Abstract: Hydrodynamic pressures acting on upstream of concrete dams during an earthquake are an important factor in designing and assessing the safety of these structures in Earthquake regions. Due to inherent complexities, assessing exact hydrodynamic pressure is only feasible for problems with simple geometry. In this research, the governing equation of concrete gravity dam reservoirs with effect of fluid viscosity in frequency domain is solved and then compared with that in which viscosity is assumed zero. The results show that viscosity influences the reservoir-s natural frequency. In excitation frequencies near the reservoir's natural frequencies, hydrodynamic pressure has a considerable difference in compare to the results of non-viscose fluid.
Abstract: The evaluation of the question answering system is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented question answering systems based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when question answering systems began to be more domains specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time achieve higher quality responses The research in this paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measure for response quality evaluation and in a later part, the call for new standard measures and the related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of heterogeneous systems, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research presents a black-box approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems (i.e. AnswerBus, START and NaLURI).
Abstract: Buoyancy driven heat transfer of nanofluids in a
cylindrical enclosure used as a control unit in the subsea hydrocarbon
injection wells is investigated in this study. The governing equations
obtained with the Boussinesq approximation are solved using Comsol
Multiphysics finite element analysis and simulation software. The
base fluid is water and CuO is used as nanoparticles. Solution is
obtained for nanoparticle solid volume fraction of 8% and for
Rayleigh number in the range of 105-107. The results show that
nanoparticle usage in the cylindrical electronic control unit has a
significant effect on the flow and heat transfer.
Abstract: In this study, we sought to investigate the mercury
removal efficiency of manganese oxides from natural gas. The
fundamental studies on mercury removal with manganese oxides
sorbents were carried out in a laboratory scale fixed bed reactor at 30
°C with a mixture of methane (20%) and nitrogen gas laden with 4.8
ppb of elemental mercury. Manganese oxides with varying surface
area and crystalline phase were prepared by conventional precipitation
method in this study. The effects of surface area, crystallinity and
other metal oxides on mercury removal efficiency were investigated.
Effect of Ag impregnation on mercury removal efficiency was also
investigated. Ag supported on metal oxide such titania and zirconia as
reference materials were also used in this study for comparison. The
characteristics of mercury removal reaction with manganese oxide
was investigated using a temperature programmed desorption (TPD)
technique.
Manganese oxides showed very high Hg removal activity (about
73-93% Hg removal) for first time use. Surface area of the manganese
oxide samples decreased after heat-treatment and resulted in complete
loss of Hg removal ability for repeated use after Hg desorption in the
case of amorphous MnO2, and 75% loss of the initial Hg removal
activity for the crystalline MnO2. Mercury desorption efficiency of
crystalline MnO2 was very low (37%) for first time use and high (98%)
after second time use. Residual potassium content in MnO2 may have
some effect on the thermal stability of the adsorbed Hg species.
Desorption of Hg from manganese oxides occurs at much higher
temperatures (with a peak at 400 °C) than Ag/TiO2 or Ag/ZrO2.
Mercury may be captured on manganese oxides in the form of mercury
manganese oxide.
Abstract: Earthquakes are natural phenomena that occur with influence of a lot of parameters such as seismic activity, changing in the ground waters' motion, changing in the water-s temperature, etc. On the other hand, the radon gas concentrations in soil vary as nonlinear generally with earthquakes. Continuous measurement of the soil radon gas is very important for determination of characteristic of the seismic activity. The radon gas changes as continuous with strain occurring within the Earth-s surface during an earthquake and effects from the physical and the chemical processes such as soil structure, soil permeability, soil temperature, the barometric pressure, etc. Therefore, at the modeling researches are notsufficient to knowthe concentration ofradon gas. In this research, we determined relationships between radon emissions based on the environmental parameters and earthquakes occurring along the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ), Turkiye and predicted magnitudes of some earthquakes with the artificial neural network (ANN) model.
Abstract: Thermoplastic starch, polylactic acid glycerol and
maleic anhydride (MA) were compounded with natural
montmorillonite (MMT) through a twin screw extruder to investigate
the effects of different loading of MMT on structure, thermal and
absorption behavior of the nanocomposites. X-ray diffraction analysis
(XRD) showed that sample with MMT loading 4phr exhibited
exfoliated structure while sample that contained MMT 8 phr
exhibited intercalated structure. FESEM images showed big lump
when MMT loading was at 8 phr. The thermal properties were
characterized by using differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). The
results showed that MMT increased melting temperature and
crystallization temperature of matrix but reduction in glass transition
temperature was observed Meanwhile the addition of MMT has
improved the water barrier property. The nanosize MMT particle is
also able to block a tortuous pathway for water to enter the starch
chain, thus reducing the water uptake and improved the physical
barrier of nanocomposite.
Abstract: Scolothrips longicornis Priesner is one of the
important predators of tetranychid mites with a wide distribution
throughout Iran. Life table and population growth parameters of S.
longicornis feeding on two-spotted spider mite, Tetranychus
turkestani Ugarov & Nikolski were investigated under laboratory
condition (26±1ºC, 65±5% R.H. and 16L: 8D). To carry of these
experiments, S. longicornis collections reared on cowpea infested
with T. turkestani were prepared. The eggs with less than 24 hours
old were selected and reared. The emerged larvae feeding directly on
cowpea leaf discs which were infested with T. turkestani. Thirty
females of S. longicornis with 24 hours age were selected and
released on infested leaf discs. They replaced daily to a new leaf disc
and the laying eggs have counted. The experiment continued till the
last thrips had died. The result showed that the mean age mortality of
the adult female thrips were between 21-25 days which is nearly
equal life expectancy (ex) at the time of adult eclosion. Parameters
related to reproductive table including gross reproductive rate, net
reproductive rate, intrinsic rate of natural increase and finite rate of
increase were 48.91, 37.63, 0.26 and 2.3, respectively. Mean age per
female/day, mean fertile egg per female/day, gross hatch rate, mean
net age fertility, mean net age fecundity, net fertility rate and net
fecundity rate were 2.23, 1.76, 0.87, 13.87, 14.26, 69.1 and 78.5,
respectively. Sex ratio of offspring also recorded daily. The highest
sex ratio for females was 0.88 in first day of oviposition. The sex
ratio decreased gradually and reached under 0.46 after the day 26 and
the oviposition rate declined. Then it seems that maintenance of
rearing culture of predatory thrips for mass rearing later than 26 days
after egg-laying commence is not profitable.
Abstract: In this paper we present the first Arabic sentence
dataset for on-line handwriting recognition written on tablet pc. The
dataset is natural, simple and clear. Texts are sampled from daily
newspapers. To collect naturally written handwriting, forms are
dictated to writers. The current version of our dataset includes 154
paragraphs written by 48 writers. It contains more than 3800 words
and more than 19,400 characters. Handwritten texts are mainly
written by researchers from different research centers. In order to use
this dataset in a recognition system word extraction is needed. In this
paper a new word extraction technique based on the Arabic
handwriting cursive nature is also presented. The technique is applied
to this dataset and good results are obtained. The results can be
considered as a bench mark for future research to be compared with.
Abstract: In the last decade, carbohydrates have attracted great
attention as renewable resources for the chemical industry.
Carbohydrates are abundantly found in nature in the form of
monomers, oligomers and polymers, or as components of
biopolymers and other naturally occurring substances. As natural
products, they play important roles in conferring certain physical,
chemical, and biological properties to their carrier molecules.The
synthesis of this particular carbohydrate glycomonomer is part of our
work to obtain biodegradable polymers. Our current paper describes
the synthesis and characterization of a novel carbohydrate
glycomonomer starting from D-glucose, in several synthesis steps,
that involve the protection/deprotection of the D-glucose ring via
acetylation, tritylation, then selective deprotection of the aromaticaliphatic
protective group, in order to obtain 1,2,3,4-tetra-O-acetyl-
6-O-allyl-β-D-glucopyranose. The glycomonomer was then obtained
by the allylation in drastic conditions of 1,2,3,4-tetra-O-acetyl-6-Oallyl-
β-D-glucopyranose with allylic alcohol in the presence of
stannic chloride, in methylene chloride, at room temperature. The
proposed structure of the glycomonomer, 2,3,4-tri-O-acetyl-1,6-di-
O-allyl-β-D-glucopyranose, was confirmed by FTIR, NMR and
HPLC-MS spectrometry. This glycomonomer will be further
submitted to copolymerization with certain acrylic or methacrylic
monomers in order to obtain competitive plastic materials for
applications in the biomedical field.
Abstract: In this study, a vibration analysis was carried out of
symmetric angle-ply laminated composite plates with and without
square hole when subjected to compressive loads, numerically. A
buckling analysis is also performed to determine the buckling load of
laminated plates. For each fibre orientation, the compression load is
taken equal to 50% of the corresponding buckling load. In the
analysis, finite element method (FEM) was applied to perform
parametric studies, the effects of degree of orthotropy and stacking
sequence upon the fundamental frequencies and buckling loads are
discussed. The results show that the presence of a constant
compressive load tends to reduce uniformly the natural frequencies
for materials which have a low degree of orthotropy. However, this
reduction becomes non-uniform for materials with a higher degree of
orthotropy.
Abstract: Gas flaring is one of the most GHG emitting sources in the oil and gas industries. It is also a major way for wasting such an energy that could be better utilized and even generates revenue. Minimize flaring is an effective approach for reducing GHG emissions and also conserving energy in flaring systems. Integrating waste and flared gases into the fuel gas networks (FGN) of refineries is an efficient tool. A fuel gas network collects fuel gases from various source streams and mixes them in an optimal manner, and supplies them to different fuel sinks such as furnaces, boilers, turbines, etc. In this article we use fuel gas network model proposed by Hasan et al. as a base model and modify some of its features and add constraints on emission pollution by gas flaring to reduce GHG emissions as possible. Results for a refinery case study showed that integration of flare gas stream with waste and natural gas streams to construct an optimal FGN can significantly reduce total annualized cost and flaring emissions.
Abstract: As the material used for fuselage structure must
possess low density, high strength to weight ratio, the selection of
appropriate materials for fuselage structure is one of the most
important tasks. Aluminum metal itself is soft and low in strength. It
can be made stronger by giving proper combination of suitable alloy
addition, mechanical treatment and thermal treatment. The usual
thermal treatment given to aluminum alloys is called age-hardening
or precipitation hardening. In this paper, the studies are carried out on
7075 aluminum alloy which is how to improve strength level for
fuselage structure. The marked effect of the strength on the ternary
alloy is clearly demonstrated at several ageing times and
temperatures. It is concluded that aluminum-zinc-magnesium alloy
can get the highest strength level in natural ageing.
Abstract: Nowadays there is a growing environmental concern
and the business communities have slowly started recognising
environmental protection and sustainable utilization of natural
resources into their marketing strategies. This paper discusses the
various Ecolabeling and Certification Systems developed world
over to regulate and introduce Fair Trade in Ornamental Fish
Industry. Ecolabeling and green certification are considered as part
of these strategies implemented partly out of compulsion from the
National and International Regulatory Bodies and Environmental
Movements. All the major markets of ornamental fishes like
European Union, USA and Japan have started putting restrictions on
the trade to impose ecolabeling as a non tariff barrier like the one
imposed on seafood and aqua cultured products. A review was done
on the available Ecolabeling and Green Certification Schemes
available at local, national and international levels for fisheries
including aquaculture and ornamental fish trade and to examine the
success and constraints faced by these schemes during its
implementation. The primary downside of certification is the
multiplicity of ecolabels and cost incurred by applicants for
certification, costs which may in turn be passed on to consumers.
The studies reveal serious inadequacies in a number of ecolabels
and cast doubt on their overall contribution to effective fisheries
management and sustainability. The paper also discusses the
inititive taken in India to develop guidelines for Green Certification
of Fresh water ornamental fishes.
Abstract: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) has demonstrated
far superior to previous Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and
standard JPEG in natural as well as medical image compression. Due
to its localization properties both in special and transform domain,
the quantization error introduced in DWT does not propagate
globally as in DCT. Moreover, DWT is a global approach that avoids
block artifacts as in the JPEG. However, recent reports on natural
image compression have shown the superior performance of
contourlet transform, a new extension to the wavelet transform in two
dimensions using nonseparable and directional filter banks,
compared to DWT. It is mostly due to the optimality of contourlet in
representing the edges when they are smooth curves. In this work, we
investigate this fact for medical images, especially for CT images,
which has not been reported yet. To do that, we propose a
compression scheme in transform domain and compare the
performance of both DWT and contourlet transform in PSNR for
different compression ratios (CR) using this scheme. The results
obtained using different type of computed tomography images show
that the DWT has still good performance at lower CR but contourlet
transform performs better at higher CR.
Abstract: Laser interferometric methods have been utilized for the measurement of natural convection heat transfer from a heated vertical flat plate, in the investigation presented here. The study mainly aims at comparing two different fringe orientations in the wedge fringe setting of Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), used for the measurements. The interference fringes are set in horizontal and vertical orientations with respect to the heated surface, and two different fringe analysis methods, namely the stepping method and the method proposed by Naylor and Duarte, are used to obtain the heat transfer coefficients. The experimental system is benchmarked with theoretical results, thus validating its reliability in heat transfer measurements. The interference fringe patterns are analyzed digitally using MATLAB 7 and MOTIC Plus softwares, which ensure improved efficiency in fringe analysis, hence reducing the errors associated with conventional fringe tracing. The work also discuss the relative merits and limitations of the two methods used.
Abstract: Ammonia nitrogen is one of the most hazardous
water pollutants, discharging into water receptors through industrial
effluents. Negative environmental impacts of such chemical species
in hydrosphere include accelerated eutrophication, water toxicity and
harming the aquatics. Natural zeolite clinoptilolite has very high
selectivity & capacity for ammonium cation sorption. It occurs in
high abundances and rich mines of this zeolite exist in different parts
of Iran and thus are available more cheaply and with different sizing.
The aim of this study is to investigate ammonia nitrogen removal
over this natural sorbent from real samples of high polluted
wastewater discharging from a fertilizer producing plant. The
experimental results showed that this natural sorbent without even
any pre treatment system & with the same particle size available in
Iranian markets has still high capability & selectivity in ammonia
nitrogen removal both in batch and continuous tests.
Abstract: Antimicrobial (AM) starch-based films were
developed by incorporating chitosan and lauric acid as antimicrobial
agent into starch-based film. Chitosan has wide range of applications
as a biomaterial, but barriers still exist to its broader use due to its
physical and chemical limitations. In this work, a series of
starch/chitosan (SC) blend films containing 8% of lauric acid was
prepared by casting method. The structure of the film was
characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Xray
diffraction (XRD), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
The results indicated that there were strong interactions were present
between the hydroxyl groups of starch and the amino groups of
chitosan resulting in a good miscibility between starch and chitosan
in the blend films. Physical properties and optical properties of the
AM starch-based film were evaluated. The AM starch-based films
incorporated with chitosan and lauric acid showed an improvement in
water vapour transmission rate (WVTR) and addition of starch
content provided more transparent films while the yellowness of the
film attributed to the higher chitosan content. The improvement in
water barrier properties was mainly attributed to the hydrophobicity
of lauric acid and optimum chitosan or starch content. AM starch
based film also showed excellent oxygen barrier. Obtaining films
with good oxygen permeability would be an indication of the
potential use of these antimicrobial packaging as a natural packaging
and an alternative packaging to the synthetic polymer to protect food
from oxidation reactions
Abstract: In this paper, several different types of natural gas liquefaction cycle. First, two processes are a cascade process with two staged compression were designed and simulated. These include Inter-cooler which is consisted to Propane, Ethylene and Methane cycle, and also, liquid-gas heat exchanger is applied to between of methane and ethylene cycles (process2) and between of ethylene and propane (process2). Also, these cycles are compared with two staged cascade process using only a Inter-cooler (process1). The COP of process2 and process3 showed about 13.99% and 6.95% higher than process1, respectively. Also, the yield efficiency of LNG improved comparing with process1 by 13.99% lower specific power. Additionally, C3MR process are simulated and compared with Process 2.
Abstract: The treatment of the industrial wastewater can be
particularly difficult in the presence of toxic compounds. Excessive
concentration of Chromium in soluble form is toxic to a wide variety
of living organisms. Biological removal of heavy metals using natural
and genetically engineered microorganisms has aroused great interest
because of its lower impact on the environment. Ralston
metallidurans, formerly known as Alcaligenes eutrophus is a LProteobacterium
colonizing industrial wastewater with a high content
of heavy metals. Tris-buffered mineral salt medium was used for
growing Alcaligenes eutrophus AE104 (pEBZ141). The cells were
cultivated for 18 h at 30 oC in Tris-buffered mineral salt medium
containing 3 mM disodium sulphate and 46 mM sodium gluconate as
the carbon source. The cells were harvested by centrifugation,
washed, and suspended in 10 mM Tris HCl, pH 7.0, containing 46
mM sodium gluconate, and 5 mM Chromium. Interaction among
induction of chr resistance determinant, and chromate reduction have
been demonstrated. Results of this study show that the above bacteria
can be very useful for bioremediation of chromium from industrial
wastewater.
Abstract: Signal processing applications which are iterative in
nature are best represented by data flow graphs (DFG). In these
applications, the maximum sampling frequency is dependent on the
topology of the DFG, the cyclic dependencies in particular. The
determination of the iteration bound, which is the reciprocal of the
maximum sampling frequency, is critical in the process of hardware
implementation of signal processing applications. In this paper, a
novel technique to compute the iteration bound is proposed. This
technique is different from all previously proposed techniques, in the
sense that it is based on the natural flow of tokens into the DFG
rather than the topology of the graph. The proposed algorithm has
lower run-time complexity than all known algorithms. The
performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated through
analytical analysis of the time complexity, as well as through
simulation of some benchmark problems.