Abstract: Traffic congestion has become a major problem in
many countries. One of the main causes of traffic congestion is due
to road merges. Vehicles tend to move slower when they reach the
merging point. In this paper, an enhanced algorithm for traffic
simulation based on the fluid-dynamic algorithm and kinematic wave
theory is proposed. The enhanced algorithm is used to study traffic
congestion at a road merge. This paper also describes the
development of a dynamic traffic simulation tool which is used as a
scenario planning and to forecast traffic congestion level in a certain
time based on defined parameter values. The tool incorporates the
enhanced algorithm as well as the two original algorithms. Output
from the three above mentioned algorithms are measured in terms of
traffic queue length, travel time and the total number of vehicles
passing through the merging point. This paper also suggests an
efficient way of reducing traffic congestion at a road merge by
analyzing the traffic queue length and travel time.
Abstract: This study presents the improvement of thermal
performance of heat pipe using copper nanofluid with aqueous
solution of n-Butanol. The nanofluids kept in the suspension of
conventional fluids have the potential of superior heat transfer
capability than the conventional fluids due to their improved thermal
conductivity. In this work, the copper nanofluid which has a 40 nm
size with a concentration of 100 mg/lit is kept in the suspension of
the de-ionized (DI) water and an aqueous solution of n-Butanol and
these fluids are used as a working medium in the heat pipe. The study
discusses about the effect of heat pipe inclination, type of working
fluid and heat input on the thermal efficiency and thermal resistance.
The experimental results are evaluated in terms of its performance
metrics and are compared with that of DI water.
Abstract: This study was designed to formulate,
pharmaceutically evaluate a topical skin-care cream (w/o emulsion)
of Aloe Vera versus its vehicle (Base) as control and determine their
effects on Stratum Corneum (SC) water content and Transepidermal
water loss (TEWL). Base containing no extract and a Formulation
containing 3% concentrated extract of Aloe Vera was developed by
entrapping in the inner aqueous phase of w/o emulsion (cream).
Lemon oil was incorporated to improve the odor. Both the Base and
Formulation were stored at 8°C ±0.1°C (in refrigerator), 25°C±0.1°C,
40°C±0.1°C and 40°C± 0.1°C with 75% RH (in incubator) for a
period of 4 weeks to predict their stability. The evaluation parameters
consisted of color, smell, type of emulsion, phase separation,
electrical conductivity, centrifugation, liquefaction and pH. Both the
Base and Formulation were applied to the cheeks of 21 healthy
human volunteers for a period of 8 weeks Stratum corneum (SC)
water content and Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were
monitored every week to measure any effect produced by these
topical creams. The expected organoleptic stability of creams was
achieved from 4 weeks in-vitro study period. Odor was disappeared
with the passage of time due to volatilization of lemon oil. Both the
Base and Formulation produced significant (p≤0.05) changes in
TEWL with respect to time. SC water content was significantly
(p≤0.05) increased by the Formulation while the Base has
insignificant (p 0.05) effects on SC water content. The newly
formulated cream of Aloe Vera, applied is suitable for improvement
and quantitative monitoring of skin hydration level (SC water
content/ moisturizing effects) and reducing TEWL in people with dry
skin.
Abstract: Size based filtration is one of the common methods
employed to isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole
blood. It is well known that this method suffers from isolation
efficiency to purity tradeoff. However, this tradeoff is poorly
understood. In this paper, we present the design and manufacturing
of a special rectangular slit filter. The filter was designed to retain
maximal amounts of nucleated cells, while minimizing the pressure
on cells, thereby preserving their morphology. The key parameter,
namely, input pressure, was optimized to retain the maximal number
of tumor cells, whilst maximizing the depletion of normal blood cells
(red and white blood cells and platelets). Our results indicate that for
a slit geometry of 5 × 40 μm on a 13 mm circular membrane with a
fill factor of 21%, a pressure of 6.9 mBar yields the optimum for
maximizing isolation of MCF-7 and depletion of normal blood cells.
Abstract: The environment pollution with pesticides and heavy
metals is a recognized problem nowadays, with extension to the
global scale the tendency of amplification. Even with all the progress
in the environmental field, both in the emphasize of the effect of the
pollutants upon health, the linked studies environment-health are
insufficient, not only in Romania but all over the world also. We aim
to describe the particular situation in Romania regarding the
uncontrolled use of pesticides, to identify and evaluate the risk zones
for health and the environment in Romania, with the final goal of
designing adequate programs for reduction and control of the risk
sources. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the
magnitude of the pesticide use problem in a population living in
Saliste, a rural setting in Transylvania, Romania. The significant
stakeholders in Saliste region were interviewed and a sample from
the population living in Saliste area was selected to fill in a designed
questionnaire. All the selected participants declared that they used
pesticides in their activities for more than one purpose. They
declared they annually applied pesticides for a period of time
between 11 and 30 years, from 5 to 9 days per year on average,
mainly on crops situated at some distance from the houses but high
risk behavior was identified as the volunteers declared the use of
pesticides in the backyard gardens, near their homes, where children
were playing. The pesticide applicators did not have the necessary
knowledge about safety and exposure. The health data must be
correlated with exposure biomarkers in attempt to identify the
possible health effects of the pesticides exposure. Future plans
include educational campaigns to raise the awareness of the
population on the danger of uncontrolled use of pesticides.
Abstract: In this work, we propose a hybrid heuristic in order to
solve the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP). Given a set of points (or
customers), each with associated score (profit or benefit), and a team
that has a fixed number of members, the problem to solve is to visit a
subset of points in order to maximize the total collected score. Each
member performs a tour starting at the start point, visiting distinct
customers and the tour terminates at the arrival point. In addition,
each point is visited at most once, and the total time in each tour
cannot be greater than a given value. The proposed heuristic combines
beam search and a local optimization strategy. The algorithm was
tested on several sets of instances and encouraging results were
obtained.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive technique for generation
of data required for construction of artificial neural network-based
performance model of nano-scale CMOS inverter circuit. The training
data are generated from the samples through SPICE simulation. The
proposed algorithm has been compared to standard progressive sampling
algorithms like arithmetic sampling and geometric sampling.
The advantages of the present approach over the others have been
demonstrated. The ANN predicted results have been compared with
actual SPICE results. A very good accuracy has been obtained.
Abstract: Increasing the demand for effectively use of the
production facility requires the tools for sharing the manufacturing
facility through remote operation of the machining process. This
research introduces the methodology of machining technology for
direct remote operation of networked milling machine. The
integrated tools with virtual simulation, remote desktop protocol and
Setup Free Attachment for remote operation of milling process are
proposed. Accessing and monitoring of machining operation is
performed by remote desktop interface and 3D virtual simulations.
Capability of remote operation is supported by an auto setup
attachment with a reconfigurable pin type setup free technology
installed on the table of CNC milling machine to perform unattended
machining process. The system is designed using a computer server
and connected to a PC based controlled CNC machine for real time
monitoring. A client will access the server through internet
communication and virtually simulate the machine activity. The
result has been presented that combination between real time virtual
simulation and remote desktop tool is enabling to operate all machine
tool functions and as well as workpiece setup..
Abstract: The 20th century has brought much development to the practice of Architecture worldwide, and technology has bridged inhabitation limits in many regions of the world with high levels of comfort and conveniences, most times at high costs to the environment. Throughout the globe, the tropical countries are being urbanized at an unprecedented rate and housing has become a major issue worldwide, in light of increased demand and lack of appropriate infra-structure and planning. Buildings and urban spaces designed in tropical cities have mainly adopted external concepts that in most cases do not fit the needs of the inhabitants living in such harsh climatic environment, and when they do, do so at high financial, environmental and cultural costs. Traditional architectural practices can provide valuable understanding on how self-reliance and autonomy of construction can be reinforced in rural-urban tropical environments. From traditional housing knowledge, it is possible to derive lessons for the development of new construction materials that are affordable, environmentally friendly, culturally acceptable and accesible to all.Specifically to the urban context, such solutions are of outmost importance, given the needs to a more democratic society, where access to housing is considered high in the agenda for development. Traditional or rural constructions are also ongoing through extensive changes eventhough they have mostly adopted climate-responsive building practices relying on local resources (with minimum embodied energy) and energy (for comfort and quality of life). It is important to note that many of these buildings can actually be called zero-energy, and hold potential answers to enable transition from high energy, high cost, low comfort urban habitations to zero/low energy habitations with high quality urban livelihood. Increasing access to modern urban lifestyels have also an effect on the aspirations from people in terms of performance, comfort and convenience in terms of their housing and the way it is produced and used. These aspirations are resulting in transitions from localresource dependent habitations- to non-local resource based highenergy urban style habitations. And such transitions are resulting in the habitations becoming increasingly unsuited to the local climatic conditions with increasing discomfort, ill-health, and increased CO2 emissions and local environmental disruption. This research studies one specific transition group in the context of 'water communities' in tropical-equatorial regions: Ribeirinhos housing typology (Amazonas, Brazil). The paper presents the results of a qualitative sustainability assessment of the housing typologies under transition, found at the Ribeirinhos communities.
Abstract: Graph has become increasingly important in modeling
complicated structures and schemaless data such as proteins, chemical
compounds, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable
to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via graph-based
indices. Different from the existing methods, our approach, called
VFM (Vertex to Frequent Feature Mapping), makes use of vertices
and decision features as the basic indexing feature. VFM constructs
two mappings between vertices and frequent features to answer graph
queries. The VFM approach not only provides an elegant solution to
the graph indexing problem, but also demonstrates how database
indexing and query processing can benefit from data mining,
especially frequent pattern mining. The results show that the proposed
method not only avoids the enumeration method of getting subgraphs
of query graph, but also effectively reduces the subgraph isomorphism
tests between the query graph and graphs in candidate answer set in
verification stage.
Abstract: The calculation of buckling length factor (K) for steel
frames columns is a major and governing processes to determine the
dimensions steel frame columns cross sections during design. The
buckling length of steel frames columns has a direct effect on the cost
(weight) of using cross section. A new formula is required to
determine buckling length factor (K) by simplified way. In this
research a new formula for buckling length factor (K) was established
to determine by accurate method for a limited interval of columns
ends rigidity (GA, GB). The new formula can be used ease to
evaluate the buckling length factor without needing to complicated
equations or difficult charts.
Abstract: The plastic flow of metal in the extrusion process is
an important factor in controlling the mechanical properties of the
extruded products. It is, however, difficult to predict the metal flow
in three dimensional extrusions of sections due to the involvement of
re-entrant corners. The present study is to find an upper bound
solution for the extrusion of triangular sectioned through taper dies
from round sectioned billet. A discontinuous kinematically
admissible velocity field (KAVF) is proposed. From the proposed
KAVF, the upper bound solution on non-dimensional extrusion
pressure is determined with respect to the chosen process parameters.
The theoretical results are compared with experimental results to
check the validity of the proposed velocity field. An extrusion setup
is designed and fabricated for the said purpose, and all extrusions are
carried out using circular billets. Experiments are carried out with
commercially available lead at room temperature.
Abstract: Everyday the usages of the Internet increase and simply a world of the data become accessible. Network providers do not want to let the provided services to be used in harmful or terrorist affairs, so they used a variety of methods to protect the special regions from the harmful data. One of the most important methods is supposed to be the firewall. Firewall stops the transfer of such packets through several ways, but in some cases they do not use firewall because of its blind packet stopping, high process power needed and expensive prices. Here we have proposed a method to find a discriminate function to distinguish between usual packets and harmful ones by the statistical processing on the network router logs. So an administrator can alarm to the user. This method is very fast and can be used simply in adjacent with the Internet routers.
Abstract: In this study concept of experimental design is
successfully applied for the determination of optimum condition to
produce PP/SWCNT (Polypropylene/Single wall carbon nanotube)
nanocomposite. Central composite design as one of experimental
design techniques is employed for the optimization and statistical
determination of the significant factors influencing on the tensile
modulus and yield stress as mechanical properties of this
nanocomposite. The significant factors are SWCNT weight fraction
and acid treatment time for functionalizing the nanoparticles.
Optimum conditions are in 0.7 % of SWCNT weight fraction and 210
min as acid treatment time for 1112.75 ± 28 MPa as maximum tensile
modulus and in 216 min and 0.65 % as acid treatment time and
SWCNT weight fraction respectively for 40.26 ± 0.3 MPa as
maximum yield stress. Also after setting new experiments for test
these optimum conditions, found excelent agreement with predicted
values.
Abstract: Tourists- eyes will often be attracted by the unique
phenomenon of the roadsides: betel nut beauties (pronounced as
binlang xishi in Mandarin), if they drive on the roads of Taiwan.
Sitting in the neon-lit glass stalls with attractive dress on the roadsides,
betel nut beauties usually sell betel nuts to the passing truckers or car
drivers with much of their efforts. Moreover, in order to attract
peoples- eyesight and increase the sales volume, the young girls are in
skimpy clothing to promote betel nuts or beverages to their customers.
Therefore, when the Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, to see the
unique betel nut beauty phenomenon has become one of their greatly
interested things or even a “must see". This paper describes betel but
beauties in Taiwan, explained why the Chinese tourists like to see
them in Taiwan and proposed propositions for examination.
Abstract: Virtual environment induces simulator sickness effect
for some users. The purpose of this research is to compare the
simulation sickness relative with parallax affect in one-screen and
three-screen HoloStageTM system, measured by Simulation Sickness
Questionnaire (SSQ). The results show the subjects tested in
three-screen has less sickness than one-screen and effect from the
Oculomotor (O) more than from the Disorientation (D) and more than
from the Nausea (N) or represented in O>D>N.
Abstract: To evaluate genetic variation of wheat (Triticum aestivum) affected by heat and drought stress on eight Australian wheat genotypes that are parents of Doubled Haploid (HD) mapping populations at the vegetative stage, the water stress experiment was conducted at 65% field capacity in growth room. Heat stress experiment was conducted in the research field under irrigation over summer. Result show that water stress decreased dry shoot weight and RWC but increased osmolarity and means of Fv/Fm values in all varieties except for Krichauff. Krichauff and Kukri had the maximum RWC under drought stress. Trident variety was shown maximum WUE, osmolarity (610 mM/Kg), dry mater, quantum yield and Fv/Fm 0.815 under water stress condition. However, the recovery of quantum yield was apparent between 4 to 7 days after stress in all varieties. Nevertheless, increase in water stress after that lead to strong decrease in quantum yield. There was a genetic variation for leaf pigments content among varieties under heat stress. Heat stress decreased significantly the total chlorophyll content that measured by SPAD. Krichauff had maximum value of Anthocyanin content (2.978 A/g FW), chlorophyll a+b (2.001 mg/g FW) and chlorophyll a (1.502 mg/g FW). Maximum value of chlorophyll b (0.515 mg/g FW) and Carotenoids (0.234 mg/g FW) content belonged to Kukri. The quantum yield of all varieties decreased significantly, when the weather temperature increased from 28 ÔùªC to 36 ÔùªC during the 6 days. However, the recovery of quantum yield was apparent after 8th day in all varieties. The maximum decrease and recovery in quantum yield was observed in Krichauff. Drought and heat tolerant and moderately tolerant wheat genotypes were included Trident, Krichauff, Kukri and RAC875. Molineux, Berkut and Excalibur were clustered into most sensitive and moderately sensitive genotypes. Finally, the results show that there was a significantly genetic variation among the eight varieties that were studied under heat and water stress.
Abstract: Adaptive control involves modifying the control law
used by the controller to cope with the fact that the parameters of the
system being controlled change drastically due to change in
environmental conditions or in system itself. This technique is based
on the fundamental characteristic of adaptation of living organism.
The adaptive control process is one that continuously and
automatically measures the dynamic behavior of plant, compares it
with the desired output and uses the difference to vary adjustable
system parameters or to generate an actuating signal in such a way so
that optimal performance can be maintained regardless of system
changes. This paper deals with application of model reference
adaptive control scheme in first order system. The rule which is used
for this application is MIT rule. This paper also shows the effect of
adaptation gain on the system performance. Simulation is done in
MATLAB and results are discussed in detail.
Abstract: In this paper a new embedded Singly Diagonally
Implicit Runge-Kutta Nystrom fourth order in fifth order method for
solving special second order initial value problems is derived. A
standard set of test problems are tested upon and comparisons on the
numerical results are made when the same set of test problems are
reduced to first order systems and solved using the existing
embedded diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta method. The results
suggests the superiority of the new method.
Abstract: En bloc assumes modeling all phases of the orthostatic test with the only one mathematical model, which allows the complex parametric view of orthostatic response. The work presents the implementation of a mathematical model for processing of the measurements of systolic, diastolic blood pressure and heart rate performed on volunteers during orthostatic test. The original assumption of model hypothesis that every postural change means only one Stressor, did not complying with the measurements of physiological circulation factor-time profiles. Results of the identification support the hypothesis that second postural change of orthostatic test causes induced Stressors, with the observation of a physiological regulation mechanism. Maximal demonstrations are on the heart rate and diastolic blood pressure-time profile, minimal are for the measurements of the systolic blood pressure. Presented study gives a new view on orthostatic test with impact on clinical practice.