Abstract: On the territory of France fenugreek is spread since long on a line from the Gironde to the Italian border. In Belarus experimental cultivation has begun since 2004. Experiments with fenugreek variety Ovari 4 were conducted about time of sowing in order to study their growth, development, and evaluation of productivity in the North-east part of Belarus and Central part of France. Reaching full ripeness of seeds the plants of fenugreek in the Central part of France requires about 94-97 days. Average seeds yield of 2011-2012 is 1259 kg/ha. Plant height is about 36,8 cm. Plants were affected by aphid and in the high moist agro-climatic conditions by powdery mildew. In North-east part of Belarus plants need 86-93 days to full ripeness. Plants of fenugreek have steam about 59 cm. The average seeds yield of 2007-2009 was about 723 kg/ha. Plants were resistant to aphid and diseases.
Abstract: The concept of flexible manufacturing is highly
appealing in gaining a competitive edge in the market by quickly
adapting to the changing customer needs. Scheduling jobs on flexible
manufacturing systems (FMSs) is a challenging task of managing the
available flexibility on the shop floor to react to the dynamics of the
environment in real-time. In this paper, an agent-oriented scheduling
framework that can be integrated with a real or a simulated FMS is
proposed. This framework works in stochastic environments with a
dynamic model of job arrival. It supports a hierarchical cooperative
scheduling that builds on the available flexibility of the shop floor.
Testing the framework on a model of a real FMS showed the
capability of the proposed approach to overcome the drawbacks of
the conventional approaches and maintain a near optimal solution
despite the dynamics of the operational environment.
Abstract: Abstraction of water from the dry river sand-beds is
well-known as an alternative source of water during dry seasons.
Internally, because of the form of sand particles, voids are created
which can store water in the riverbeds. Large rivers are rare in South
Africa. Many rivers are sand river types and without water during the
prolonged dry periods. South Africa has not taken full advantage of
water storage in sand as a solution to the growing water scarcity both
in urban and rural areas. The paper reviews the benefits of run-off
storage in sand reservoirs gained from other arid areas and need for
adoption in rural areas of South Africa as an alternative water supply
where it is probable.
Abstract: Sulphur dioxide is a harmful gaseous product that
needs to be minimized in the atmosphere. This research work
investigates the use of zeolite as a possible additive that can improve
the sulphur dioxide capture in wet flue gas desulphurisation
dissolution process. This work determines the effect of temperature,
solid to liquid ratio, acid concentration and stirring speed on the
leaching of zeolite using a pH stat apparatus. The atomic absorption
spectrometer was used to measure the calcium ions from the solution.
It was found that the dissolution rate of zeolite decreased with
increase in solid to liquid ratio and increases with increase in
temperature, stirring speed and acid concentration. The activation
energy for the dissolution rate of zeolite in hydrochloric acid was
found to be 9.29kJ/mol. and therefore the product layer diffusion was
the rate limiting step.
Abstract: Landscape connectivity combines a description of the
physical structure of the landscape with special species- response to
that structure, which forms the theoretical background of applying
landscape connectivity principles in the practices of landscape
planning and design. In this study, a residential development project in
the southern United States was used to explore the meaning of
landscape connectivity and its application in town planning. The vast
rural landscape in the southern United States is conspicuously
characterized by the hedgerow trees or groves. The patchwork
landscape of fields surrounded by high hedgerows is a traditional and
familiar feature of the American countryside. Hedgerows are in effect
linear strips of trees, groves, or woodlands, which are often critical
habitats for wildlife and important for the visual quality of the
landscape. Based on geographic information system (GIS) and
statistical analysis (FRAGSTAT), this study attempts to quantify the
landscape connectivity characterized by hedgerows in south Alabama
where substantial areas of authentic hedgerow landscape are being
urbanized due to the ever expanding real estate industry and high
demand for new residential development. The results of this study
shed lights on how to balance the needs of new urban development and
biodiversity conservation by maintaining a higher level of landscape
connectivity, thus will inform the design intervention.
Abstract: Vehicle which are turning or maneuvering at high speeds
are susceptible to sliding and subsequently deviate from desired path. In
this paper the dynamics governing the Yaw/Roll behavior of a vehicle
has been simulated. Two different simulations have been used one for
the real vehicle, for which a fuzzy controller is designed to increase its
directional stability property. The other simulation is for a hypothetical
vehicle with much higher tire cornering stiffness which is capable of
developing the required lateral forces at the tire-ground patch contact to
attain the desired lateral acceleration for the vehicle to follow the
desired path without slippage. This simulation model is our reference
model.
The logic for keeping the vehicle on the desired track in the cornering
or maneuvering state is to have some braking forces on the inner or
outer tires based on the direction of vehicle deviation from the desired
path. The inputs to our vehicle simulation model is steer angle δ and
vehicle velocity V , and the outputs can be any kinematical parameters
like yaw rate, yaw acceleration, side slip angle, rate of side slip angle
and so on. The proposed fuzzy controller is a feed forward controller.
This controller has two inputs which are steer angle δ and vehicle
velocity V, and the output of the controller is the correcting moment M,
which guides the vehicle back to the desired track. To develop the
membership functions for the controller inputs and output and the fuzzy
rules, the vehicle simulation has been run for 1000 times and the
correcting moment have been determined by trial and error. Results of
the vehicle simulation with fuzzy controller are very promising
and show the vehicle performance is enhanced greatly over the
vehicle without the controller. In fact the vehicle performance
with the controller is very near the performance of the reference
ideal model.
Abstract: Salinity level may affect early development of
biofuel feedstock crops. The biofuel feedstock crops canola
(Brassica napus L.), sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench], and
sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.); and the potential feedstock crop
sweet corn (Zea mays L.) were planted in media in pots and treated
with aqueous solutions of 0, 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 M NaCl once at: 1)
planting; 2) 7-10 days after planting or 3) first true leaf expansion.
An additional treatment (4) comprised of one-half strength of the 0.1,
0.5 and 1.0 M (concentrations 0.05, 0.25, 0.5 M at each application)
was applied at first true leaf expansion and four days later. Survival
of most crops decreased below 90% above 0.5 M; survival of canola
decreased above 0.1 M. Application timing had little effect on crop
survival. For canola root fresh and dry weights improved when
application was at plant emergence; for sorghum top and root fresh
weights improved when the split application was used. When
application was at planting root dry weight was improved over most
other applications. Sunflower top fresh weight was among the
highest when saline solutions were split and top dry weight was
among the highest when application was at plant emergence. Sweet
corn root fresh weight was improved when the split application was
used or application was at planting. Sweet corn root dry weight was
highest when application was at planting or plant emergence. Even at
high salinity rates survival rates greater than what might be expected
occurred. Plants that survived appear to be able to adjust to saline
during the early stages of development.
Abstract: With the enormous growth on the web, users get easily
lost in the rich hyper structure. Thus developing user friendly and
automated tools for providing relevant information without any
redundant links to the users to cater to their needs is the primary task
for the website owners. Most of the existing web mining algorithms
have concentrated on finding frequent patterns while neglecting the
less frequent one that are likely to contain the outlying data such as
noise, irrelevant and redundant data. This paper proposes new
algorithm for mining the web content by detecting the redundant
links from the web documents using set theoretical(classical
mathematics) such as subset, union, intersection etc,. Then the
redundant links is removed from the original web content to get the
required information by the user..
Abstract: One major source of performance decline in speaker
recognition system is channel mismatch between training and testing.
This paper focuses on improving channel robustness of speaker
recognition system in two aspects of channel compensation technique
and channel robust features. The system is text-independent speaker
identification system based on two-stage recognition. In the aspect of
channel compensation technique, this paper applies MAP (Maximum
A Posterior Probability) channel compensation technique, which was
used in speech recognition, to speaker recognition system. In the
aspect of channel robust features, this paper introduces
pitch-dependent features and pitch-dependent speaker model for the
second stage recognition. Based on the first stage recognition to
testing speech using GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model), the system
uses GMM scores to decide if it needs to be recognized again. If it
needs to, the system selects a few speakers from all of the speakers
who participate in the first stage recognition for the second stage
recognition. For each selected speaker, the system obtains 3
pitch-dependent results from his pitch-dependent speaker model, and
then uses ANN (Artificial Neural Network) to unite the 3
pitch-dependent results and 1 GMM score for getting a fused result.
The system makes the second stage recognition based on these fused
results. The experiments show that the correct rate of two-stage
recognition system based on MAP channel compensation technique
and pitch-dependent features is 41.7% better than the baseline system
for closed-set test.
Abstract: The purpose of planned islanding is to construct a
power island during system disturbances which are commonly
formed for maintenance purpose. However, in most of the cases
island mode operation is not allowed. Therefore distributed
generators (DGs) must sense the unplanned disconnection from the
main grid. Passive technique is the most commonly used method for
this purpose. However, it needs improvement in order to identify the
islanding condition. In this paper an effective method for
identification of islanding condition based on phase space and neural
network techniques has been developed. The captured voltage
waveforms at the coupling points of DGs are processed to extract the
required features. For this purposed a method known as the phase
space techniques is used. Based on extracted features, two neural
network configuration namely radial basis function and probabilistic
neural networks are trained to recognize the waveform class.
According to the test result, the investigated technique can provide
satisfactory identification of the islanding condition in the
distribution system.
Abstract: The design of a complete expansion that allows for
compact representation of certain relevant classes of signals is a
central problem in signal processing applications. Achieving such a
representation means knowing the signal features for the purpose of
denoising, classification, interpolation and forecasting. Multilayer
Neural Networks are relatively a new class of techniques that are
mathematically proven to approximate any continuous function
arbitrarily well. Radial Basis Function Networks, which make use of
Gaussian activation function, are also shown to be a universal
approximator. In this age of ever-increasing digitization in the
storage, processing, analysis and communication of information,
there are numerous examples of applications where one needs to
construct a continuously defined function or numerical algorithm to
approximate, represent and reconstruct the given discrete data of a
signal. Many a times one wishes to manipulate the data in a way that
requires information not included explicitly in the data, which is
done through interpolation and/or extrapolation.
Tidal data are a very perfect example of time series and many
statistical techniques have been applied for tidal data analysis and
representation. ANN is recent addition to such techniques. In the
present paper we describe the time series representation capabilities
of a special type of ANN- Radial Basis Function networks and
present the results of tidal data representation using RBF. Tidal data
analysis & representation is one of the important requirements in
marine science for forecasting.
Abstract: Users of computer systems may often require the
private transfer of messages/communications between parties across
a network. Information warfare and the protection and dominance of
information in the military context is a prime example of an
application area in which the confidentiality of data needs to be
maintained. The safe transportation of critical data is therefore often
a vital requirement for many private communications. However,
unwanted interception/sniffing of communications is also a
possibility. An elementary stealthy transfer scheme is therefore
proposed by the authors. This scheme makes use of encoding,
splitting of a message and the use of a hashing algorithm to verify the
correctness of the reconstructed message. For this proof-of-concept
purpose, the authors have experimented with the random sending of
encoded parts of a message and the construction thereof to
demonstrate how data can stealthily be transferred across a network
so as to prevent the obvious retrieval of data.
Abstract: This paper presents a systematic procedure for modelling and simulation of a power system installed with a power system stabilizer (PSS) and a flexible ac transmission system (FACTS)-based controller. For the design purpose, the model of example power system which is a single-machine infinite-bus power system installed with the proposed controllers is developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK. In the developed model synchronous generator is represented by model 1.1. which includes both the generator main field winding and the damper winding in q-axis so as to evaluate the impact of PSS and FACTS-based controller on power system stability. The model can be can be used for teaching the power system stability phenomena, and also for research works especially to develop generator controllers using advanced technologies. Further, to avoid adverse interactions, PSS and FACTS-based controller are simultaneously designed employing genetic algorithm (GA). The non-linear simulation results are presented for the example power system under various disturbance conditions to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modelling and simultaneous design approach.
Abstract: The paper deals with the pulsating flow of an incompressible couple stress fluid between permeable beds. The couple stress fluid is injected into the channel from the lower permeable bed with a certain velocity and is sucked into the upper permeable bed with the same velocity. The flow between the permeable beds is assumed to be governed by couple stress fluid flow equations of V. K. Stokes and that in the permeable regions by Darcy-s law. The equations are solved analytically and the expressions for velocity and volume flux are obtained. The effects of the material parameters are studied numerically and the results are presented through graphs.
Abstract: In the present work, we have developed a symmetric electrochemical capacitor based on the nanostructured iron oxide (Fe3O4)-activated carbon (AC) nanocomposite materials. The physical properties of the nanocomposites were characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis. The electrochemical performances of the composite electrode in 1.0 M Na2SO3 and 1.0 M Na2SO4 aqueous solutions were evaluated using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The composite electrode with 4 wt% of iron oxide nanomaterials exhibits the highest capacitance of 86 F/g. The experimental results clearly indicate that the incorporation of iron oxide nanomaterials at low concentration to the composite can improve the capacitive performance, mainly attributed to the contribution of the pseudocapacitance charge storage mechanism and the enhancement on the effective surface area of the electrode. Nevertheless, there is an optimum threshold on the amount of iron oxide that needs to be incorporated into the composite system. When this optimum threshold is exceeded, the capacitive performance of the electrode starts to deteriorate, as a result of the undesired particle aggregation, which is clearly indicated in the SEM analysis. The electrochemical performance of the composite electrode is found to be superior when Na2SO3 is used as the electrolyte, if compared to the Na2SO4 solution. It is believed that Fe3O4 nanoparticles can provide favourable surface adsorption sites for sulphite (SO3 2-) anions which act as catalysts for subsequent redox and intercalation reactions.
Abstract: This study investigated the ecological effects of
particulate pollution from a cement factory on the vegetation in the
western Mediterranean coastal desert of Egypt. Variations in
vegetation, soil chemical characters, and some responses of Atriplex
halimus, as a dominant species in the study area, were investigated in
some sites located in different directions from the cement factory
between Burg El-Arab in the east and El-Hammam in the west. The
results showed an obvious decrease in vegetation diversity, in
response to cement-kiln dust pollution, that accompanied by a high
dominance attributed to the high contribution of Atriplex halimus.
Annual species were found to be more sensitive to cement dust
pollution as they all failed to persist in highly disturbed sites. It is
remarkable that cover and phytomass of Atriplex halimus were
increased greatly in response to cement dust pollution, and this was
accompanied by a reduction in the mature seeds and leaf-area of the
plant. The few seeds of the affected individuals seemed to be more
fertile and attained higher germination percentages and exhibited
hardening against drought stress.
Abstract: This study carried out to determine the effect of plant
densities on some agronomic characteristics of four safflower cultivars in spring planting. The experiment was conducted at Yazd,
Iran- using a factorial in a randomized complete block design with four replications. Cultivars were including Arak, IL, Asteria and Local and plant densities were 10, 13.3, 20 and 40 plant/m2. Number
of seeds/head, number of heads/plant, HI, 1000-seed weight and seed yield significantly decreased as planting density increased. With increasing planting density, LAI, plant height, first branch height and
biological yield increased. The highest seed yield was obtained in 13.3 plant/m2 (2167 kg/ha). There were significant differences
between cultivars. Local cv. had higher seed yield than the other cultivars mainly due to higher heads/plant and seeds/head.
Abstract: Hydrogen is regarded to play an important role in
future energy systems because it can be produced from abundant
resources and its combustion only generates water. The disposal of
waste tyres is a major problem in environmental management
throughout the world. The use of waste materials as a source of
hydrogen is particularly of interest in that it would also solve a waste
treatment problem. There is much interest in the use of alternative
feedstocks for the production of hydrogen since more than 95% of
current production is from fossil fuels. The pyrolysis of waste tyres
for the production of liquid fuels, activated carbons and gases has
been extensively researched. However, combining pyrolysis with
gasification is a novel process that can gasify the gaseous products
from pyrolysis. In this paper, an experimental investigation into the
production of hydrogen and other gases from the bench scale
pyrolysis-gasification of tyres has been investigated. Experiments
were carried using a two stage system consisting of pyrolysis of the
waste tyres followed by catalytic steam gasification of the evolved
gases and vapours in a second reactor. Experiments were conducted
at a pyrolysis temperature of 500 °C using Ni/Al2O3 as a catalyst. The
results showed that there was a dramatic increase in gas yield and the
potential H2 production when the gasification temperature was
increased from 600 to 900 oC. Overall, the process showed that high
yields of hydrogen can be produced from waste tyres.
Abstract: Information and communication technology (ICT) is
essential to the operation of business, and create many employment
opportunities. High volumes of students graduate in ICT however
students struggle to find job placement. A discrepancy exists between
graduate skills and industry skill requirements. To address the need
for ICT skills required, universities must create programs to meet the
demands of a changing ICT industry. This requires a partnership
between industry, universities and other stakeholders. This situation
may be viewed as a critical systems thinking problem situation as
there are various role players each with their own needs and
requirements. Jackson states a typical critical systems methods has a
pluralistic nature. This paper explores the applicability and suitability
of Maslow and Dooyeweerd to guide understanding and make
recommendations for change in ICT WIL, to foster an all-inclusive
understanding of the situation by stakeholders. The above methods
provide tools for understanding softer issues beyond the skills
required. The study findings suggest that besides skills requirements,
a deeper understanding and empowering students from being a
student to a professional need to be understood and addressed.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to determine noise level of
six different types of machines in printing companies in Novi Sad.
The A-weighted levels on Leq, Lmax and Lmin Sound Pressure Level
(SPL) in dBA were measured. It was found that the folders, offset
printing presses and binding machines are the predominant noise
sources. The noise levels produced by 12 of 38 machines exceed the
limiting threshold level of 85 dBA, tolerated by law. Since it was
determined that the average noise level for folders (87.7 dB) exceeds
the permitted value the octave analysis of noise was performed.