Abstract: Problems insulation of building structures is often
closely connected with the problem of moisture remediation. In the
case of historic buildings or if only part of the redevelopment of
envelope of structures, it is not possible to apply the classical external
thermal insulation composite systems. This application is mostly
effective thermal insulation plasters with high porosity and controlled
capillary properties which assures improvement of thermal properties
construction, its diffusion openness towards the external environment
and suitable treatment capillary properties of preventing the
penetration of liquid moisture and salts thereof toward the outer
surface of the structure.
With respect to the current trend of reducing the energy
consumption of building structures and reduce the production of CO2
is necessary to develop capillary-active materials characterized by
their low density, low thermal conductivity while maintaining good
mechanical properties. The aim of researchers at the Faculty of Civil
Engineering, Brno University of Technology is the development and
study of hygrothermal behaviour of optimal materials for thermal
insulation and rehabilitation of building structures with the possible
use of alternative, less energy demanding binders in comparison with
conventional, frequently used binder, which represents cement.
The paper describes the evaluation of research activities aimed at
the development of thermal insulation and repair materials using
lightweight aggregate and alternative binders such as metakaolin and
finely ground fly ash.
Abstract: The introduction of degradable plastic materials into
agricultural sectors has represented a promising alternative to
promote green agriculture and environmental friendly of modern
farming practices. Major challenges of developing degradable
agricultural films are to identify the most feasible types of
degradation mechanisms, composition of degradable polymers and
related processing techniques. The incorrect choice of degradable
mechanisms to be applied during the degradation process will cause
premature losses of mechanical performance and strength. In order to
achieve controlled process of agricultural film degradation, the
compositions of degradable agricultural film also important in order
to stimulate degradation reaction at required interval of time and to
achieve sustainability of the modern agricultural practices. A set of
photodegradable polyethylene based agricultural film was developed
and produced, following the selective optimization of processing
parameters of the agricultural film manufacturing system. Example of
agricultural films application for oil palm seedlings cultivation is
presented.
Abstract: Phelipanche ramosa is the most damaging obligate
flowering parasitic weed on wide species of cultivated plants. The
semi-arid regions of the world are considered the main centers of this
parasitic plant that causes heavy infestation. This is due to its
production of high numbers of seeds (up to 200,000) that remain
viable for extended periods (up to 20 years). In this study, 13
treatments for the control of Phelipanche were carried out, which
included agronomic, chemical, and biological treatments and the use
of resistant plant methods. In 2014, a trial was performed at the
Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment, University of
Foggia (southern Italy), on processing tomato (cv ‘Docet’) grown in
pots filled with soil taken from a field that was heavily infested by P.
ramosa). The tomato seedlings were transplanted on May 8, 2014,
into a sandy-clay soil (USDA). A randomized block design with 3
replicates (pots) was adopted. During the growing cycle of the
tomato, at 70, 75, 81 and 88 days after transplantation, the number of
P. ramosa shoots emerged in each pot was determined. The tomato
fruit were harvested on August 8, 2014, and the quantitative and
qualitative parameters were determined. All of the data were
subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) using the JMP software
(SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA), and for comparisons of means
(Tukey's tests). The data show that each treatment studied did not
provide complete control against P. ramosa. However, the virulence
of the attacks was mitigated by some of the treatments tried: radicon
biostimulant, compost activated with Fusarium, mineral fertilizer
nitrogen, sulfur, enzone, and the resistant tomato genotype. It is
assumed that these effects can be improved by combining some of
these treatments with each other, especially for a gradual and
continuing reduction of the “seed bank” of the parasite in the soil.
Abstract: The problem of toughening in brittle materials
reinforced by fibers is complex, involving all of the mechanical
properties of fibers, matrix and the fiber/matrix interface, as well as
the geometry of the fiber. Development of new numerical methods
appropriate to toughening simulation and analysis is necessary. In
this work, we have performed simulations and analysis of toughening
in brittle matrix reinforced by randomly distributed fibers by means
of the discrete elements method. At first, we put forward a
mechanical model of toughening contributed by random fibers. Then
with a numerical program, we investigated the stress, damage and
bridging force in the composite material when a crack appeared in the
brittle matrix. From the results obtained, we conclude that: (i) fibers
of high strength and low elasticity modulus are beneficial to
toughening; (ii) fibers of relatively high elastic modulus compared to
the matrix may result in substantial matrix damage due to spalling
effect; (iii) employment of high-strength synthetic fibers is a good
option for toughening. We expect that the combination of the discrete
element method (DEM) with the finite element method (FEM) can
increase the versatility and efficiency of the software developed. The
present work can guide the design of ceramic composites of high
performance through the optimization of the parameters.
Abstract: Experimental study on slicing of sapphire with fixed
abrasive diamond wire saw was conducted in this paper. The process
parameters were optimized through orthogonal experiment of three
factors and four levels. The effects of wire speed, feed speed and
tension pressure on the surface roughness were analyzed. Surface
roughness in cutting direction and feed direction were both detected.
The results show that feed speed plays the most significant role on the
surface roughness of sliced sapphire followed by wire speed and
tension pressure. The optimized process parameters are as follows:
wire speed 1.9 m/s, feed speed 0.187 mm/min and tension pressure
0.18 MPa. In the end, the results were verified by analysis of variance.
Abstract: Fixed-geometry hydrodynamic journal bearings are
one of the best supporting systems for several applications of rotating
machinery. Cylindrical journal bearings present excellent loadcarrying
capacity and low manufacturing costs, but they are subjected
to the oil-film instability at high speeds. An attempt of overcoming
this instability problem has been the development of non-circular
journal bearings. This work deals with an analysis of oil-lubricated
elliptical journal bearings using the finite element method. Steadystate
and dynamic performance characteristics of elliptical bearings
are rendered by zeroth- and first-order lubrication equations obtained
through a linearized perturbation method applied on the classical
Reynolds equation. Four-node isoparametric rectangular finite
elements are employed to model the bearing thin film flow. Curves of
elliptical bearing load capacity and dynamic force coefficients are
rendered at several operating conditions. The results presented in this
work demonstrate the influence of the bearing ellipticity on its
performance at different loading conditions.
Abstract: The construction industry has been demonstrating
increased growth and importance in Brazil’s national economic
development. This study aims to evaluate the financial performance
of the leading companies in the construction sector in Brazil in the
period from 2009 to 2012. An analysis is made of the capital
structure, liquidity, and profitability of the six largest companies in
the construction sector in Brazil: Brookfield, Cyrela, Gafisa, MRV,
PDG and Rossi. The results are then compared with standard industry
ratios. It was found that among the companies analyzed, MRV and
Cyrela showed the best relative performance in the period under
consideration.
Abstract: This exploratory study gives an overview of the
evolution of the main financial and performance indicators of the
Academic Spin-Off’s and High Growth Academic Spin-Off’s in year
3 and year 6 after its creation in the region of Catalonia in Spain. The
study compares and evaluates results of these different measures of
performance and the degree of success of these companies for each
University.
We found that the average Catalonian Academic Spin-Off is small
and have not achieved the sustainability stage at year 6. On the
contrary, a small group of High Growth Academic Spin-Off’s
exhibits robust performance with high profits in year 6. Our results
support the need to increase selectivity and support for these
companies especially near year 3, because are the ones that will bring
wealth and employment. University role as an investor has rigid
norms and habits that impede an efficient economic return from their
ASO investment.
Universities with high performance on sales and employment in
year 3 not always could sustain this growth in year 6 because their
ASO’s are not profitable. On the contrary, profitable ASO exhibit
superior performance in all measurement indicators in year 6. We
advocate the need of a balanced growth (with profits) as a way to
obtain subsequent continuous growth.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduced a gradient-based inverse
solver to obtain the missing boundary conditions based on the
readings of internal thermocouples. The results show that the method
is very sensitive to measurement errors, and becomes unstable when
small time steps are used. The artificial neural networks are shown to
be capable of capturing the whole thermal history on the run-out
table, but are not very effective in restoring the detailed behavior of
the boundary conditions. Also, they behave poorly in nonlinear cases
and where the boundary condition profile is different.
GA and PSO are more effective in finding a detailed
representation of the time-varying boundary conditions, as well as in
nonlinear cases. However, their convergence takes longer. A
variation of the basic PSO, called CRPSO, showed the best
performance among the three versions. Also, PSO proved to be
effective in handling noisy data, especially when its performance
parameters were tuned. An increase in the self-confidence parameter
was also found to be effective, as it increased the global search
capabilities of the algorithm. RPSO was the most effective variation
in dealing with noise, closely followed by CRPSO. The latter
variation is recommended for inverse heat conduction problems, as it
combines the efficiency and effectiveness required by these
problems.
Abstract: Rice husk and kenaf filled with calcium carbonate
(CaCO3) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) composite were
prepared separately using twin-screw extruder at 50rpm. Different
filler loading up to 30 parts of rice husk particulate and kenaf fiber
were mixed with the fixed 30% amount of CaCO3 mineral filler to
produce rice husk/CaCO3/HDPE and kenaf/CaCO3/HDPE hybrid
composites. In this study, the effects of natural fiber for both rice
husk and kenaf in CaCO3/HDPE composite on physical, mechanical
and morphology properties were investigated. Field Emission
Scanning Microscope (FeSEM) was used to investigate the impact
fracture surfaces of the hybrid composite. The property analyses
showed that water absorption increased with the presence of kenaf
and rice husk fillers. Natural fibers in composite significantly
influence water absorption properties due to natural characters of
fibers which contain cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin structures.
The result showed that 10% of additional natural fibers into hybrid
composite had caused decreased flexural strength, however additional
of high natural fiber (>10%) filler loading has proved to increase its
flexural strength.
Abstract: A model was constructed to predict the amount of
solar radiation that will make contact with the surface of the earth in
a given location an hour into the future. This project was supported
by the Southern Company to determine at what specific times during
a given day of the year solar panels could be relied upon to produce
energy in sufficient quantities. Due to their ability as universal
function approximators, an artificial neural network was used to
estimate the nonlinear pattern of solar radiation, which utilized
measurements of weather conditions collected at the Griffin, Georgia
weather station as inputs. A number of network configurations and
training strategies were utilized, though a multilayer perceptron with
a variety of hidden nodes trained with the resilient propagation
algorithm consistently yielded the most accurate predictions. In
addition, a modeled direct normal irradiance field and adjacent
weather station data were used to bolster prediction accuracy. In later
trials, the solar radiation field was preprocessed with a discrete
wavelet transform with the aim of removing noise from the
measurements. The current model provides predictions of solar
radiation with a mean square error of 0.0042, though ongoing efforts
are being made to further improve the model’s accuracy.
Abstract: In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
model has been developed for studying the effect of surface
roughness profile on the EHL problem. The cylinders contact
geometry, meshing and calculation of the conservation of mass and
momentum equations are carried out using the commercial software
packages ICEMCFD and ANSYS Fluent. The user defined functions
(UDFs) for density, viscosity and elastic deformation of the cylinders
as the functions of pressure and temperature are defined for the CFD
model. Three different surface roughness profiles are created and
incorporated into the CFD model. It is found that the developed CFD
model can predict the characteristics of fluid flow and heat transfer in
the EHL problem, including the main parameters such as pressure
distribution, minimal film thickness, viscosity, and density changes.
The results obtained show that the pressure profile at the center of the
contact area directly relates to the roughness amplitude. A rough
surface with kurtosis value of more than 3 has greater influence over
the fluctuated shape of pressure distribution than in other cases.
Abstract: Traditional document representation for classification
follows Bag of Words (BoW) approach to represent the term weights.
The conventional method uses the Vector Space Model (VSM) to
exploit the statistical information of terms in the documents and they
fail to address the semantic information as well as order of the terms
present in the documents. Although, the phrase based approach
follows the order of the terms present in the documents rather than
semantics behind the word. Therefore, a semantic concept based
approach is used in this paper for enhancing the semantics by
incorporating the ontology information. In this paper a novel method
is proposed to forecast the intraday stock market price directional
movement based on the sentiments from Twitter and money control
news articles. The stock market forecasting is a very difficult and
highly complicated task because it is affected by many factors such
as economic conditions, political events and investor’s sentiment etc.
The stock market series are generally dynamic, nonparametric, noisy
and chaotic by nature. The sentiment analysis along with wisdom of
crowds can automatically compute the collective intelligence of
future performance in many areas like stock market, box office sales
and election outcomes. The proposed method utilizes collective
sentiments for stock market to predict the stock price directional
movements. The collective sentiments in the above social media have
powerful prediction on the stock price directional movements as
up/down by using Granger Causality test.
Abstract: These days customer satisfaction plays vital role in
any business. When customer searches for a product, significantly a
junk of irrelevant information is what is given, leading to customer
dissatisfaction. To provide exactly relevant information on the
searched product, we are proposing a model of KaaS (Knowledge as
a Service), which pre-processes the information using decision
making paradigm using Multi-agents.
Information obtained from various sources is taken to derive
knowledge and they are linked to Cloud to capture new idea. The
main focus of this work is to acquire relevant information
(knowledge) related to product, then convert this knowledge into a
service for customer satisfaction and deploy on cloud.
For achieving these objectives we are have opted to use multi
agents. They are communicating and interacting with each other,
manipulate information, provide knowledge, to take decisions. The
paper discusses about KaaS as an intelligent approach for Knowledge
acquisition.
Abstract: This paper describes an Action Research project
which was undertaken to inform professional practice in order to
develop a newly created Centre for Student Success in the specific
context of transnational medical and nursing education in the Middle
East. The objectives were to enhance the academic performance,
persistence, integration and personal and professional development of
a multinational study body, in particular in relation to pre-clinical
medical students, and to establish a comfortable, friendly and
student-driven environment within an Irish medical university
recently established in Bahrain. The outcomes of the project resulted
in the development of a specific student success ‘signature’ for this
particular transnational higher education context.
Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to determine the
applicability of the constitutional social rights in the so-called
horizontal relations, i.e. the relations between private entities.
Nowadays the constitutional rights are more and more often violated
by private entities and not only by the state. The private entities
interfere with the privacy of individuals, limit their freedom of
expression or disturb their peaceful gatherings. International
corporations subordinate individuals in a way which may limit their
constitutional rights. These new realities determine the new role of
the constitution in protecting human rights.
The paper will aim at answering two important questions. Firstly,
are the private entities obliged to respect the constitutional social
rights of other private entities and can they be liable for violation of
these rights? Secondly, how the constitutional social rights can
receive horizontal effect? Answers to these questions will have a
significant meaning for the popularisation of the practice of applying
the Constitution among the citizens as well as for the courts which
settle disputes between them.
Abstract: Parabolic solar trough systems have seen limited
deployments in cold northern climates as they are more suitable for
electricity production in southern latitudes. A numerical dynamic
model is developed to simulate troughs installed in cold climates and
validated using a parabolic solar trough facility in Winnipeg. The
model is developed in Simulink and will be utilized to simulate a trigeneration
system for heating, cooling and electricity generation in
remote northern communities. The main objective of this simulation
is to obtain operational data of solar troughs in cold climates and use
the model to determine ways to improve the economics and address
cold weather issues.
In this paper the validated Simulink model is applied to simulate a
solar assisted absorption cooling system along with electricity
generation using Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and thermal storage.
A control strategy is employed to distribute the heated oil from solar
collectors among the above three systems considering the
temperature requirements. This modelling provides dynamic
performance results using measured meteorological data recorded
every minute at the solar facility location. The purpose of this
modeling approach is to accurately predict system performance at
each time step considering the solar radiation fluctuations due to
passing clouds. Optimization of the controller in cold temperatures is
another goal of the simulation to for example minimize heat losses in
winter when energy demand is high and solar resources are low.
The solar absorption cooling is modeled to use the generated heat
from the solar trough system and provide cooling in summer for a
greenhouse which is located next to the solar field.
The results of the simulation are presented for a summer day in
Winnipeg which includes comparison of performance parameters of
the absorption cooling and ORC systems at different heat transfer
fluid (HTF) temperatures.
Abstract: In this paper, the exergy analysis of vapor absorption
refrigeration system using LiBr-H2O as working fluid is carried out
with the modified Gouy-Stodola approach rather than the classical
Gouy-Stodola equation and effect of varying input parameters is also
studied on the performance of the system. As the modified approach
uses the concept of effective temperature, the mathematical
expressions for effective temperature have been formulated and
calculated for each component of the system. Various constraints and
equations are used to develop program in EES to solve these
equations. The main aim of this analysis is to determine the
performance of the system and the components having major
irreversible loss. Results show that exergy destruction rate is
considerable in absorber and generator followed by evaporator and
condenser. There is an increase in exergy destruction in generator,
absorber and condenser and decrease in the evaporator by the
modified approach as compared to the conventional approach. The
value of exergy determined by the modified Gouy-Stodola equation
deviates maximum i.e. 26% in the generator as compared to the
exergy calculated by the classical Gouy-Stodola method.
Abstract: Essential oils have a significant antimicrobial activity.
These oils can successfully replace the antibiotics. So, the
microorganisms show their inefficiencies resistant for the antibiotics.
For this reason, we study the physicochemical analysis and
antimicrobial activity of the essential oil of Daucus carota. The
extraction is done by steam distillation of water which brought us a
very significant return of 4.65%. The analysis of the essential oil is
performed by GC / MS and has allowed us to identify 32 compounds
in the oil of D. carota flowering tops of Bouira. Three of which are in
the majority are the α-Pinene (22.3%), the carotol (21.7%) and the
limonene (15.8%).
Abstract: Cloud computing is a new technology in industry and
academia. The technology has grown and matured in last half decade
and proven their significant role in changing environment of IT
infrastructure where cloud services and resources are offered over the
network. Cloud technology enables users to use services and
resources without being concerned about the technical implications of
technology. There are substantial research work has been performed
for the usage of cloud computing in educational institutes and
majority of them provides cloud services over high-end blade servers
or other high-end CPUs. However, this paper proposes a new stack
called “CiCKAStack” which provide cloud services over unutilized
computing resources, named as commodity computers.
“CiCKAStack” provides IaaS and PaaS using underlying commodity
computers. This will not only increasing the utilization of existing
computing resources but also provide organize file system, on
demand computing resource and design and development
environment.