Abstract: Nowadays, in advanced countries, agriculture as one of the most significant sectors of the economy, plays an important role in its political and economic independence. Due to farmers' lack of information about products' demand and lack of proper planning for harvest time, annually the considerable amount of products is corrupted. Besides, in this paper, we attempt to improve these unfavorable conditions via designing an effective supply chain network that tries to minimize total costs of agricultural products along with minimizing shortage in demand points. To validate the proposed model, a stochastic optimization approach by using a branch and bound solver of the LINGO software is utilized. Furthermore, to accumulate the data of parameters, a case study in Mazandaran province placed in the north of Iran has been applied. Finally, using ɛ-constraint approach, a Pareto front is obtained and one of its Pareto solutions as best solution is selected. Then, related results of this solution are explained. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for the future research are presented.
Abstract: Floods have huge environmental and economic impact. Therefore, flood prediction is given a lot of attention due to its importance. This study analysed the annual maximum streamflow (discharge) (AMS or AMD) of Karkheh River in Karkheh River Basin for flood predicting using ARIMA model. For this purpose, we use the Box-Jenkins approach, which contains four-stage method model identification, parameter estimation, diagnostic checking and forecasting (predicting). The main tool used in ARIMA modelling was the SAS and SPSS software. Model identification was done by visual inspection on the ACF and PACF. SAS software computed the model parameters using the ML, CLS and ULS methods. The diagnostic checking tests, AIC criterion, RACF graph and RPACF graphs, were used for selected model verification. In this study, the best ARIMA models for Annual Maximum Discharge (AMD) time series was (4,1,1) with their AIC value of 88.87. The RACF and RPACF showed residuals’ independence. To forecast AMD for 10 future years, this model showed the ability of the model to predict floods of the river under study in the Karkheh River Basin. Model accuracy was checked by comparing the predicted and observation series by using coefficient of determination (R2).
Abstract: This paper is focused on the mechanical characterization of foamed concrete specimens with protein-based foaming agent. Unlike classic foamed concrete, a peculiar property of the analyzed foamed concrete is the extrudability, which is achieved via a specific additive in the concrete mix that significantly improves the cohesion and viscosity of the fresh cementitious paste. A broad experimental campaign was conducted to evaluate the compressive strength and the indirect tensile strength of the specimens. The study has comprised three different cement types, two water/cement ratios, three curing conditions and three target dry densities. The variability of the strength values upon the above mentioned factors is discussed.
Abstract: As a way of managing the increasing volume and complexity of information that circulates in the present time, graphical representations are increasingly used, which add meaning to the information presented in communication media, through an efficient communication design. The visual culture itself, driven by technological evolution, has been redefining the forms of communication, so that contemporary visual communication represents a major impact on society. This article presents the results and respective comparative analysis of four publications in the Iberian press, focusing on the formal aspects of newspapers and the space they dedicate to the various communication elements. Two Portuguese newspapers and two Spanish newspapers were selected for this purpose. The findings indicated that the newspapers show a similarity in the use of graphic solutions, which corroborate a visual trend in communication design. The results also reveal that Spanish newspapers are more meticulous with graphic consistency. This study intended to contribute to improving knowledge of the Iberian generalist press.
Abstract: In today’s scenario, the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) applications and various microcontroller architectures have been increasing to such an extent that the traditional approaches to multiplier design in most processors are becoming outdated for being comparatively slow. Modern processing applications require suitable pipelined approaches, and therefore, algorithms that are friendlier with pipelined architectures. Traditional algorithms like Wallace Tree, Radix-4 Booth, Radix-8 Booth, Dadda architectures have been proven to be comparatively slow for pipelined architectures. These architectures, therefore, need to be optimized or combined with other architectures amongst them to enhance its performances and to be made suitable for pipelined hardware/architectures. Recently, Vedic algorithm mathematically has proven to be efficient by appearing to be less complex and with fewer steps for its output establishment and have assumed renewed importance. This paper describes and shows how the Vedic algorithm can be better suited for pipelined architectures and also can be combined with traditional architectures and algorithms for enhancing its ability even further. In this paper, we also established that for complex applications on DSP and other microcontroller architectures, using Vedic approach for multiplication proves to be the best available and efficient option.
Abstract: In this paper, we perform the investigation of some routing protocols in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) context. Indeed, we study the efficiency of protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing convention (OLSR) and Vehicular Multi-hop algorithm for Stable Clustering (VMASC) in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput. The performance evaluation and comparison between the studied protocols shows that the VMASC is the best protocols regarding fast data transmission and link stability in VANETs. The validation of all results is done by the NS3 simulator.
Abstract: Subversion analysis is a tool used in the TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) methodology. This article introduces the history and describes the process of subversion analysis, as well as function analysis and analysis of the resources, used at the design stage when generating possible undesirable situations. The article charts the course of subversion analysis when applied to a fuel injection nozzle of a marine engine. The work describes the fuel injector nozzle as a technological system and presents principles of analysis for the causes of a cracked tip of the nozzle body. The system is modelled with functional analysis. A search for potential causes of the damage is undertaken and a cause-and-effect analysis for various hypotheses concerning the damage is drawn up. The importance of particular hypotheses is evaluated and the most likely causes of damage identified.
Abstract: A clean spectrophotometric method for the determination of hafnium by using a green reagent, acidic extract of Ficus carica tree leaves is developed. In 6-M hydrochloric acid, hafnium reacts with this reagent to form a yellow product. The formed product shows maximum absorbance at 421 nm with a molar absorptivity value of 0.28 × 104 l mol⁻¹ cm⁻¹, and the method was linear in the 2-11 µg ml⁻¹ concentration range. The detection limit value was found to be 0.312 µg ml⁻¹. Except zirconium and iron, the selectivity was good, and most of the ions did not show any significant spectral interference at concentrations up to several hundred times. The proposed method was green, simple, low cost, and selective.
Abstract: Lightning strikes can cause severe negative impacts to the electrical sector causing direct damage to equipment as well as shutdowns, especially when occurring in power substations. In order to mitigate this problem, a meticulous planning of the power substation protection system is of vital importance. A critical part of this is the distribution of shielding wires through the substation, which creates a 3D imaginary protection mesh similar to a circus tarpaulin. Equipment enclosed in the volume defined by that 3D mesh is considered protected against lightning strikes. The use of traditional methods of longitudinal cutting analysis based on 2D CAD tools makes the process laborious and the results obtained may not guarantee satisfactory protection of electrical equipment. This work describes the application of a Game Engine to the problem of lightning protection of power substations providing the visualization of the 3D protection mesh, the amount of protected components and the highlight of equipment which remain unprotected. In addition, aspects regarding the implementation and the advantages of approaching the problem using Unreal® Engine 4 are described. In order to validate results, a comparison with traditional 2D methods is applied to the same case study to which the proposed technique has been applied. Finally, a comparative study involving different levels of protection using the technique developed in this work is presented, showing that modern game engines can be a powerful accessory for simulations in several areas of engineering.
Abstract: Water and sediment samples from the Danube River and Moson Danube Arm (Hungary) have been collected and analyzed for contamination by 18 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and eight trace metal(loid)s (As, Cu, Pb, Ni, Cr, Cd, Hg and Zn) in the period of 2014-2015. Moreover, the trace metal(loid) concentrations were measured in the Rába and Marcal rivers (parts of the tributary system feeding the Danube). Total PAH contents in water were found to vary from 0.016 to 0.133 µg/L and concentrations in sediments varied in the range of 0.118 mg/kg and 0.283 mg/kg. Source analysis of PAHs using diagnostic concentration ratios indicated that PAHs found in sediments were of pyrolytic origins. The dissolved trace metal and arsenic concentrations were relatively low in the surface waters. However, higher concentrations were detected in the water samples of Rába (Zn, Cu, Ni, Pb) and Marcal (As, Cu, Ni, Pb) compared to the Danube and Moson Danube. The concentrations of trace metals in sediments were higher than those found in water samples.
Abstract: Automatic voltage regulator (AVR) plays an important
role in volt/var control of synchronous condenser (SC) in power
systems. Test AVR performance in steady-state and dynamic
conditions in real grid is expensive, low efficiency, and hard to
achieve. To address this issue, we implement hardware-in-the-loop
(HiL) test for the AVR of SC to test the steady-state and dynamic
performances of AVR in different operating conditions. Startup
procedure of the system and voltage set point changes are studied to
evaluate the AVR hardware response. Overexcitation, underexcitation,
and AVR set point loss are tested to compare the performance of
SC with the AVR hardware and that of simulation. The comparative
results demonstrate how AVR will work in a real system. The results
show HiL test is an effective approach for testing devices before
deployment and is able to parameterize the controller with lower
cost, higher efficiency, and more flexibility.
Abstract: This work concerns with the experimental study of the adsorption of the Ni(II) on bentonite. The effects of various parameters such as contact time, stirring rate, initial concentration of Ni(II), masse of clay, initial pH of aqueous solution and temperature on the adsorption yield, were carried out. The study of the effect of the ionic strength on the yield of adsorption was examined by the identification and the quantification of the present chemical species in the aqueous phase containing the metallic ion Ni(II). The adsorbed species were investigated by a calculation program using CHEAQS V. L20.1 in order to determine the relation between the percentages of the adsorbed species and the adsorption yield. The optimization process was carried out using 23 factorial designs. The individual and combined effects of three process parameters, i.e. initial Ni(II) concentration in aqueous solution (2.10−3 and 5.10−3 mol/L), initial pH of the solution (2 and 6.5), and mass of bentonite (0.03 and 0.3 g) on Ni(II) adsorption, were studied.
Abstract: Millions of Syrian families have been displaced since the beginning of the Syrian war, and the negative effects of post-war trauma have shown detrimental effects on the mental health of refugee children. While educational strategies have focused on vocational training and academic achievement, little has been done to include music in the school curriculum to help these children improve their mental health. The literature of music education and psychology, on the other hand, shows the positive effects of music on traumatized children, especially when it comes to dealing with stress. This paper presents a brief literature review of trauma, music therapy, and music in the classroom, after having introduced the Syrian war and refugee situation. Furthermore, the paper highlights the benefits of using music with traumatized children from the literature and offers strategies for teachers (such as singing, playing an instrument, songwriting, and others) to include music in their classrooms to help Syrian refugee children deal with post-war trauma.
Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are resource constrained networks, where energy is the major resource in such networks. Therefore, energy conservation is major aspect in the deployment of Wireless Sensor Network. This work makes use of an extended Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (eGPSR) protocol that mainly focuses on energy efficient data transmission. This data transmission is based on the fact that the message that is sent to a distant node consumes more energy than the message that is sent to a short range transmission. Every cluster contains a head set that consists of many virtual cluster heads. Routing is decided by head set members. The energy level of the received signal is the major constraint to choose head set from its members. The experimental result shows that the use of eGPSR in routing has improved throughput with comparatively less delay.
Abstract: The complex oblique shock phenomenon can be simply assumed as a normal shock at the constant area section to simulate a sharp pressure increase and velocity decrease in 1-D thermodynamic models. The assumed normal shock location is one of the greatest sources of error in ejector thermodynamic models. Most researchers consider an arbitrary location without justifying it. Our study compares the effect of normal shock place on ejector dimensions in 1-D models. To this aim, two different ejector experimental test benches, a constant area-mixing ejector (CAM) and a constant pressure-mixing (CPM) are considered, with different known geometries, operating conditions and working fluids (R245fa, R141b). In the first step, in order to evaluate the real value of the efficiencies in the different ejector parts and critical back pressure, a CFD model was built and validated by experimental data for two types of ejectors. These reference data are then used as input to the 1D model to calculate the lengths and the diameters of the ejectors. Afterwards, the design output geometry calculated by the 1D model is compared directly with the corresponding experimental geometry. It was found that there is a good agreement between the ejector dimensions obtained by the 1D model, for both CAM and CPM, with experimental ejector data. Furthermore, it is shown that normal shock place affects only the constant area length as it is proven that the inlet normal shock assumption results in more accurate length. Taking into account previous 1D models, the results suggest the use of the assumed normal shock location at the inlet of the constant area duct to design the supersonic ejectors.
Abstract: Bioassay is the measurement of the potency of a chemical substance by its effect on a living animal or plant tissue. Bioassay data and chemical structures from pharmacokinetic and drug metabolism screening are mined from and housed in multiple databases. Bioassay prediction is calculated accordingly to determine further advancement. This paper proposes a four-step preprocessing of datasets for improving the bioassay predictions. The first step is instance selection in which dataset is categorized into training, testing, and validation sets. The second step is discretization that partitions the data in consideration of accuracy vs. precision. The third step is normalization where data are normalized between 0 and 1 for subsequent machine learning processing. The fourth step is feature selection where key chemical properties and attributes are generated. The streamlined results are then analyzed for the prediction of effectiveness by various machine learning algorithms including Pipeline Pilot, R, Weka, and Excel. Experiments and evaluations reveal the effectiveness of various combination of preprocessing steps and machine learning algorithms in more consistent and accurate prediction.
Abstract: Application of reversible logic in integrated circuits results in the improved optimization of power consumption. This technology can be put into use in a variety of low power applications such as quantum computing, optical computing, nano-technology, and Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) design etc. Logic gates are the basic building blocks in the design of any logic network and thus integrated circuits. In this paper, reversible Dual Key Gate (DKG) and Dual key Gate Pair (DKGP) gates that work singly as full adder/full subtractor are used to realize the basic building blocks of logic circuits. Reversible full adder/subtractor and parallel adder/ subtractor are designed using other reversible gates available in the literature and compared with that of DKG & DKGP gates. Efficient performance of reversible logic circuits relies on the optimization of the key parameters viz number of constant inputs, garbage outputs and number of reversible gates. The full adder/subtractor and parallel adder/subtractor design with reversible DKGP and DKG gates results in least number of constant inputs, garbage outputs, and number of reversible gates compared to the other designs. Thus, this paper provides a threshold to build more complex arithmetic systems using these reversible logic gates, leading to the enhanced performance of computing systems.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is the comparison of three different methods, in order to produce fuzzy tolerance relations for rainfall data classification. More specifically, the three methods are correlation coefficient, cosine amplitude and max-min method. The data were obtained from seven rainfall stations in the region of central Greece and refers to 20-year time series of monthly rainfall height average. Three methods were used to express these data as a fuzzy relation. This specific fuzzy tolerance relation is reformed into an equivalence relation with max-min composition for all three methods. From the equivalence relation, the rainfall stations were categorized and classified according to the degree of confidence. The classification shows the similarities among the rainfall stations. Stations with high similarity can be utilized in water resource management scenarios interchangeably or to augment data from one to another. Due to the complexity of calculations, it is important to find out which of the methods is computationally simpler and needs fewer compositions in order to give reliable results.
Abstract: Organic cultivation of crops is gaining importance consumer awareness towards pesticide residue free foodstuffs is increasing globally. This is also because of high costs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, making the conventional farming non-remunerative. In India, organic manures (such as vermicompost) are an important input in organic agriculture. Though vermicompost obtained through earthworm and microbe-mediated processes is known to comprise most of the crop nutrients, but they are in small amounts thus necessitating enrichment of nutrients so that crop nourishment is complete. Another characteristic of organic manures is that the pest infestations are kept under check due to induced resistance put up by the crop plants. In the present investigation, deoiled neem cake containing azadirachtin, copper ore tailings (COT), a source of micro-nutrients and microbial consortia were added for enrichment of vermicompost. Neem cake is a by-product obtained during the process of oil extraction from neem plant seeds. Three enriched vermicompost blends were prepared using vermicompost (at 70, 65 and 60%), deoiled neem cake (25, 30 and 35%), microbial consortia and COTwastes (5%). Enriched vermicompost was thoroughly mixed, moistened (25+5%), packed and incubated for 15 days at room temperature. In the crop response studies, the field trials on chili (Capsicum annum var. longum) and soybean, (Glycine max cv JS 335) were conducted during Kharif 2015 at the Main Agricultural Research Station, UAS, Dharwad-Karnataka, India. The vermicompost blend enriched with neem cake (known to possess higher amounts of nutrients) and vermicompost were applied to the crops and at two dosages and at two intervals of crop cycle (at sowing and 30 days after sowing) as per the treatment plan along with 50% recommended dose of fertilizer (RDF). 10 plants selected randomly in each plot were studied for pest density and plant damage. At maturity, crops were harvested, and the yields were recorded as per the treatments, and the data were analyzed using appropriate statistical tools and procedures. In the crops, chili and soybean, crop nourishment with neem enriched vermicompost reduced insect density and plant damage significantly compared to other treatments. These treatments registered as much yield (16.7 to 19.9 q/ha) as that realized in conventional chemical control (18.2 q/ha) in soybean, while 72 to 77 q/ha of green chili was harvested in the same treatments, being comparable to the chemical control (74 q/ha). The yield superiority of the treatments was of the order neem enriched vermicompost>conventional chemical control>neem cake>vermicompost>untreated control. The significant features of the result are that it reduces use of inorganic manures by 50% and synthetic chemical insecticides by 100%.
Abstract: Light is the central theme of sacred architecture of all religions and so of Christianity. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the inner sense of light and its constitutive role in Christian sacred architecture. The theme of light in Christian sacred architecture is fundamentally connected to its meaning and symbolism of light in Christian theology and liturgy. This fundamental connection is opening the space to the symbolic and theological comprehending of light which was present throughout the history of Christianity and which is lacking in contemporary sacred architecture.