Abstract: Combustion of sprays is of technological importance, but its flame behavior is not fully understood. Furthermore, the multiplicity of dependent variables such as pressure, temperature, equivalence ratio, and droplet sizes complicates the study of spray combustion. Fundamental study on the influence of the presence of liquid droplets has revealed that laminar flames within aerosol mixtures more readily become unstable than for gaseous ones and this increases the practical burning rate. However, fundamental studies on turbulent flames of aerosol mixtures are limited particularly those under near mono-dispersed droplet conditions. In the present work, centrally ignited expanding flames at near atmospheric pressures are employed to quantify the burning rates in gaseous and aerosol flames. Iso-octane-air aerosols are generated by expansion of the gaseous pre-mixture to produce a homogeneously distributed suspension of fuel droplets. The effects of the presence of droplets and turbulence velocity in relation to the burning rates of the flame are also investigated.
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how the soft systems
methodology can be used to improve the delivery of a module in data warehousing for fourth year information technology students.
Graduates in information technology needs to have academic skills
but also needs to have good practical skills to meet the skills requirements of the information technology industry. In developing
and improving current data warehousing education modules one has to find a balance in meeting the expectations of various role players such as the students themselves, industry and academia. The soft
systems methodology, developed by Peter Checkland, provides a
methodology for facilitating problem understanding from different world views. In this paper it is demonstrated how the soft systems methodology can be used to plan the improvement of data
warehousing education for fourth year information technology students.
Abstract: In this article, we aim to discuss the formulation of two explicit group iterative finite difference methods for time-dependent two dimensional Burger-s problem on a variable mesh. For the non-linear problems, the discretization leads to a non-linear system whose Jacobian is a tridiagonal matrix. We discuss the Newton-s explicit group iterative methods for a general Burger-s equation. The proposed explicit group methods are derived from the standard point and rotated point Crank-Nicolson finite difference schemes. Their computational complexity analysis is discussed. Numerical results are given to justify the feasibility of these two proposed iterative methods.
Abstract: Structural Integrity Management (SIM) is
important for the protection of offshore crew, environment, business assets and company and industry reputation. API RP 2A contained guidelines for assessment of existing platforms mostly for the Gulf
of Mexico (GOM). ISO 19902 SIM framework also does not
specifically cater for Malaysia. There are about 200 platforms in
Malaysia with 90 exceeding their design life. The Petronas Carigali
Sdn Bhd (PCSB) uses the Asset Integrity Management System and
the very subjective Risk based Inspection Program for these
platforms. Petronas currently doesn-t have a standalone Petronas
Technical Standard PTS-SIM. This study proposes a recommended
practice for the SIM process for offshore structures in Malaysia,
including studies by API and ISO and local elements such as the
number of platforms, types of facilities, age and risk ranking. Case
study on SMG-A platform in Sabah shows missing or scattered
platform data and a gap in inspection history. It is to undergo a level
3 underwater inspection in year 2015.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose ablock-wise watermarking scheme for color image authentication to resist malicious tampering of digital media. The thresholding technique is incorporated into the scheme such that the tampered region of the color image can be recovered with high quality while the proofing result is obtained. The watermark for each block consists of its dual authentication data and the corresponding feature information. The feature information for recovery iscomputed bythe thresholding technique. In the proofing process, we propose a dual-option parity check method to proof the validity of image blocks. In the recovery process, the feature information of each block embedded into the color image is rebuilt for high quality recovery. The simulation results show that the proposed watermarking scheme can effectively proof the tempered region with high detection rate and can recover the tempered region with high quality.
Abstract: Identity verification of authentic persons by their multiview faces is a real valued problem in machine vision. Multiview faces are having difficulties due to non-linear representation in the feature space. This paper illustrates the usability of the generalization of LDA in the form of canonical covariate for face recognition to multiview faces. In the proposed work, the Gabor filter bank is used to extract facial features that characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality and orientation. Gabor face representation captures substantial amount of variations of the face instances that often occurs due to illumination, pose and facial expression changes. Convolution of Gabor filter bank to face images of rotated profile views produce Gabor faces with high dimensional features vectors. Canonical covariate is then used to Gabor faces to reduce the high dimensional feature spaces into low dimensional subspaces. Finally, support vector machines are trained with canonical sub-spaces that contain reduced set of features and perform recognition task. The proposed system is evaluated with UMIST face database. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed system with high recognition rates.
Abstract: Based on an analysis of the current research and application of Road maintenance, geographic information system (WebGIS) and ArcGIS Server, the platform overhead construction for Road maintenance development is studied and the key issues are presented, including the organization and design of spatial data on the basis of the geodatabase technology, middleware technology, tiles cache index technology and dynamic segmentation of WebGIS. Road maintenance geographic information platform is put forward through the researching ideas of analysis of the system design. The design and application of WebGIS system are discussed on the basis of a case study of BaNan district of Chongqing highway maintenance management .The feasibility of the theories and methods are validated through the system.
Abstract: In this research, heat transfer of a poly Ethylene
fluidized bed reactor without reaction were studied experimentally
and computationally at different superficial gas velocities. A multifluid
Eulerian computational model incorporating the kinetic theory
for solid particles was developed and used to simulate the heat
conducting gas–solid flows in a fluidized bed configuration.
Momentum exchange coefficients were evaluated using the Syamlal–
O-Brien drag functions. Temperature distributions of different phases
in the reactor were also computed. Good agreement was found
between the model predictions and the experimentally obtained data
for the bed expansion ratio as well as the qualitative gas–solid flow
patterns. The simulation and experimental results showed that the gas
temperature decreases as it moves upward in the reactor, while the
solid particle temperature increases. Pressure drop and temperature
distribution predicted by the simulations were in good agreement
with the experimental measurements at superficial gas velocities
higher than the minimum fluidization velocity. Also, the predicted
time-average local voidage profiles were in reasonable agreement
with the experimental results. The study showed that the
computational model was capable of predicting the heat transfer and
the hydrodynamic behavior of gas-solid fluidized bed flows with
reasonable accuracy.
Abstract: When acid is pumped into damaged reservoirs for
damage removal/stimulation, distorted inflow of acid into the
formation occurs caused by acid preferentially traveling into highly
permeable regions over low permeable regions, or (in general) into
the path of least resistance. This can lead to poor zonal coverage and
hence warrants diversion to carry out an effective placement of acid.
Diversion is desirably a reversible technique of temporarily reducing
the permeability of high perm zones, thereby forcing the acid into
lower perm zones.
The uniqueness of each reservoir can pose several challenges to
engineers attempting to devise optimum and effective diversion
strategies. Diversion techniques include mechanical placement and/or
chemical diversion of treatment fluids, further sub-classified into ball
sealers, bridge plugs, packers, particulate diverters, viscous gels,
crosslinked gels, relative permeability modifiers (RPMs), foams,
and/or the use of placement techniques, such as coiled tubing (CT)
and the maximum pressure difference and injection rate (MAPDIR)
methodology.
It is not always realized that the effectiveness of diverters greatly
depends on reservoir properties, such as formation type, temperature,
reservoir permeability, heterogeneity, and physical well
characteristics (e.g., completion type, well deviation, length of
treatment interval, multiple intervals, etc.). This paper reviews the
mechanisms by which each variety of diverter functions and
discusses the effect of various reservoir properties on the efficiency
of diversion techniques. Guidelines are recommended to help
enhance productivity from zones of interest by choosing the best
methods of diversion while pumping an optimized amount of
treatment fluid. The success of an overall acid treatment often
depends on the effectiveness of the diverting agents.
Abstract: The objectif of the present work is to determinate the
potential of the solar parabolic trough collector (PTC) for use in the
design of a solar thermal power plant in Algeria. The study is based
on a mathematical modeling of the PTC. Heat balance has been
established respectively on the heat transfer fluid (HTF), the absorber
tube and the glass envelop using the principle of energy conservation
at each surface of the HCE cross-sectionn. The modified Euler
method is used to solve the obtained differential equations. At first
the results for typical days of two seasons the thermal behavior of the
HTF, the absorber and the envelope are obtained. Then to determine
the thermal performances of the heat transfer fluid, different oils are
considered and their temperature and heat gain evolutions compared.
Abstract: The objectives of this research paper were to study the
influencing factors that contributed to the success of electronic
commerce (e-commerce) and to study the approach to enhance the
standard of e-commerce for small and medium enterprises (SME).
The research paper focused the study on only sole proprietorship
SMEs in Bangkok, Thailand. The factors contributed to the success
of SME included business management, learning in the organization,
business collaboration, and the quality of website. A quantitative and
qualitative mixed research methodology was used. In terms of
quantitative method, a questionnaire was used to collect data from
251 sole proprietorships. The System Equation Model (SEM) was
utilized as the tool for data analysis. In terms of qualitative method,
an in-depth interview, a dialogue with experts in the field of ecommerce
for SMEs, and content analysis were used.
By using the adjusted causal relationship structure model, it was
revealed that the factors affecting the success of e-commerce for
SMEs were found to be congruent with the empirical data. The
hypothesis testing indicated that business management influenced the
learning in the organization, the learning in the organization
influenced business collaboration and the quality of the website, and
these factors, in turn, influenced the success of SMEs. Moreover, the
approach to enhance the standard of SMEs revealed that the majority
of respondents wanted to enhance the standard of SMEs to a high
level in the category of safety of e-commerce system, basic structure
of e-commerce, development of staff potentials, assistance of budget
and tax reduction, and law improvement regarding the e-commerce
respectively.
Abstract: This research paper deals with the implementation of face recognition using neural network (recognition classifier) on low-resolution images. The proposed system contains two parts, preprocessing and face classification. The preprocessing part converts original images into blurry image using average filter and equalizes the histogram of those image (lighting normalization). The bi-cubic interpolation function is applied onto equalized image to get resized image. The resized image is actually low-resolution image providing faster processing for training and testing. The preprocessed image becomes the input to neural network classifier, which uses back-propagation algorithm to recognize the familiar faces. The crux of proposed algorithm is its beauty to use single neural network as classifier, which produces straightforward approach towards face recognition. The single neural network consists of three layers with Log sigmoid, Hyperbolic tangent sigmoid and Linear transfer function respectively. The training function, which is incorporated in our work, is Gradient descent with momentum (adaptive learning rate) back propagation. The proposed algorithm was trained on ORL (Olivetti Research Laboratory) database with 5 training images. The empirical results provide the accuracy of 94.50%, 93.00% and 90.25% for 20, 30 and 40 subjects respectively, with time delay of 0.0934 sec per image.
Abstract: With the explosive growth of information sources available on the World Wide Web, it has become increasingly difficult to identify the relevant pieces of information, since web pages are often cluttered with irrelevant content like advertisements, navigation-panels, copyright notices etc., surrounding the main content of the web page. Hence, tools for the mining of data regions, data records and data items need to be developed in order to provide value-added services. Currently available automatic techniques to mine data regions from web pages are still unsatisfactory because of their poor performance and tag-dependence. In this paper a novel method to extract data items from the web pages automatically is proposed. It comprises of two steps: (1) Identification and Extraction of the data regions based on visual clues information. (2) Identification of data records and extraction of data items from a data region. For step1, a novel and more effective method is proposed based on visual clues, which finds the data regions formed by all types of tags using visual clues. For step2 a more effective method namely, Extraction of Data Items from web Pages (EDIP), is adopted to mine data items. The EDIP technique is a list-based approach in which the list is a linear data structure. The proposed technique is able to mine the non-contiguous data records and can correctly identify data regions, irrespective of the type of tag in which it is bound. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique performs better than the existing techniques.
Abstract: In this paper, the solubility of CO2 in AMP solution
have been measured at temperature range of ( 293, 303 ,313,323)
K.The amine concentration ranges studied are (2.0, 2.8, and 3.4) M.
A solubility apparatus was used to measure the solubility of CO2 in
AMP solution on samples of flue gases from Thermal and Central
Power Plants of Esfahan Steel Company. The modified Kent
Eisenberg model was used to correlate and predict the vapor-liquid
equilibria of the (CO2 + AMP + H2O) system. The model predicted
results are in good agreement with the experimental vapor-liquid
equilibrium measurements.
Abstract: A new fuzzy filter is presented for noise reduction of
images corrupted with additive noise. The filter consists of two
stages. In the first stage, all the pixels of image are processed for
determining noisy pixels. For this, a fuzzy rule based system
associates a degree to each pixel. The degree of a pixel is a real
number in the range [0,1], which denotes a probability that the pixel
is not considered as a noisy pixel. In the second stage, another fuzzy
rule based system is employed. It uses the output of the previous
fuzzy system to perform fuzzy smoothing by weighting the
contributions of neighboring pixel values. Experimental results are
obtained to show the feasibility of the proposed filter. These results
are also compared to other filters by numerical measure and visual
inspection.
Abstract: Over the years, many implementations have been
proposed for solving IA networks. These implementations are
concerned with finding a solution efficiently. The primary goal of
our implementation is simplicity and ease of use.
We present an IA network implementation based on finite domain
non-binary CSPs, and constraint logic programming. The
implementation has a GUI which permits the drawing of arbitrary IA
networks. We then show how the implementation can be extended to
find all the solutions to an IA network. One application of finding all
the solutions, is solving probabilistic IA networks.
Abstract: Self-efficacy, self-reliance, and motivation were
examined in a quasi-experimental study with 178 sophomore
university students. Participants used an interactive cardiovascular
anatomy and physiology CD-ROM, and completed a 15-item
questionnaire. Reliability of the questionnaire was established using
Cronbach-s alpha. Post-tests and course grades were examined using
a t-test, demonstrating no significance. Results of an item-to-item
analysis of the questionnaire showed overall satisfaction with the
teaching methodology and varied results for self-efficacy, selfreliance,
and motivation. Kendall-s Tau was calculated for all items
in the questionnaire.
Abstract: To understand complex living system an effort has
made by mechanical engineers and dentists to deliver prompt
products and services to patients concerned about their aesthetic look.
Since two decades various bracket systems have designed involving
techniques like milling, injection molding which are technically not
flexible for the customized dental product development. The aim of
this paper to design, develop a customized system which is
economical and mainly emphasizes the expertise design and
integration of engineering and dental fields. A custom made selfadjustable
lingual bracket and customized implants are designed and
developed using computer aided design (CAD) and rapid prototyping
technology (RPT) to improve the smiles and to overcome the
difficulties associated with conventional ones. Lengthy orthodontic
treatment usually not accepted by the patients because the patient
compliance is lost. Patient-s compliance can be improved by
facilitating faster tooth movements by designing a localized dental
vibrator using advanced engineering principles.
Abstract: With respect to the dissipation of energy through
plastic deformation of joints of prefabricated wall units, the paper
points out the principal importance of efficient reinforcement of the
prefabricated system at its joints. The method, quality and amount of
reinforcement are essential for reaching the necessary degree of joint
ductility. The paper presents partial results of experimental research
of vertical joints of prefabricated units exposed to monotonously
rising loading and repetitive shear force and formulates a conclusion
that the limit state of the structure as a whole is preceded by the
disintegration of joints, or that the structure tends to pass from
linearly elastic behaviour to non-linearly elastic to plastic behaviour
by exceeding the proportional elastic limit in joints.Experimental
verification on a model of a 7-storey prefabricated structure revealed
weak points in its load-bearing systems, mainly at places of critical
points around openings situated in close proximity to vertical joints
of mutually perpendicularly oriented walls.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a mathematical
model to determine invariant sets, set covering, orbits and, in
particular, attractors in the set of tourism variables. Analysis was
carried out based on a pre-designed algorithm and applying our
interpretation of chaos theory developed in the context of General
Systems Theory. This article sets out the causal relationships
associated with tourist flows in order to enable the formulation of
appropriate strategies. Our results can be applied to numerous cases.
For example, in the analysis of tourist flows, these findings can be
used to determine whether the behaviour of certain groups affects that
of other groups and to analyse tourist behaviour in terms of the most
relevant variables. Unlike statistical analyses that merely provide
information on current data, our method uses orbit analysis to
forecast, if attractors are found, the behaviour of tourist variables in
the immediate future.