Abstract: This study examined how individuals in their
respective teams contributed to innovation performance besides
defining the term of innovation in their own respective views. This
study also identified factors that motivated University staff to
contribute to the innovation products. In addition, it examined
whether there is a significant relationship between professional
training level and the length of service among university staff
towards innovation and to what extent do the two variables
contributed towards innovative products. The significance of this
study is that it revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the
university staff when contributing to innovation performance.
Stratified-random sampling was employed to determine the samples
representing the population of lecturers in the study, involving 123
lecturers in one of the local universities in Malaysia. The method
employed to analyze the data is through categorizing into themes for
the open-ended questions besides using descriptive and inferential
statistics for the quantitative data. This study revealed that two types
of definition for the term “innovation” exist among the university
staff, namely, creation of new product or new approach to do things
as well as value-added creative way to upgrade or improve existing
process and service to be more efficient. This study found that the
most prominent factor that propels them towards innovation is to
improve the product in order to benefit users, followed by selfsatisfaction
and recognition. This implies that the staff in the
organization viewed the creation of innovative products as a process
of growth to fulfill the needs of others and also to realize their
personal potential. This study also found that there was only a
significant relationship between the professional training level and
the length of service of 4 - 6 years among the university staff. The
rest of the groups based on the length of service showed that there
was no significant relationship with the professional training level
towards innovation. Moreover, results of the study on directional
measures depicted that the relationship for the length of service of 4-
6 years with professional training level among the university staff is
quite weak. This implies that good organization management lies on
the shoulders of the key leaders who enlighten the path to be
followed by the staff.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel integrated hybrid
approach for fault diagnosis (FD) of nonlinear systems. Unlike most
FD techniques, the proposed solution simultaneously accomplishes
fault detection, isolation, and identification (FDII) within a unified
diagnostic module. At the core of this solution is a bank of adaptive
neural parameter estimators (NPE) associated with a set of singleparameter
fault models. The NPEs continuously estimate unknown
fault parameters (FP) that are indicators of faults in the system. Two
NPE structures including series-parallel and parallel are developed
with their exclusive set of desirable attributes. The parallel scheme is
extremely robust to measurement noise and possesses a simpler, yet
more solid, fault isolation logic. On the contrary, the series-parallel
scheme displays short FD delays and is robust to closed-loop system
transients due to changes in control commands. Finally, a fault
tolerant observer (FTO) is designed to extend the capability of the
NPEs to systems with partial-state measurement.
Abstract: Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) is
granting a new group of advanced power electronic devices emerging
for enhancement of the power system performance. Unified Power
Flow Controller (UPFC) is a recent version of FACTS devices for
power system applications. The back-up energy supply system
incorporated with UPFC is providing a complete control of real and
reactive power at the same time and hence is competent to improve
the performance of an electrical power system. In this article, backup
energy supply unit such as superconducting magnetic energy storage
(SMES) is integrated with UPFC. In addition, comparative
exploration of UPFC–battery, UPFC–UC and UPFC–SMES
performance is evaluated through the vibrant simulation by using
MATLAB/Simulink software.
Abstract: In this paper, a numerical simulation of a finned store
separating from a wing-pylon configuration has been studied and
validated. A dynamic unstructured tetrahedral mesh approach is
accomplished by using three grid sizes to numerically solving the
discretized three dimensional, inviscid and compressible Euler
equations. The method used for computations of separation of an
external store assuming quasi-steady flow condition. Computations of
quasi-steady flow have been directly coupled to a six degree-offreedom
(6DOF) rigid-body motion code to generate store
trajectories. The pressure coefficients at four different angular cuts
and time histories of various trajectory parameters and wing pressure
distribution during the store separation are compared for every grid
size with published experimental data.
Abstract: Experimental production methods of Chevreul’s salt
being an intermediate stage product in copper recovery were
investigated on this article. Chevreul’s salt, Cu2SO3.CuSO3.2H2O,
being a mixed valence copper sulphite compound, has been obtained
by using different methods and reagents. Chevreul’s salt has an
intense brick-red color. It is highly stable and expensive. The
production of Chevreul’s salt plays a key role in hydrometallurgy.
Thermodynamic tendency on precipitation of Chevreul’s salt is
related to pH and temperature. Besides, SO2 gaseous is a versatile
reagent for precipitating of copper sulphites, Using of SO2 for
selective precipitation can be made by appropriate adjustments of pH
and temperature. Chevreul’s salt does not form in acidic solutions if
those solutions contains considerable amount of sulfurous acid. It is
necessary to maintain between pH 2–4.5, because, solubility of
Chevreul’s salt increases with decreasing of pH values. Also, the
region which Chevreul’s salt is stable can be seen from the potentialpH
diagram.
Abstract: In the current work, a three-dimensional geometry of a
75% stenosed blood vessel is analyzed. Large eddy simulation (LES)
with the help of a dynamic subgrid scale Smagorinsky model is
applied to model the turbulent pulsatile flow. The geometry, the
transmural pressure and the properties of the blood and the elastic
boundary were based on clinical measurement data. For the flexible
wall model, a thin solid region is constructed around the 75%
stenosed blood vessel. The deformation of this solid region was
modelled as a deforming boundary to reduce the computational cost
of the solid model. Fluid-structure interaction is realized via a twoway
coupling between the blood flow modelled via LES and the
deforming vessel. The information of the flow pressure and the wall
motion was exchanged continually during the cycle by an arbitrary
Lagrangian-Eulerian method. The boundary condition of current time
step depended on previous solutions. The fluctuation of the velocity
in the post-stenotic region was analyzed in the study. The axial
velocity at normalized position Z=0.5 shows a negative value near
the vessel wall. The displacement of the elastic boundary was
concerned in this study. In particular, the wall displacement at the
systole and the diastole were compared. The negative displacement at
the stenosis indicates a collapse at the maximum velocity and the
deceleration phase.
Abstract: Predicting the collapse potential of a structure during
earthquakes is an important issue in earthquake engineering. Many
researchers proposed different methods to assess the collapse
potential of structures under the effect of strong ground motions.
However most of them did not consider degradation and softening
effect in hysteretic behavior. In this study, collapse potential of
SDOF systems caused by dynamic instability with stiffness and
strength degradation has been investigated. An equation was
proposed for the estimation of collapse period of SDOF system which
is a limit value of period for dynamic instability. If period of the
considered SDOF system is shorter than the collapse period then the
relevant system exhibits dynamic instability and collapse occurs.
Abstract: This paper presents effects of distilled water, seawater
and sustained bending strains of 30% and 50% ultimate strain at
room temperature, on the durability of unidirectional pultruded
carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) plates. In this study,
dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA) was used to investigate the
synergic effects of the immersions and bending strains on the viscoelastic
properties of (CFRP) such as storage modulus, tan delta and
glass transition temperature. The study reveals that the storage
modulus and glass transition temperature increase while tan delta
peak decreases in the initial stage of both immersions due to the
progression of curing. The storage modulus and Tg subsequently
decrease and tan delta increases due to the matrix plasticization. The
blister induced damages in the unstrained seawater samples enhance
water uptake and cause more serious degradation of Tg and storage
modulus than in water immersion. Increasing sustained bending
decreases Tg and storage modulus in a long run for both immersions
due to resin matrix cracking and debonding. The combined effects of
immersions and strains are not clearly reflected due to the statistical
effects of DMA sample sizes and competing processes of molecular
reorientation and postcuring.
Abstract: The objective of this work is to study the effect of two
key factors - external magnetic field and applied current density
during template-based electrodeposition of nickel nanowires using an
electrode distance of 20 mm. Morphology, length, crystallite size and
crystallographic characterization of the grown nickel nanowires at an
electrode distance of 20mm are presented. For this electrode distance
of 20 mm, these two key electrodeposition factors when coupled was
found to reduce crystallite size with a higher growth length and
preferred orientation of Ni crystals. These observed changes can be
inferred to be due to coupled interaction forces induced by the
intensity of applied electric field (current density) and external
magnetic field known as magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effect during
the electrodeposition process.
Abstract: The hydrodynamics and heat transfer characteristics
of a vaporized elongated bubble in a rectangular microchannel have
been simulated based on Cahn-Hilliard phase-field method. In the
simulations, the initially nucleated bubble starts growing as it comes
in contact with superheated water. The growing shape of the bubble
compared well with the available experimental data in the literature.
Abstract: Fixed-geometry hydrodynamic journal bearings are
one of the best supporting systems for several applications of rotating
machinery. Cylindrical journal bearings present excellent loadcarrying
capacity and low manufacturing costs, but they are subjected
to the oil-film instability at high speeds. An attempt of overcoming
this instability problem has been the development of non-circular
journal bearings. This work deals with an analysis of oil-lubricated
elliptical journal bearings using the finite element method. Steadystate
and dynamic performance characteristics of elliptical bearings
are rendered by zeroth- and first-order lubrication equations obtained
through a linearized perturbation method applied on the classical
Reynolds equation. Four-node isoparametric rectangular finite
elements are employed to model the bearing thin film flow. Curves of
elliptical bearing load capacity and dynamic force coefficients are
rendered at several operating conditions. The results presented in this
work demonstrate the influence of the bearing ellipticity on its
performance at different loading conditions.
Abstract: In this paper, we will give a cryptographic application
over the integral closure O_Lof sextic extension L, namely L is an
extension of Q of degree 6 in the form Q(a,b), which is a rational
quadratic and monogenic extension over a pure monogenic cubic
subfield K generated by a who is a root of monic irreducible
polynomial of degree 2 andb is a root of irreducible polynomial of
degree 3.
Abstract: Co-crystal is believed to improve the solubility and
dissolution rates and thus, enhanced the bioavailability of poor water
soluble drugs particularly during the oral route of administration.
With the existing of poorly soluble drugs in pharmaceutical industry,
the screening of co-crystal formation using carbamazepine (CBZ) as
a model drug compound with dicarboxylic acids co-crystal formers
(CCF) namely fumaric (FA) and succinic (SA) acids in ethanol has
been studied. The co-crystal formations were studied by varying the
mol ratio values of CCF to CBZ to access the effect of CCF
concentration on the formation of the co-crystal. Solvent evaporation,
slurry and cooling crystallization which representing the solution
based method co-crystal screening were used. Based on the
differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis, the melting point of
CBZ-SA in different ratio was in the range between 188oC-189oC.
For CBZ-FA form A and CBZ-FA form B the melting point in
different ratio were in the range of 174oC-175oC and 185oC-186oC
respectively. The product crystal from the screening was also
characterized using X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD). The XRPD
pattern profile analysis has shown that the CBZ co-crystals with FA
and SA were successfully formed for all ratios studied. The findings
revealed that CBZ-FA co-crystal were formed in two different
polymorphs. It was found that CBZ-FA form A and form B were
formed from evaporation and slurry crystallization methods
respectively. On the other hand, in cooling crystallization method,
CBZ-FA form A was formed at lower mol ratio of CCF to CBZ and
vice versa. This study disclosed that different methods and mol ratios
during the co-crystal screening can affect the outcome of co-crystal
produced such as polymorphic forms of co-crystal and thereof. Thus,
it was suggested that careful attentions is needed during the screening
since the co-crystal formation is currently one of the promising
approach to be considered in research and development for
pharmaceutical industry to improve the poorly soluble drugs.
Abstract: The convective heat and mass transfer in nanofluid
flow through a porous media due to a permeable stretching sheet with
magnetic field, viscous dissipation, chemical reaction and Soret
effects are numerically investigated. Two types of nanofluids, namely
Cu-water and Ag-water were studied. The governing boundary layer
equations are formulated and reduced to a set of ordinary differential
equations using similarity transformations and then solved
numerically using the Keller box method. Numerical results are
obtained for the skin friction coefficient, Nusselt number and
Sherwood number as well as for the velocity, temperature and
concentration profiles for selected values of the governing
parameters. Excellent validation of the present numerical results has
been achieved with the earlier linearly stretching sheet problems in
the literature.
Abstract: Incineration of municipal solid waste (MSW) is one of
the key scopes in the global clean energy strategy. A computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) model was established in order to reveal these
features of the combustion process in a fixed porous bed of MSW.
Transporting equations and process rate equations of the waste bed
were modeled and set up to describe the incineration process,
according to the local thermal conditions and waste property
characters. Gas phase turbulence was modeled using k-ε turbulent
model and the particle phase was modeled using the kinetic theory of
granular flow. The heterogeneous reaction rates were determined
using Arrhenius eddy dissipation and the Arrhenius-diffusion
reaction rates. The effects of primary air flow rate and temperature in
the burning process of simulated MSW are investigated
experimentally and numerically. The simulation results in bed are
accordant with experimental data well. The model provides detailed
information on burning processes in the fixed bed, which is otherwise
very difficult to obtain by conventional experimental techniques.
Abstract: In this paper, a direct power control (DPC)
strategies have been investigated in order to control a high
power AC/DC converter with time variable load. This converter
is composed of a three level three phase neutral point clamped
(NPC) converter as rectifier and an H-bridge four quadrant
current control converter. In the high power application,
controller not only must adjust the desire outputs but also
decrease the level of distortions which are injected to the network
from the converter. Regarding to this reason and nonlinearity
of the power electronic converter, the conventional controllers
cannot achieve appropriate responses. In this research, the
precise mathematical analysis has been employed to design the
appropriate controller in order to control the time variable
load. A DPC controller has been proposed and simulated using
Matlab/ Simulink. In order to verify the simulation result, a real
time simulator- OPAL-RT- has been employed. In this paper,
the dynamic response and stability of the high power NPC
with variable load has been investigated and compared with
conventional types using a real time simulator. The results proved
that the DPC controller is more stable and has more precise
outputs in comparison with conventional controller.
Abstract: In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
model has been developed for studying the effect of surface
roughness profile on the EHL problem. The cylinders contact
geometry, meshing and calculation of the conservation of mass and
momentum equations are carried out using the commercial software
packages ICEMCFD and ANSYS Fluent. The user defined functions
(UDFs) for density, viscosity and elastic deformation of the cylinders
as the functions of pressure and temperature are defined for the CFD
model. Three different surface roughness profiles are created and
incorporated into the CFD model. It is found that the developed CFD
model can predict the characteristics of fluid flow and heat transfer in
the EHL problem, including the main parameters such as pressure
distribution, minimal film thickness, viscosity, and density changes.
The results obtained show that the pressure profile at the center of the
contact area directly relates to the roughness amplitude. A rough
surface with kurtosis value of more than 3 has greater influence over
the fluctuated shape of pressure distribution than in other cases.
Abstract: Traditional document representation for classification
follows Bag of Words (BoW) approach to represent the term weights.
The conventional method uses the Vector Space Model (VSM) to
exploit the statistical information of terms in the documents and they
fail to address the semantic information as well as order of the terms
present in the documents. Although, the phrase based approach
follows the order of the terms present in the documents rather than
semantics behind the word. Therefore, a semantic concept based
approach is used in this paper for enhancing the semantics by
incorporating the ontology information. In this paper a novel method
is proposed to forecast the intraday stock market price directional
movement based on the sentiments from Twitter and money control
news articles. The stock market forecasting is a very difficult and
highly complicated task because it is affected by many factors such
as economic conditions, political events and investor’s sentiment etc.
The stock market series are generally dynamic, nonparametric, noisy
and chaotic by nature. The sentiment analysis along with wisdom of
crowds can automatically compute the collective intelligence of
future performance in many areas like stock market, box office sales
and election outcomes. The proposed method utilizes collective
sentiments for stock market to predict the stock price directional
movements. The collective sentiments in the above social media have
powerful prediction on the stock price directional movements as
up/down by using Granger Causality test.
Abstract: R.C.C. buildings with dual structural system
consisting of shear walls (or braces) and moment resisting frames
have been widely used to resist lateral forces during earthquakes. The
dual systems are designed to resist the total design lateral force in
proportion to their lateral stiffness. The response of combination of
braces and shear walls has not yet been studied. The combination
may prove to be more effective to resist lateral forces during
earthquakes. This concept has been applied to regular R.C.C.
buildings provided with shear walls, braces and their combinations.
Abstract: Parabolic solar trough systems have seen limited
deployments in cold northern climates as they are more suitable for
electricity production in southern latitudes. A numerical dynamic
model is developed to simulate troughs installed in cold climates and
validated using a parabolic solar trough facility in Winnipeg. The
model is developed in Simulink and will be utilized to simulate a trigeneration
system for heating, cooling and electricity generation in
remote northern communities. The main objective of this simulation
is to obtain operational data of solar troughs in cold climates and use
the model to determine ways to improve the economics and address
cold weather issues.
In this paper the validated Simulink model is applied to simulate a
solar assisted absorption cooling system along with electricity
generation using Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and thermal storage.
A control strategy is employed to distribute the heated oil from solar
collectors among the above three systems considering the
temperature requirements. This modelling provides dynamic
performance results using measured meteorological data recorded
every minute at the solar facility location. The purpose of this
modeling approach is to accurately predict system performance at
each time step considering the solar radiation fluctuations due to
passing clouds. Optimization of the controller in cold temperatures is
another goal of the simulation to for example minimize heat losses in
winter when energy demand is high and solar resources are low.
The solar absorption cooling is modeled to use the generated heat
from the solar trough system and provide cooling in summer for a
greenhouse which is located next to the solar field.
The results of the simulation are presented for a summer day in
Winnipeg which includes comparison of performance parameters of
the absorption cooling and ORC systems at different heat transfer
fluid (HTF) temperatures.