Abstract: Proton transfer and hydrogen bonding are two aspects
of the chemistry of hydrogen that respectively govern the behaviour
and structure of many molecules, both simple and complex. All the
theoretical enol and keto conformations of 1,3-diphenyl-1,3-
propandion known as dibenzoylmethane (DBM), have been
investigated by means of atoms in molecules (AIM) theory. It was
found that the most stable conformers are those stabilized by
hydrogen bridges.The aim of the present paper is a thorough
conformational analysis of DBM (with special attention on chelated
cis-enol conformers) in order to obtain detailed information on the
geometrical parameters, relative stabilities and rotational motion of
the phenyl groups. It is also important to estimate the barrier height
for ptoton transfer and hydrogen bond strength, which are the main
factors governing conformational stability.
Abstract: Polypropylene blended with natural oil and pigment additives has been studied. Different formulations for each compound were made into polybag used for cultivation of oil palm seedlings for strength and mechanical properties studies. One group of sample was exposed under normal sunlight to initiate degradation and another group of sample was placed under shaded area for five months. All samples were tested for tensile strength to determine the degradation effects. The tensile strength of directly exposed sunlight samples and shaded area showed up to 50% and 25% degradation respectively. However, similar reduction of Young’s modulus for all samples was found for both exposures. Structural investigations were done using FTIR to detect deformation. The natural additives that were used in the studies were all natural and environmental friendly
Abstract: The periodic mixed convection of a water-copper
nanofluid inside a rectangular cavity with aspect ratio of 3 is
investigated numerically. The temperature of the bottom wall of the
cavity is assumed greater than the temperature of the top lid which
oscillates horizontally with the velocity defined as u = u0 sin (ω t).
The effects of Richardson number, Ri, and volume fraction of
nanoparticles on the flow and thermal behavior of the nanofluid are
investigated. Velocity and temperature profiles, streamlines and
isotherms are presented. It is observed that when Ri < 1, heat transfer
rate is much greater than when Ri > 1. The higher value of Ri
corresponds to a lower value of the amplitude of the oscillation of
Num in the steady periodic state. Moreover, increasing the volume
fraction of the nanoparticles increases the heat transfer rate.
Abstract: Nowadays the devices of night vision are widely used both for military and civil applications. The variety of night vision applications require a variety of the night vision devices designs. A web-based architecture of a software system for design assessment before producing of night vision devices is developed. The proposed architecture of the web-based system is based on the application of a mathematical model for designing of night vision devices. An algorithm with two components – for iterative design and for intelligent design is developed and integrated into system architecture. The iterative component suggests compatible modules combinations to choose from. The intelligent component provides compatible combinations of modules satisfying given user requirements to device parameters. The proposed web-based architecture of a system for design assessment of night vision devices is tested via a prototype of the system. The testing showed the applicability of both iterative and intelligent components of algorithm.
Abstract: The novelty proposed in this study is twofold and consists in the developing of a new color similarity metric based on the human visual system and a new color indexing based on a textual approach. The new color similarity metric proposed is based on the color perception of the human visual system. Consequently the results returned by the indexing system can fulfill as much as possibile the user expectations. We developed a web application to collect the users judgments about the similarities between colors, whose results are used to estimate the metric proposed in this study. In order to index the image's colors, we used a text indexing engine to facilitate the integration of visual features in a database of text documents. The textual signature is build by weighting the image's colors in according to their occurrence in the image. The use of a textual indexing engine, provide us a simple, fast and robust solution to index images. A typical usage of the system proposed in this study, is the development of applications whose data type is both visual and textual. In order to evaluate the proposed method we chose a price comparison engine as a case of study, collecting a series of commercial offers containing the textual description and the image representing a specific commercial offer.
Abstract: Islamic institutions in Malaysia play a variety of
socioeconomic roles such as poverty alleviation. To perform this role,
these institutions face a major task in identifying the poverty group.
Most of these institutions measure and operationalize poverty from
the monetary perspective using variables such as income, expenditure
or consumption. In practice, most Islamic institutions in Malaysia use
the monetary approach in measuring poverty through the
conventional Poverty Line Income (PLI) method and recently, the
had al kifayah (HAK) method using total necessities of a household
from an Islamic perspective. The objective of this paper is to present
the PLI and also the HAK method. This micro-data study would
highlight the similarities and differences of both the methods.A
survey aided by a structured questionnaire was carried out on 260
selected head of households in the state of Selangor. The paper
highlights several demographic factors that are associated with the
three monetary indicators in the study, namely income, PLI and
HAK. In addition, the study found that these monetary variables are
significantly related with each other.
Abstract: In this study, a comparison of two control methods,
Proportional Control (PC) and Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC), which
have been used to develop an ideal thermoelectric renal hypothermia
system in order to use in renal surgery, has been carried out. Since
the most important issues in long-lasting parenchymatous renal
surgery are to provide an operation medium free of blood and to
prevent renal dysfunction in the postoperative period, control of the
temperature has become very important in renal surgery. The final
product is seriously affected from the changes in temperature,
therefore, it is necessary to reach some desired temperature points
quickly and avoid large overshoot. PIC16F877 microcontroller has
been used as controller for both of these two methods. Each control
method can simply ensure extra renal hypothermia in the targeted
way. But investigation of advantages and disadvantages of every
control method to each other is aimed and carried out by the
experimental implementations. Shortly, investigation of the most
appropriate method to use for development of system and that can be
applied to people safely in the future, has been performed. In this
sense, experimental results show that fuzzy logic control gives out
more reliable responses and efficient performance.
Abstract: HIV-1 genome is highly heterogeneous. Due to this
variation, features of HIV-I genome is in a wide range. For this
reason, the ability to infection of the virus changes depending on
different chemokine receptors. From this point of view, R5 HIV
viruses use CCR5 coreceptor while X4 viruses use CXCR5 and
R5X4 viruses can utilize both coreceptors. Recently, in
Bioinformatics, R5X4 viruses have been studied to classify by using
the experiments on HIV-1 genome.
In this study, R5X4 type of HIV viruses were classified using
Auto Regressive (AR) model through Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs). The statistical data of R5X4, R5 and X4 viruses was
analyzed by using signal processing methods and ANNs. Accessible
residues of these virus sequences were obtained and modeled by AR
model since the dimension of residues is large and different from
each other. Finally the pre-processed data was used to evolve various
ANN structures for determining R5X4 viruses. Furthermore ROC
analysis was applied to ANNs to show their real performances. The
results indicate that R5X4 viruses successfully classified with high
sensitivity and specificity values training and testing ROC analysis
for RBF, which gives the best performance among ANN structures.
Abstract: Midpoint filter is quite effective in recovering the
images confounded by the short-tailed (uniform) noise. It, however,
performs poorly in the presence of additive long-tailed (impulse)
noise and it does not preserve the edge structures of the image
signals. Median smoother discards outliers (impulses) effectively, but
it fails to provide adequate smoothing for images corrupted with nonimpulse
noise. In this paper, two nonlinear techniques for image
filtering, namely, New Filter I and New Filter II are proposed based
on a nonlinear high-pass filter algorithm. New Filter I is constructed
using a midpoint filter, a highpass filter and a combiner. It suppresses
uniform noise quite well. New Filter II is configured using an alpha
trimmed midpoint filter, a median smoother of window size 3x3, the
high pass filter and the combiner. It is robust against impulse noise
and attenuates uniform noise satisfactorily. Both the filters are shown
to exhibit good response at the image boundaries (edges). The
proposed filters are evaluated for their performance on a test image
and the results obtained are included.
Abstract: Most of researches for conventional simulations were
studied focusing on flocks with a single species. While there exist the
flocking behaviors with a single species in nature, the flocking
behaviors are frequently observed with multi-species. This paper
studies on the flocking simulation for heterogeneous agents. In order
to simulate the flocks for heterogeneous agents, the conventional
method uses the identifier of flock, while the proposed method defines
the feature vector of agent and uses the similarity between agents by
comparing with those feature vectors. Based on the similarity, the
paper proposed the attractive force and repulsive force and then
executed the simulation by applying two forces. The results of
simulation showed that flock formation with heterogeneous agents is
very natural in both cases. In addition, it showed that unlike the
existing method, the proposed method can not only control the density
of the flocks, but also be possible for two different groups of agents to
flock close to each other if they have a high similarity.
Abstract: German electricity European options on futures using
Lévy processes for the underlying asset are examined. Implied
volatility evolution, under each of the considered models, is
discussed after calibrating for the Merton jump diffusion (MJD),
variance gamma (VG), normal inverse Gaussian (NIG), Carr, Geman,
Madan and Yor (CGMY) and the Black and Scholes (B&S) model.
Implied volatility is examined for the entire sample period, revealing
some curious features about market evolution, where data fitting
performances of the five models are compared. It is shown that
variance gamma processes provide relatively better results and that
implied volatility shows significant differences through time, having
increasingly evolved. Volatility changes for changed uncertainty, or
else, increasing futures prices and there is evidence for the need to
account for seasonality when modelling both electricity spot/futures
prices and volatility.
Abstract: This paper presents the design and layout of a two stage, high speed operational amplifiers using standard 0.35um CMOS technology. The design procedure involves designing the bias circuit, the differential input pair, and the gain stage using CAD tools. Both schematic and layout of the operational amplifier along with the comparison in the results of the two has been presented. The operational amplifier designed, has a gain of 93.51db at low frequencies. It has a gain bandwidth product of 55.07MHz, phase margin of 51.9º and a slew rate of 22v/us for a load of capacitor of 10pF.
Abstract: this paper presents an auto-regressive network called the Auto-Regressive Multi-Context Recurrent Neural Network (ARMCRN), which forecasts the daily peak load for two large power plant systems. The auto-regressive network is a combination of both recurrent and non-recurrent networks. Weather component variables are the key elements in forecasting because any change in these variables affects the demand of energy load. So the AR-MCRN is used to learn the relationship between past, previous, and future exogenous and endogenous variables. Experimental results show that using the change in weather components and the change that occurred in past load as inputs to the AR-MCRN, rather than the basic weather parameters and past load itself as inputs to the same network, produce higher accuracy of predicted load. Experimental results also show that using exogenous and endogenous variables as inputs is better than using only the exogenous variables as inputs to the network.
Abstract: This paper presents a sensor-based motion planning algorithm for 3-DOF car-like robots with a nonholonomic constraint. Similar to the classic Bug family algorithms, the proposed algorithm enables the car-like robot to navigate in a completely unknown environment using only the range sensor information. The car-like robot uses the local range sensor view to determine the local path so that it moves towards the goal. To guarantee that the robot can approach the goal, the two modes of motion are repeated, termed motion-to-goal and wall-following. The motion-to-goal behavior lets the robot directly move toward the goal, and the wall-following behavior makes the robot circumnavigate the obstacle boundary until it meets the leaving condition. For each behavior, the nonholonomic motion for the car-like robot is planned in terms of the instantaneous turning radius. The proposed algorithm is implemented to the real robot and the experimental results show the performance of proposed algorithm.
Abstract: Textile structures are engineered and fabricated to
meet worldwide structural applications. Nevertheless, research
varying textile structure on natural fibre as composite reinforcement
was found to be very limited. Most of the research is focusing on
short fibre and random discontinuous orientation of the reinforcement
structure. Realizing that natural fibre (NF) composite had been
widely developed to be used as synthetic fibre composite
replacement, this research attempted to examine the influence of
woven and cross-ply laminated structure towards its mechanical
performances. Laminated natural fibre composites were developed
using hand lay-up and vacuum bagging technique. Impact and
flexural strength were investigated as a function of fibre type (coir
and kenaf) and reinforcement structure (imbalanced plain woven,
0°/90° cross-ply and +45°/-45° cross-ply). Multi-level full factorial
design of experiment (DOE) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was
employed to impart data as to how fibre type and reinforcement
structure parameters affect the mechanical properties of the
composites. This systematic experimentation has led to determination
of significant factors that predominant influences the impact and
flexural properties of the textile composites. It was proven that both
fibre type and reinforcement structure demonstrated significant
difference results. Overall results indicated that coir composite and
woven structure exhibited better impact and flexural strength. Yet,
cross-ply composite structure demonstrated better fracture resistance.
Abstract: The image segmentation method described in this
paper has been developed as a pre-processing stage to be used in
methodologies and tools for video/image indexing and retrieval by
content. This method solves the problem of whole objects extraction
from background and it produces images of single complete objects
from videos or photos. The extracted images are used for calculating
the object visual features necessary for both indexing and retrieval
processes.
The segmentation algorithm is based on the cooperation among an
optical flow evaluation method, edge detection and region growing
procedures. The optical flow estimator belongs to the class of
differential methods. It permits to detect motions ranging from a
fraction of a pixel to a few pixels per frame, achieving good results in
presence of noise without the need of a filtering pre-processing stage
and includes a specialised model for moving object detection.
The first task of the presented method exploits the cues from
motion analysis for moving areas detection. Objects and background
are then refined using respectively edge detection and seeded region
growing procedures. All the tasks are iteratively performed until
objects and background are completely resolved.
The method has been applied to a variety of indoor and outdoor
scenes where objects of different type and shape are represented on
variously textured background.
Abstract: Ever since industrial revolution began, our ecosystem
has changed. And indeed, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Industrial waste usually released into all kinds of body of water, such
as river or sea. Tempeh waste is one example of waste that carries
many hazardous and unwanted substances that will affect the
surrounding environment. Tempeh is a popular fermented food in
Asia which is rich in nutrients and active substances. Tempeh liquid
waste- in particular- can cause an air pollution, and if penetrates
through the soil, it will contaminates ground-water, making it
unavailable for the water to be consumed. Moreover, bacteria will
thrive within the polluted water, which often responsible for causing
many kinds of diseases. The treatment used for this chemical waste is
biological treatment such as constructed wetland and activated
sludge. These kinds of treatment are able to reduce both physical and
chemical parameters altogether such as temperature, TSS, pH, BOD,
COD, NH3-N, NO3-N, and PO4-P. These treatments are implemented
before the waste is released into the water. The result is a
comparation between constructed wetland and activated sludge,
along with determining which method is better suited to reduce the
physical and chemical subtances of the waste.
Abstract: This paper considers the robust exponential stability issues for a class of uncertain switched neutral system which delays switched according to the switching rule. The system under consideration includes both stable and unstable subsystems. The uncertainties considered in this paper are norm bounded, and possibly time varying. Based on multiple Lyapunov functional approach and dwell-time technique, the time-dependent switching rule is designed depend on the so-called average dwell time of stable subsystems as well as the ratio of the total activation time of stable subsystems and unstable subsystems. It is shown that by suitably controlling the switching between the stable and unstable modes, the robust stabilization of the switched uncertain neutral systems can be achieved. Two simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Abstract: The design of a landing gear is one of the fundamental aspects of aircraft design. The need for a light weight, high strength, and stiffness characteristics coupled with techno economic feasibility are a key to the acceptability of any landing gear construction. In this paper, an approach for analyzing two different designed landing gears for an unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) using advanced CAE techniques will be applied. Different landing conditions have been considered for both models. The maximum principle stresses for each model along with the factor of safety are calculated for every loading condition. A conclusion is drawing about better geometry.
Abstract: The ability of agricultural and decorative plants to
absorb and detoxify TNT and RDX has been studied. All tested 8
plants, grown hydroponically, were able to absorb these explosives
from water solutions: Alfalfa > Soybean > Chickpea> Chikling vetch
>Ryegrass > Mung bean> China bean > Maize. Differently from
TNT, RDX did not exhibit negative influence on seed germination
and plant growth. Moreover, some plants, exposed to RDX
containing solution were increased in their biomass by 20%. Study of
the fate of absorbed [1-14ðí]-TNT revealed the label distribution in
low and high-molecular mass compounds, both in roots and above
ground parts of plants, prevailing in the later. Content of 14ðí in lowmolecular
compounds in plant roots are much higher than in above
ground parts. On the contrary, high-molecular compounds are more
intensively labeled in aboveground parts of soybean. Most part (up to
70%) of metabolites of TNT, formed either by enzymatic reduction
or oxidation, is found in high molecular insoluble conjugates.
Activation of enzymes, responsible for reduction, oxidation and
conjugation of TNT, such as nitroreductase, peroxidase,
phenoloxidase and glutathione S-transferase has been demonstrated.
Among these enzymes, only nitroreductase was shown to be induced
in alfalfa, exposed to RDX. The increase in malate dehydrogenase
activities in plants, exposed to both explosives, indicates
intensification of Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle, that generates reduced
equivalents of NAD(P)H, necessary for functioning of the
nitroreductase. The hypothetic scheme of TNT metabolism in plants
is proposed.