Profit Optimization for Solar Plant Electricity Production

In this paper a stochastic scenario-based model predictive control applied to molten salt storage systems in concentrated solar tower power plant is presented. The main goal of this study is to build up a tool to analyze current and expected future resources for evaluating the weekly power to be advertised on electricity secondary market. This tool will allow plant operator to maximize profits while hedging the impact on the system of stochastic variables such as resources or sunlight shortage. Solving the problem first requires a mixed logic dynamic modeling of the plant. The two stochastic variables, respectively the sunlight incoming energy and electricity demands from secondary market, are modeled by least square regression. Robustness is achieved by drawing a certain number of random variables realizations and applying the most restrictive one to the system. This scenario approach control technique provides the plant operator a confidence interval containing a given percentage of possible stochastic variable realizations in such a way that robust control is always achieved within its bounds. The results obtained from many trajectory simulations show the existence of a ‘’reliable’’ interval, which experimentally confirms the algorithm robustness.

Investigation of Regenerative and Recuperative Burners for Different Sizes of Reheating Furnaces

This research aims to analyze the regenerative burner and the recuperative burner for the different reheating furnaces in the steel industry. The warm air temperatures of the burners are determined to suit with the sizes of the reheating furnaces by considering the air temperature, the fuel cost and the investment cost. The calculations of the payback period and the net present value are studied to compare the burners for the different reheating furnaces. The energy balance is utilized to calculate and compare the energy used in the different sizes of reheating furnaces for each burner. It is found that the warm air temperature is different if the sizes of reheating furnaces are varied. Based on the considerations of the net present value and the payback period, the regenerative burner is suitable for all plants at the same life of the burner. Finally, the sensitivity analysis of all factors has been discussed in this research.

An Efficient Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Wavelet Based Image Denoising

This frame work describes a computationally more efficient and adaptive threshold estimation method for image denoising in the wavelet domain based on Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) modeling of subband coefficients. In this proposed method, the choice of the threshold estimation is carried out by analysing the statistical parameters of the wavelet subband coefficients like standard deviation, arithmetic mean and geometrical mean. The noisy image is first decomposed into many levels to obtain different frequency bands. Then soft thresholding method is used to remove the noisy coefficients, by fixing the optimum thresholding value by the proposed method. Experimental results on several test images by using this method show that this method yields significantly superior image quality and better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Here, to prove the efficiency of this method in image denoising, we have compared this with various denoising methods like wiener filter, Average filter, VisuShrink and BayesShrink.

Library Aware Power Conscious Realization of Complementary Boolean Functions

In this paper, we consider the problem of logic simplification for a special class of logic functions, namely complementary Boolean functions (CBF), targeting low power implementation using static CMOS logic style. The functions are uniquely characterized by the presence of terms, where for a canonical binary 2-tuple, D(mj) ∪ D(mk) = { } and therefore, we have | D(mj) ∪ D(mk) | = 0 [19]. Similarly, D(Mj) ∪ D(Mk) = { } and hence | D(Mj) ∪ D(Mk) | = 0. Here, 'mk' and 'Mk' represent a minterm and maxterm respectively. We compare the circuits minimized with our proposed method with those corresponding to factored Reed-Muller (f-RM) form, factored Pseudo Kronecker Reed-Muller (f-PKRM) form, and factored Generalized Reed-Muller (f-GRM) form. We have opted for algebraic factorization of the Reed-Muller (RM) form and its different variants, using the factorization rules of [1], as it is simple and requires much less CPU execution time compared to Boolean factorization operations. This technique has enabled us to greatly reduce the literal count as well as the gate count needed for such RM realizations, which are generally prone to consuming more cells and subsequently more power consumption. However, this leads to a drawback in terms of the design-for-test attribute associated with the various RM forms. Though we still preserve the definition of those forms viz. realizing such functionality with only select types of logic gates (AND gate and XOR gate), the structural integrity of the logic levels is not preserved. This would consequently alter the testability properties of such circuits i.e. it may increase/decrease/maintain the same number of test input vectors needed for their exhaustive testability, subsequently affecting their generalized test vector computation. We do not consider the issue of design-for-testability here, but, instead focus on the power consumption of the final logic implementation, after realization with a conventional CMOS process technology (0.35 micron TSMC process). The quality of the resulting circuits evaluated on the basis of an established cost metric viz., power consumption, demonstrate average savings by 26.79% for the samples considered in this work, besides reduction in number of gates and input literals by 39.66% and 12.98% respectively, in comparison with other factored RM forms.

Neural Networks for Short Term Wind Speed Prediction

Predicting short term wind speed is essential in order to prevent systems in-action from the effects of strong winds. It also helps in using wind energy as an alternative source of energy, mainly for Electrical power generation. Wind speed prediction has applications in Military and civilian fields for air traffic control, rocket launch, ship navigation etc. The wind speed in near future depends on the values of other meteorological variables, such as atmospheric pressure, moisture content, humidity, rainfall etc. The values of these parameters are obtained from a nearest weather station and are used to train various forms of neural networks. The trained model of neural networks is validated using a similar set of data. The model is then used to predict the wind speed, using the same meteorological information. This paper reports an Artificial Neural Network model for short term wind speed prediction, which uses back propagation algorithm.

Use of NMMO Pretreatment for Biogas Production from Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch

Pretreatment of oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) with N-Methylmorpholine-N-oxide (NMMO) to enhance biogas production was investigated. The pretreatments were performed at 90 and 120ºC for 1, 3, and 5 h using three different concentrations of NMMO of 73%, 79%, and 85%. The pretreated OPEFB was subsequently anaerobically digested to produce biogas. After pretreatment, there were no significant changes of the main composition of OPEFB and the maximum total solid recovery was 92%. The amorphous phase was increased up to 78% at pretreatment condition using 85% NMMO solution for 3 h at 120oC. In general, higher concentration of NMMO and higher temperature resulted in increased amorphous form and higher biogas production. The best results of biogas production reached enhancement of methane yield of 148% compared to the untreated OPEFB and increased in digestion of 94% compared to starch as reference.

Anticancer Effect of Doxorubicin Loaded Heparin based Super-paramagnetic Iron oxide Nanoparticles against the Human Ovarian Cancer Cells

This study determines the effect of naked and heparinbased super-paramagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles on the human cancer cell lines of A2780. Doxorubicin was used as the anticancer drug, entrapped in the SPIO-NPs. This study aimed to decorate nanoparticles with heparin, a molecular ligand for 'active' targeting of cancerous cells and the application of modified-nanoparticles in cancer treatment. The nanoparticles containing the anticancer drug DOX were prepared by a solvent evaporation and emulsification cross-linking method. The physicochemical properties of the nanoparticles were characterized by various techniques, and uniform nanoparticles with an average particle size of 110±15 nm with high encapsulation efficiencies (EE) were obtained. Additionally, a sustained release of DOX from the SPIO-NPs was successful. Cytotoxicity tests showed that the SPIO-DOX-HP had higher cell toxicity than the individual HP and confocal microscopy analysis confirmed excellent cellular uptake efficiency. These results indicate that HP based SPIO-NPs have potential uses as anticancer drug carriers and also have an enhanced anticancer effect.

In silico Simulations for DNA Shuffling Experiments

DNA shuffling is a powerful method used for in vitro evolute molecules with specific functions and has application in areas such as, for example, pharmaceutical, medical and agricultural research. The success of such experiments is dependent on a variety of parameters and conditions that, sometimes, can not be properly pre-established. Here, two computational models predicting DNA shuffling results is presented and their use and results are evaluated against an empirical experiment. The in silico and in vitro results show agreement indicating the importance of these two models and motivating the study and development of new models.

Energy Efficient Clustering and Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are wireless networks consisting of number of tiny, low cost and low power sensor nodes to monitor various physical phenomena like temperature, pressure, vibration, landslide detection, presence of any object, etc. The major limitation in these networks is the use of nonrechargeable battery having limited power supply. The main cause of energy consumption WSN is communication subsystem. This paper presents an efficient grid formation/clustering strategy known as Grid based level Clustering and Aggregation of Data (GCAD). The proposed clustering strategy is simple and scalable that uses low duty cycle approach to keep non-CH nodes into sleep mode thus reducing energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed GCAD protocol performs better in various performance metrics.

Structural Analysis of Stiffened FGM Thick Walled Cylinders by Application of a New Cylindrical Super Element

Structural behavior of ring stiffened thick walled cylinders made of functionally graded materials (FGMs) is investigated in this paper. Functionally graded materials are inhomogeneous composites which are usually made from a mixture of metal and ceramic. The gradient compositional variation of the constituents from one surface to the other provides an elegant solution to the problem of high transverse shear stresses that are induced when two dissimilar materials with large differences in material properties are bonded. FGM formation of the cylinder is modeled by power-law exponent and the variation of characteristics is supposed to be in radial direction. A finite element formulation is derived for the analysis. According to the property variation of the constituent materials in the radial direction of the wall, it is not convenient to use conventional elements to model and analyze the structure of the stiffened FGM cylinders. In this paper a new cylindrical super-element is used to model the finite element formulation and analyze the static and modal behavior of stiffened FGM thick walled cylinders. By using this super-element the number of elements, which are needed for modeling, will reduce significantly and the process time is less in comparison with conventional finite element formulations. Results for static and modal analysis are evaluated and verified by comparison to finite element formulation with conventional elements. Comparison indicates a good conformity between results.

Artificial Neural Network with Steepest Descent Backpropagation Training Algorithm for Modeling Inverse Kinematics of Manipulator

Inverse kinematics analysis plays an important role in developing a robot manipulator. But it is not too easy to derive the inverse kinematic equation of a robot manipulator especially robot manipulator which has numerous degree of freedom. This paper describes an application of Artificial Neural Network for modeling the inverse kinematics equation of a robot manipulator. In this case, the robot has three degree of freedoms and the robot was implemented for drilling a printed circuit board. The artificial neural network architecture used for modeling is a multilayer perceptron networks with steepest descent backpropagation training algorithm. The designed artificial neural network has 2 inputs, 2 outputs and varies in number of hidden layer. Experiments were done in variation of number of hidden layer and learning rate. Experimental results show that the best architecture of artificial neural network used for modeling inverse kinematics of is multilayer perceptron with 1 hidden layer and 38 neurons per hidden layer. This network resulted a RMSE value of 0.01474.

Control of Vibrations in Flexible Smart Structures using Fast Output Sampling Feedback Technique

This paper features the modeling and design of a Fast Output Sampling (FOS) Feedback control technique for the Active Vibration Control (AVC) of a smart flexible aluminium cantilever beam for a Single Input Single Output (SISO) case. Controllers are designed for the beam by bonding patches of piezoelectric layer as sensor / actuator to the master structure at different locations along the length of the beam by retaining the first 2 dominant vibratory modes. The entire structure is modeled in state space form using the concept of piezoelectric theory, Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, Finite Element Method (FEM) and the state space techniques by dividing the structure into 3, 4, 5 finite elements, thus giving rise to three types of systems, viz., system 1 (beam divided into 3 finite elements), system 2 (4 finite elements), system 3 (5 finite elements). The effect of placing the sensor / actuator at various locations along the length of the beam for all the 3 types of systems considered is observed and the conclusions are drawn for the best performance and for the smallest magnitude of the control input required to control the vibrations of the beam. Simulations are performed in MATLAB. The open loop responses, closed loop responses and the tip displacements with and without the controller are obtained and the performance of the proposed smart system is evaluated for vibration control.

A General Stochastic Spatial MIMO Channel Model for Evaluating Various MIMO Techniques

A general stochastic spatial MIMO channel model is proposed for evaluating various MIMO techniques in this paper. It can generate MIMO channels complying with various MIMO configurations such as smart antenna, spatial diversity and spatial multiplexing. The modeling method produces the stochastic fading involving delay spread, Doppler spread, DOA (direction of arrival), AS (angle spread), PAS (power azimuth Spectrum) of the scatterers, antenna spacing and the wavelength. It can be applied in various MIMO technique researches flexibly with low computing complexity.

Use of Bayesian Network in Information Extraction from Unstructured Data Sources

This paper applies Bayesian Networks to support information extraction from unstructured, ungrammatical, and incoherent data sources for semantic annotation. A tool has been developed that combines ontologies, machine learning, and information extraction and probabilistic reasoning techniques to support the extraction process. Data acquisition is performed with the aid of knowledge specified in the form of ontology. Due to the variable size of information available on different data sources, it is often the case that the extracted data contains missing values for certain variables of interest. It is desirable in such situations to predict the missing values. The methodology, presented in this paper, first learns a Bayesian network from the training data and then uses it to predict missing data and to resolve conflicts. Experiments have been conducted to analyze the performance of the presented methodology. The results look promising as the methodology achieves high degree of precision and recall for information extraction and reasonably good accuracy for predicting missing values.

Adaptive Impedance Control for Unknown Time-Varying Environment Position and Stiffness

This study is concerned with a new adaptive impedance control strategy to compensate for unknown time-varying environment stiffness and position. The uncertainties are expressed by Function Approximation Technique (FAT), which allows the update laws to be derived easily using Lyapunov stability theory. Computer simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Studies on the Blended Concrete Prepared with Tannery Effluent

There is a acute water problem especially in the dry season in and around Perundurai (Erode district, Tamil Nadu, India) where there are more number of tannery units. Hence an attempt was made to use the waste water from tannery industry for construction purpose. The mechanical properties such as compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength etc were studied by casting various concrete specimens in form of cube, cylinders and beams etc and were found to be satisfactory. Hence some special properties such as chloride attack, sulphate attack and chemical attack are considered and comparatively studied with the conventional potable water. In this experimental study the results of specimens prepared by using treated and untreated tannery effluent were compared with the concrete specimens prepared by using potable water. It was observed that the concrete had some reduction in strength while subjected to chloride attack, sulphate attack and chemical attack. So admixtures were selected and optimized in suitable proportion to counter act the adverse effects and the results were found to be satisfactory.

Gasifier System Identification for Biomass Power Plants using Neural Network

The use of renewable energy sources becomes more necessary and interesting. As wider applications of renewable energy devices at domestic, commercial and industrial levels has not only resulted in greater awareness, but also significantly installed capacities. In addition, biomass principally is in the form of woods, which is a form of energy by humans for a long time. Gasification is a process of conversion of solid carbonaceous fuel into combustible gas by partial combustion. Many gasifier models have various operating conditions; the parameters kept in each model are different. This study applied experimental data, which has three inputs, which are; biomass consumption, temperature at combustion zone and ash discharge rate. One output is gas flow rate. For this paper, neural network was used to identify the gasifier system suitable for the experimental data. In the result,neural networkis usable to attain the answer.

Effect of Boric Acid on a-Hydroxy Acids Compounds in Thin Layer Chromatography

In this investigation Salicylic acid, Sulfosalicylic acid and Acetyl salicylic acid were chosen as a sample for thin layer chromatography (TLC) on silica gel plates. Bicarbonate buffer at different pH containing different amounts of boric acid was applied as mobile phase. Specific interaction of these substances with boric acid has effect on Rf in thin layer chromatography. Regular and similar trend was observed in variations of Rf for mentioned compounds in TLC by altering of percentages of boric acid in mobile phase in pH range of 8-10. Also effect of organic solvent, mixture of water/ organic solvent and organic solvent containing boric acid as mobile phase was studied.

Performance of Random Diagonal Codes for Spectral Amplitude Coding Optical CDMA Systems

In this paper we study the use of a new code called Random Diagonal (RD) code for Spectral Amplitude Coding (SAC) optical Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, using Fiber Bragg-Grating (FBG), FBG consists of a fiber segment whose index of reflection varies periodically along its length. RD code is constructed using code level and data level, one of the important properties of this code is that the cross correlation at data level is always zero, which means that Phase intensity Induced Phase (PIIN) is reduced. We find that the performance of the RD code will be better than Modified Frequency Hopping (MFH) and Hadamard code It has been observed through experimental and theoretical simulation that BER for RD code perform significantly better than other codes. Proof –of-principle simulations of encoding with 3 channels, and 10 Gbps data transmission have been successfully demonstrated together with FBG decoding scheme for canceling the code level from SAC-signal.

Evolutionary of Prostate Cancer Stem Cells in Prostate Duct

A systems approach model for prostate cancer in prostate duct, as a sub-system of the organism is developed. It is accomplished in two steps. First this research work starts with a nonlinear system of coupled Fokker-Plank equations which models continuous process of the system like motion of cells. Then extended to PDEs that include discontinuous processes like cell mutations, proliferation and deaths. The discontinuous processes is modeled by using intensity poisson processes. The model incorporates the features of the prostate duct. The system of PDEs spatial coordinate is along the proximal distal axis. Its parameters depend on features of the prostate duct. The movement of cells is biased towards distal region and mutations of prostate cancer cells is localized in the proximal region. Numerical solutions of the full system of equations are provided, and are exhibit traveling wave fronts phenomena. This motivates the use of the standard transformation to derive a canonically related system of ODEs for traveling wave solutions. The results obtained show persistence of prostate cancer by showing that the non-negative cone for the traveling wave system is time invariant. The traveling waves have a unique global attractor is proved also. Biologically, the global attractor verifies that evolution of prostate cancer stem cells exhibit the avascular tumor growth. These numerical solutions show that altering prostate stem cell movement or mutation of prostate cancer cells lead to avascular tumor. Conclusion with comments on clinical implications of the model is discussed.