Abstract: This paper describes the designs of a first and second
generation autonomous gas monitoring system and the successful
field trial of the final system (2nd generation). Infrared sensing
technology is used to detect and measure the greenhouse gases
methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) at point sources. The
ability to monitor real-time events is further enhanced through the
implementation of both GSM and Bluetooth technologies to
communicate these data in real-time. These systems are robust,
reliable and a necessary tool where the monitoring of gas events in
real-time are needed.
Abstract: The controllable electrical loss which consists of the
copper loss and iron loss can be minimized by the optimal control of
the armature current vector. The control algorithm of current vector
minimizing the electrical loss is proposed and the optimal current
vector can be decided according to the operating speed and the load
conditions. The proposed control algorithm is applied to the
experimental PM motor drive system and this paper presents a
modern approach of speed control for permanent magnet
synchronous motor (PMSM) applied for Electric Vehicle using a
nonlinear control. The regulation algorithms are based on the
feedback linearization technique. The direct component of the current
is controlled to be zero which insures the maximum torque operation.
The near unity power factor operation is also achieved. More over,
among EV-s motor electric propulsion features, the energy efficiency
is a basic characteristic that is influenced by vehicle dynamics and
system architecture. For this reason, the EV dynamics are taken into
account.
Abstract: This paper investigates experimentally and
analytically the torsion behavior of steel fibered high strength self
compacting concrete beams reinforced by GFRP bars. Steel fibered
high strength self compacting concrete (SFHSSCC) and GFRP bars
became in the recent decades a very important materials in the
structural engineering field. The use of GFRP bars to replace steel
bars has emerged as one of the many techniques put forward to
enhance the corrosion resistance of reinforced concrete structures.
High strength concrete and GFRP bars attract designers and
architects as it allows improving the durability as well as the esthetics
of a construction. One of the trends in SFHSSCC structures is to
provide their ductile behavior and additional goal is to limit
development and propagation of macro-cracks in the body of
SFHSSCC elements. SFHSSCC and GFRP bars are tough, improve
the workability, enhance the corrosion resistance of reinforced
concrete structures, and demonstrate high residual strengths after
appearance of the first crack. Experimental studies were carried out
to select effective fiber contents. Three types of volume fraction from
hooked shape steel fibers are used in this study, the hooked steel
fibers were evaluated in volume fractions ranging between 0.0%,
0.75% and 1.5%. The beams shape is chosen to create the required
forces (i.e. torsion and bending moments simultaneously) on the test
zone. A total of seven beams were tested, classified into three groups.
All beams, have 200cm length, cross section of 10×20cm,
longitudinal bottom reinforcement of 3
Abstract: This paper presented the technique of robot control by event-related potentials (ERPs) of brain waves. Based on the proposed technique, severe physical disabilities can free browse outside world. A specific component of ERPs, N2P3, was found and used to control the movement of robot and the view of camera on the designed brain-computer interface (BCI). Users only required watching the stimuli of attended button on the BCI, the evoked potentials of brain waves of the target button, N2P3, had the greatest amplitude among all control buttons. An experimental scene had been constructed that the robot required walking to a specific position and move the view of camera to see the instruction of the mission, and then completed the task. Twelve volunteers participated in this experiment, and experimental results showed that the correct rate of BCI control achieved 80% and the average of execution time was 353 seconds for completing the mission. Four main contributions included in this research: (1) find an efficient component of ERPs, N2P3, for BCI control, (2) embed robot's viewpoint image into user interface for robot control, (3) design an experimental scene and conduct the experiment, and (4) evaluate the performance of the proposed system for assessing the practicability.
Abstract: The aim of the study is to determine the effects of
perceived organizational support on organizational identification. In
accordance with this purpose was applied on 131 family physicians in
Konya. The data obtained by means of the survey method were
analyzed. According to the results of correlation analysis, while
positive relationship between perceived organizational support,
organizational identification and supervisor support was revealed.
Also, with the scope of the research, relationships between these
variables and certain demographic variables were detected.
According to difference analysis results of the research, significant
differences between organizational identification and gender variable
were determined. However, significant differences were not
determined between demographic variables and perceived
organizational support.
Abstract: The result of process of territory-s development is the territory-s state of development (TSoD), which is pointed towards the provision and improvement of people-s life conditions. The authors offer to measure the TSoD according to their own developed model. Using the available statistical data regarding the values of model-s elements, the authors empirically show which element mainly determines the TSoD. The findings of the research showed that the key elements of the TSoD are the “Material welfare of people" and “People-s health". Performing a deeper statistical analysis of correlation between these elements, it turned out that it is not so necessary for a country to be bent on trying to increase the material growth of a territory, because a relatively high index of life expectancy at birth could be ensured also by much more modest material resources. On the other hand, the economical feedback of longer lifespan within countries with lower material performance is also relatively low.
Abstract: Thermal water hammer is a special type of water
hammer which rarely occurs in heat exchangers. In biphasic fluids, if
steam bubbles are surrounded by condensate, regarding lower
condensate temperature than steam, they will suddenly collapse. As a
result, the vacuum caused by an extreme change in volume lead to
movement of the condensates in all directions and their collision the
force produced by this collision leads to a severe stress in the pipe
wall. This phenomenon is a special type of water hammer. According
to fluid mechanics, this phenomenon is a particular type of transient
flows during which abrupt change of fluid leads to sudden pressure
change inside the tube. In this paper, the mechanism of abrupt failure
of 80 tubes of 481 tubes of a methanol heat exchanger is discussed.
Initially, due to excessive temperature differences between heat
transfer fluids and simultaneous failure of 80 tubes, thermal shock
was presupposed as the reason of failure. Deeper investigation on
cross-section of failed tubes showed that failure was, ductile type of
failure, so the first hypothesis was rejected. Further analysis and more
accurate experiments revealed that failure of tubes caused by thermal
water hammer. Finally, the causes of thermal water hammer and
various solutions to avoid such mechanism are discussed.
Abstract: The research focuses on the effects of polyphenols
extracted from Sambucus nigra fruit, using an experimental arterial
hypertension pattern, as well as their influence on the oxidative
stress. The results reveal the normalization of the reduced glutathion
concentration, as well as a considerable reduction in the
malondialdehide serum concentration by the polyphenolic protection.
The rat blood pressure values were recorded using a CODATM
system, which uses a non-invasive blood pressure measuring method.
All the measured blood pressure components revealed a biostatistically
significant (p
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a method of alter duration in
frequency domain that control prosody in real time after pitch
alteration. If there has a method to alteration duration freely among
prosody information, that may used in several fields such as speech
impediment person's pronunciation proof reading or language study.
The pitch alteration method used control prosody altered by PSOLA
synthesis method which is in time domain processing method.
However, the duration of pitch alteration speech is changed by the
frequency domain. In this paper, we altered the duration with the
method of duration alteration by Fast Fourier Transformation in
frequency domain. Consequently, the intelligibility of the pitch and
duration are controlled has a slight decrease than the case when only
pitch is changed, but the proposed algorithm obtained the higher MOS
score about naturalness.
Abstract: Operational risk has become one of the most discussed topics in the financial industry in the recent years. The reasons for this attention can be attributed to higher investments in information systems and technology, the increasing wave of mergers and acquisitions and emergence of new financial instruments. In addition, the New Basel Capital Accord (known as Basel II) demands a capital requirement for operational risk and further motivates financial institutions to more precisely measure and manage this type of risk. The aim of this paper is to shed light on main characteristics of operational risk management and common applied methods: scenario analysis, key risk indicators, risk control self assessment and loss distribution approach.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a blind algorithm for peakto- average power ratio (PAPR) reduction in OFDM systems, based on selected mapping (SLM) algorithm as a distortionless method. The main drawback of the conventional SLM technique is the need for transmission of several side information bits, for each data block, which results in loss in data rate transmission. In the proposed method some special number of carriers in the OFDM frame is reserved to be rotated with one of the possible phases according to the number of phase sequence blocks in SLM algorithm. Reserving some limited number of carriers wont effect the reduction in PAPR of OFDM signal. Simulation results show using ML criteria at the receiver will lead to the same system-performance as the conventional SLM algorithm, while there is no need to send any side information to the receiver.
Abstract: Autoregressive Moving average (ARMA) is a parametric based method of signal representation. It is suitable for problems in which the signal can be modeled by explicit known source functions with a few adjustable parameters. Various methods have been suggested for the coefficients determination among which are Prony, Pade, Autocorrelation, Covariance and most recently, the use of Artificial Neural Network technique. In this paper, the method of using Artificial Neural network (ANN) technique is compared with some known and widely acceptable techniques. The comparisons is entirely based on the value of the coefficients obtained. Result obtained shows that the use of ANN also gives accurate in computing the coefficients of an ARMA system.
Abstract: In this study, an experimental investigation was carried
out to fix CO2 into the electronic arc furnace (EAF) reducing slag from
stainless steelmaking process under wet grinding. The slag was ground
by the vibrating ball mill with the CO2 and pure water. The reaction
behavior was monitored with constant pressure method, and the
change of CO2 volume in the experimental system with grinding time
was measured. It was found that the CO2 absorption occurred as soon
as the grinding started. The CO2 absorption under wet grinding was
significantly larger than that under dry grinding. Generally, the
amount of CO2 absorption increased as the amount of water, the
amount of slag, the diameter of alumina ball and the initial pressure of
CO2 increased. However, the initial absorption rate was scarcely
influenced by the experimental conditions except for the initial CO2
pressure. According to this research, the CO2 reacted with the CaO
inside the slag to form CaCO3.
Abstract: A direct downconversion receiver implemented in 0.13 μm 1P8M process is presented. The circuit is formed by a single-end LNA, an active balun for conversion into balanced mode, a quadrature double-balanced passive switch mixer and a quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator. The receiver operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band and complies with IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) specifications. The circuit exhibits a very low noise figure of only 2.27 dB and dissipates only 14.6 mW with a 1.2 V supply voltage and is hence suitable for low-power applications.
Abstract: In this paper, a fragile watermarking scheme is proposed for color image specified object-s authentication. The color image is first transformed from RGB to YST color space, suitable for watermarking the color media. The T channel corresponds to the chrominance component of a color image andYS ÔèÑ T , therefore selected for embedding the watermark. The T channel is first divided into 2×2 non-overlapping blocks and the two LSBs are set to zero. The object that is to be authenticated is also divided into 2×2 nonoverlapping blocks and each block-s intensity mean is computed followed by eight bit encoding. The generated watermark is then embedded into T channel randomly selected 2×2 block-s LSBs using 2D-Torus Automorphism. Selection of block size is paramount for exact localization and recovery of work. The proposed scheme is blind, efficient and secure with ability to detect and locate even minor tampering applied to the image with full recovery of original work. The quality of watermarked media is quite high both subjectively and objectively. The technique is suitable for class of images with format such as gif, tif or bitmap.
Abstract: The standard approach to image reconstruction is to stabilize the problem by including an edge-preserving roughness penalty in addition to faithfulness to the data. However, this methodology produces noisy object boundaries and creates a staircase effect. The existing attempts to favor the formation of smooth contour lines take the edge field explicitly into account; they either are computationally expensive or produce disappointing results. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the smoothness of the edge field in an implicit way by means of an additional penalty term defined in the wavelet domain. We also derive an efficient half-quadratic algorithm to solve the resulting optimization problem, including the case when the data fidelity term is non-quadratic and the cost function is nonconvex. Numerical experiments show that our technique preserves edge sharpness while smoothing contour lines; it produces visually pleasing reconstructions which are quantitatively better than those obtained without wavelet-domain constraints.
Abstract: We propose a novel prioritized limited
processor-sharing (PS) rule and a simulation algorithm for the performance evaluation of this rule. The performance measures of practical interest are evaluated using this algorithm. Suppose that there
are two classes and that an arriving (class-1 or class-2) request encounters n1 class-1 and n2 class-2 requests (including the arriving
one) in a single-server system. According to the proposed rule, class-1
requests individually and simultaneously receive m / (m * n1+ n2) of the service-facility capacity, whereas class-2 requests receive 1 / (m *n1 + n2) of it, if m * n1 + n2 ≤ C. Otherwise (m * n1 + n2 > C), the arriving request will be queued in the corresponding class waiting
room or rejected. Here, m (1) denotes the priority ratio, and C ( ∞), the service-facility capacity. In this rule, when a request arrives at [or
departs from] the system, the extension [shortening] of the remaining
sojourn time of each request receiving service can be calculated using
the number of requests of each class and the priority ratio. Employing
a simulation program to execute these events and calculations enables
us to analyze the performance of the proposed prioritized limited PS
rule, which is realistic in a time-sharing system (TSS) with a
sufficiently small time slot. Moreover, this simulation algorithm is
expanded for the evaluation of the prioritized limited PS system with
N 3 priority classes.
Abstract: The scale dependence of the strength of virtually homogeneous rock is usually considered to be insignificant but the spectrum of discontinuities plays a very important role for the strength of differently sized rock elements and also controls the rock creep strain. Large-scale load tests comprised recording of the creep strain rate that was found to be strongly retarded and negligible for stresses lower than about 1/3 of the failure load. For higher stresses creep took place according to a log time law representing secondary creep that ultimately changed to tertiary creep and failure.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal fuzzy
based algorithm for noise filtering of image sequences. Our proposed algorithm uses adaptive weights based on a triangular membership
functions. In this algorithm median filter is used to suppress noise.
Experimental results show when the images are corrupted by highdensity
Salt and Pepper noise, our fuzzy based algorithm for noise filtering of image sequences, are much more effective in suppressing
noise and preserving edges than the previously reported algorithms such as [1-7]. Indeed, assigned weights to noisy pixels are very
adaptive so that they well make use of correlation of pixels. On the other hand, the motion estimation methods are erroneous and in highdensity noise they may degrade the filter performance. Therefore, our
proposed fuzzy algorithm doesn-t need any estimation of motion trajectory. The proposed algorithm admissibly removes noise without having any knowledge of Salt and Pepper noise density.
Abstract: Psoriasis is a widespread skin disease affecting up to 2% population with plaque psoriasis accounting to about 80%. It can be identified as a red lesion and for the higher severity the lesion is usually covered with rough scale. Psoriasis Area Severity Index (PASI) scoring is the gold standard method for measuring psoriasis severity. Scaliness is one of PASI parameter that needs to be quantified in PASI scoring. Surface roughness of lesion can be used as a scaliness feature, since existing scale on lesion surface makes the lesion rougher. The dermatologist usually assesses the severity through their tactile sense, therefore direct contact between doctor and patient is required. The problem is the doctor may not assess the lesion objectively. In this paper, a digital image analysis technique is developed to objectively determine the scaliness of the psoriasis lesion and provide the PASI scaliness score. Psoriasis lesion is modelled by a rough surface. The rough surface is created by superimposing a smooth average (curve) surface with a triangular waveform. For roughness determination, a polynomial surface fitting is used to estimate average surface followed by a subtraction between rough and average surface to give elevation surface (surface deviations). Roughness index is calculated by using average roughness equation to the height map matrix. The roughness algorithm has been tested to 444 lesion models. From roughness validation result, only 6 models can not be accepted (percentage error is greater than 10%). These errors occur due the scanned image quality. Roughness algorithm is validated for roughness measurement on abrasive papers at flat surface. The Pearson-s correlation coefficient of grade value (G) of abrasive paper and Ra is -0.9488, its shows there is a strong relation between G and Ra. The algorithm needs to be improved by surface filtering, especially to overcome a problem with noisy data.