Abstract: A statistical optimization of the saccharification
process of EFB was studied. The statistical analysis was done by
applying faced centered central composite design (FCCCD) under
response surface methodology (RSM). In this investigation, EFB
dose, enzyme dose and saccharification period was examined, and the
maximum 53.45% (w/w) yield of reducing sugar was found with 4%
(w/v) of EFB, 10% (v/v) of enzyme after 120 hours of incubation. It
can be calculated that the conversion rate of cellulose content of the
substrate is more than 75% (w/w) which can be considered as a
remarkable achievement. All the variables, linear, quadratic and
interaction coefficient, were found to be highly significant, other than
two coefficients, one quadratic and another interaction coefficient.
The coefficient of determination (R2) is 0.9898 that confirms a
satisfactory data and indicated that approximately 98.98% of the
variability in the dependent variable, saccharification of EFB, could
be explained by this model.
Abstract: Behavior of dams against the seismic loads has been
studied by many researchers. Most of them proposed new numerical
methods to investigate the dam safety. In this paper, to study the
effect of nonlinear parameters of concrete in gravity dams, a twodimensional
approach was used including the finite element method,
staggered method and smeared crack approach. Effective parameters
in the models are physical properties of concrete such as modulus of
elasticity, tensile strength and specific fracture energy. Two different
models were used in foundation (mass-less and massed) in order to
determine the seismic response of concrete gravity dams. Results
show that when the nonlinear analysis includes the dam- foundation
interaction, the foundation-s mass, flexibility and radiation damping
are important in gravity dam-s response.
Abstract: Voice Over IP (VoIP) is a technology that could pass
the voice traffic and data packet form over an IP network. Network
can be used for intranet or Internet. Phone calls using VoIP has
advantages in terms of cheaper cost of PSTN phone to more than
half, because the cost is calculated by the cost of the global nature of
the Internet. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol
at the application layer which serves to establish, modify, and
terminate a multimedia session involving one or more users. This SIP
signaling has SIP message in text form that is used for session
management by the SIP components, such as User Agent, Registrar,
Redirect Server, and Proxy Server. To build a SIP communication is
required SIP Express Router (SER) to be able to receive SIP
messages, for handling the basic functions of SIP messages.
Problems occur when the NAT through which affects the voice
communication will be blocked starting from the sound that is not
sent or one side of the sound are sent (half duplex). How that could
be used to penetrate NAT is to use a given mediaproxy random RTP
port to penetrate NAT.
Abstract: This paper describes a rapid prototyping (RP)
technology for forming a hydroxyapatite (HA) bone scaffold model.
The HA powder and a silica sol are mixed into bioceramic slurry form
under a suitable viscosity. The HA particles are embedded in the
solidified silica matrix to form green parts via a wide range of process
parameters after processing by selective laser sintering (SLS). The
results indicate that the proposed process was possible to fabricate
multilayers and hollow shell structure with brittle property but
sufficient integrity for handling prior to post-processing. The
fabricated bone scaffold models had a surface finish of 25
Abstract: The level of visual abilities, language, memory
processes and intellectual functioning development affects the quality
of a written text. The following analysis will present the results of
diagnostic tests indicating the most common criterion for a group and
stating whether a person has been diagnosed with having cognitive
developmental level below the group-s average or not.The study-s
aim is to determine whether there are specific patterns of cognitive
deficits, which can be distinguished among the group of young
people with spelling disorders.
Abstract: The excessive use of agricultural pesticides and the
resulting contamination of food and beds of rivers have been a
recurring problem nowadays. Some of these substances can cause
changes in endocrine balance and impair reproductive function of
human and animal population. In the present study, we evaluated the
possible effects of the fungicide cuprous copper oxide Sandoz® on
pregnant Wistar rats. They received a daily oral administration of 103
or 3.103 mg/kg of the fungicide from the 6th to the 15th day of
gestation. On day 21 of gestation, the maternal and fetal toxicity
parameters and indices were determined. The administration of
cuprous oxide (Copper Sandoz) in Wistar rats, the period of
organogenesis, revealed no evidence of maternal toxicity or embryo
at the studied doses.
Abstract: A trustworthy voting process in democratic is
important that each vote is recorded with accuracy and impartiality.
The accuracy and impartiality are tallied in high rate with biometric
system. One of the sign is a fingerprint. Fingerprint recognition is
still a challenging problem, because of the distortions among the
different impression of the same finger. Because of the trustworthy of
biometric voting technologies, it may give a great effect on numbers
of voter-s participation and outcomes of the democratic process.
Hence in this study, the authors are interested in designing and
analyzing the Electronic Voting System and the participation of the
users. The system is based on the fingerprint minutiae with the
addition of person ID number. This is in order to enhance the
accuracy and speed of the voting process. The new design is analyzed
by conducting pilot election among a class of students for selecting
their representative.
Abstract: Slag sample from copper smelting operation in a
water jacket furnace from DRC plant was used. The study intends to
determine the effect of cooling in the extraction of base metals. The
cooling methods investigated were water quenching, air cooling and
furnace cooling. The latter cooling ways were compared to the
original as received slag. It was observed that, the cooling rate of the
slag affected the leaching of base metals as it changed the phase
distribution in the slag and the base metals distribution within the
phases. It was also found that fast cooling of slag prevented
crystallization and produced an amorphous phase that encloses the
base metals. The amorphous slags from the slag dumps were more
leachable in acidic medium (HNO3) which leached 46%Cu, 95% Co,
85% Zn, 92% Pb and 79% Fe with no selectivity at pH0, than in
basic medium (NH4OH). The leachability was vice versa for the
modified slags by quenching in water which leached 89%Cu with a
high selectivity as metal extractions are less than 1% for Co, Zn, Pb
and Fe at ambient temperature and pH12. For the crystallized slags,
leaching of base metals increased with the increase of temperature
from ambient temperature to 60°C and decreased at the higher
temperature of 80°C due to the evaporation of the ammonia solution
used for basic leaching, the total amounts of base metals that were
leached in slow cooled slags were very low compared to the
quenched slag samples.
Abstract: A high-performance Monte Carlo simulation, which
simultaneously takes diffusion-controlled and chain-length-dependent
bimolecular termination reactions into account, is developed to
simulate atom transfer radical copolymerization of styrene and nbutyl
acrylate. As expected, increasing initial feed fraction of styrene
raises the fraction of styrene-styrene dyads (fAA) and reduces that of
n-butyl acrylate dyads (fBB). The trend of variation in randomness
parameter (fAB) during the copolymerization also varies significantly.
Also, there is a drift in copolymer heterogeneity and the highest drift
occurs in the initial feeds containing lower percentages of styrene, i.e.
20% and 5%.
Abstract: In this paper, we study statistical multiplexing of VBR
video in ATM networks. ATM promises to provide high speed realtime
multi-point to central video transmission for telemedicine
applications in rural hospitals and in emergency medical services.
Video coders are known to produce variable bit rate (VBR) signals
and the effects of aggregating these VBR signals need to be
determined in order to design a telemedicine network infrastructure
capable of carrying these signals. We first model the VBR video
signal and simulate it using a generic continuous-data autoregressive
(AR) scheme. We carry out the queueing analysis by the Fluid
Approximation Model (FAM) and the Markov Modulated Poisson
Process (MMPP). The study has shown a trade off: multiplexing
VBR signals reduces burstiness and improves resource utilization,
however, the buffer size needs to be increased with an associated
economic cost. We also show that the MMPP model and the Fluid
Approximation model fit best, respectively, the cell region and the
burst region. Therefore, a hybrid MMPP and FAM completely
characterizes the overall performance of the ATM statistical
multiplexer. The ramifications of this technology are clear: speed,
reliability (lower loss rate and jitter), and increased capacity in video
transmission for telemedicine. With migration to full IP-based
networks still a long way to achieving both high speed and high
quality of service, the proposed ATM architecture will remain of
significant use for telemedicine.
Abstract: Heavy metal transfer in soil profiles is a major
environmental concern because even slow transport through the soil
may eventually lead to deterioration of groundwater quality. The use
of sewage sludge and effluents from wastewater treatment plants for
irrigation of agricultural lands is on the rise particularly in peri-urban
area of developing countries. In this study soil samples under sludge
application and wastewater irrigation were studied and soil samples
were collected in the soil profiles from the surface to 100 cm in
depth. For this purpose, three plots were made in a treatment plant in
south of Tehran-Iran. First plot was irrigated just with effluent from
wastewater treatment plant, second plot with simulated heavy metals
concentration equal 50 years irrigation and in third plot sewage
sludge and effluent was used. Trace metals concentration (Cd, Cu)
were determined for soil samples. The results indicate movement of
metals was observed, but the most concentration of metals was found
in topsoil samples. The most of Cadmium concentration was
measured in the topsoil of plot 3, 4.5mg/kg and Maximum cadmium
movement was observed in 0-20 cm. The most concentration of
copper was 27.76mg/kg, and maximum percolation in 0-20 cm.
Metals (Cd, Cu) were measured in leached water. Preferential flow
and metal complexation with soluble organic apparently allow
leaching of heavy metals.
Abstract: In this study, static batch fermentation was used for bacterial cellulose production in date syrup solution (Bx. 10%) at 28°C using Gluconacetobacter. xylinus (PTCC 1734). The physicochemical properties of standard Sigma CMC and the produced carboxymethyl bacterial cellulose (CMBC) were studied using FT-IR spectroscopy, X-ray diffractometry (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). According to the FT-IR spectra the bands at 1664 and 1431 cm-1 indicate that carboxylic acid groups and carboxylate groups exist on the surface. The SEM imaging of CMBC and CMC carried out in magnification of 1K. Comparing the SEM imaging obviously showed that the ribbon shape in CMC remained but the length of ribbons became shorter while that shape changed to flake shape for CMBC. Determination of the area under XRD patterns demonstrated that the crystallinity amount of CMC was more than that for CMBC (51.08% and 81.84% for CMBC and CMC, respectively).
Abstract: The African Great Lakes Region refers to the zone
around lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, Albert, Edward, Kivu, and
Malawi. The main source of electricity in this region is hydropower
whose systems are generally characterized by relatively weak,
isolated power schemes, poor maintenance and technical deficiencies
with limited electricity infrastructures. Most of the hydro sources are
rain fed, and as such there is normally a deficiency of water during
the dry seasons and extended droughts. In such calamities fossil fuels
sources, in particular petroleum products and natural gas, are
normally used to rescue the situation but apart from them being nonrenewable,
they also release huge amount of green house gases to our
environment which in turn accelerates the global warming that has at
present reached an amazing stage. Wind power is ample, renewable,
widely distributed, clean, and free energy source that does not
consume or pollute water. Wind generated electricity is one of the
most practical and commercially viable option for grid quality and
utility scale electricity production. However, the main shortcoming
associated with electric wind power generation is fluctuation in its
output both in space and time. Before making a decision to establish
a wind park at a site, the wind speed features there should therefore
be known thoroughly as well as local demand or transmission
capacity. The main objective of this paper is to utilise monthly
average wind speed data collected from one prospective site within
the African Great Lakes Region to demonstrate that the available
wind power there is high enough to generate electricity. The mean
monthly values were calculated from records gathered on hourly
basis for a period of 5 years (2001 to 2005) from a site in Tanzania.
The documentations that were collected at a height of 2 m were
projected to a height of 50 m which is the standard hub height of
wind turbines. The overall monthly average wind speed was found to
be 12.11 m/s whereas June to November was established to be the
windy season as the wind speed during the session is above the
overall monthly wind speed. The available wind power density
corresponding to the overall mean monthly wind speed was evaluated
to be 1072 W/m2, a potential that is worthwhile harvesting for the
purpose of electric generation.
Abstract: The management of the health-care wastes is one of
the most important problems in Istanbul, a city with more than 12
million inhabitants, as it is in most of the developing countries.
Negligence in appropriate treatment and final disposal of the healthcare
wastes can lead to adverse impacts to public health and to the
environment. This paper employs a fuzzy multi-criteria group
decision making approach, which is based on the principles of fusion
of fuzzy information, 2-tuple linguistic representation model, and
technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution
(TOPSIS), to evaluate health-care waste (HCW) treatment
alternatives for Istanbul. The evaluation criteria are determined
employing nominal group technique (NGT), which is a method of
systematically developing a consensus of group opinion. The
employed method is apt to manage information assessed using multigranularity
linguistic information in a decision making problem with
multiple information sources. The decision making framework
employs ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator that
encompasses several operators as the aggregation operator since it
can implement different aggregation rules by changing the order
weights. The aggregation process is based on the unification of
information by means of fuzzy sets on a basic linguistic term set
(BLTS). Then, the unified information is transformed into linguistic
2-tuples in a way to rectify the problem of loss information of other
fuzzy linguistic approaches.
Abstract: Advances in processors architecture, such as multicore,
increase the size of complexity of parallel computer systems.
With multi-core architecture there are different parallel languages
that can be used to run parallel programs. One of these languages is
OpenMP which embedded in C/Cµ or FORTRAN. Because of this
new architecture and the complexity, it is very important to evaluate
the performance of OpenMP constructs, kernels, and application
program on multi-core systems. Performance is the activity of
collecting the information about the execution characteristics of a
program. Performance tools consists of at least three interfacing
software layers, including instrumentation, measurement, and
analysis. The instrumentation layer defines the measured
performance events. The measurement layer determines what
performance event is actually captured and how it is measured by the
tool. The analysis layer processes the performance data and
summarizes it into a form that can be displayed in performance tools.
In this paper, a number of OpenMP performance tools are surveyed,
explaining how each is used to collect, analyse, and display data
collection.
Abstract: A statistical optimization was studied to design a media composition to produce optimum cellulolytic enzyme where palm oil mill effluent (POME) as a basal medium and filamentous fungus, Trichoderma reesei RUT-C30 were used in the liquid state bioconversion(LSB). 2% (w/v) total suspended solid, TSS, of the POME supplemented with 1% (w/v) cellulose, 0.5%(w/v) peptone and 0.02% (v/v) Tween 80 was estimated to produce the optimum CMCase activity of 18.53 U/ml through the statistical analysis followed by the faced centered central composite design(FCCCD). The probability values of cellulose (
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: This work proposes a set of actions to assist redesign
procedure in existing products of Electric and Electronic Equipment
(EEE). The aim is to improve their environmental behavior after their
withdrawal in the End-of-Life (EOL) phase. In the beginning data
collection takes place. Then follows selection and implementation of
the optimal EOL Treatment Strategy (EOL_TS) and its results-
evaluation concerning the environment. In parallel, product design
characteristics that can be altered are selected based on their
significance for the environment in the EOL stage. All results from
the previous stages are combined and possible redesign actions are
formulated for further examination and afterwards configuration in
the design stage. The applied method to perform these tasks is Lean
Thinking (LT). At the end, results concerning the application of the
proposed method on a distribution transformer are presented.
Abstract: Although the Vietnamese catfish farming has grown
at very high rates in recent years, the industry has also faced many
problems affecting its sustainability. This paper studies the
perceptions of catfish farmers regarding risk and risk management
strategies in their production activities. Specifically, the study aims
to measure the consequences, likelihoods, and levels of risks as well
as the efficacy of risk management in Vietnamese catfish farming.
Data for the study were collected through a sample of 261 catfish
farmers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam using a questionnaire survey
in 2008. Results show that, in general, price and production risks
were perceived as the most important risks. Farm management and
technical measures were perceived more effective than other kinds of
risk management strategies in risk reduction. Although price risks
were rated as important risks, price risk management strategies were
not perceived as important measures for risk mitigation. The results
of the study are discussed to provide implications for various
industry stakeholders, including policy makers, processors, advisors,
and developers of new risk management strategies.
Abstract: In today-s competitive market, most companies
develop manufacturing systems that can help in cost reduction and
maximum quality. Human issues are an important part of
manufacturing systems, yet most companies ignore their effects on
production performance. This paper aims to developing an integrated
workforce planning system that incorporates the human being.
Therefore, a multi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming
model is developed to determine the amount of hiring, firing,
training, overtime for each worker type. This paper considers a
workforce planning model including human aspects such as skills,
training, workers- personalities, capacity, motivation, and learning
rates. This model helps to minimize the hiring, firing, training and
overtime costs, and maximize the workers- performance. The results
indicate that the workers- differences should be considered in
workforce scheduling to generate realistic plans with minimum costs.
This paper also investigates the effects of human learning rates on the
performance of the production systems.