Abstract: In recent years, rehabilitation has been the subject of extensive research due to increased spending on building work and repair of built works. In all cases, it is absolutely essential to carry out methods of strengthening or repair of structural elements, and that following an inspection analysis and methodology of a correct diagnosis. The reinforced concrete columns are important elements in building structures. They support the vertical loads and provide bracing against the horizontal loads. This research about the behavior of reinforced concrete rectangular columns, rehabilitated by concrete liner, confinement FRP fabric, steel liner or cage formed by metal corners. It allows comparing the contributions of different processes used perspective section resistance elements rehabilitated compared to that is not reinforced or repaired. The different results obtained revealed a considerable gain in bearing capacity failure of reinforced sections cladding concrete, metal bracket, steel plates and a slight improvement to the section reinforced with fabric FRP. The use of FRP does not affect the weight of the structures, but the use of different techniques cladding increases the weight of elements rehabilitated and therefore the weight of the building which requires resizing foundations.
Abstract: Accurate assessment of the primary tumor response to
treatment is important in the management of breast cancer. This
paper introduces a new set of treatment evaluation indicators for
breast cancer cases based on the computational process of three
known metrics, the Euclidian, Hamming and Levenshtein distances.
The distance principals are applied to pairs of mammograms and/or
echograms, recorded before and after treatment, determining a
reference point in judging the evolution amount of the studied
carcinoma. The obtained numerical results are indeed very
transparent and indicate not only the evolution or the involution of
the tumor under treatment, but also a quantitative measurement of the
benefit in using the selected method of treatment.
Abstract: This article presents a method for elections between the members of a group that is founded by fuzzy logic. Linguistic variables are objects for decision on election cards and deduction is based on t-norms and s-norms. In this election-s method election cards are questionnaire. The questionnaires are comprised of some questions with some choices. The choices are words from natural language. Presented method is accompanied by center of gravity (COG) defuzzification added up to a computer program by MATLAB. Finally the method is illustrated by solving two examples; choose a head for a research group-s members and a representative for students.
Abstract: This paper presents the approximate analytical solution of a Zakharov-Kuznetsov ZK(m, n, k) equation with the help of the differential transform method (DTM). The DTM method is a powerful and efficient technique for finding solutions of nonlinear equations without the need of a linearization process. In this approach the solution is found in the form of a rapidly convergent series with easily computed components. The two special cases, ZK(2,2,2) and ZK(3,3,3), are chosen to illustrate the concrete scheme of the DTM method in ZK(m, n, k) equations. The results demonstrate reliability and efficiency of the proposed method.
Abstract: In this paper, an extended study is performed on the
effect of different factors on the quality of vector data based on a
previous study. In the noise factor, one kind of noise that appears in
document images namely Gaussian noise is studied while the previous
study involved only salt-and-pepper noise. High and low levels of
noise are studied. For the noise cleaning methods, algorithms that were
not covered in the previous study are used namely Median filters and
its variants. For the vectorization factor, one of the best available
commercial raster to vector software namely VPstudio is used to
convert raster images into vector format. The performance of line
detection will be judged based on objective performance evaluation
method. The output of the performance evaluation is then analyzed
statistically to highlight the factors that affect vector quality.
Abstract: This study is about an application of King Bhumibol
Adulyadej’s “Learn Wisely” (LW) concept in instructional design
and management process at the Faculty of Education, Suan Sunahdha
Rajabhat University. The concept suggests four strategies for true
learning. Related literature and significant LW methods in teaching
and learning are also reviewed and then applied in designing a
pedagogy learning module. The design has been implemented in
three classrooms with a total of 115 sophomore student teachers.
After one consecutive semester of managing and adjusting the
process by instructors and experts using collected data from minutes,
assessment of learning management, satisfaction and learning
achievement of the students, it is found that the effective SSRU
model of LW instructional method comprises of five steps.
Abstract: Computational study of two dimensional supersonic reacting hydrogen-air flows is performed to investigate the nitrogen effects on ignition delay time for premixed and diffusion flames. Chemical reaction is treated using detail kinetics and the advection upstream splitting method is used to calculate the numerical inviscid fluxes. The results show that just in stoichiometric condition for both premixed and diffusion flames, there is monotone dependency of the ignition delay time to the nitrogen addition. In other situations, the optimal condition from ignition viewpoint should be found using numerical investigations.
Abstract: Microtomographic images and thin section (TS)
images were analyzed and compared against some parameters of
geological interest such as porosity and its distribution along the
samples. The results show that microtomography (CT) analysis,
although limited by its resolution, have some interesting information
about the distribution of porosity (homogeneous or not) and can also
quantify the connected and non-connected pores, i.e., total porosity.
TS have no limitations concerning resolution, but are limited by the
experimental data available in regards to a few glass sheets for
analysis and also can give only information about the connected
pores, i.e., effective porosity. Those two methods have their own
virtues and flaws but when paired together they are able to
complement one another, making for a more reliable and complete
analysis.
Abstract: We present a method to create special domain
collections from news sites. The method only requires a single
sample article as a seed. No prior corpus statistics are needed and the
method is applicable to multiple languages. We examine various
similarity measures and the creation of document collections for
English and Japanese. The main contributions are as follows. First,
the algorithm can build special domain collections from as little as
one sample document. Second, unlike other algorithms it does not
require a second “general" corpus to compute statistics. Third, in our
testing the algorithm outperformed others in creating collections
made up of highly relevant articles.
Abstract: Climate change leading to global warming affects the
earth through many different ways such as weather (temperature, precipitation, humidity and the other parameters of weather), snow coverage and ice melting, sea level rise, hydrological cycles, quality of water, agriculture, forests, ecosystems and health. One of the most
affected areas by climate change is hydrology and water resources.
Regions where majority of runoff consists of snow melt are more
sensitive to climate change. The first step of climate change studies
is to establish trends of significant climate variables including precipitation,
temperature and flow data to detect any potential climate
change impacts already happened. Two popular non-parametric trend
analysis methods, Mann-Kendal and Spearman-s Rho were applied
to Upper Euphrates Basin (Turkey) to detect trends of precipitation,
temperatures (maximum, minimum and average) and streamflow.
Abstract: A scaffold is necessary for tooth regeneration because of its three-dimensional geometry. For restoration of defect, it is necessary for the scaffold to be prepared in the shape of the defect. Sponges made from polyvinyl alcohol with formalin cross-linking (PVF sponge) have been used for scaffolds for bone formation in vivo. To induce osteogenesis within the sponge, methods of growing rat bone marrow cells (rBMCs) among the fiber structures in the sponge might be considered. Storage of rBMCs among the fibers in the sponge coated with dextran (10 kDa) was tried. After seeding of rBMCs to PVF sponge immersed in dextran solution at 2 g/dl concentration, osteogenesis was recognized in subcutaneously implanted PVF sponge as a scaffold in vivo. The level of osteocalcin was 25.28±5.71 ng/scaffold and that of Ca was 129.20±19.69 µg/scaffold. These values were significantly higher than those in sponges without dextran coating (p
Abstract: A subsea hydrocarbon production system can undergo planned and unplanned shutdowns during the life of the field. The thermal FEA is used to simulate the cool down to verify the insulation design of the subsea equipment, but it is also used to derive an acceptable insulation design for the cold spots. The driving factors of subsea analyses require fast responding and accurate models of the equipment cool down. This paper presents cool down analysis carried out by a Krylov subspace reduction method, and compares this approach to the commonly used FEA solvers. The model considered represents a typical component of a subsea production system, a closed valve on a dead leg. The results from the Krylov reduction method exhibits the least error and requires the shortest computational time to reach the solution. These findings make the Krylov model order reduction method very suitable for the above mentioned subsea applications.
Abstract: As the development of digital technology is increasing,
Digital cinema is getting more spread.
However, content copy and attack against the digital cinema becomes
a serious problem. To solve the above security problem, we propose
“Additional Watermarking" for digital cinema delivery system. With
this proposed “Additional watermarking" method, we protect content
copyrights at encoder and user side information at decoder. It realizes
the traceability of the watermark embedded at encoder.
The watermark is embedded into the random-selected frames using
Hash function. Using it, the embedding position is distributed by Hash
Function so that third parties do not break off the watermarking
algorithm.
Finally, our experimental results show that proposed method is much
better than the convenient watermarking techniques in terms of
robustness, image quality and its simple but unbreakable algorithm.
Abstract: The H.264/AVC standard uses an intra prediction, 9
directional modes for 4x4 luma blocks and 8x8 luma blocks, 4
directional modes for 16x16 macroblock and 8x8 chroma blocks,
respectively. It means that, for a macroblock, it has to perform 736
different RDO calculation before a best RDO modes is determined.
With this Multiple intra-mode prediction, intra coding of H.264/AVC
offers a considerably higher improvement in coding efficiency
compared to other compression standards, but computational
complexity is increased significantly. This paper presents a fast intra
prediction algorithm for H.264/AVC intra prediction based a
characteristic of homogeneity information. In this study, the gradient
prediction method used to predict the homogeneous area and the
quadratic prediction function used to predict the nonhomogeneous
area. Based on the correlation between the homogeneity and block
size, the smaller block is predicted by gradient prediction and
quadratic prediction, so the bigger block is predicted by gradient
prediction. Experimental results are presented to show that the
proposed method reduce the complexity by up to 76.07%
maintaining the similar PSNR quality with about 1.94%bit rate
increase in average.
Abstract: Magnesium wastes and scraps, one of the metal wastes, are produced by many industrial activities, all over the world. Their growing size is becoming a future problem for the world. In this study, the use of magnesium wastes as a raw material in the production of the magnesium borate hydrates are aimed. The method used in the experiments is hydrothermal synthesis. The conditions are set to, waste magnesium to B2O3, 1:3 as a molar ratio. Four different reaction times are studied which are 30, 60, 120 and 240 minutes. For the identification analyses X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) and Raman spectroscopy techniques are used. As a result at all the reaction times magnesium borate hydrates are synthesized and the most crystalline forms are obtained at a reaction time of 120 minutes. The overall yields of the production are found between the values of 65-80 %.
Abstract: This paper outlines the research conducted to propose na framework of 'Knowledge Society' (KS) in the Malaysian context.
It is important to highlight that the emergence of KS is a result of the rapid growth in knowledge and information. However, the discussion
of KS should not only be limited to the importance of knowledge, but a holistic KS is also determined by other imperative dimensions. This
article discusses the results of a study conducted previously in Malaysia in order to identify the essential dimensions of KS, and
consequently propose a KS framework in the Malaysian context.
Two methods were employed, namely the Delphi technique and semi-structured interviews. The modified Delphi involved five
rounds with ten experts, while the interviews were conducted with two prominent figures in Malaysia. The results support the proposed
framework which contains seven major dimensions in order for Malaysia to become a KS in the future. The dimensions which are
crucial for a holistic Malaysian KS are human capital, spirituality, economy, social, institutional, sustainability, and driven by the ICT.
Abstract: Energy intensity(energy consumption intensity) is a
global index which computes the required energy for producing a
specific value of goods and services in each country. It is computed
in terms of initial energy supply or final energy consumption. In this
study (research) Divisia method is used to decompose energy
consumption and energy intensity. This method decomposes
consumption and energy intensity to production effects, structural
and net intensity and could be done as time series or two-periodical.
This study analytically investigates consumption changes and energy
intensity on economical sectors of Iran and more specific on road
transportation(rail road and road).Our results show that the
contribution of structural effect (change in economical activities
combination) is very low and the effect of net energy consumption
has the higher contribution in consumption changes and energy
intensity. In other words, the high consumption of energy is due to
Intensity of energy consumption and is not to structural effect of
transportation sector.
Abstract: The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) represents any time series into a finite set of basis functions. The bases are termed as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) which are mutually orthogonal containing minimum amount of cross-information. The EMD successively extracts the IMFs with the highest local frequencies in a recursive way, which yields effectively a set low-pass filters based entirely on the properties exhibited by the data. In this paper, EMD is applied to explore the properties of the multi-year air temperature and to observe its effects on climate change under global warming. This method decomposes the original time-series into intrinsic time scale. It is capable of analyzing nonlinear, non-stationary climatic time series that cause problems to many linear statistical methods and their users. The analysis results show that the mode of EMD presents seasonal variability. The most of the IMFs have normal distribution and the energy density distribution of the IMFs satisfies Chi-square distribution. The IMFs are more effective in isolating physical processes of various time-scales and also statistically significant. The analysis results also show that the EMD method provides a good job to find many characteristics on inter annual climate. The results suggest that climate fluctuations of every single element such as temperature are the results of variations in the global atmospheric circulation.
Abstract: This is an applied research to propose the method for
price quotation for a contract electronics manufacturer. It has had a
precise price quoting method but such method could not quickly
provide a result as the customer required. This reduces the ability of
company to compete in this kind of business. In this case, the cause
of long time quotation process was analyzed. A lot of product
features have been demanded by customer. By checking routine
processes, it was found that high fraction of quoting time was used
for production time estimating which has effected to the
manufacturing or production cost. Then the historical data of
products including types, number of components, assembling
method, and their assembling time were used to analyze the key
components affecting to production time. The price quoting model
then was proposed. The implementation of proposed model was able
to remarkably reduce quoting time with an acceptable required
precision.
Abstract: Monitoring lightning electromagnetic pulses (sferics) and other terrestrial as well as extraterrestrial transient radiation signals is of considerable interest for practical and theoretical purposes in astro- and geophysics as well as meteorology. Managing a continuous flow of data, automation of the analysis and classification process is important. Features based on a combination of wavelet and statistical methods proved efficient for this task and serve as input into a radial basis function network that is trained to discriminate transient shapes from pulse like to wave like. We concentrate on signals in the Very Low Frequency (VLF, 3 -30 kHz) range in this paper, but the developed methods are independent of this specific choice.