Abstract: This paper describes technological possibilities to
enhance methane productionin the anaerobic stabilization of wastewater treatment plant excess sludge. This objective can be achieved by the addition of waste residues: crude glycerol from biodiesel production and residues from fishery. The addition
ofglycerol in an amount by weight of 2 – 5% causes enhancement of methane production of about 250 – 400%. At the same time the
percentage increase of total solids concentration in the outgoing sludge is ten or more times less. The containment of methane in
biogas is higher in case of admixed substrate.
Abstract: We consider a typical problem in the assembly of
printed circuit boards (PCBs) in a two-machine flow shop system to
simultaneously minimize the weighted sum of weighted tardiness and
weighted flow time. The investigated problem is a group scheduling
problem in which PCBs are assembled in groups and the interest is to
find the best sequence of groups as well as the boards within each
group to minimize the objective function value. The type of setup
operation between any two board groups is characterized as carryover
sequence-dependent setup time, which exactly matches with the real
application of this problem. As a technical constraint, all of the
boards must be kitted before the assembly operation starts (kitting
operation) and by kitting staff. The main idea developed in this paper
is to completely eliminate the role of kitting staff by assigning the
task of kitting to the machine operator during the time he is idle
which is referred to as integration of internal (machine) and external
(kitting) setup times. Performing the kitting operation, which is a
preparation process of the next set of boards while the other boards
are currently being assembled, results in the boards to continuously
enter the system or have dynamic arrival times. Consequently, a
dynamic PCB assembly system is introduced for the first time in the
assembly of PCBs, which also has characteristics similar to that of
just-in-time manufacturing. The problem investigated is
computationally very complex, meaning that finding the optimal
solutions especially when the problem size gets larger is impossible.
Thus, a heuristic based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed. An
example problem on the application of the GA developed is
demonstrated and also numerical results of applying the GA on
solving several instances are provided.
Abstract: The main aim of this study is to identify the most
influential variables that cause defects on the items produced by a
casting company located in Turkey. To this end, one of the items
produced by the company with high defective percentage rates is
selected. Two approaches-the regression analysis and decision treesare
used to model the relationship between process parameters and
defect types. Although logistic regression models failed, decision tree
model gives meaningful results. Based on these results, it can be
claimed that the decision tree approach is a promising technique for
determining the most important process variables.
Abstract: These days wireless local area networks has become
very popular, when the initial IEEE802.11 is the standard for
providing wireless connectivity to automatic machinery, equipment
and stations that require rapid deployment, which may be portable,
handheld or which may be mounted on moving vehicles within a
local area. IEEE802.11 Wireless local area network is a sharedmedium
communication network that transmits information over
wireless links for all IEEE802.11 stations in its transmission range to
receive. When a user is moving from one location to another, how
the other user knows about the required station inside WLAN. For
that we designed and implemented a system to locate a mobile user
inside the wireless local area network based on RSSI with the help of
four specially designed architectures. These architectures are based
on statistical or we can say manual configuration of mapping and
radio map of indoor and outdoor location with the help of available
Sniffer based and cluster based techniques. We found a better
location of a mobile user in WLAN. We tested this work in indoor
and outdoor environments with different locations with the help of
Pamvotis, a simulator for WLAN.
Abstract: This paper aims to select the optimal location and
setting parameters of TCSC (Thyristor Controlled Series
Compensator) controller using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
and Genetic Algorithm (GA) to mitigate small signal oscillations in a
multimachine power system. Though Power System Stabilizers
(PSSs) are prime choice in this issue, installation of FACTS device
has been suggested here in order to achieve appreciable damping of
system oscillations. However, performance of any FACTS devices
highly depends upon its parameters and suitable location in the
power network. In this paper PSO as well as GA based techniques are
used separately and compared their performances to investigate this
problem. The results of small signal stability analysis have been
represented employing eigenvalue as well as time domain response in
face of two common power system disturbances e.g., varying load
and transmission line outage. It has been revealed that the PSO based
TCSC controller is more effective than GA based controller even
during critical loading condition.
Abstract: A generalization of the concepts of Feistel Networks (FN), known as Extended Feistel Network (EFN) is examined. EFN splits the input blocks into n > 2 sub-blocks. Like conventional FN, EFN consists of a series of rounds whereby at least one sub-block is subjected to an F function. The function plays a key role in the diffusion process due to its completeness property. It is also important to note that in EFN the F-function is the most computationally expensive operation in a round. The aim of this paper is to determine a suitable type of EFN for a scalable cipher. This is done by analyzing the threshold number of rounds for different types of EFN to achieve the completeness property as well as the number of F-function required in the network. The work focuses on EFN-Type I, Type II and Type III only. In the analysis it is found that EFN-Type II and Type III diffuses at the same rate and both are faster than Type-I EFN. Since EFN-Type-II uses less F functions as compared to EFN-Type III, therefore Type II is the most suitable EFN for use in a scalable cipher.
Abstract: Employing a recently introduced unified adaptive filter
theory, we show how the performance of a large number of important
adaptive filter algorithms can be predicted within a general framework
in nonstationary environment. This approach is based on energy conservation
arguments and does not need to assume a Gaussian or white
distribution for the regressors. This general performance analysis can
be used to evaluate the mean square performance of the Least Mean
Square (LMS) algorithm, its normalized version (NLMS), the family
of Affine Projection Algorithms (APA), the Recursive Least Squares
(RLS), the Data-Reusing LMS (DR-LMS), its normalized version
(NDR-LMS), the Block Least Mean Squares (BLMS), the Block
Normalized LMS (BNLMS), the Transform Domain Adaptive Filters
(TDAF) and the Subband Adaptive Filters (SAF) in nonstationary
environment. Also, we establish the general expressions for the
steady-state excess mean square in this environment for all these
adaptive algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate through simulations that
these results are useful in predicting the adaptive filter performance.
Abstract: This article provides partial evaluation index and its
standard of sports aerobics, including the following 12 indexes: health
vitality, coordination, flexibility, accuracy, pace, endurance, elasticity,
self-confidence, form, control, uniformity and musicality. The
three-layer BP artificial neural network model including input layer,
hidden layer and output layer is established. The result shows that the
model can well reflect the non-linear relationship between the
performance of 12 indexes and the overall performance. The predicted
value of each sample is very close to the true value, with a relative
error fluctuating around of 5%, and the network training is successful.
It shows that BP network has high prediction accuracy and good
generalization capacity if being applied in sports aerobics performance
evaluation after effective training.
Abstract: Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is widely used today in the areas of geodesy and topography as well as in aeronautics mainly for military purposes. Due to the military usage of GPS, full access and use of this technology is being denied to the civilian user who must then work with a less accurate version. In this paper we focus on the estimation of the receiver coordinates ( X, Y, Z ) and its clock bias ( δtr ) of a fixed point based on pseudorange measurements of a single GPS receiver. Utilizing the instantaneous coordinates of just 4 satellites and their clock offsets, by taking into account the atmospheric delays, we are able to derive a set of pseudorange equations. The estimation of the four unknowns ( X, Y, Z , δtr ) is achieved by introducing an extended Kalman filter that processes, off-line, all the data collected from the receiver. Higher performance of position accuracy is attained by appropriate tuning of the filter noise parameters and by including other forms of biases.
Abstract: Hearing impairment is the number one chronic
disability affecting many people in the world. Background noise is
particularly damaging to speech intelligibility for people with
hearing loss especially for sensorineural loss patients. Several
investigations on speech intelligibility have demonstrated
sensorineural loss patients need 5-15 dB higher SNR than the normal
hearing subjects. This paper describes Discrete Hartley Transform
Power Normalized Least Mean Square algorithm (DHT-LMS) to
improve the SNR and to reduce the convergence rate of the Least
Means Square (LMS) for sensorineural loss patients. The DHT
transforms n real numbers to n real numbers, and has the convenient
property of being its own inverse. It can be effectively used for noise
cancellation with less convergence time. The simulated result shows
the superior characteristics by improving the SNR at least 9 dB for
input SNR with zero dB and faster convergence rate (eigenvalue ratio
12) compare to time domain method and DFT-LMS.
Abstract: Dexamethasone (Dex) is a synthetic glucocorticoid
that is used in therapy. However prolonged treatments with high
doses are often required. This causes side effects that interfere with
the activity of several endocrine systems, including the gonadotropic
axis.
The aim of our study is to determine the effect of Dex on testicular
function in prepubertal Wistar rats.
Newborn Wistar rats are submitted to intraperitoneal injection of
Dex (1μg of Dex dissolved in NaCl 0.9% / 5g bw) for 20 days and
then sacrificed at the age of 40days. A control group received NaCl
0.9%. The rat is weighed daily. The plasmatic levels of testosterone,
LH and FSH were measured by radioimmunoassay. A histomorphometric
study was performed on sections of testis.
Treated groups showed a significant decrease in body weight (p
Abstract: Understanding the number of people and the flow of
the persons is useful for efficient promotion of the institution
managements and company-s sales improvements. This paper
introduces an automated method for counting passerby using virtualvertical
measurement lines. The process of recognizing a passerby is
carried out using an image sequence obtained from the USB camera.
Space-time image is representing the human regions which are
treated using the segmentation process. To handle the problem of
mismatching, different color space are used to perform the template
matching which chose automatically the best matching to determine
passerby direction and speed. A relation between passerby speed and
the human-pixel area is used to distinguish one or two passersby. In
the experiment, the camera is fixed at the entrance door of the hall in
a side viewing position. Finally, experimental results verify the
effectiveness of the presented method by correctly detecting and
successfully counting them in order to direction with accuracy of
97%.
Abstract: Hand gesture is one of the typical methods used in
sign language for non-verbal communication. It is most commonly
used by people who have hearing or speech problems to
communicate among themselves or with normal people. Various sign
language systems have been developed by manufacturers around the
globe but they are neither flexible nor cost-effective for the end
users. This paper presents a system prototype that is able to
automatically recognize sign language to help normal people to
communicate more effectively with the hearing or speech impaired
people. The Sign to Voice system prototype, S2V, was developed
using Feed Forward Neural Network for two-sequence signs
detection. Different sets of universal hand gestures were captured
from video camera and utilized to train the neural network for
classification purpose. The experimental results have shown that
neural network has achieved satisfactory result for sign-to-voice
translation.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to estimate the frequency of
EBV infection in Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) and non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma (NHL) occurring in Jordanian patients. A total of 55
patients with lymphoma were examined in this study. Of 55 patients,
30 and 25 were diagnosed as HL and NHL, respectively. The four
HL subtypes were observed with the majority of the cases exhibited
the mixed cellularity (MC) subtype followed by the nodular sclerosis
(NS). The high grade was found to be the commonest subtype of
NHL in our sample, followed by the low grade. The presence of EBV
virus was detected by immunostating for expression of latent
membrane protein-1 (LMP-1). The frequency of LMP-1 expression
occurred more frequent in patients with HL (60.0%) than in patients
with NHL (32.0%). The frequency of LMP-1 expression was also
higher in patients with MC subtype (61.11%) than those patients with
NS (28.57%). No age or gender difference in occurrence of EBV
infection was observed among patient with HL. By contrast, the
prevalence of EBV infection in NHL patients aged below 50 was
lower (16.66%) than in NHL patients aged 50 or above (46.15%). In
addition, EBV infection was more frequent in females with NHL
(38.46%) than in male with NHL (25%). In NHL cases, the
frequency of EBV infection in intermediate grade (60.0%) was high
when compared with frequency of low (25%) or high grades (25%).
In conclusion, analysis of LMP-1 expression indicates an important
role for this viral oncogene in the pathogenesis of EBV-associated
malignant lymphomas. These data also support the previous findings
that people with EBV may develop lymphoma and that efforts to
maintain low lymphoma should be considered for people with EBV
infection.
Abstract: The use of the mechanical simulation (in particular the finite element analysis) requires the management of assumptions in order to analyse a real complex system. In finite element analysis (FEA), two modeling steps require assumptions to be able to carry out the computations and to obtain some results: the building of the physical model and the building of the simulation model. The simplification assumptions made on the analysed system in these two steps can generate two kinds of errors: the physical modeling errors (mathematical model, domain simplifications, materials properties, boundary conditions and loads) and the mesh discretization errors. This paper proposes a mesh adaptive method based on the use of an h-adaptive scheme in combination with an error estimator in order to choose the mesh of the simulation model. This method allows us to choose the mesh of the simulation model in order to control the cost and the quality of the finite element analysis.
Abstract: Advances in technology (e.g. the internet,
telecommunication) and political changes (fewer trade barriers and an
enlarged European Union, ASEAN, NAFTA and other organizations)
have led to develop international competition and expand into new
markets. Companies in Thailand, Asia and around the globe are
increasingly being pressured on price and for faster time to enter the
market. At the same time, new markets are appearing and many
companies are looking for changes and shifts in their domestic
markets. These factors have enabled the rapid growth for companies
and globalizing many different business activities during the product
development process from research and development (R&D) to
production.
This research will show and clarify methods how to develop
global product. Also, it will show how important is a global product
impact into Thai Economy development.
Abstract: In the present study, development of salbutamol
sulphate nanoparticles that adhere to gastric mucus was investigated.
Salbutamol sulphate has low bioavailability due to short transit time in
gastric. It also has a positive surface charge that provides hurdles to be
encapsulated by the positively strong mucoadhesive polymer of
chitosan. To overcome the difficulties, the surface charge of active
ingredient was modified using several nonionic and anionic
stomach-specific polymers. The nanoparticles were prepared using
ionotropic gelation technique. The evaluation involved determination
of particle size, zeta potential, entrapment efficiency, in vitro drug
release and in vitro mucoadhesion test. Results exhibited that the use
of anionic alginate polymer was more satisfactory than that of
nonionic polymer. Characteristics of the particles was nano-size, high
encapsulation efficiency, fulfilled the drug release requirements and
adhesive towards stomach for around 11 hours. This result shows that
the salbutamol sulphate nanoparticles can be utilized for improvement
its delivery.
Abstract: The Chichiawan stream in the Wulin catchment in
Taiwan is the natural habitat of Formosan landlocked salmon. Human
and agriculture activities gradually worsen water quality and impact
the fish habitat negatively. To protect and manage Formosan
landlocked salmon habitat, it is important to understand a variety
land-uses affect on the watershed responses to storms. This study
discusses watershed responses to the dry-day before a storm event and
a variety of land-uses in the Wulin catchment. Under the land-use
planning in the Wulin catchment, the peak flows during typhoon
events do not have noticeable difference. However, the nutrient
exports can be highly reduced under the strategies of restraining
agriculture activities. Due to the higher affinity of P for soil than that
of N, the exports of TN from overall Wuling catchment were much
greater than Ortho-P. Agriculture mainly centralized in subbasin A,
which is the important source of nutrients in nonpoint source discharge.
The subbasin A supplied about 26% of the TN and 32% of the Ortho-P
discharge in 2004, despite the fact it only covers 19% area of the
Wuling catchment. The subbasin analysis displayed that the
agricultural subbasin A exports higher nutrients per unit area than
other forest subbasins. Additionally, the agricultural subbasin A
contributed a higher percentage to total Ortho-P exports compares to
TN. The results of subbasin analysis might imply the transport of
Ortho-P was similar to the particulate matter which was mainly
influenced by the runoff and affected by the desorption from soil
particles while the TN (dominated as nitrate-N) was mainly influenced
by base-flow.
Abstract: Sleep stage scoring is the process of classifying the
stage of the sleep in which the subject is in. Sleep is classified into
two states based on the constellation of physiological parameters.
The two states are the non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and the
rapid eye movement (REM). The NREM sleep is also classified into
four stages (1-4). These states and the state wakefulness are
distinguished from each other based on the brain activity. In this
work, a classification method for automated sleep stage scoring
based on a single EEG recording using wavelet packet decomposition
was implemented. Thirty two ploysomnographic recording from the
MIT-BIH database were used for training and validation of the
proposed method. A single EEG recording was extracted and
smoothed using Savitzky-Golay filter. Wavelet packets
decomposition up to the fourth level based on 20th order Daubechies
filter was used to extract features from the EEG signal. A features
vector of 54 features was formed. It was reduced to a size of 25 using
the gain ratio method and fed into a classifier of regression trees. The
regression trees were trained using 67% of the records available. The
records for training were selected based on cross validation of the
records. The remaining of the records was used for testing the
classifier. The overall correct rate of the proposed method was found
to be around 75%, which is acceptable compared to the techniques in
the literature.
Abstract: The next stage of the home networking environment is
supposed to be ubiquitous, where each piece of material is equipped
with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. To fully support
the ubiquitous environment, home networking middleware should be
able to recommend home services based on a user-s interests and
efficiently manage information on service usage profiles for the users.
Therefore, USN (Ubiquitous Sensor Network) technology, which
recognizes and manages a appliance-s state-information (location,
capabilities, and so on) by connecting RFID tags is considered. The
Intelligent Multi-Agent Middleware (IMAM) architecture was
proposed to intelligently manage the mobile RFID-based home
networking and to automatically supply information about home
services that match a user-s interests. Evaluation results for
personalization services for IMAM using Bayesian-Net and Decision
Trees are presented.