Abstract: Agriculture products are being more demanding in
market today. To increase its productivity, automation to produce
these products will be very helpful. The purpose of this work is to
measure and determine the ripeness and quality of watermelon. The
textures on watermelon skin will be captured using digital camera.
These images will be filtered using image processing technique. All
these information gathered will be trained using ANN to determine
the watermelon ripeness accuracy. Initial results showed that the best
model has produced percentage accuracy of 86.51%, when measured
at 32 hidden units with a balanced percentage rate of training dataset.
Abstract: fibers of pure cellulose can be made from some bacteria such as acetobacter xylinum. Bacterial cellulose fibers are very pure, tens of nm across and about 0.5 micron long. The fibers are very stiff and, although nobody seems to have measured the strength of individual fibers. Their stiffness up to 70 GPa. Fundamental strengths should be at least greater than those of the best commercial polymers, but best bulk strength seems to about the same as that of steel. They can potentially be produced in industrial quantities at greatly lowered cost and water content, and with triple the yield, by a new process. This article presents a critical review of the available information on the bacterial cellulose as a biological nonwoven fabric with special emphasis on its fermentative production and applications. Characteristics of bacterial cellulose biofabric with respect to its structure and physicochemical properties are discussed. Current and potential applications of bacterial cellulose in textile, nonwoven cloth, paper, films synthetic fiber coating, food, pharmaceutical and other industries are also presented.
Abstract: Task of object localization is one of the major
challenges in creating intelligent transportation. Unfortunately, in
densely built-up urban areas, localization based on GPS only
produces a large error, or simply becomes impossible. New
opportunities arise for the localization due to the rapidly emerging
concept of a wireless ad-hoc network. Such network, allows
estimating potential distance between these objects measuring
received signal level and construct a graph of distances in which
nodes are the localization objects, and edges - estimates of the
distances between pairs of nodes. Due to the known coordinates of
individual nodes (anchors), it is possible to determine the location of
all (or part) of the remaining nodes of the graph. Moreover, road
map, available in digital format can provide localization routines
with valuable additional information to narrow node location search.
However, despite abundance of well-known algorithms for solving
the problem of localization and significant research efforts, there are
still many issues that currently are addressed only partially. In this
paper, we propose localization approach based on the graph mapped
distances on the digital road map data basis. In fact, problem is
reduced to distance graph embedding into the graph representing area
geo location data. It makes possible to localize objects, in some cases
even if only one reference point is available. We propose simple
embedding algorithm and sample implementation as spatial queries
over sensor network data stored in spatial database, allowing
employing effectively spatial indexing, optimized spatial search
routines and geometry functions.
Abstract: The Sphere Method is a flexible interior point algorithm for linear programming problems. This was developed mainly by Professor Katta G. Murty. It consists of two steps, the centering step and the descent step. The centering step is the most expensive part of the algorithm. In this centering step we proposed some improvements such as introducing two or more initial feasible solutions as we solve for the more favorable new solution by objective value while working with the rigorous updates of the feasible region along with some ideas integrated in the descent step. An illustration is given confirming the advantage of using the proposed procedure.
Abstract: The Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous Network on Chip (GALS NoC) is the most efficient solution that provides low latency transfers and power efficient System on Chip (SoC) interconnect. This study presents a GALS and generic NoC architecture based on a configurable router. This router integrates a sophisticated dynamic arbiter, the wormhole routing technique and can be configured in a manner that allows it to be used in many possible NoC topologies such as Mesh 2-D, Tree and Polygon architectures. This makes it possible to improve the quality of service (QoS) required by the proposed NoC. A comparative performances study of the proposed NoC architecture, Tore architecture and of the most used Mesh 2D architecture is performed. This study shows that Spidergon architecture is characterised by the lower latency and the later saturation. It is also shown that no matter what the number of used links is raised; the Links×Diameter product permitted by the Spidergon architecture remains always the lower. The only limitation of this architecture comes from it-s over cost in term of silicon area.
Abstract: The present experimental investigation brings about
a comparative study of lactic acid production by pure strains of
Lactobacilli (1) L. delbreuckii (NCIM2025), (2) L. pentosus (NCIM
2912), (3) Lactobacillus sp.(NCIM 2734, (4) Lactobacillus sp.
(NCIM2084) and coculture of strain-1 and Stain-2 in solid bed of
wheat bran, under the influence of different nitrogen sources such as
baker-s yeast, meat extract and proteose peptone. Among the pure
cultures, strain-3 attained lowest pH value of 3.44, hence highest acid
formation 46.41 g/L, while the coculture attained an overall
maximum value 47.56 g/L lactic acid (pH 3.38) at 15 g/L and 20 g/L
level of baker-s yeast, respectively.
Abstract: We report the electronic structure and optical
properties of NdF3 compound. Our calculations are based on density
functional theory (DFT) using the full potential linearized augmented
plane wave (FPLAPW) method with the inclusion of spin orbit
coupling. We employed the local spin density approximation (LSDA)
and Coulomb-corrected local spin density approximation, known for
treating the highly correlated 4f electrons properly, is able to
reproduce the correct insulating ground state. We find that the
standard LSDA approach is incapable of correctly describing the
electronic properties of such materials since it positions the f-bands
incorrectly resulting in an incorrect metallic ground state. On the
other hand, LSDA + U approximation, known for treating the highly
correlated 4f electrons properly, is able to reproduce the correct
insulating ground state. Interestingly, however, we do not find any
significant differences in the optical properties calculated using
LSDA, and LSDA + U suggesting that the 4f electrons do not play a
decisive role in the optical properties of these compounds. The
reflectivity for NdF3 compound stays low till 7 eV which is
consistent with their large energy gaps. The calculated energy gaps
are in good agreement with experiments. Our calculated reflectivity
compares well with the experimental data and the results are analyzed
in the light of band to band transitions.
Abstract: The Bangnanglee Sub-district Administrative Office,
Thailand had initiated a policy to environmental protection with
encouraging household waste management in order to promote civil
responsibility for domestic hygienic. This research studied the
household behaviors on solid waste and wastewater management. A
sample population of 306 families answered a questionnaire. The
study showed that, on average, domestic activities had produced 1.93
kilograms of waste per household per day. It has been found that 79%
of the households made several attempts to reduce their own amount
of waste. 80% of the households stationed their own garbage bins.
71% managed their waste by selling recyclable products. As for the
rest of the waste, 51% burned them, while 29% disposed their waste
in the nearby public trashcans and other 13% have them buried. As
for wastewater, 60% of the households disposed it into the sewage,
whereas 30% disposed them right from their elevated house.
Abstract: Some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)
are the strongest known carcinogens compounds; the majority of
them are mostly produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil
fuels; Motor vehicles are a significant source of polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbon (PAH) where diesel emission is one of the main sources
of such compounds available in the ambient air. There is a big
concern about the increasing concentration of PAHs in the
environment. Researchers are trying to explore optimal methods to
reduce those pollutants and improve the quality of air. Water blended
fuel is one of the possible approaches to reduce emission of PAHs
from the combustion of diesel in urban and domestic vehicles. In this
work a modeling study was conducted using CHEMKIN-PRO
software to simulate spray combustion at similar diesel engine
conditions. Surrogate fuel of (80 % n-heptane and 20 % toluene) was
used due to detailed kinetic and thermodynamic data needed for
modeling is available for this kind of fuel but not available for diesel.
An emulsified fuel with 3, 5, 8, 10 and 20 % water by volume is used
as an engine feed for this study. The modeling results show that water
has a significant effect on reducing engine soot and PAHs precursors
formation up to certain extent.
Abstract: Structured phospholipids from commercial soybean
lecithin with oil enriched omega-3 fatty acid form by product of tuna
canning is alternative procedure to provides the stability of omega-3
fatty acid structure and increase these bioactive function in
metabolism. Best treatment condition was obtain in 18 hours
acidolysis reaction with 30% enzyme concentration, which EPADHA
incorporation level was 127,47 mg/g and incorporation
percentage of EPA-DHA was 51,04% at phospholipids structure.
This structured phospolipids could reduce atherosclerosis risk in
male Sprague dawley rat. Provision of structured phospholipids has
significant effect (α = 0.05) on changes in lipid profile, intima-media
thickness of aorta rats (male Sprague dawley) fed atherogenic diet.
Structured phospholipids intake can lower total cholesterol 78.36
mg/dL, total triglycerides 94,57 mg/dL, LDL levels 87.08 mg/dL and
increased HDL level as much as 12,64 mg/dL in 10 weeks cares.
Structured phospholipids intake also can prevent the thickening of
the intima-media layer of the aorta.
Abstract: Mixed model assembly lines (MMAL) are a type of
production line where a variety of product models similar in product
characteristics are assembled. The effective design of these lines
requires that schedule for assembling the different products is
determined. In this paper we tried to fit the sequencing problem with
the main characteristics of make to order (MTO) environment. The
problem solved in this paper is a multiple objective sequencing
problem in mixed model assembly lines sequencing using weighted
Sum Method (WSM) using GAMS software for small problem and
an effective GA for large scale problems because of the nature of
NP-hardness of our problem and vast time consume to find the
optimum solution in large problems. In this problem three practically
important objectives are minimizing: total utility work, keeping a
constant production rate variation, and minimizing earliness and
tardiness cost which consider the priority of each customer and
different due date which is a real situation in mixed model assembly
lines and it is the first time we consider different attribute to
prioritize the customers which help the company to reduce the cost of
earliness and tardiness. This mechanism is a way to apply an advance
available to promise (ATP) in mixed model assembly line sequencing
which is the main contribution of this paper.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to characterize the spontaneous Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of four different motor imagery tasks and to show hereby a possible solution for the present binary communication between the brain and a machine ora Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The processing technique used in this paper was the fractal analysis evaluated by the Critical Exponent Method (CEM). The EEG signal was registered in 5 healthy subjects,sampling 15 measuring channels at 1024 Hz.Each channel was preprocessed by the Laplacian space ltering so as to reduce the space blur and therefore increase the spaceresolution. The EEG of each channel was segmented and its Fractaldimension (FD) calculated. The FD was evaluated in the time interval corresponding to the motor imagery and averaged out for all the subjects (each channel). In order to characterize the FD distribution,the linear regression curves of FD over the electrodes position were applied. The differences FD between the proposed mental tasks are quantied and evaluated for each experimental subject. The obtained results of the proposed method are a substantial fractal dimension in the EEG signal of motor imagery tasks and can be considerably utilized as the multiple-states BCI applications.
Abstract: One of the most important applications of
wireless sensor networks is data collection. This paper
proposes as efficient approach for data collection in wireless
sensor networks by introducing Member Forward List. This list
includes the nodes with highest priority for forwarding the data.
When a node fails or dies, this list is used to select the next node
with higher priority. The benefit of this node is that it prevents
the algorithm from repeating when a node fails or dies. The
results show that Member Forward List decreases power
consumption and latency in wireless sensor networks.
Abstract: This paper presented a novel combined cycle of air separation and natural gas liquefaction. The idea is that natural gas can be liquefied, meanwhile gaseous or liquid nitrogen and oxygen are produced in one combined cryogenic system. Cycle simulation and exergy analysis were performed to evaluate the process and thereby reveal the influence of the crucial parameter, i.e., flow rate ratio through two stages expanders β on heat transfer temperature difference, its distribution and consequent exergy loss. Composite curves for the combined hot streams (feeding natural gas and recycled nitrogen) and the cold stream showed the degree of optimization available in this process if appropriate β was designed. The results indicated that increasing β reduces temperature difference and exergy loss in heat exchange process. However, the maximum limit value of β should be confined in terms of minimum temperature difference proposed in heat exchanger design standard and heat exchanger size. The optimal βopt under different operation conditions corresponding to the required minimum temperature differences was investigated.
Abstract: The anti-lock braking systems installed on vehicles
for safe and effective braking, are high-order nonlinear and timevariant.
Using fuzzy logic controllers increase efficiency of such
systems, but impose a high computational complexity as well. The
main concept introduced by this paper is reducing computational
complexity of fuzzy controllers by deploying problem-solution data
structure. Unlike conventional methods that are based on
calculations, this approach is based on data oriented modeling.
Abstract: A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system
requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker
modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features.
Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)
modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard
acoustic feature set for speech related applications. On a recent
contribution by authors, it has been shown that the Inverted Mel-
Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (IMFCC) is useful feature set for
SI, which contains complementary information present in high
frequency region. This paper introduces the Gaussian shaped filter
(GF) while calculating MFCC and IMFCC in place of typical
triangular shaped bins. The objective is to introduce a higher
amount of correlation between subband outputs. The performances
of both MFCC & IMFCC improve with GF over conventional
triangular filter (TF) based implementation, individually as well as
in combination. With GMM as speaker modeling paradigm, the
performances of proposed GF based MFCC and IMFCC in
individual and fused mode have been verified in two standard
databases YOHO, (Microphone Speech) and POLYCOST
(Telephone Speech) each of which has more than 130 speakers.
Abstract: In diversity rich environments, such as in Ultra-
Wideband (UWB) applications, the a priori determination of the
number of strong diversity branches is difficult, because of the considerably large number of diversity paths, which are characterized
by a variety of power delay profiles (PDPs). Several
Rake implementations have been proposed in the past, in order to reduce the number of the estimated and combined paths. To this
aim, we introduce two adaptive Rake receivers, which combine
a subset of the resolvable paths considering simultaneously the
quality of both the total combining output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the individual SNR of each path. These schemes achieve
better adaptation to channel conditions compared to other known receivers, without further increasing the complexity. Their performance
is evaluated in different practical UWB channels, whose models are based on extensive propagation measurements. The
proposed receivers compromise between the power consumption,
complexity and performance gain for the additional paths, resulting in important savings in power and computational resources.
Abstract: This study was designed to formulate,
pharmaceutically evaluate a topical skin-care cream (w/o emulsion)
of Aloe Vera versus its vehicle (Base) as control and determine their
effects on Stratum Corneum (SC) water content and Transepidermal
water loss (TEWL). Base containing no extract and a Formulation
containing 3% concentrated extract of Aloe Vera was developed by
entrapping in the inner aqueous phase of w/o emulsion (cream).
Lemon oil was incorporated to improve the odor. Both the Base and
Formulation were stored at 8°C ±0.1°C (in refrigerator), 25°C±0.1°C,
40°C±0.1°C and 40°C± 0.1°C with 75% RH (in incubator) for a
period of 4 weeks to predict their stability. The evaluation parameters
consisted of color, smell, type of emulsion, phase separation,
electrical conductivity, centrifugation, liquefaction and pH. Both the
Base and Formulation were applied to the cheeks of 21 healthy
human volunteers for a period of 8 weeks Stratum corneum (SC)
water content and Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were
monitored every week to measure any effect produced by these
topical creams. The expected organoleptic stability of creams was
achieved from 4 weeks in-vitro study period. Odor was disappeared
with the passage of time due to volatilization of lemon oil. Both the
Base and Formulation produced significant (p≤0.05) changes in
TEWL with respect to time. SC water content was significantly
(p≤0.05) increased by the Formulation while the Base has
insignificant (p 0.05) effects on SC water content. The newly
formulated cream of Aloe Vera, applied is suitable for improvement
and quantitative monitoring of skin hydration level (SC water
content/ moisturizing effects) and reducing TEWL in people with dry
skin.
Abstract: Increasing the demand for effectively use of the
production facility requires the tools for sharing the manufacturing
facility through remote operation of the machining process. This
research introduces the methodology of machining technology for
direct remote operation of networked milling machine. The
integrated tools with virtual simulation, remote desktop protocol and
Setup Free Attachment for remote operation of milling process are
proposed. Accessing and monitoring of machining operation is
performed by remote desktop interface and 3D virtual simulations.
Capability of remote operation is supported by an auto setup
attachment with a reconfigurable pin type setup free technology
installed on the table of CNC milling machine to perform unattended
machining process. The system is designed using a computer server
and connected to a PC based controlled CNC machine for real time
monitoring. A client will access the server through internet
communication and virtually simulate the machine activity. The
result has been presented that combination between real time virtual
simulation and remote desktop tool is enabling to operate all machine
tool functions and as well as workpiece setup..
Abstract: The 20th century has brought much development to the practice of Architecture worldwide, and technology has bridged inhabitation limits in many regions of the world with high levels of comfort and conveniences, most times at high costs to the environment. Throughout the globe, the tropical countries are being urbanized at an unprecedented rate and housing has become a major issue worldwide, in light of increased demand and lack of appropriate infra-structure and planning. Buildings and urban spaces designed in tropical cities have mainly adopted external concepts that in most cases do not fit the needs of the inhabitants living in such harsh climatic environment, and when they do, do so at high financial, environmental and cultural costs. Traditional architectural practices can provide valuable understanding on how self-reliance and autonomy of construction can be reinforced in rural-urban tropical environments. From traditional housing knowledge, it is possible to derive lessons for the development of new construction materials that are affordable, environmentally friendly, culturally acceptable and accesible to all.Specifically to the urban context, such solutions are of outmost importance, given the needs to a more democratic society, where access to housing is considered high in the agenda for development. Traditional or rural constructions are also ongoing through extensive changes eventhough they have mostly adopted climate-responsive building practices relying on local resources (with minimum embodied energy) and energy (for comfort and quality of life). It is important to note that many of these buildings can actually be called zero-energy, and hold potential answers to enable transition from high energy, high cost, low comfort urban habitations to zero/low energy habitations with high quality urban livelihood. Increasing access to modern urban lifestyels have also an effect on the aspirations from people in terms of performance, comfort and convenience in terms of their housing and the way it is produced and used. These aspirations are resulting in transitions from localresource dependent habitations- to non-local resource based highenergy urban style habitations. And such transitions are resulting in the habitations becoming increasingly unsuited to the local climatic conditions with increasing discomfort, ill-health, and increased CO2 emissions and local environmental disruption. This research studies one specific transition group in the context of 'water communities' in tropical-equatorial regions: Ribeirinhos housing typology (Amazonas, Brazil). The paper presents the results of a qualitative sustainability assessment of the housing typologies under transition, found at the Ribeirinhos communities.