Abstract: An exploration in the competency of the optical
multilevel Mapping Multiplexing Technique (MMT) system in
tolerating to the impact of nonlinearities as Self Phase Modulation
(SPM) during the presence of dispersion compensation methods. The
existence of high energy pulses stimulates deterioration in the chirp
compression process attained by SPM which introduces an upper
power boundary limit. An evaluation of the post and asymmetric prepost
fiber compensation methods have been deployed on the MMT
system compared with others of the same bit rate modulation formats.
The MMT 40 Gb/s post compensation system has 1.4 dB
enhancements to the 40 Gb/s 4-Arysystem and less than 3.9 dB
penalty compared to the 40 Gb/s OOK-RZsystem. However, the
optimized Pre-Post asymmetric compensation has an enhancement of
4.6 dB compared to the Post compensation MMT configuration for a
30% pre compensation dispersion.
Abstract: The direct synthesis process of dimethyl ether (DME)
from syngas in slurry reactors is considered to be promising because
of its advantages in caloric transfer. In this paper, the influences of
operating conditions (temperature, pressure and weight hourly space
velocity) on the conversion of CO, selectivity of DME and methanol
were studied in a stirred autoclave over Cu-Zn-Al-Zr slurry catalyst,
which is far more suitable to liquid phase dimethyl ether synthesis
process than bifunctional catalyst commercially. A Langmuir-
Hinshelwood mechanism type global kinetics model for liquid phase
DME direct synthesis based on methanol synthesis models and a
methanol dehydration model has been investigated by fitting our
experimental data. The model parameters were estimated with
MATLAB program based on general Genetic Algorithms and
Levenberg-Marquardt method, which is suitably fitting experimental
data and its reliability was verified by statistical test and residual
error analysis.
Abstract: Addition of an oily waste to a co-composting process of dairy cow manure with food waste, and the influence in the final product was evaluated. Three static composting piles with different substrates concentrations were assessed. Sawdust was also added to all composting piles to attain 60%, humidity at the beginning of the process. In pile 1, the co-substrates were the solid-phase of dairy cow manure, food waste and sawdust as bulking agent. In piles 2 and 3 there was an extra input of oily waste of 7 and 11% of the total volume, respectively, corresponding to 18 and 28% in dry weight. The results showed that the co-composting process was feasible even at the highest fat content. Another positive effect due to the oily waste addition was the requirement of extra humidity, due to the hydrophobic properties of this specific waste, which may imply reduced need of a bulking agent. Moreover, this study shows that composting can be a feasible way of adding value to fatty wastes. The three final composts presented very similar and suitable properties for land application.
Abstract: In this work, new experimental data for slugging
frequency in inclined gas-liquid flow are reported, and a new
correlation is proposed. Scale experiments were carried out using a
mixture of air and water in a 6 m long pipe. Two different pipe
diameters were used, namely, 38 and 67 mm. The data were taken
with capacitance type sensors at a data acquisition frequency of 200
Hz over an interval of 60 seconds. For the range of flow conditions
studied, the liquid superficial velocity is observed to influence the
frequency strongly. A comparison of the present data with
correlations available in the literature reveals a lack of agreement. A
new correlation for slug frequency has been proposed for the inclined
flow, which represents the main contribution of this work.
Abstract: Cattle manure and mineral fertilizers are two source
of Nitrogen, which can affect the growth and quantity of potato. In
this research the effects of the use of cattle manure (5, 10, 15 and 20
ton ha-1), Nitrogen fertilizer (50, 100 and 150 kg N ha-1) and their
interaction on potato growth were evaluated during field
experiments in 2008 with the help of Randomized Complete Block
(RCB) with the factorial arrangement of three experimental
replications in Iran. At the 75 th day after emergence, dry weight of
Shoots, leaf area index (LAI) and plant height were recorded. Results
showed that, dry weight of Shoots, LAI and plant height increased
linearly and very significantly in response to the application of
manure and Nitrogen fertilizer. While the interaction between
manure and Nitrogen fertilizer just on the LAI and plant height was
significant, somehow the maximum amount of plant height( 73 cm)
was obtained by using 150 kg Nitrogen + 15 tons of manure per
hectare, and maximum LAI ( 5.36) was obtained by using 150 kg
Nitrogen + 20 tons of manure per hectare. Also in this experiment
maximum tuber yield (36.8 tons ha-1) was obtained by the utilization
of 150 kg Nitrogen per hectare + 20 tons manure.
Abstract: The international society focuses on the environment
protection and natural energy sources control for the global
cooperation against weather change and sustainable growth. The study
presents the overview of the water shortage status and the necessity of wastewater reuse facility in military facilities and for the possibility of
the introduction, compares the economics by means of cost-benefit
analysis. The military features such as the number of users of military barracks and the water use were surveyed by the design principles by
facility types, the application method of wastewater reuse facility was selected, the feed water, its application and the volume of reuse volume were defined and the expectation was estimated, confirming
the possibility of introducing a wastewater reuse possibility by means of cost-benefit analysis.
Abstract: HIV-1 genome is highly heterogeneous. Due to this
variation, features of HIV-I genome is in a wide range. For this
reason, the ability to infection of the virus changes depending on
different chemokine receptors. From this point of view, R5 HIV
viruses use CCR5 coreceptor while X4 viruses use CXCR5 and
R5X4 viruses can utilize both coreceptors. Recently, in
Bioinformatics, R5X4 viruses have been studied to classify by using
the experiments on HIV-1 genome.
In this study, R5X4 type of HIV viruses were classified using
Auto Regressive (AR) model through Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs). The statistical data of R5X4, R5 and X4 viruses was
analyzed by using signal processing methods and ANNs. Accessible
residues of these virus sequences were obtained and modeled by AR
model since the dimension of residues is large and different from
each other. Finally the pre-processed data was used to evolve various
ANN structures for determining R5X4 viruses. Furthermore ROC
analysis was applied to ANNs to show their real performances. The
results indicate that R5X4 viruses successfully classified with high
sensitivity and specificity values training and testing ROC analysis
for RBF, which gives the best performance among ANN structures.
Abstract: Midpoint filter is quite effective in recovering the
images confounded by the short-tailed (uniform) noise. It, however,
performs poorly in the presence of additive long-tailed (impulse)
noise and it does not preserve the edge structures of the image
signals. Median smoother discards outliers (impulses) effectively, but
it fails to provide adequate smoothing for images corrupted with nonimpulse
noise. In this paper, two nonlinear techniques for image
filtering, namely, New Filter I and New Filter II are proposed based
on a nonlinear high-pass filter algorithm. New Filter I is constructed
using a midpoint filter, a highpass filter and a combiner. It suppresses
uniform noise quite well. New Filter II is configured using an alpha
trimmed midpoint filter, a median smoother of window size 3x3, the
high pass filter and the combiner. It is robust against impulse noise
and attenuates uniform noise satisfactorily. Both the filters are shown
to exhibit good response at the image boundaries (edges). The
proposed filters are evaluated for their performance on a test image
and the results obtained are included.
Abstract: Recently, the Spherical Motion Models (SMM-s) have been introduced [1]. These new models have been developed for 3D local landmark-base Autonomous Navigation (AN). This paper is revealing new arguments and experimental results to support the SMM-s characteristics. The accuracy and the robustness in performing a specific task are the main concerns of the new investigations. To analyze their performances of the SMM-s, the most powerful tools of estimation theory, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF), which give the best estimations in noisy environments, have been employed. The Monte Carlo validation implementations used to test the stability and robustness of the models have been employed as well.
Abstract: Urban planning, in particular on protected landscape
areas, demands an increasing role of public participation within the
frame of the efficiency of sustainable planning process. The
development of urban planning actions in Protected Landscape areas,
as Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, should perform a methodological
process that is structured over distinct sequential stages, providing
the development of a continuous, interactive, integrated and
participative planning. From the start of Malveira da Serra and Janes
Plan process, several public participation actions were promoted, in
order to involve the local agents, stakeholders and the population in
the decision of specific local key issues and define the appropriate
priorities within the goals and strategies previously settled. As a
result, public participation encouraged an innovative process that
guarantees the efficiency of sustainable urban planning and promotes
a sustainable new way of living in community.
Abstract: PROFIBUS (PROcess FIeld BUS) which is defined with international standarts (IEC61158, EN50170) is the most popular fieldbus, and provides a communication between industrial applications which are located in different control environment and location in manufacturing, process and building automation. Its communication speed is from 9.6 Kbps to 12 Mbps over distances from 100 to 1200 meters, and so it is to be often necessary to interconnect them in order to break these limits. Unfortunately this interconnection raises several issues and the solutions found so far are not very satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a new solution to interconnect PROFIBUS segments, which uses a wireless MAN based on the IEEE 802.16 standard as a backbone system. Also, the solution which is described a model for internetworking unit integrates the traffic generated by PROFIBUS segments into IEEE 802.16 wireless MAN using encapsulation technique.
Abstract: Because road traffic accidents are a major source of death worldwide, attempts have been made to create Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) able to detect vehicle, driver and
environmental conditions that are cues for possible potential accidents. This paper presents continued work on a novel Nonintrusive
Intelligent Driver Assistance and Safety System (Ni-DASS)
for assessing driver attention and hazard awareness. It uses two onboard
CCD cameras – one observing the road and the other observing
the driver-s face. The windscreen is divided into cells and analysis of
the driver-s eye-gaze patterns allows Ni-DASS to determine the windscreen cell the driver is focusing on using eye-gesture templates.
Intersecting the driver-s field of view through the observed
windscreen cell with subsections of the camera-s field of view containing a potential hazard allows Ni-DASS to estimate the
probability that the driver has actually observed the hazard. Results
have shown that the proposed technique is an accurate enough
measure of driver observation to be useful in ADAS systems.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to introduce the concepts of τ1τ2-regular generalized star star closed sets , τ1τ2-regular generalized star star open sets and study their basic properties in bitopological spaces.
Abstract: Using the idea of prime and semiprime bi-ideals of
rings, the concept of prime and semiprime generalized bi-ideals of
rings is introduced, which is an extension of the concept of prime and
semiprime bi-ideals of rings and some interesting characterizations
of prime and semiprime generalized bi-ideals are obtained. Also,
we give the relationship between the Baer radical and prime and
semiprime generalized bi-ideals of rings in the same way as of biideals
of rings which was studied by Roux.
Abstract: The prediction of meteorological parameters at a
meteorological station is an interesting and open problem. A firstorder
linear dynamic model GM(1,1) is the main component of the
grey system theory. The grey model requires only a few previous data
points in order to make a real-time forecast. In this paper, we
consider the daily average ambient temperature as a time series and
the grey model GM(1,1) applied to local prediction (short-term
prediction) of the temperature. In the same case study we use a fuzzy
predictive model for global prediction. We conclude the paper with a
comparison between local and global prediction schemes.
Abstract: The impact of rain attenuation on wireless communication signals is predominant because of the used high frequency (above 10 GHz). The knowledge of statistics of attenuation is very important for planning point-to-point microwave links operating in high frequency band. Describing the statistics of attenuation is possible for instance with fade duration or level crossing rate. In our examination we determine these statistics from one year measured data for a given microwave link, and we are going to make an attempt to transform the level crossing rate statistic to fade duration statistic.
Abstract: The persistent nature of perfluorochemicals (PFCs) has attracted global concern in recent years. Perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) are the most commonly found PFC compounds, and thus their fate and transport play key roles in PFC distribution in the natural environment. The kinetic behavior of PFOS or PFOA on boehmite consists of a fast adsorption process followed by a slow adsorption process which may be attributed to the slow transport of PFOS or PFOA into the boehmite pore surface. The adsorption isotherms estimated the maximum adsorption capacities of PFOS and PFOA on boehmite as 0.877 μg/m2 and 0.633 μg/m2, with the difference primarily due to their different functional groups. The increase of solution pH led to a moderate decrease of PFOS and PFOA adsorption, owing to the increase of ligand exchange reactions and the decrease of electrostatic interactions. The presence of NaCl in solution demonstrated negative effects for PFOS and PFOA adsorption on boehmite surfaces, with potential mechanisms being electrical double layer compression, competitive adsorption of chloride.
Abstract: Computational techniques derived from digital image processing are playing a significant role in the security and digital copyrights of multimedia and visual arts. This technology has the effect within the domain of computers. This research presents discrete M-band wavelet transform (MWT) and cosine transform (DCT) based watermarking algorithm by incorporating the principal component analysis (PCA). The proposed algorithm is expected to achieve higher perceptual transparency. Specifically, the developed watermarking scheme can successfully resist common signal processing, such as geometric distortions, and Gaussian noise. In addition, the proposed algorithm can be parameterized, thus resulting in more security. To meet these requirements, the image is transformed by a combination of MWT & DCT. In order to improve the security further, we randomize the watermark image to create three code books. During the watermark embedding, PCA is applied to the coefficients in approximation sub-band. Finally, first few component bands represent an excellent domain for inserting the watermark.
Abstract: The purpose of this work was to inspect the potential
of vincristine-dextran complex loaded solid lipid nanoparticles for
drug delivery to the brain.
The nanoparticles were stained with a fluorescence dye and their
plasma pharmacokinetic and brain concentrations were investigated
following injection to rats.
The result revealed a significant improvement in the plasma
concentration profile of the SLN injected animals as well as a sharp
increased concentration in the brains.
Abstract: Liners are made to protect the groundwater table from
the infiltration of leachate which normally carries different kinds of
toxic materials from landfills. Although these liners are engineered to
last for long period of time; unfortunately these liners fail; therefore,
toxic materials pass to groundwater. This paper focuses on the
changes of the hydraulic conductivity of a sand-bentonite liner due to
the infiltration of biofuel and ethanol fuel. Series of laboratory tests
were conducted in 20-cm-high PVC columns. Several compositions
of sand-bentonite liners were tested: 95% sand: 5% bentonite; 90%
sand: 10% bentonite; and 100% sand (passed mesh #40). The
columns were subjected to extreme pressures of 40 kPa, and 100 kPa
to evaluate the transport of alternative fuels (biofuel and ethanol
fuel). For comparative studies, similar tests were carried out using
water. Results showed that hydraulic conductivity increased due to
the infiltration of alternative fuels through the liners. Accordingly,
the increase in the hydraulic conductivity showed significant
dependency on the type of liner mixture and the characteristics of the
liquid. The hydraulic conductivity of a liner (subjected to biofuel
infiltration) consisting of 5% bentonite: 95% sand under pressure of
40 kPa and 100 kPa had increased by one fold. In addition, the
hydraulic conductivity of a liner consisting of 10% bentonite: 90%
sand under pressure of 40 kPa and 100 kPa and infiltrated by biofuel
had increased by three folds. On the other hand, the results obtained
by water infiltration under 40 kPa showed lower hydraulic
conductivities of 1.50×10-5 and 1.37×10-9 cm/s for 5% bentonite:
95% sand, and 10% bentonite: 90% sand, respectively. Similarly,
under 100 kPa, the hydraulic conductivities were 2.30×10-5 and
1.90×10-9 cm/s for 5% bentonite: 95% sand, and 10% bentonite: 90%
sand, respectively.