Abstract: Larval survey was carried out in 6 localities in the
urban areas (Putrajaya) and suburban areas (Kuala Selangor) from
January until December 2010. A total of 520 representative
households in 6 localities were selected. Breeding habitats were
sampled outdoors in the surroundings of housing areas. The study
indicated that the most predominant species found in both areas was
Aedes albopictus with the gardening utensil as a preferred breeding
microhabitat for Putrajaya, in contrast to the artificial containers for
Kuala Selangor. From a total of 1083 mosquito larvae species, 984
were Aedes albopictus larvae, 67 positive larvae of Aedes aegypti
and 32 of Culex larvae. Aedes Index and Container Index were
elevated in Putrajaya with 13% and 11% respectively which is higher
than the standard given by the Ministry of Health, Malaysia. This
results implicating dengue-sensitive skewed to the urban areas.
Breteau Index result also above the standard in both study locations.
Abstract: Seismic design may require non-conventional
concept, due to the fact that the stiffness and layout of the structure
have a great effect on the overall structural behaviour, on the seismic
load intensity as well as on the internal force distribution. To find an
economical and optimal structural configuration the key issue is the
optimal design of the lateral load resisting system. This paper focuses
on the optimal design of regular, concentric braced frame (CBF)
multi-storey steel building structures. The optimal configurations are
determined by a numerical method using genetic algorithm approach,
developed by the authors. Aim is to find structural configurations
with minimum structural cost. The design constraints of objective
function are assigned in accordance with Eurocode 3 and Eurocode 8
guidelines. In this paper the results are presented for various building
geometries, different seismic intensities, and levels of energy
dissipation.
Abstract: The primary cause of Total Hip Replacement (THR)
failure for younger patients is aseptic loosening. This complication is
twice more likely to happen in acetabular cup than in femoral stem.
Excessive micromotion between bone and implant will cause
loosening and it depends in patient activities, age and bone. In this
project, the effects of different metal back design of press fit on
osseointegration of the acetabular cup are carried out. Commercial
acetabular cup designs, namely Spiked, Superfix and Quadrafix are
modelled and analyzed using commercial finite element software.
The diameter of acetabular cup is based on the diameter of acetabular
rim to make sure the component fit to the acetabular cavity. A new
design of acetabular cup are proposed and analyzed to get better
osseointegration between the bones and implant interface. Results
shows that the proposed acetabular cup designs are more stable
compared to other designs with respect to stress and displacement
aspects.
Abstract: Lipases are enzymes particularly amenable for
immobilization by entrapment methods, as they can work equally
well in aqueous or non-conventional media and long-time stability of
enzyme activity and enantioselectivity is needed to elaborate more
efficient bioprocesses. The improvement of Pseudomonas
fluorescens (Amano AK) lipase characteristics was investigated by
optimizing the immobilization procedure in hybrid organic-inorganic
matrices using ionic liquids as additives. Ionic liquids containing a
more hydrophobic alkyl group in the cationic moiety are beneficial
for the activity of immobilized lipase. Silanes with alkyl- or aryl
nonhydrolizable groups used as precursors in combination with
tetramethoxysilane could generate composites with higher
enantioselectivity compared to the native enzyme in acylation
reactions of secondary alcohols. The optimal effect on both activity
and enantioselectivity was achieved for the composite made from
octyltrimethoxysilane and tetramethoxysilane at 1:1 molar ratio (60%
increase of total activity following immobilization and enantiomeric
ratio of 30). Ionic liquids also demonstrated valuable properties as
reaction media for the studied reactions, comparable with the usual
organic solvent, hexane.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the complex
flow structure a novel active-type micromixer that based on concept of
Wankle-type rotor. The characteristics of this micromixer are two
folds; a rapid mixing of reagents in a limited space due to the
generation of multiple vortices and a graduate increment in dynamic
pressure as the mixed reagents is delivered to the output ports.
Present micro-mixer is consisted of a rotor with shape of triangle
column, a blending chamber and several inlet and outlet ports. The
geometry of blending chamber is designed to make the rotor can be
freely internal rotated with a constant eccentricity ratio. When the
shape of the blending chamber and the rotor are fixed, the effects of
rotating speed of rotor and the relative locations of ports on the mixing
efficiency are numerical studied. The governing equations are
unsteady, two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equation
and the working fluid is the water. The species concentration equation
is also solved to reveal the mass transfer process of reagents in various
regions then to evaluate the mixing efficiency.
The dynamic mesh technique was implemented to model the
dynamic volume shrinkage and expansion of three individual
sub-regions of blending chamber when the rotor conducted a complete
rotating cycle. Six types of ports configuration on the mixing
efficiency are considered in a range of Reynolds number from 10 to
300. The rapid mixing process was accomplished with the multiple
vortex structures within a tiny space due to the equilibrium of shear
force, viscous force and inertial force. Results showed that the highest
mixing efficiency could be attained in the following conditions: two
inlet and two outlet ports configuration, that is an included angle of 60
degrees between two inlets and an included angle of 120 degrees
between inlet and outlet ports when Re=10.
Abstract: In this work study the location of interface in a stirred vessel with a Concave impeller by computational fluid dynamic was presented. To modeling rotating the impeller, sliding mesh (SM) technique was used and standard k-ε model was selected for turbulence closure. Mean tangential, radial and axial velocities and also turbulent kinetic energy (k) and turbulent dissipation rate (ε) in various points of tank was investigated. Results show sensitivity of system to location of interface and radius of 7 to 10cm for interface in the vessel with existence characteristics cause to increase the accuracy of simulation.
Abstract: The selection of parents and breeding strategies for
the successful maize hybrid production will be facilitated by
heterotic groupings of parental lines and determination of combining
abilities of them. Fourteen maize inbred lines, used in maize breeding
programs in Iran, were crossed in a diallel mating design. The 91 F1
hybrids and the 14 parental lines were studied during two years at
four locations of Iran for investigation of combining ability of
gentypes for grain yield and to determine heterotic patterns among
germplasm sources, using both, the Griffing-s method and the biplot
approach for diallel analysis. The graphical representation offered by
biplot analysis allowed a rapid and effective overview of general
combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA)
effects of the inbred lines, their performance in crosses, as well as
grouping patterns of similar genotypes. GCA and SCA effects were
significant for grain yield (GY). Based on significant positive GCA
effects, the lines derived from LSC could be used as parent in crosses
to increase GY. The maximum best- parent heterosis values and
highest SCA effects resulted from crosses B73 × MO17 and A679 ×
MO17 for GY. The best heterotic patterns were LSC × RYD, which
would be potentially useful in maize breeding programs to obtain
high-yielding hybrids in the same climate of Iran.
Abstract: Images of human iris contain specular highlights due
to the reflective properties of the cornea. This corneal reflection
causes many errors not only in iris and pupil center estimation but
also to locate iris and pupil boundaries especially for methods that
use active contour. Each iris recognition system has four steps:
Segmentation, Normalization, Encoding and Matching. In order to
address the corneal reflection, a novel reflection removal method is
proposed in this paper. Comparative experiments of two existing
methods for reflection removal method are evaluated on CASIA iris
image databases V3. The experimental results reveal that the
proposed algorithm provides higher performance in reflection
removal.
Abstract: Bangladesh is a developing country with large
population. Demand of electrical energy is increasing day by day
because of increasing population and industrialization. But due to
limited resources, people here are suffering from power crisis
problem which is considered as a major obstacle to the economic
development. In most of the cases, it is extremely difficult to extend
high tension transmission lines to some of the places that are
separated from the mainland. Renewable energy is considered to be
the right choice for providing clean energy to these remote
settlements. This paper proposes a cost effective design of off-grid
wind-diesel hybrid power system using combined heat and power
(CHP) technology in a grid isolated island, Sandwip, Bangladesh.
Design and simulation of the wind-diesel hybrid power system is
performed considering different factors for the island Sandwip.
Detailed economic analysis and comparison with solar PV system
clearly reveals that wind-diesel hybrid power system can be a cost
effective solution for the isolated island like Sandwip.
Abstract: Image Searching was always a problem specially when these images are not properly managed or these are distributed over different locations. Currently different techniques are used for image search. On one end, more features of the image are captured and stored to get better results. Storing and management of such features is itself a time consuming job. While on the other extreme if fewer features are stored the accuracy rate is not satisfactory. Same image stored with different visual properties can further reduce the rate of accuracy. In this paper we present a new concept of using polynomials of sorted histogram of the image. This approach need less overhead and can cope with the difference in visual features of image.
Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a good opportunities
for city development schemes in UK. The government encouraged
restoration of city centers to comprise mixed use developments with
high density residential apartments. Investments in regeneration areas
were doing well according to the analyses of Property Databank
(IPD). However, more recent analysis by IPD has shown that since
2007, property in regeneration areas has been more vulnerable to the
market downturn than other types of investment property. The early
stages of a property market downturn may be felt most in
regeneration where funding, investor confidence and occupier
demand would dissipate because the sector was considered more
marginal or risky when development costs rise. Moreover, the Bank
of England survey shows that lenders have sequentially tightened the
availability of credit for commercial real estate since mid-2007. A
sharp reduction in the willingness of banks to lend on commercial
property was recorded. The credit crunch has already affected
commercial property but its impact has been particularly severe in
certain kinds of properties where residential developments are
extremely difficult, in particular city centre apartments and buy-to-let
markets. Commercial property – retail, industrial leisure and mixed
use were also pressed, in Birmingham; tens of mixed use plots were
built to replace old factories in the heart of the city. The purpose of
these developments was to enable young professionals to work and
live in same place. Thousands of people lost their jobs during the
recession, moreover lending was more difficult and the future of
many developments is unknown. The recession casts its shadow upon
the society due to cuts in public spending by government, Inflation,
rising tuition fees and high rise in unemployment generated anger and
hatred was spreading among youth causing vandalism and riots in
many cities. Recent riots targeted many mixed used development in
the UK where banks, shops, restaurants and big stores were robbed
and set into fire leaving residents with horror and shock. This paper
examines the impact of the recession and riots on mixed use
development in UK.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a Perceptually Optimized Embedded ZeroTree Image Coder (POEZIC) that introduces a perceptual weighting to wavelet transform coefficients prior to control SPIHT encoding algorithm in order to reach a targeted bit rate with a perceptual quality improvement with respect to the coding quality obtained using the SPIHT algorithm only. The paper also, introduces a new objective quality metric based on a Psychovisual model that integrates the properties of the HVS that plays an important role in our POEZIC quality assessment. Our POEZIC coder is based on a vision model that incorporates various masking effects of human visual system HVS perception. Thus, our coder weights the wavelet coefficients based on that model and attempts to increase the perceptual quality for a given bit rate and observation distance. The perceptual weights for all wavelet subbands are computed based on 1) luminance masking and Contrast masking, 2) the contrast sensitivity function CSF to achieve the perceptual decomposition weighting, 3) the Wavelet Error Sensitivity WES used to reduce the perceptual quantization errors. The new perceptually optimized codec has the same complexity as the original SPIHT techniques. However, the experiments results show that our coder demonstrates very good performance in terms of quality measurement.
Abstract: There are two common methodologies to verify
signatures: the functional approach and the parametric approach. This
paper presents a new approach for dynamic handwritten signature
verification (HSV) using the Neural Network with verification by the
Conjugate Gradient Neural Network (NN). It is yet another avenue in
the approach to HSV that is found to produce excellent results when
compared with other methods of dynamic. Experimental results show
the system is insensitive to the order of base-classifiers and gets a
high verification ratio.
Abstract: A large quantity of world-s oil reserves exists in
carbonate reservoirs. Carbonate reservoirs are very sensitive to
chemical enhanced oil recovery process because of containing large
amount of calcite, dolomite and calcium sulfate minerals. These
minerals cause major obstacles during alkali-surfactant-polymer
(ASP) flooding. Alkali reacts with these minerals and form undesired
precipitations which plug effective porous openings, reduce
permeability and cause scale occurrence at the wellbore. In this
paper, a new chemical combination consists of acrylic acid and alkali
was used to minimize precipitation problem during ASP flooding. A
series of fluid-fluid compatibility tests were performed using acrylic
acid and different concentrations of alkaline. Two types of alkalis
namely; sodium carbonate and sodium metaborate were screened. As
a result, the combination of acrylic acid and sodium carbonate was
not effective in preventing calcium and magnesium precipitations.
However, acrylic acid and sodium metaborate showed promising
results for keeping all solutions without any precipitations. The ratio
of acrylic acid to sodium metaborate of 0.7:1.0 was found to be
optimum for achieving a compatible solution for 30 days at 80oC.
Abstract: Fatigue cracking continues to be the main challenges in
improving the performance of bituminous mixture pavements. The
purpose of this paper is to look at some aspects of the effects of fine
aggregate properties on the fatigue behaviour of hot mixture asphalt.
Two types of sand (quarry and mining sand) with two conventional
bitumen (PEN 50/60 & PEN 80/100) and four polymers modified
bitumen PMB (PM1_82, PM1_76, PM2_82 and PM2_76) were used.
Physical, chemical and mechanical tests were performed on the sands
to determine their effect when incorporated with a bituminous
mixture. According to the beam fatigue results, quarry sand that has
more angularity, rougher, higher shear strength and a higher
percentage of Aluminium oxide presented higher resistance to
fatigue. Also a PMB mixture gives better fatigue results than
conventional mixtures, this is due to the PMB having better viscosity
property than that of the conventional bitumen.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the strategic stochastic air traffic flow management problem which seeks to balance airspace capacity and demand under weather disruptions. The goal is to reduce the need for myopic tactical decisions that do not account for probabilistic knowledge about the NAS near-future states. We present and discuss a scenario-based modeling approach based on a time-space stochastic process to depict weather disruption occurrences in the NAS. A solution framework is also proposed along with a distributed implementation aimed at overcoming scalability problems. Issues related to this implementation are also discussed.
Abstract: Crime is a major societal problem for most of the
world's nations. Consequently, the police need to develop new
methods to improve their efficiency in dealing with these ever increasing crime rates. Two of the common difficulties that the police
face in crime control are crime investigation and the provision of crime information to the general public to help them protect themselves. Crime control in police operations involves the use of
spatial data, crime data and the related crime data from different organizations (depending on the nature of the analysis to be made).
These types of data are collected from several heterogeneous sources
in different formats and from different platforms, resulting in a lack of standardization. Moreover, there is no standard framework for
crime data collection, integration and dissemination through mobile
devices. An investigation into the current situation in crime control was carried out to identify the needs to resolve these issues. This
paper proposes and investigates the use of service oriented
architecture (SOA) and the mobile spatial information service in crime control. SOA plays an important role in crime control as an
appropriate way to support data exchange and model sharing from
heterogeneous sources. Crime control also needs to facilitate mobile
spatial information services in order to exchange, receive, share and release information based on location to mobile users anytime and
anywhere.
Abstract: An interesting method to produce calcium carbonate is based in a gas-liquid reaction between carbon dioxide and aqueous solutions of calcium hydroxide. The design parameters for gas-liquid phase are flow regime, individual mass transfer, gas-liquid specific interfacial area. Most studies on gas-liquid phase were devoted to the experimental determination of some of these parameters, and more specifically, of the mass transfer coefficient, kLa which depends fundamentally on the superficial gas velocity and on the physical properties of absorption phase. The principle investigation was directed to study the effect of the vibration on the mass transfer coefficient kLa in gas-liquid phase during absorption of CO2 in the in aqueous solution of calcium hydroxide. The vibration with a higher frequency increase the mass transfer coefficient kLa, but vibration with lower frequency didn-t improve it, the mass transfer coefficient kLa increase with increase the superficial gas velocity.
Abstract: Studies on Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation (SSF) of corn flour, a major agricultural product as the substrate using starch digesting glucoamylase enzyme derived from Aspergillus niger and non starch digesting and sugar fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae in a batch fermentation. Experiments based on Central Composite Design (CCD) were conducted to study the effect of substrate concentration, pH, temperature, enzyme concentration on Ethanol Concentration and the above parameters were optimized using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The optimum values of substrate concentration, pH, temperature and enzyme concentration were found to be 160 g/l, 5.5, 30°C and 50 IU respectively. The effect of inoculums age on ethanol concentration was also investigated. The corn flour solution equivalent to 16% initial starch concentration gave the highest ethanol concentration of 63.04 g/l after 48 h of fermentation at optimum conditions of pH and temperature. Monod model and Logistic model were used for growth kinetics and Leudeking – Piret model was used for product formation kinetics.
Abstract: Recently, a great amount of interest has been shown
in the field of modeling and controlling hybrid systems. One of the
efficient and common methods in this area utilizes the mixed logicaldynamical
(MLD) systems in the modeling. In this method, the
system constraints are transformed into mixed-integer inequalities by
defining some logic statements. In this paper, a system containing
three tanks is modeled as a nonlinear switched system by using the
MLD framework. Comparing the model size of the three-tank system
with that of a two-tank system, it is deduced that the number of
binary variables, the size of the system and its complexity
tremendously increases with the number of tanks, which makes the
control of the system more difficult. Therefore, methods should be
found which result in fewer mixed-integer inequalities.