Abstract: High Strength Concrete (HSC) is defined as concrete
that meets special combination of performance and uniformity
requirements that cannot be achieved routinely using conventional
constituents and normal mixing, placing, and curing procedures. It is
a highly complex material, which makes modeling its behavior a very
difficult task. This paper aimed to show possible applicability of
Neural Networks (NN) to predict the slump in High Strength
Concrete (HSC). Neural Network models is constructed, trained and
tested using the available test data of 349 different concrete mix
designs of High Strength Concrete (HSC) gathered from a particular
Ready Mix Concrete (RMC) batching plant. The most versatile
Neural Network model is selected to predict the slump in concrete.
The data used in the Neural Network models are arranged in a format
of eight input parameters that cover the Cement, Fly Ash, Sand,
Coarse Aggregate (10 mm), Coarse Aggregate (20 mm), Water,
Super-Plasticizer and Water/Binder ratio. Furthermore, to test the
accuracy for predicting slump in concrete, the final selected model is
further used to test the data of 40 different concrete mix designs of
High Strength Concrete (HSC) taken from the other batching plant.
The results are compared on the basis of error function (or
performance function).
Abstract: This paper highlights the importance of the selection
of the building-s wall material,and the shortcomings of the most
commonly used framed structures with masonry infills .The
objective of this study is investigating the behavior of infill walls as
structural components in existing structures.Structural infill walls are
very important in structural behavior under earthquake effects.
Structural capacity under the effect of earthquake,displacement and
relative story displacement are affected by the structural irregularities
.The presence of nonstructural masonry infill walls can modify
extensively the global seismic behavior of framed buildings .The
stability and integrity of reinforced concrete frames are enhanced by
masonry infill walls. Masonry infill walls alter displacement and
base shear of the frame as well. Short columns have great
importance during earthquakes,because their failure may lead to
additional structural failures and result in total building collapse.
Consequently the effects of short columns are considered in this
study.
Abstract: Most buildings have been using anchor bolts
commonly for installing outdoor advertising structures. Anchor bolts
of common carbon steel are widely used and often installed
indiscriminately by inadequate installation standards. In the area
where strong winds frequently blow, falling accidents of outdoor
advertising structures can occur and cause a serious disaster, which is
very dangerous and to be prevented. In this regard, the development of
high-performance anchor bolts is urgently required. In the present
study, 25Cr-8Ni-1.5Si-1Mn-0.4C alloy was produced by traditional
vacuum induction melting (VIM) for the application of anchor bolt.
The alloy composition is revealed as a duplex microstructure from
thermodynamic phase analysis by FactSage® and confirmed by
metallographic experiment. Addition of Nitrogen to the alloy was
found to reduce the ferritic phase domain and significantly increase the
hardness and the tensile strength. Microstructure observation revealed
mixed structure of austenite and ferrite with fine carbide distributed
along the grain and phase boundaries.
Abstract: The study of the fouling deposition of pink guava
juice (PGJ) is relatively new research compared to milk fouling
deposit. In this work, a new experimental set-up was developed to
imitate the fouling formation in heat exchanger, namely a continuous
flow experimental set-up heat exchanger. The new experimental setup
was operated under industrial pasteurization temperature of PGJ,
which was at 93°C. While the flow rate and pasteurization period
were based on the experimental capacity, which were 0.5 and 1
liter/min for the flow rate and the pasteurization period was set for 1
hour. Characterization of the fouling deposit was determined by
using various methods. Microstructure of the deposits was carried
out using ESEM. Proximate analyses were performed to determine
the composition of moisture, fat, protein, fiber, ash and carbohydrate
content. A study on the hardness and stickiness of the fouling deposit
was done using a texture analyzer. The presence of seedstone in pink
guava juice was also analyzed using a particle analyzer. The findings
shown that seedstone from pink guava juice ranging from 168 to
200μm and carbohydrate was found to be a major composition
(47.7% of fouling deposit consists of carbohydrate). Comparison
between the hardness and stickiness of the deposits at two different
flow rates showed that fouling deposits were harder and denser at
higher flow rate. Findings from this work provide basis knowledge
for further study on fouling and cleaning of PGJ.
Abstract: In recent methodological articles related to structural equation modeling (SEM), the question of how to measure endogenous formative variables has been raised as an urgent, unresolved issue. This research presents an empirical application from the CRM system development context to test a recently developed technique, which makes it possible to measure endogenous formative constructs in structural models. PLS path modeling is used to demonstrate the feasibility of measuring antecedent relationships at the formative indicator level, not the formative construct level. Empirical results show that this technique is a promising approach to measure antecedent relationships of formative constructs in SEM.
Abstract: Motion detection is very important in image
processing. One way of detecting motion is using optical flow.
Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent
measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while
the flow velocity has two components. A second constraint is needed.
The method used for finding the optical flow in this project is
assuming that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies
smoothly almost everywhere in the image. This technique is later
used in developing software for motion detection which has the
capability to carry out four types of motion detection. The motion
detection software presented in this project also can highlight motion
region, count motion level as well as counting object numbers. Many
objects such as vehicles and human from video streams can be
recognized by applying optical flow technique.
Abstract: Dynamics of a vapour bubble generated due to a high local energy input near a circular thin bronze plate in the absence of the buoyancy forces is numerically investigated in this paper. The bubble is generated near a thin bronze plate and during the growth and collapse of the bubble, it deforms the nearby plate. The Boundary Integral Equation Method is employed for numerical simulation of the problem. The fluid is assumed to be incompressible, irrotational and inviscid and the surface tension on the bubble boundary is neglected. Therefore the fluid flow around the vapour bubble can be assumed as a potential flow. Furthermore, the thin bronze plate is assumed to have perfectly plastic behaviour. Results show that the displacement of the circular thin bronze plate has considerable effect on the dynamics of its nearby vapour bubble. It is found that by decreasing the thickness of the thin bronze plate, the growth and collapse rate of the bubble becomes higher and consequently the lifetime of the bubble becomes shorter.
Abstract: This paper presents the effect of driving a motor
vehicle on the stress levels of older drivers, indicated by monitoring
their hear rate increase whilst completing various everyday driving
tasks. Results suggest that whilst older female drivers heart rate varied
more significantly than males, the actual age of a participant did not
result in a significant change in heart rate due to stress, within the age
group tested. The analysis of the results indicates the most stressful
manoeuvres undertaken by the older drivers and highlights the tasks
which were found difficult with a view to implementing technologies
to aid the more senior driver in automotive travel.
Abstract: We report in this paper the model adopted by our
system of continuous speech recognition in Arab language SySRA
and the results obtained until now. This system uses the database
Arabdic-10 which is a corpus of word for the Arab language and
which was manually segmented. Phonetic decoding is represented
by an expert system where the knowledge base is translated in the
form of production rules. This expert system transforms a vocal
signal into a phonetic lattice. The higher level of the system takes
care of the recognition of the lattice thus obtained by deferring it in
the form of written sentences (orthographical Form). This level
contains initially the lexical analyzer which is not other than the
module of recognition. We subjected this analyzer to a set of
spectrograms obtained by dictating a score of sentences in Arab
language. The rate of recognition of these sentences is about 70%
which is, to our knowledge, the best result for the recognition of the
Arab language. The test set consists of twenty sentences from four
speakers not having taken part in the training.
Abstract: In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed for ownership identification and authentication using color images by deploying Cryptography and Digital Watermarking as underlaying technologies. The former is used to compute the contents based hash and the latter to embed the watermark. The host image that will claim to be the rightful owner is first transformed from RGB to YST color space exclusively designed for watermarking based applications. Geometrically YS ÔèÑ T and T channel corresponds to the chrominance component of color image, therefore suitable for embedding the watermark. The T channel is divided into 4×4 nonoverlapping blocks. The size of block is important for enhanced localization, security and low computation. Each block along with ownership information is then deployed by SHA160, a one way hash function to compute the content based hash, which is always unique and resistant against birthday attack instead of using MD5 that may raise the condition i.e. H(m)=H(m'). The watermark payload varies from block to block and computed by the variance factorα . The quality of watermarked images is quite high both subjectively and objectively. Our scheme is blind, computationally fast and exactly locates the tampered region.
Abstract: Recent developments in Soft computing techniques,
power electronic switches and low-cost computational hardware have
made it possible to design and implement sophisticated control
strategies for sensorless speed control of AC motor drives. Such an
attempt has been made in this work, for Sensorless Speed Control of
Induction Motor (IM) by means of Direct Torque Fuzzy Control
(DTFC), PI-type fuzzy speed regulator and MRAS speed estimator
strategy, which is absolutely nonlinear in its nature. Direct torque
control is known to produce quick and robust response in AC drive
system. However, during steady state, torque, flux and current ripple
occurs. So, the performance of conventional DTC with PI speed
regulator can be improved by implementing fuzzy logic techniques.
Certain important issues in design including the space vector
modulated (SVM) 3-Ф voltage source inverter, DTFC design,
generation of reference torque using PI-type fuzzy speed regulator
and sensor less speed estimator have been resolved. The proposed
scheme is validated through extensive numerical simulations on
MATLAB. The simulated results indicate the sensor less speed
control of IM with DTFC and PI-type fuzzy speed regulator provides
satisfactory high dynamic and static performance compare to
conventional DTC with PI speed regulator.
Abstract: The coastal sediments of West Port of Malaysia was monitored from Nov. 2009 to Oct. 2010 to assess spatial distribution of heavy metals As, Cu, Cd, Cr, Hg, Ni, Zn and Pb. Sediment samples were collected from 10 stations in dry and rainy season in West Port. The range concentrations measured (Mg/g dry weight ) were from 23.4 to 98.3 for Zn, 22.3 to 80 for Pb, 7.4 to 27.6 Cu, 0.244 to 3.53 for Cd, 7.2 to 22.2 for Ni, 20.2 to 162 for As, 0.11 to 0.409 for Hg and 11.5 to 61.5 for Cr. The geochemical indexes used in this study were Geoaccumulation (Igeo), Contamination Factor (CF) and Pollution Load Index (PLI); these indexes were used to evaluate the levels of sediment contaminations. The results of these indexes show that, the status of West Port sediment quality are moderately polluted by heavy metals except in arsenic which shows the high level of pollution.
Abstract: Ranked set sampling (RSS) was first suggested to increase the efficiency of the population mean. It has been shown that this method is highly beneficial to the estimation based on simple random sampling (SRS). There has been considerable development and many modifications were done on this method. When a concomitant variable is available, ratio estimation based on ranked set sampling was proposed. This ratio estimator is more efficient than that based on SRS. In this paper some ratio type estimators of the population mean based on RSS are suggested. These estimators are found to be more efficient than the estimators of similar form using simple random sample.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to discuss the effect of the
intervention of exercise behavior change plan for high school students
on study subjects- social and psychological factors and exercise
stages. This research uses the transtheoretical model as the research
framework. One experiment group and one control group were used in
a quasi-experimental design research. The experimental group
accepted health-related physical fitness course and the traditional
course; the control group accepted traditional physical education
course. There is a significant difference before and after the
intervention in the experimental group. Karl-s test shows the
experimental group gained a better improvement than that in the
control group. The Analysis of Covariance had shown the exercise
stages (F=7.62, p
Abstract: Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) to model genetic regulatory networks from gene expression data is one of the major paradigms for inferring the interactions among genes. Averaging a collection of models for predicting network is desired, rather than relying on a single high scoring model. In this paper, two kinds of model searching approaches are compared, which are Greedy hill-climbing Search with Restarts (GSR) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The GSR is preferred in many papers, but there is no such comparison study about which one is better for DBN models. Different types of experiments have been carried out to try to give a benchmark test to these approaches. Our experimental results demonstrated that on average the MCMC methods outperform the GSR in accuracy of predicted network, and having the comparable performance in time efficiency. By proposing the different variations of MCMC and employing simulated annealing strategy, the MCMC methods become more efficient and stable. Apart from comparisons between these approaches, another objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using DBN modeling approaches for inferring gene networks from few snapshots of high dimensional gene profiles. Through synthetic data experiments as well as systematic data experiments, the experimental results revealed how the performances of these approaches can be influenced as the target gene network varies in the network size, data size, as well as system complexity.
Abstract: Potato is one of the main components of warm meals in Latvia. Consumption of fried potatoes in Latvia is the highest comparing to Nordic and other Baltic countries. Therefore acrylamide (AA) intake coming from fried potatoes in population might be high as well. The aim of the research was to determine AA content in traditionally cooked potatoes bred and cultivated in Latvia. Five common Latvian potato varieties were selected: Lenora, Brasla, Imanta, Zile and Madara. A two-year research was conducted during two periods: just after harvesting and after six months of storage. The following cooking methods were used: shallow frying (150 ± 5 °C); deep-fat frying (180 ± 5 °C) and roasting (210 ± 5 °C). Time and temperature was recorded during frying. AA was extracted from potatoes by solid phase extraction and AA content was determined by LC-MS/MS. AA content significantly differs (p
Abstract: With the advance of information technology in the
new era the applications of Internet to access data resources has
steadily increased and huge amount of data have become accessible
in various forms. Obviously, the network providers and agencies,
look after to prevent electronic attacks that may be harmful or may
be related to terrorist applications. Thus, these have facilitated the
authorities to under take a variety of methods to protect the special
regions from harmful data. One of the most important approaches is
to use firewall in the network facilities. The main objectives of
firewalls are to stop the transfer of suspicious packets in several
ways. However because of its blind packet stopping, high process
power requirements and expensive prices some of the providers are
reluctant to use the firewall. In this paper we proposed a method to
find a discriminate function to distinguish between usual packets and
harmful ones by the statistical processing on the network router logs.
By discriminating these data, an administrator may take an approach
action against the user. This method is very fast and can be used
simply in adjacent with the Internet routers.
Abstract: A new dual-fluid concept was studied that could eventually find application for cold-gas propulsion for small space satellites or other constant flow applications. In basic form, the concept uses two different refrigerant working fluids, each having a different saturation vapor pressure. The higher vapor pressure refrigerant remains in the saturation phase and is used to pressurize the lower saturation vapor pressure fluid (the propellant) which remains in the compressed liquid phase. A demonstration thruster concept based on this principle was designed and built to study its operating characteristics. An automotive-type electronic fuel injector was used to meter and deliver the propellant. Ejected propellant mass and momentum were measured for several combinations of refrigerants and hydrocarbon fluids. The thruster has the advantage of delivering relatively large total impulse at low tank pressure within a small volume.
Abstract: In the present investigation, H13 tool steel has been
deposited on copper alloy substrate using both CO2 and diode laser.
A detailed parametric analysis has been carried out in order to find
out optimum processing zone for coating defect free H13 tool steel
on copper alloy substrate. Followed by parametric optimization, the
microstructure and microhardness of the deposited clads have been
evaluated. SEM micrographs revealed dendritic microstructure in
both clads. However, the microhardness of CO2 laser deposited clad
was much higher compared to diode laser deposited clad.
Abstract: With the intention of screening for heavy metal
tolerance, a number of bacteria were isolated and characterized from
a pristine soil. Two Gram positive isolates were identified as
Paenibacillus sp. and Bacillus thuringeinsis. Tolerance of Cd2+, Cu2+
and Zn2+ by these bacteria was studied and found that both bacteria
were highly sensitive to Cu2+ compared to other two metals. Both
bacteria showed the same pattern of metal tolerance in the order Zn+
> Cd2+ > Cu2+. When the metal tolerance in both bacteria was
compared, Paenibacillus sp. showed the highest sensitivity to Cu2+
where as B. thuringiensis showed highest sensitivity to Cd2+ and Zn2+
.These findings revealed the potential of Paenibacillus sp. in
developing a biosensor to detect Cu2+ in environmental samples.