Abstract: Processes of production of innovative medical tools have interdisciplinary character. They consist of direct and indirect close cooperation of specialists of different scientific branches. The Knowledge they have seems to be important for undertaken design, construction and manufacturing processes. The Knowledge exchange between participants of these processes is therefore crucial for the final result, which are innovative medical products. The paper draws attention to the necessity of feedback from the end user to the designer / manufacturer of medical tools which will allow for more accurate understanding of user needs. The study describes prerequisites of production processes of innovative medical (surgical) tools including participants and category of knowledge resources occurring in these processes. They are the result of research in selected Polish organizations involved in the production of medical instruments and are the basis for further work on the development of knowledge sharing model in interdisciplinary teams geographically dispersed.
Abstract: In many practical situations, bubbles are dispersed in a
liquid phase. Understanding these complex bubbly flows is therefore
a key issue for applications such as shell and tube heat exchangers,
mineral flotation and oxidation in water treatment. Although a large
body of work exists for bubbles rising in an unbounded medium,
that of bubbles rising in constricted geometries has received less
attention. The particular case of a bubble sliding underneath an
inclined surface is common to two-phase flow systems. The current
study intends to expand this knowledge by performing experiments
to quantify the streamwise flow structures associated with a single
sliding air bubble under an inclined surface in quiescent water. This
is achieved by means of two-dimensional, two-component particle
image velocimetry (PIV), performed with a continuous wave laser
and high-speed camera. PIV vorticity fields obtained in a plane
perpendicular to the sliding surface show that there is significant bulk
fluid motion away from the surface. The associated momentum of the
bubble means that this wake motion persists for a significant time
before viscous dissipation. The magnitude and direction of the flow
structures in the streamwise measurement plane are found to depend
on the point on its path through which the bubble enters the plane.
This entry point, represented by a phase angle, affects the nature and
strength of the vortical structures. This study reconstructs the vorticity
field in the wake of the bubble, converting the field at different
instances in time to slices of a large-scale wake structure. This is, in
essence, Taylor’s ”frozen turbulence” hypothesis. Applying this to the
vorticity fields provides a pseudo three-dimensional representation
from 2-D data, allowing for a more intuitive understanding of the
bubble wake. This study provides insights into the complex dynamics
of a situation common to many engineering applications, particularly
shell and tube heat exchangers in the nucleate boiling regime.
Abstract: Control of diesel engine’s air path has drawn a lot of attention due to its multi input-multi output, closed coupled, non-linear relation. Today, precise control of amount of air to be combusted is a must in order to meet with tight emission limits and performance targets. In this study, passenger car size diesel engine is modeled by AVL Boost RT, and then simulated with standard, industry level PID controllers. Finally, linear model predictive control is designed and simulated. This study shows the importance of modeling and control of diesel engines with flexible algorithm development in computer based systems.
Abstract: Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a short-range
wireless communication around human body for various applications
such as wearable devices, entertainment, military, and especially
medical devices. WBAN attracts the attention of continuous health
monitoring system including diagnostic procedure, early detection of
abnormal conditions, and prevention of emergency situations.
Compared to cellular network, WBAN system is more difficult to
control inter- and inner-cell interference due to the limited power,
limited calculation capability, mobility of patient, and
non-cooperation among WBANs.
In this paper, we compare the performance of resource allocation
scheme based on several Pseudo Orthogonal Codewords (POCs) to
mitigate inter-WBAN interference. Previously, the POCs are widely
exploited for a protocol sequence and optical orthogonal code. Each
POCs have different properties of auto- and cross-correlation and
spectral efficiency according to its construction of POCs. To identify
different WBANs, several different pseudo orthogonal patterns based
on POCs exploits for resource allocation of WBANs. By simulating
these pseudo orthogonal resource allocations of WBANs on
MATLAB, we obtain the performance of WBANs according to
different POCs and can analyze and evaluate the suitability of POCs
for the resource allocation in the WBANs system.
Abstract: Soil improvement using vibro stone column techniques consists of two main parts: (1) the installed load bearing columns of well-compacted, coarse-grained material and (2) the improvements to the surrounding soil due to vibro compaction. Extensive research work has been carried out over the last 20 years to understand the improvement in the composite foundation performance due to the second part mentioned above. Nevertheless, few of these studies have tried to quantify some of the key design parameters, namely the changes in the stiffness and stress state of the treated soil, or have consider these parameters in the design and calculation process. Consequently, empirical and conservative design methods are still being used by ground improvement companies with a significant variety of results in engineering practice. Two-dimensional finite element study to develop an axisymmetric model of a single stone column reinforced foundation was performed using PLAXIS 2D AE to quantify the effect of the vibro installation of this column in soft saturated clay. Settlement and bearing performance were studied as an essential part of the design and calculation of the stone column foundation. Particular attention was paid to the large deformation in the soft clay around the installed column caused by the lateral expansion. So updated mesh advanced option was taken in the analysis. In this analysis, different degrees of stone column lateral expansions were simulated and numerically analyzed, and then the changes in the stress state, stiffness, settlement performance and bearing capacity were quantified. It was found that application of radial expansion will produce a horizontal stress in the soft clay mass that gradually decrease as the distance from the stone column axis increases. The excess pore pressure due to the undrained conditions starts to dissipate immediately after finishing the column installation, allowing the horizontal stress to relax. Changes in the coefficient of the lateral earth pressure K ٭, which is very important in representing the stress state, and the new stiffness distribution in the reinforced clay mass, were estimated. More encouraging results showed that increasing the expansion during column installation has a noticeable effect on improving the bearing capacity and reducing the settlement of reinforced ground, So, a design method should include this significant effect of the applied lateral displacement during the stone column instillation in simulation and numerical analysis design.
Abstract: Promotion of the Fiber Reinforced Concrete (FRC) as a construction material for civil engineering projects has invoked numerous researchers to investigate their mechanical behavior. Even though there is satisfactory information about the effects of fiber type and length, concrete mixture, casting type and other variables on the strength and deformability parameters of FRC, the numerical modeling of such materials still needs research attention. The focus of this study is to investigate the feasibility of Concrete Damaged Plasticity (CDP) model in prediction of Macro-synthetic FRC structures behavior. CDP model requires the tensile behavior of concrete to be well characterized. For this purpose, a series of uniaxial direct tension and four point bending tests were conducted on the notched specimens to define bilinear tension softening (post-peak tension stress-strain) behavior. With these parameters obtained, the flexural behavior of macro-synthetic FRC beams were modeled and the results showed a good agreement with the experimental measurements.
Abstract: Critical success factors (CSFs) and the criteria to measure project success have received much attention over the decades and are among the most widely researched topics in the context of project management. However, although there have been extensive studies on the subject by different researchers, to date, there has been little agreement on the CSFs. The aim of this study is to identify the CSFs that influence the performance of construction projects, and determine their relative importance for different objectives across five stages in the project life cycle. A considerable literature review was conducted that resulted in the identification of 179 individual factors. These factors were then grouped into nine major categories. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from three groups of respondents: client representatives, consultants, and contractors. Out of 164 questionnaires distributed, 93 were returned, yielding a response rate of 56.7%. Using the mean score, relative importance index, and weighted average method, the top 10 critical factors for each category were identified. The agreement of survey respondents on those categorised factors were analysed using Spearman’s rank correlation. A one-way analysis of variance was then performed to determine whether the mean scores among the various groups of respondents were statistically significant. The findings indicate the most CSFs in each category in procurement phase are: proper procurement programming of materials (time), stability in the price of materials (cost), and determining quality in the construction (quality). They are then followed by safety equipment acquisition and maintenance (health and safety), budgeting allowed in a contractual arrangement for implementing environmental management activities (environment), completeness of drawing documents (productivity), accurate measurement and pricing of bill of quantities (risk management), adequate communication among the project team (human resource), and adequate cost control measures (client satisfaction). An understanding of CSFs would help all interested parties in the construction industry to improve project performance. Furthermore, the results of this study would help construction professionals and practitioners take proactive measures for effective project management.
Abstract: HMS Industrial Networks AB has been recognized as
one of the most innovative companies in the industrial
communication industry worldwide. The creation of their Anybus
innovation during the 1990s contributed considerably to the
company’s success. From inception, HMS’ employees were
innovating for the purpose of creating new business (the creation
phase). After the Anybus innovation, they began the process of
internationalization (the commercialization phase), which in turn led
them to concentrate on cost reduction, product quality, delivery
precision, operational efficiency, and increasing growth (the growth
phase). As a result of this transformation, performing new radical
innovations have become more complicated. The purpose of our research was to explore the dynamics of
innovation at HMS from the aspect of key actors, activities, and
events, over the three phases, in order to understand what led to the
creation of their Anybus innovation, and why it has become
increasingly challenging for HMS to create new radical innovations
for the future. Our research methodology was based on a longitudinal,
retrospective study from the inception of HMS in 1988 to 2014, a
single case study inspired by the grounded theory approach. We
conducted 47 interviews and collected 1 024 historical documents for
our research. Our analysis has revealed that HMS’ success in creating the
Anybus, and developing a successful business around the innovation,
was based on three main capabilities – cultivating customer relations
on different managerial and organizational levels, inspiring business
relations, and balancing complementary human assets for the purpose
of business creation. The success of HMS has turned the management’s attention away
from past activities of key actors, of their behavior, and how they
influenced and stimulated the creation of radical innovations.
Nowadays, they are rhetorically focusing on creativity and
innovation. All the while, their real actions put emphasis on growth,
cost reduction, product quality, delivery precision, operational
efficiency, and moneymaking. In the process of becoming an
international company, HMS gradually refocused. In so doing they
became profitable and successful, but they also forgot what made
them innovative in the first place. Fortunately, HMS’ management
has come to realize that this is the case and they are now in search of
recapturing innovation once again. Our analysis indicates that HMS’ management is facing several
barriers to innovation related path dependency and other lock-in
phenomena. HMS’ management has been captured, trapped in their
mindset and actions, by the success of the past. But now their future has to be secured, and they have come to realize that moneymaking is
not everything. In recent years, HMS’ management have begun to
search for innovation once more, in order to recapture their past
capabilities for creating radical innovations. In order to unlock their
managerial perceptions of customer needs and their counter-innovation
driven activities and events, to utilize the full potential of
their employees and capture the innovation opportunity for the future.
Abstract: Sentiment analysis (SA) has received growing
attention in Arabic language research. However, few studies have yet
to directly apply SA to Arabic due to lack of a publicly available
dataset for this language. This paper partially bridges this gap due to
its focus on one of the Arabic dialects which is the Saudi dialect. This
paper presents annotated data set of 4700 for Saudi dialect sentiment
analysis with (K= 0.807). Our next work is to extend this corpus and
creation a large-scale lexicon for Saudi dialect from the corpus.
Abstract: The aim of this research is to understand how the
emerging power bloc BRICS employs infrastructure development
narratives to construct a new world order. BRICS is an international
body consisting of five emerging countries that collaborate on
economic and political issues: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa. This study explores the projection of infrastructure
development narratives through an analysis of BRICS’ attention to
infrastructure investment and financing, its support of the New
Partnership on African Development and the establishment of the
New Development Bank in Shanghai. The theory of Strategic
Narratives is used to explore BRICS’ commitment to infrastructure
development and to distinguish three layers: system narratives
(BRICS as a global actor to propose development reform), identity
narratives (BRICS as a collective identity joining efforts to act upon
development aspirations) and issue narratives (BRICS committed to a
range of issues of which infrastructure development is prominent).
The methodology that is employed is a narrative analysis of BRICS’
official documents, media statements, and website imagery. A
comparison of these narratives illuminates tensions at the three layers
and among the five member states. Identifying tensions among
development infrastructure narratives provides an indication of how
policymaking for infrastructure development could be improved.
Subsequently, it advances BRICS’ ability to act as a global actor to
construct a new world order.
Abstract: The irradiation of polymeric materials has received
much attention because it can produce diverse changes in chemical
structure and physical properties. Thus, studying the chemical and
structural changes of polymers is important in practice to achieve
optimal conditions for the modification of polymers. The effect of
gamma irradiation on the crystalline structure of poly(vinylidene
fluoride) (PVDF) has been investigated using differential scanning
calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray diffraction techniques (XRD). Gamma
irradiation was carried out in atmosphere air with doses between 100
kGy at 3,000 kGy with a Co-60 source. In the melting thermogram of
the samples irradiated can be seen a bimodal melting endotherm is
detected with two melting temperature. The lower melting
temperature is attributed to melting of crystals originally present and
the higher melting peak due to melting of crystals reorganized upon
heat treatment. These results are consistent with those obtained by
XRD technique showing increasing crystallinity with increasing
irradiation dose, although the melting latent heat is decreasing.
Abstract: Interaction between mixing and crystallization is often
ignored despite the fact that it affects almost every aspect of the
operation including nucleation, growth, and maintenance of the
crystal slurry. This is especially pronounced in multiple impeller
systems where flow complexity is increased. By choosing proper
mixing parameters, what closely depends on the knowledge of the
hydrodynamics in a mixing vessel, the process of batch cooling
crystallization may considerably be improved. The values that render
useful information when making this choice are mixing time and
power consumption. The predominant motivation for this work was
to investigate the extent to which radial dual impeller configuration
influences mixing time, power consumption and consequently the
values of metastable zone width and nucleation rate. In this research,
crystallization of borax was conducted in a 15 dm3 baffled batch
cooling crystallizer with an aspect ratio (H/T) of 1.3. Mixing was
performed using two straight blade turbines (4-SBT) mounted on the
same shaft that generated radial fluid flow. Experiments were
conducted at different values of N/NJS ratio (impeller speed/
minimum impeller speed for complete suspension), D/T ratio
(impeller diameter/crystallizer diameter), c/D ratio (lower impeller
off-bottom clearance/impeller diameter), and s/D ratio (spacing
between impellers/impeller diameter). Mother liquor was saturated at
30°C and was cooled at the rate of 6°C/h. Its concentration was
monitored in line by Na-ion selective electrode. From the values of
supersaturation that was monitored continuously over process time, it
was possible to determine the metastable zone width and
subsequently the nucleation rate using the Mersmann’s nucleation
criterion. For all applied dual impeller configurations, the mixing
time was determined by potentiometric method using a pulse
technique, while the power consumption was determined using a
torque meter produced by Himmelstein & Co. Results obtained in
this investigation show that dual impeller configuration significantly
influences the values of mixing time, power consumption as well as
the metastable zone width and nucleation rate. A special attention
should be addressed to the impeller spacing considering the flow
interaction that could be more or less pronounced depending on the
spacing value.
Abstract: Smart metering and demand response are gaining
ground in industrial and residential applications. Smart Appliances
have been given concern towards achieving Smart home. The success
of Smart grid development relies on the successful implementation of
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in power sector.
Smart Appliances have been the technology under development and
many new contributions to its realization have been reported in the
last few years. The role of ICT here is to capture data in real time,
thereby allowing bi-directional flow of information/data between
producing and utilization point; that lead a way for the attainment of
Smart appliances where home appliances can communicate between
themselves and provide a self-control (switch on and off) using the
signal (information) obtained from the grid. This paper depicts the
background on ICT for smart appliances paying a particular attention
to the current technology and identifying the future ICT trends for
load monitoring through which smart appliances can be achieved to
facilitate an efficient smart home system which promote demand
response program. This paper grouped and reviewed the recent
contributions, in order to establish the current state of the art and
trends of the technology, so that the reader can be provided with a
comprehensive and insightful review of where ICT for smart
appliances stands and is heading to. The paper also presents a brief
overview of communication types, and then narrowed the discussion
to the load monitoring (Non-intrusive Appliances Load Monitoring
‘NALM’). Finally, some future trends and challenges in the further
development of the ICT framework are discussed to motivate future
contributions that address open problems and explore new
possibilities.
Abstract: Growth and remodeling of biological structures have
gained lots of attention over the past decades. Determining the
response of living tissues to mechanical loads is necessary for a wide
range of developing fields such as prosthetics design or computerassisted
surgical interventions. It is a well-known fact that biological
structures are never stress-free, even when externally unloaded. The
exact origin of these residual stresses is not clear, but theoretically,
growth is one of the main sources. Extracting body organ’s shapes
from medical imaging does not produce any information regarding
the existing residual stresses in that organ. The simplest cause of such
stresses is gravity since an organ grows under its influence from
birth. Ignoring such residual stresses might cause erroneous results in
numerical simulations. Accounting for residual stresses due to tissue
growth can improve the accuracy of mechanical analysis results. This
paper presents an original computational framework based on gradual
growth to determine the residual stresses due to growth. To illustrate
the method, we apply it to a finite element model of a healthy human
face reconstructed from medical images. The distribution of residual
stress in facial tissues is computed, which can overcome the effect of
gravity and maintain tissues firmness. Our assumption is that tissue
wrinkles caused by aging could be a consequence of decreasing
residual stress and thus not counteracting gravity. Taking into
account these stresses seems therefore extremely important in
maxillofacial surgery. It would indeed help surgeons to estimate
tissues changes after surgery.
Abstract: Open jet testing is a valuable testing technique which
provides the desired results with reasonable accuracy. It has been
used in past for the airships and now has recently been applied for the
hybrid ones, having more non-buoyant force coming from the wings,
empennage and the fuselage. In the present review work, an effort
has been done to review the challenges involved in open jet testing.
In order to shed light on the application of this technique, the
experimental results of two different configurations are presented.
Although, the aerodynamic results of such vehicles are unique to its
own design; however, it will provide a starting point for planning any
future testing. Few important testing areas which need more attention
are also highlighted. Most of the hybrid buoyant aerial vehicles are
unconventional in shape and there experimental data is generated,
which is unique to its own design.
Abstract: Recently, traffic monitoring has attracted the attention
of computer vision researchers. Many algorithms have been
developed to detect and track moving vehicles. In fact, vehicle
tracking in daytime and in nighttime cannot be approached with the
same techniques, due to the extreme different illumination conditions.
Consequently, traffic-monitoring systems are in need of having a
component to differentiate between daytime and nighttime scenes. In
this paper, a HSV-based day/night detector is proposed for traffic
monitoring scenes. The detector employs the hue-histogram and the
value-histogram on the top half of the image frame. Experimental
results show that the extraction of the brightness features along with
the color features within the top region of the image is effective for
classifying traffic scenes. In addition, the detector achieves high
precision and recall rates along with it is feasible for real time
applications.
Abstract: In IEEE 802.11 networks, it is well known that the
traditional time-domain contention often leads to low channel
utilization. The first frequency-domain contention scheme, the time to
frequency (T2F), has recently been proposed to improve the channel
utilization and has attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, we
present the latest research progress on the weighed frequency-domain
contention. We compare the basic ideas, work principles of these
related schemes and point out their differences. This paper is very
useful for further study on frequency-domain contention.
Abstract: Fractal based digital image compression is a specific
technique in the field of color image. The method is best suited for
irregular shape of image like snow bobs, clouds, flame of fire; tree
leaves images, depending on the fact that parts of an image often
resemble with other parts of the same image. This technique has
drawn much attention in recent years because of very high
compression ratio that can be achieved. Hybrid scheme incorporating
fractal compression and speedup techniques have achieved high
compression ratio compared to pure fractal compression. Fractal
image compression is a lossy compression method in which selfsimilarity
nature of an image is used. This technique provides high
compression ratio, less encoding time and fart decoding process. In
this paper, fractal compression with quad tree and DCT is proposed
to compress the color image. The proposed hybrid schemes require
four phases to compress the color image. First: the image is
segmented and Discrete Cosine Transform is applied to each block of
the segmented image. Second: the block values are scanned in a
zigzag manner to prevent zero co-efficient. Third: the resulting image
is partitioned as fractals by quadtree approach. Fourth: the image is
compressed using Run length encoding technique.
Abstract: Dietary cholesterol has elicited the most public
interest as it relates with coronary heart disease. Thus, humans have
been paying more attention to health, thereby reducing consumption
of cholesterol enriched food. Egg is considered as one of the major
sources of human dietary cholesterol. However, an alternative way to
reduce the potential cholesterolemic effect of eggs is to modify the
fatty acid composition of the yolk. The effect of palm oil (PO),
soybean oil (SO), sesame seed oil (SSO) and fish oil (FO)
supplementation in the diets of layers on egg yolk fatty acid,
cholesterol, egg production and egg quality parameters were
evaluated in a 42-day feeding trial. One hundred and five Isa Brown
laying hens of 34 weeks of age were randomly distributed into seven
groups of five replicates and three birds per replicate in a completely
randomized design. Seven corn-soybean basal diets (BD) were
formulated: BD+No oil (T1), BD+1.5% PO (T2), BD+1.5% SO (T3),
BD+1.5% SSO (T4), BD+1.5% FO (T5), BD+0.75% SO+0.75% FO
(T6) and BD+0.75% SSO+0.75% FO (T7). Five eggs were randomly
sampled at day 42 from each replicate to assay for the cholesterol,
fatty acid profile of egg yolk and egg quality assessment. Results
showed that there were no significant (P>0.05) differences observed
in production performance, egg cholesterol and egg quality
parameters except for yolk height, albumen height, yolk index, egg
shape index, haugh unit, and yolk colour. There were no significant
differences (P>0.05) observed in total cholesterol, high density
lipoprotein and low density lipoprotein levels of egg yolk across the
treatments. However, diets had effect (P
Abstract: Success means different things for different people.
For us, project managers, it becomes even harder to actually find a
definition. Many factors have to be included in the evaluation.
Moreover, literature is not very helpful, lacking consensus and
neutrality. Post-implementation reviews (PIR) can be an efficient tool
in evaluating how things worked on a certain project. Despite the
visible progress, PIR is not a very detailed subject yet and there is not
common understanding in this matter. This may be the reason that
some organizations include it in the projects’ lifecycle and some do
not. Through this paper, we point out the reasons why all project
managers should pay proper attention to this important step and to the
elements which can be assessed, beside the already famous triple
constraints: cost, budget and time. It is essential to take notice that PIR is not a checklist. It brings the
edge in eliminating subjectivity and judging projects based on actual
proof. Based on our experience, our success indicator model,
presented in this paper, contributes to the success of the project! In
the same time, it increases trust among customers who will perceive
success more objectively.