed that it is more flexible to
use Python scripts than using other post-processing tools in dealing
with netCDF files. Using WRF Model, Python, and Geographic
Information Systems, a reliable wind resource map is produced.
Abstract: The present research aimed at studying the awareness
and attitudes of teachers towards inclusive education. The sample
consisted of 60 teachers, teaching in the primary section (1st – 4th) of
regular schools affiliated to the SSC board in Mumbai. Sample was
selected by Multi-stage cluster sampling technique. A semi-structured
self-constructed interview schedule and a self-constructed attitude
scale was used to study the awareness of teachers about disability and
Inclusive education, and their attitudes towards inclusive education
respectively. Themes were extracted from the interview data and
quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS package. Results revealed
that teachers had some amount of awareness but an inadequate
amount of information on disabilities and inclusive education.
Disability to most (37) teachers meant “an inability to do something”.
The difference between disability and handicap was stated by most as
former being cognitive while handicap being physical in nature. With
regard to Inclusive education, a large number (46) stated that they
were unaware of the term and did not know what it meant. Majority
(52) of them perceived maximum challenges for themselves in an
inclusive set up, and emphasized on the role of teacher training
courses in the area of providing knowledge (49) and training in
teaching methodology (53). Although, 83.3% of teachers held a
moderately positive attitude towards inclusive education, a large
percentage (61.6%) of participants felt that being in inclusive set up
would be very challenging for both children with special needs and
without special needs. Though, most (49) of the teachers stated that
children with special needs should be educated in regular classroom
but they further clarified that only those should be in a regular
classroom who have physical impairments of mild or moderate
degree.
Abstract: Anogeissus leiocarpus (Combretaceae) is well known
for its medicinal uses in African traditional medicine, for treating
many human diseases mainly skin diseases and infections. Mycetoma
disease is a fungal and/ or bacterial skininfection, mainly cause by
Madurella mycetomatis fungus. This study was carried out in vitro to
investigate the antifungal activity of Anogeissus leiocarpus leaf
extracts against the isolated pathogenic Madurella mycetomatis, by
using the NCCLS modified method compared to Ketoconazole
standard drug, and MTT assay. The bioactive fraction was subjected
to chemical analysis implementing different chromatographic
analytical methods (TLC, HPLC, and LC-MS/MS). The results
showed significance antifungal activity of A. leiocarpus leaf extracts
against the isolated pathogenic M. mycetomatis, compared to negative
and positive controls. The chloroform fraction showed the highest
antifungal activity. The chromatographic analysis of the chloroform
fraction with the highest activity showed the presence of important
bioactive compounds such as ellagic and flavellagic acids derivatives,
flavonoids and stilbenoid, which are well known for their antifungal
activity.
Abstract: The main cause of Alzheimer disease (AD) was
believed to be mainly due to the accumulation of free radicals owing
to oxidative stress (OS) in brain tissue. The mechanism of the
neurotoxicity of Aluminum chloride (AlCl3) induced AD in
hippocampus Albino wister rat brain tissue, the curative & the
protective effects of Lipidium sativum group (LS) water extract were
assessed after 8 weeks by attenuated total reflection spectroscopy
ATR-IR and histologically by light microscope. ATR-IR results
revealed that the membrane phospholipid undergo free radical
attacks, mediated by AlCl3, primary affects the polyunsaturated fatty
acids indicated by the increased of the olefinic -C=CH sub-band area
around 3012 cm-1 from the curve fitting analysis. The narrowing in
the half band width (HBW) of the sνCH2 sub-band around 2852 cm-1
due to Al intoxication indicates the presence of trans form fatty acids
rather than gauch rotomer. The degradation of hydrocarbon chain to
shorter chain length, increasing in membrane fluidity, disorder, and
decreasing in lipid polarity in AlCl3 group indicated by the detected
changes in certain calculated area ratios compared to the control.
Administration of LS was greatly improved these parameters
compared to the AlCl3 group. Al influences the Aβ aggregation and
plaque formation, which in turn interferes to and disrupts the
membrane structure. The results also showed a marked increase in
the β-parallel and antiparallel structure, that characterize the Aβ
formation in Al-induced AD hippocampal brain tissue, indicated by
the detected increase in both amide I sub-bands around 1674, 1692
cm-1. This drastic increase in Aβ formation was greatly reduced in the
curative and protective groups compared to the AlCl3 group and
approached nearly the control values. These results supported too by
the light microscope. AlCl3 group showed significant marked
degenerative changes in hippocampal neurons. Most cells appeared
small, shrieked and deformed. Interestingly, the administration of LS
in curative and protective groups markedly decreases the amount of
degenerated cells compared to the non-treated group. In addition, the
intensity of congo red stained cells was decreased. Hippocampal
neurons looked more/or less similar to those of control. This study showed a promising therapeutic effect of Lipidium
sativum group (LS) on AD rat model that seriously overcome the
signs of oxidative stress on membrane lipid and restore the protein
misfolding.
Abstract: High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)
method was developed and validated for simultaneous estimation of
6-Gingerol(6G) and 6-Shogaol(6S) in joint pain relief gel containing
ginger extract. The chromatographic separation was achieved by
using C18 column, 150 x 4.6mm i.d., 5μ Luna, mobile phase
containing acetonitrile and water (gradient elution). The flow rate
was 1.0 ml/min and the absorbance was monitored at 282 nm. The
proposed method was validated in terms of the analytical parameters
such as specificity, accuracy, precision, linearity, range, limit of
detection (LOD), limit of quantification (LOQ), and determined
based on the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH)
guidelines. The linearity ranges of 6G and 6S were obtained over 20-
60 and 6-18 μg/ml respectively. Good linearity was observed over the
above-mentioned range with linear regression equation Y= 11016x-
23778 for 6G and Y = 19276x-19604 for 6S (x is concentration of
analytes in μg/ml and Y is peak area). The value of correlation
coefficient was found to be 0.9994 for both markers. The limit of
detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) for 6G were
0.8567 and 2.8555 μg/ml and for 6S were 0.3672 and 1.2238 μg/ml
respectively. The recovery range for 6G and 6S were found to be
91.57 to 102.36 % and 84.73 to 92.85 % for all three spiked levels.
The RSD values from repeated extractions for 6G and 6S were 3.43
and 3.09% respectively. The validation of developed method on
precision, accuracy, specificity, linearity, and range were also
performed with well-accepted results.
Abstract: Foundation differential settlement and supported
structure tilting are an occasionally occurred engineering problem.
This may be caused by overloading, changes in ground soil properties
or unsupported nearby excavations. Engineering thinking points
directly toward the logic solution for such problem by uplifting the
settled side. This can be achieved with deep foundation elements
such as micro-piles and macro-piles™, jacked piers, and helical piers,
jet grouted mortar columns, compaction grout columns, cement
grouting or with chemical grouting, or traditional pit underpinning
with concrete and mortar. Although, some of these techniques offer
economic, fast and low noise solutions, many of them are quite the
contrary. For tilted structures, with the limited inclination, it may be much
easier to cause a balancing settlement on the less-settlement side
which shall be done carefully in a proper rate. This principal has been
applied in Leaning Tower of Pisa stabilization with soil extraction
from the ground surface. In this research, the authors attempt to
introduce a new solution with a different point of view. So, the
micro-tunneling technique is presented in here as an intended ground
deformation cause. In general, micro-tunneling is expected to induce
limited ground deformations. Thus, the researchers propose to apply
the technique to form small size ground unsupported holes to produce
the target deformations. This shall be done in four phases: 1.
Application of one or more micro-tunnels, regarding the existing
differential settlement value, under the raised side of the tilted
structure. 2. For each individual tunnel, the lining shall be pulled out
from both sides (from jacking and receiving shafts) in the slow rate.
3. If required, according to calculations and site records, an additional
surface load can be applied on the raised foundation side. 4. Finally, a
strengthening soil grouting shall be applied for stabilization after
adjustment. A finite element based numerical model is presented to simulate
the proposed construction phases for different tunneling positions and
tunnels group. For each case, the surface settlements are calculated
and induced plasticity points are checked. These results show the
impact of the suggested procedure on the tilted structure and its
feasibility. Comparing results also show the importance of the
position selection and tunnels group gradual effect. Thus, a new
engineering solution is presented to one of the structural and
geotechnical engineering challenges.
Abstract: Many herbal medicinal products are considered
potential anti-hypercholesterolemic agents with encouraging safety
profiles, however only a limited amount of clinical research exists to
support their efficacy. The present study was designed to compare the
antihypercholesterolemic and antioxidant activities of the crude
ethanolic extracts of Citrus reticulata fruit peel, Zingiber officinale
rhizome and Sesamum indicum seeds. Forty-five rats were used throughout the experiment which are
extended for four weeks. These were divided into nine groups, five
rats per each group as follows; group 1 was the normal control group
(rats only fed standard normal rat diet), group 2 was the
hypercholesterolemic control group (rats fed only
hypercholesterolemic diet which contained 1% cholesterol plus 10%
saturated animal fat added to the normal rat diet), groups 3 and 4
were fed hypercholesterolemic diet in addition to Citrus reticulata
ethanolic extract at doses of (250mg/kg (group 3) and 500mg/kg
(group 4)) administered daily via oral route, groups 5 and 6 were
given hypercholesterolemic diet in addition to Zingiber officinale
ethanolic extract at doses of (250mg/kg (group 5) and 500mg/kg
(group 6)) daily through oral route, groups 7 and 8 fed on
hypercholesterolemic diet in addition to Sesamum indicum ethanolic
extract at doses of (250mg/kg (group 7) and 500mg/kg (group 8))
daily orally; and group 9 rats were given hypercholesterolemic diet in
addition to atorvastatin (0.18mg/kg) daily via oral route as a standard
reference antihypercholesterolemic drug. Blood samples from all
groups were drawn from the retro-orbital venous plexus four weeks
following treatment after overnight fasting and the lipid profile (total
cholesterol (TC), high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), low
density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) and triglyceride levels) were
measured and the risk ratio (TC/HDL-C) was assessed. The
antioxidant activity of the three plants extracts was determined using
DPPH free-radical antioxidant assay. Results of in vivo and in vitro
antihypercholesterolemic and antioxidant assay respectively, revealed
that the three extracts possess comparable antioxidant and
antihypercholesterolemic activities.
Abstract: Round addition differential fault analysis using
operation skipping for lightweight block ciphers with on-the-fly key
scheduling is presented. For 64-bit KLEIN, it is shown that only a pair
of correct and faulty ciphertexts can be used to derive the secret master
key. For PRESENT, one correct ciphertext and two faulty ciphertexts
are required to reconstruct the secret key. Furthermore, secret key
extraction is demonstrated for the LBlock Feistel-type lightweight
block cipher.
Abstract: Hydraulic fracturing is one of the most important
stimulation techniques available to the petroleum engineer to extract
hydrocarbons in tight gas sandstones. It allows more oil and gas
production in tight reservoirs as compared to conventional means.
The main aim of the study is to optimize the hydraulic fracturing as
technique and for this purpose three multi-zones layer formation is
considered and fractured contemporaneously. The three zones are
named as Zone1 (upper zone), Zone2 (middle zone) and Zone3
(lower zone) respectively and they all occur in shale rock. Simulation was performed with Mfrac integrated software which
gives a variety of 3D fracture options. This simulation process
yielded an average fracture efficiency of 93.8%for the three
respective zones and an increase of the average permeability of the
rock system. An average fracture length of 909 ft with net height
(propped height) of 210 ft (average) was achieved. Optimum
fracturing results was also achieved with maximum fracture width of
0.379 inches at an injection rate of 13.01 bpm with 17995 Mscf of
gas production.
Abstract: Obturator Foramen is a specific structure in Pelvic
bone images and recognition of it is a new concept in medical image
processing. Moreover, segmentation of bone structures such as
Obturator Foramen plays an essential role for clinical research in
orthopedics. In this paper, we present a novel method to analyze the
similarity between the substructures of the imaged region and a hand
drawn template as a preprocessing step for computation of Pelvic
bone rotation on hip radiographs. This method consists of integrated
usage of Marker-controlled Watershed segmentation and Zernike
moment feature descriptor and it is used to detect Obturator Foramen
accurately. Marker-controlled Watershed segmentation is applied to
separate Obturator Foramen from the background effectively. Then,
Zernike moment feature descriptor is used to provide matching
between binary template image and the segmented binary image for
final extraction of Obturator Foramens. Finally, Pelvic bone rotation
rate calculation for each hip radiograph is performed automatically to
select and eliminate hip radiographs for further studies which depend
on Pelvic bone angle measurements. The proposed method is tested
on randomly selected 100 hip radiographs. The experimental results
demonstrated that the proposed method is able to segment Obturator
Foramen with 96% accuracy.
Abstract: In this paper, we present an application of Riemannian
geometry for processing non-Euclidean image data. We consider the
image as residing in a Riemannian manifold, for developing a new
method to brain edge detection and brain extraction. Automating this
process is a challenge due to the high diversity in appearance brain
tissue, among different patients and sequences. The main contribution, in this paper, is the use of an edge-based
anisotropic diffusion tensor for the segmentation task by integrating
both image edge geometry and Riemannian manifold (geodesic,
metric tensor) to regularize the convergence contour and extract
complex anatomical structures. We check the accuracy of the
segmentation results on simulated brain MRI scans of single
T1-weighted, T2-weighted and Proton Density sequences. We
validate our approach using two different databases: BrainWeb
database, and MRI Multiple sclerosis Database (MRI MS DB). We
have compared, qualitatively and quantitatively, our approach with
the well-known brain extraction algorithms. We show that using
a Riemannian manifolds to medical image analysis improves the
efficient results to brain extraction, in real time, outperforming the
results of the standard techniques.