Exploration of the Communication Area of Infrared Short-Range Communication Systems for Intervehicle Communication

Infrared communication in the wavelength band 780- 950 nm is very suitable for short-range point-to-point communications. It is a good choice for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in several intelligent-transportation-system (ITS) applications such as cooperative driving, collision warning, and pileup-crash prevention. In this paper, with the aid of a physical model established in our previous works, we explore the communication area of an infrared intervehicle communication system utilizing a typical low-cost cormmercial lightemitting diodes (LEDs) as the emitter and planar p-i-n photodiodes as the receiver. The radiation pattern of the emitter fabricated by aforementioned LEDs and the receiving pattern of the receiver are approximated by a linear combination of cosinen functions. This approximation helps us analyze the system performance easily. Both multilane straight-road conditions and curved-road conditions with various radius of curvature are taken into account. The condition of a small car communicating with a big truck, i.e., there is a vertical mounting height difference between the emitter and the receiver, is also considered. Our results show that the performance of the system meets the requirement of aforementioned ITS applications in terms of the communication area.

Conflicts and Compromise at the Management of Transboundry Water Resources (The Case of the Central Asia)

The problem of complex use of water resources in Central Asia by taking into consideration the sovereignty of the states and increasing demand on use of water for economic aspects are considered. Complex program with appropriate mathematical software intended for calculation of possible variants of using the Amudarya up-stream water resources according to satisfaction of incompatible requirements of the national economics in irrigation and energy generation is proposed.

Hydrodynamic Characteristics of Dry Beneficiation of Iron Ore and Coal in a Fast Fluidized Bed

Iron ore and coal are the two major important raw materials being used in Iron making industries. Usually ore fines containing around 5% Alumina are rejected due to higher proportion of alumina. Therefore, a technology or process which may reduce the alumina content by 2% by beneficiation process will be highly attractive . In addition fine coals with ash content is used nearly 12% is directly injected in blast furnace. Fast fluidization is a technology by using dry beneficiation of coal and iron ore can be done. During the fluidization process the iron ore band coal is fluidized at high velocity in the riser of a fast fluidized bed, the heavier and coarse particles is generally settled at the bottom in a dense zone of the riser while the finer and lighter particle are entrained to the top dilute zone and then via a cyclone is fed back to the bottom of the riser column. Most of the alumina and low ash fine size coals being lighter are expected to move up to the riser and by a natural beneficiation of ores is expected to take place in the riser. Therefore in this study an attempt has been made for dry beneficiation of iron ore and coal in a fluidized bed and its hydrodynamic characterization.

Fault Detection and Isolation using RBF Networks for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell

This paper presents a new method of fault detection and isolation (FDI) for polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell (FC) dynamic systems under an open-loop scheme. This method uses a radial basis function (RBF) neural network to perform fault identification, classification and isolation. The novelty is that the RBF model of independent mode is used to predict the future outputs of the FC stack. One actuator fault, one component fault and three sensor faults have been introduced to the PEMFC systems experience faults between -7% to +10% of fault size in real-time operation. To validate the results, a benchmark model developed by Michigan University is used in the simulation to investigate the effect of these five faults. The developed independent RBF model is tested on MATLAB R2009a/Simulink environment. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for FDI under an open-loop condition. By using this method, the RBF networks able to detect and isolate all five faults accordingly and accurately.

Linguistic, Pragmatic and Evolutionary Factors in Wason Selection Task

In two studies we tested the hypothesis that the appropriate linguistic formulation of a deontic rule – i.e. the formulation which clarifies the monadic nature of deontic operators - should produce more correct responses than the conditional formulation in Wason selection task. We tested this assumption by presenting a prescription rule and a prohibition rule in conditional vs. proper deontic formulation. We contrasted this hypothesis with two other hypotheses derived from social contract theory and relevance theory. According to the first theory, a deontic rule expressed in terms of cost-benefit should elicit a cheater detection module, sensible to mental states attributions and thus able to discriminate intentional rule violations from accidental rule violations. We tested this prevision by distinguishing the two types of violations. According to relevance theory, performance in selection task should improve by increasing cognitive effect and decreasing cognitive effort. We tested this prevision by focusing experimental instructions on the rule vs. the action covered by the rule. In study 1, in which 480 undergraduates participated, we tested these predictions through a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (type of the rule x rule formulation x type of violation x experimental instructions) between-subjects design. In study 2 – carried out by means of a 2 x 2 (rule formulation x type of violation) between-subjects design - we retested the hypothesis of rule formulation vs. the cheaterdetection hypothesis through a new version of selection task in which intentional vs. accidental rule violations were better discriminated. 240 undergraduates participated in this study. Results corroborate our hypothesis and challenge the contrasting assumptions. However, they show that the conditional formulation of deontic rules produces a lower performance than what is reported in literature.

Elliptical Features Extraction Using Eigen Values of Covariance Matrices, Hough Transform and Raster Scan Algorithms

In this paper, we introduce a new method for elliptical object identification. The proposed method adopts a hybrid scheme which consists of Eigen values of covariance matrices, Circular Hough transform and Bresenham-s raster scan algorithms. In this approach we use the fact that the large Eigen values and small Eigen values of covariance matrices are associated with the major and minor axial lengths of the ellipse. The centre location of the ellipse can be identified using circular Hough transform (CHT). Sparse matrix technique is used to perform CHT. Since sparse matrices squeeze zero elements and contain a small number of nonzero elements they provide an advantage of matrix storage space and computational time. Neighborhood suppression scheme is used to find the valid Hough peaks. The accurate position of circumference pixels is identified using raster scan algorithm which uses the geometrical symmetry property. This method does not require the evaluation of tangents or curvature of edge contours, which are generally very sensitive to noise working conditions. The proposed method has the advantages of small storage, high speed and accuracy in identifying the feature. The new method has been tested on both synthetic and real images. Several experiments have been conducted on various images with considerable background noise to reveal the efficacy and robustness. Experimental results about the accuracy of the proposed method, comparisons with Hough transform and its variants and other tangential based methods are reported.

Conjugate Heat transfer over an Unsteady Stretching Sheet Mixed Convection with Magnetic Effect

A conjugate heat transfer for steady two-dimensional mixed convection with magnetic hydrodynamic (MHD) flow of an incompressible quiescent fluid over an unsteady thermal forming stretching sheet has been studied. A parameter, M, which is used to represent the dominance of the magnetic effect has been presented in governing equations. The similar transformation and an implicit finite-difference method have been used to analyze the present problem. The numerical solutions of the flow velocity distributions, temperature profiles, the wall unknown values of f''(0) and '(θ (0) for calculating the heat transfer of the similar boundary-layer flow are carried out as functions of the unsteadiness parameter (S), the Prandtl number (Pr), the space-dependent parameter (A) and temperature-dependent parameter (B) for heat source/sink and the magnetic parameter (M). The effects of these parameters have also discussed. At the results, it will produce greater heat transfer effect with a larger Pr and M, S, A, B will reduce heat transfer effects. At last, conjugate heat transfer for the free convection with a larger G has a good heat transfer effect better than a smaller G=0.

Influence of Active Packaging on the Quality of Pumpkin - Rowanberry Marmalade Candies

Experiments with pumpkin-rowanberry marmalade candies were carried out at the Faculty of Food Technology of the Latvia University of Agriculture. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the quality changes of pumpkin-rowanberry marmalade candies packed in different packaging materials during the storage of 15 weeks, and to find the most suitable packaging material for prolongation of low sugar marmalade candies shelf-life. An active packaging in combination with modified atmosphere (MAP, CO2 100%) was examined and compared with traditional packaging in air ambiance. Polymer Multibarrier 60 and paper bags were used. Influence of iron based oxygen absorber in sachets of 500 cc obtained from Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Europe Ageless® on the marmalade candies’ quality was tested during shelf life. Samples of 80±5 g were packaged in polymer pouches (110 mm x 110 mm), hermetically sealed by MULTIVAC C300 vacuum chamber machine, and stored in a room temperature +21±0.5 °C. The physiochemical properties –moisture content, hardness, aw, pH, changes of atmosphere content (CO2 and O2), ascorbic acid, total carotenoids, total phenols in headspace of packs, and microbial conditions were analysed before packaging and in the 1st, 3rd , 5th, 8th, 11th and 15th weeks of storage.

Analysis of Climatic Strategies in Designing the Residential Buildings in Cold Dry Climate of Tabriz Metropolis to Reduce Air Pollution in Urban Environment

Nowadays, the earth is countered with serious problem of air pollution. This problem has been started from the industrial revolution and has been faster in recent years, so that leads the earth to ecological and environmental disaster. One of its results is the global warming problem and its related increase in global temperature. The most important factors in air pollution especially in urban environments are Automobiles and residential buildings that are the biggest consumers of the fossil energies, so that if the residential buildings as a big part of the consumers of such energies reduce their consumption rate, the air pollution will be decreased. Since Metropolises are the main centers of air pollution in the world, assessment and analysis of efficient strategies in decreasing air pollution in such cities, can lead to the desirable and suitable results and can solve the problem at least in critical level. Tabriz city is one of the most important metropolises in North west of Iran that about two million people are living there. for its situation in cold dry climate, has a high rate of fossil energies consumption that make air pollution in its urban environment. These two factors, being both metropolis and in cold dry climate, make this article try to analyze the strategies of climatic design in old districts of the city and use them in new districts of the future. These strategies can be used in this city and other similar cities and pave the way to reduce energy consumption and related air pollution to save whole world.

A Novel Stator Resistance Estimation Method and Control Design of Speed-Sensorless Induction Motor Drives

Speed sensorless systems are intensively studied during recent years; this is mainly due to their economical benefit and fragility of mechanical sensors and also the difficulty of installing this type of sensor in many applications. These systems suffer from instability problems and sensitivity to parameter mismatch at low speed operation. In this paper an analysis of adaptive observer stability with stator resistance estimation is given.

Laminar Free Convection of Nanofluid Flow in Horizontal Porous Annulus

A numerical study has been carried out to investigate the heat transfer by natural convection of nanofluid taking Cu as nanoparticles and the water as based fluid in a three dimensional annulus enclosure filled with porous media (silica sand) between two horizontal concentric cylinders with 12 annular fins of 2.4mm thickness attached to the inner cylinder under steady state conditions. The governing equations which used are continuity, momentum and energy equations under an assumptions used Darcy law and Boussinesq-s approximation which are transformed to dimensionless equations. The finite difference approach is used to obtain all the computational results using the MATLAB-7. The parameters affected on the system are modified Rayleigh number (10 ≤Ra*≤ 1000), fin length Hf (3, 7 and 11mm), radius ratio Rr (0.293, 0.365 and 0.435) and the volume fraction(0 ≤ ¤ò ≤ 0 .35). It was found that the average Nusselt number depends on (Ra*, Hf, Rr and φ). The results show that, increasing of fin length decreases the heat transfer rate and for low values of Ra*, decreasing Rr cause to decrease Nu while for Ra* greater than 100, decreasing Rr cause to increase Nu and adding Cu nanoparticles with 0.35 volume fraction cause 27.9% enhancement in heat transfer. A correlation for Nu in terms of Ra*, Hf and φ, has been developed for inner hot cylinder.

Seismic Behavior and Capacity/Demand Analyses of a Simply-Supported Multi-Span Precast Bridge

This paper presents the results of an analytical study on the seismic response of a Multi-Span-Simply-Supported precast bridge in Washington State. The bridge was built in the early 1960's along Interstate 5 and was widened the first time in 1979 and the second time in 2001. The primary objective of this research project is to determine the seismic vulnerability of the bridge in order to develop the required retrofit measure. The seismic vulnerability of the bridge is evaluated using two seismic evaluation methods presented in the FHWA Seismic Retrofitting Manual for Highway Bridges, Method C and Method D2. The results of the seismic analyses demonstrate that Method C and Method D2 vary markedly in terms of the information they provide to the bridge designer regarding the vulnerability of the bridge columns.

A Scenario Oriented Supplier Selection by Considering a Multi Tier Supplier Network

One of the main processes of supply chain management is supplier selection process which its accurate implementation can dramatically increase company competitiveness. In presented article model developed based on the features of second tiers suppliers and four scenarios are predicted in order to help the decision maker (DM) in making up his/her mind. In addition two tiers of suppliers have been considered as a chain of suppliers. Then the proposed approach is solved by a method combined of concepts of fuzzy set theory (FST) and linear programming (LP) which has been nourished by real data extracted from an engineering design and supplying parts company. At the end results reveal the high importance of considering second tier suppliers features as criteria for selecting the best supplier.

Business Rules for Data Warehouse

Business rules and data warehouse are concepts and technologies that impact a wide variety of organizational tasks. In general, each area has evolved independently, impacting application development and decision-making. Generating knowledge from data warehouse is a complex process. This paper outlines an approach to ease import of information and knowledge from a data warehouse star schema through an inference class of business rules. The paper utilizes the Oracle database for illustrating the working of the concepts. The star schema structure and the business rules are stored within a relational database. The approach is explained through a prototype in Oracle-s PL/SQL Server Pages.

Analytical Solution for Free Vibration of Rectangular Kirchhoff Plate from Wave Approach

In this paper, an analytical approach for free vibration analysis of four edges simply supported rectangular Kirchhoff plates is presented. The method is based on wave approach. From wave standpoint vibration propagate, reflect and transmit in a structure. Firstly, the propagation and reflection matrices for plate with simply supported boundary condition are derived. Then, these matrices are combined to provide a concise and systematic approach to free vibration analysis of a simply supported rectangular Kirchhoff plate. Subsequently, the eigenvalue problem for free vibration of plates is formulated and the equation of plate natural frequencies is constructed. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach is shown by comparison of the results with existing classical solution.

Fuzzy Control of the Air Conditioning System at Different Operating Pressures

The present work demonstrates the design and simulation of a fuzzy control of an air conditioning system at different pressures. The first order Sugeno fuzzy inference system is utilized to model the system and create the controller. In addition, an estimation of the heat transfer rate and water mass flow rate injection into or withdraw from the air conditioning system is determined by the fuzzy IF-THEN rules. The approach starts by generating the input/output data. Then, the subtractive clustering algorithm along with least square estimation (LSE) generates the fuzzy rules that describe the relationship between input/output data. The fuzzy rules are tuned by Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). The results show that when the pressure increases the amount of water flow rate and heat transfer rate decrease within the lower ranges of inlet dry bulb temperatures. On the other hand, and as pressure increases the amount of water flow rate and heat transfer rate increases within the higher ranges of inlet dry bulb temperatures. The inflection in the pressure effect trend occurs at lower temperatures as the inlet air humidity increases.

A Monte Carlo Method to Data Stream Analysis

Data stream analysis is the process of computing various summaries and derived values from large amounts of data which are continuously generated at a rapid rate. The nature of a stream does not allow a revisit on each data element. Furthermore, data processing must be fast to produce timely analysis results. These requirements impose constraints on the design of the algorithms to balance correctness against timely responses. Several techniques have been proposed over the past few years to address these challenges. These techniques can be categorized as either dataoriented or task-oriented. The data-oriented approach analyzes a subset of data or a smaller transformed representation, whereas taskoriented scheme solves the problem directly via approximation techniques. We propose a hybrid approach to tackle the data stream analysis problem. The data stream has been both statistically transformed to a smaller size and computationally approximated its characteristics. We adopt a Monte Carlo method in the approximation step. The data reduction has been performed horizontally and vertically through our EMR sampling method. The proposed method is analyzed by a series of experiments. We apply our algorithm on clustering and classification tasks to evaluate the utility of our approach.

An investigation on the Effect of Continuous Phase Height on the First and Second Critical Rotor Speeds in a Rotary Disc Contactor

A Rotary Disc Contactor with inner diameter of 9.1cm and maximum operating height of 40cm has been used to investigate break up phenomenon. Water-Toluene, Water as continuous phase and Toluene as dispersed phase, was selected as chemical system in the experiments. The mentioned chemical system has high interfacial tension so it was possible to form big drops which permit accurate investigation on break up phenomenon as well as the first and second critical rotor speeds. In this study, Break up phenomenon has been studied as a function of mother drop size, rotor speed and continuous phase height. Further more; the effects of mother drop size and continuous phase height on the first and second critical rotor speeds were investigated. Finally, two modified correlations were proposed to estimate the first and second critical speeds.

Random Oracle Model of Information Hiding System

Random Oracle Model (ROM) is an effective method for measuring the practical security of cryptograph. In this paper, we try to use it into information hiding system (IHS). Because IHS has its own properties, the ROM must be modified if it is used into IHS. Firstly, we fully discuss why and how to modify each part of ROM respectively. The main changes include: 1) Divide the attacks that IHS may be suffered into two phases and divide the attacks of each phase into several kinds. 2) Distinguish Oracles and Black-boxes clearly. 3) Define Oracle and four Black-boxes that IHS used. 4) Propose the formalized adversary model. And 5) Give the definition of judge. Secondly, based on ROM of IHS, the security against known original cover attack (KOCA-KOCA-security) is defined. Then, we give an actual information hiding scheme and prove that it is KOCA-KOCA-secure. Finally, we conclude the paper and propose the open problems of further research.

Scatter Analysis of Fatigue Life and Pore Size Data of Die-Cast AM60B Magnesium Alloy

Scatter behavior of fatigue life in die-cast AM60B alloy was investigated. For comparison, those in rolled AM60B alloy and die-cast A365-T5 aluminum alloy were also studied. Scatter behavior of pore size was also investigated to discuss dominant factors for fatigue life scatter in die-cast materials. Three-parameter Weibull function was suitable to explain the scatter behavior of both fatigue life and pore size. The scatter of fatigue life in die-cast AM60B alloy was almost comparable to that in die-cast A365-T5 alloy, while it was significantly large compared to that in the rolled AM60B alloy. Scatter behavior of pore size observed at fracture nucleation site on the fracture surface was comparable to that observed on the specimen cross-section and also to that of fatigue life. Therefore, the dominant factor for large scatter of fatigue life in die-cast alloys would be the large scatter of pore size. This speculation was confirmed by the fracture mechanics fatigue life prediction, where the pore observed at fatigue crack nucleation site was assumed as the pre-existing crack.