Abstract: In order to produce lead free piezoceramics with
optimum piezoelectric and dielectric properties, KNN modified with
Li+ (as an A site dopant) and Sb5+ (as a B site dopant)
(K0.49Na0.49Li0.02) (Nb0.96Sb0.04) O3 (referred as KNLNS in this paper)
have been synthesized using solid state reaction method and
conventional sintering technique. The ceramics were sintered in the
narrow range of 1050°C-1090°C for 2-3 h to get precise information
about sintering parameters. Detailed study of dependence of
microstructural, dielectric and piezoelectric properties on sintering
conditions was then carried out. The study suggests that the volatility
of the highly hygroscopic KNN ceramics is not only sensitive to
sintering temperatures but also to sintering durations. By merely
reducing the sintering duration for a given sintering temperature we
saw an increase in the density of the samples which was supported by
the increase in dielectric constants of the ceramics. And since density
directly or indirectly affects almost all the associated properties, other
dielectric and piezoelectric properties were also enhanced as we
approached towards the most suitable sintering temperature and
duration combination. The detailed results are reported in this paper.
Abstract: This paper is aimed to the use of different types of
industrial wastes in concrete production. From examined waste
(crushed concrete waste) our tested concrete samples with dimension
150 mm were prepared. In these samples, fractions 4/8 mm and 8/16
mm by recycled concrete aggregate with a range of variation from 0
to 100% were replaced. Experiment samples were tested for
compressive strength after 2, 7, 14 and 28 days of hardening.
From obtained results it is evident that all samples prepared with
washed recycled concrete aggregates met the requirement of standard
for compressive strength of 20 MPa already after 14 days of
hardening. Sample prepared with recycled concrete aggregates (4/8
mm: 100% and 8/16 mm: 60%) reached 101% of compressive
strength value (34.7 MPa) after 28 days of hardening in comparison
with the reference sample (34.4 MPa). The lowest strength after 28
days of hardening (27.42 MPa) was obtained for sample consisting of
recycled concrete in proportion of 40% for 4/8 fraction and 100% for
8/16 fraction of recycled concrete.
Abstract: Evolutionary optimization methods such as genetic
algorithms have been used extensively for the construction site layout
problem. More recently, ant colony optimization algorithms, which
are evolutionary methods based on the foraging behavior of ants,
have been successfully applied to benchmark combinatorial
optimization problems. This paper proposes a formulation of the site
layout problem in terms of a sequencing problem that is suitable for
solution using an ant colony optimization algorithm.
In the construction industry, site layout is a very important
planning problem. The objective of site layout is to position
temporary facilities both geographically and at the correct time such
that the construction work can be performed satisfactorily with
minimal costs and improved safety and working environment. During
the last decade, evolutionary methods such as genetic algorithms
have been used extensively for the construction site layout problem.
This paper proposes an ant colony optimization model for
construction site layout. A simple case study for a highway project is
utilized to illustrate the application of the model.
Abstract: Quick adoption of e-business and emerging influence
of “Electronic Word of Mouth e-WOM” communication on guests
made leading hotel brands successful examples of electronic guest
relationship management. Main reasons behind such success are well
established procedures in collection, analysis and usage of highly
valuable data available on the Internet, generated through some form
of e-GRM programme. E-GRM is more than just a technology
solution. It’s a system which balance respective guest demands, hotel
technological capabilities and organizational culture of employees,
discharging the universal approach in guest relations “same for all”.
The purpose of this research derives from the necessity of
determining the importance of monitoring and applying e-WOM
communication as one of the methods used in managing guest
relations. This paper analyses and compares different hotelier’s
opinions on e-WOM communication.
Abstract: This study investigated the behavior of improved soft soils through the vibro replacement technique by considering their settlements and consolidation rates and the applicability of this technique in various types of soils and settlement and bearing capacity calculations.
Abstract: The article represents the results of clinical researches
of composite herbal medicinal product based on essential oils of
Sedum plants growing in Kazakhstan in commercial reserves at the
territory of Kazakhstan. The results of comparative analysis are
represented in obstetric-gynecologic practice during combined
therapy for postnatal complications, inflammatory infiltrates in the
area of surgical wounds including wounds after caesarean section.
Abstract: An efficient remanufacturing network lead to an
efficient design of sustainable manufacturing enterprise. In
remanufacturing network, products are collected from the customer
zone, disassembled and remanufactured at a suitable remanufacturing
facility. In this respect, another issue to consider is how the returned
product to be remanufactured, in other words, what is the best layout
for such facility. In order to achieve a sustainable manufacturing
system, Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) designs are highly
recommended, CMSs combine high throughput rates of line layouts
with the flexibility offered by functional layouts (job shop).
Introducing the CMS while designing a remanufacturing network will
benefit the utilization of such a network. This paper presents and
analyzes a comprehensive mathematical model for the design of
Dynamic Cellular Remanufacturing Systems (DCRSs). In this paper,
the proposed model is the first one to date that considers CMS and
remanufacturing system simultaneously. The proposed DCRS model
considers several manufacturing attributes such as multi period
production planning, dynamic system reconfiguration, duplicate
machines, machine capacity, available time for workers, worker
assignments, and machine procurement, where the demand is totally
satisfied from a returned product. A numerical example is presented
to illustrate the proposed model.
Abstract: Hypersonic flows around spatial vehicles during their reentry phase in planetary atmospheres are characterized by intense aerothermodynamics phenomena. The aim of this work is to analyze high temperature flows around an axisymmetric blunt body taking into account chemical and vibrational non-equilibrium for air mixture species and the no slip condition at the wall. For this purpose, the Navier-Stokes equations system is resolved by the finite volume methodology to determine the flow parameters around the axisymmetric blunt body especially at the stagnation point and in the boundary layer along the wall of the blunt body. The code allows the capture of shock wave before a blunt body placed in hypersonic free stream. The numerical technique uses the Flux Vector Splitting method of Van Leer. CFL coefficient and mesh size level are selected to ensure the numerical convergence.
Abstract: This paper presents the development of a robot car
that can track the motion of an object by detecting its color through
an Android device. The employed computer vision algorithm uses the
OpenCV library, which is embedded into an Android application of a
smartphone, for manipulating the captured image of the object. The
captured image of the object is subjected to color conversion and is
transformed to a binary image for further processing after color
filtering. The desired object is clearly determined after removing
pixel noise by applying image morphology operations and contour
definition. Finally, the area and the center of the object are
determined so that object’s motion to be tracked. The smartphone
application has been placed on a robot car and transmits by Bluetooth
to an Arduino assembly the motion directives so that to follow
objects of a specified color. The experimental evaluation of the
proposed algorithm shows reliable color detection and smooth
tracking characteristics.
Abstract: Failure of typical seismic frames has been found by
plastic hinge occurring on beams section near column faces. On the
other hand, the seismic capacity of the frames can be enhanced if the
plastic hinges of the beams are shifted away from the column faces.
This paper presents detailing of reinforcements in the interior beam–
column connections aiming to relocate the plastic hinge of reinforced
concrete and precast concrete frames. Four specimens were tested
under quasi-static cyclic load including two monolithic specimens
and two precast specimens. For one monolithic specimen, typical
seismic reinforcement was provided and considered as a reference
specimen named M1. The other reinforced concrete frame M2
contained additional intermediate steel in the connection area
compared with the specimen M1. For the precast specimens,
embedded T-section steels in joint were provided, with and without
diagonal bars in the connection area for specimen P1 and P2,
respectively. The test results indicated the ductile failure with beam
flexural failure in monolithic specimen M1 and the intermediate steel
increased strength and improved joint performance of specimen M2.
For the precast specimens, cracks generated at the end of the steel
inserts. However, slipping of reinforcing steel lapped in top of the
beams was seen before yielding of the main bars leading to the brittle
failure. The diagonal bars in precast specimens P2 improved the
connection stiffness and the energy dissipation capacity.
Abstract: With the growing of computer and network, digital
data can be spread to anywhere in the world quickly. In addition,
digital data can also be copied or tampered easily so that the security
issue becomes an important topic in the protection of digital data.
Digital watermark is a method to protect the ownership of digital data.
Embedding the watermark will influence the quality certainly. In this
paper, Vector Quantization (VQ) is used to embed the watermark into
the image to fulfill the goal of data hiding. This kind of watermarking
is invisible which means that the users will not conscious the existing
of embedded watermark even though the embedded image has tiny
difference compared to the original image. Meanwhile, VQ needs a lot
of computation burden so that we adopt a fast VQ encoding scheme by
partial distortion searching (PDS) and mean approximation scheme to
speed up the data hiding process.
The watermarks we hide to the image could be gray, bi-level and
color images. Texts are also can be regarded as watermark to embed.
In order to test the robustness of the system, we adopt Photoshop to
fulfill sharpen, cropping and altering to check if the extracted
watermark is still recognizable. Experimental results demonstrate that
the proposed system can resist the above three kinds of tampering in
general cases.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: OPEN_EmoRec_II is an open multimodal corpus with
experimentally induced emotions. In the first half of the experiment,
emotions were induced with standardized picture material and in the
second half during a human-computer interaction (HCI), realized
with a wizard-of-oz design. The induced emotions are based on the
dimensional theory of emotions (valence, arousal and dominance).
These emotional sequences - recorded with multimodal data (facial
reactions, speech, audio and physiological reactions) during a
naturalistic-like HCI-environment one can improve classification
methods on a multimodal level.
This database is the result of an HCI-experiment, for which 30
subjects in total agreed to a publication of their data including the
video material for research purposes*. The now available open
corpus contains sensory signal of: video, audio, physiology (SCL,
respiration, BVP, EMG Corrugator supercilii, EMG Zygomaticus
Major) and facial reactions annotations.
Abstract: In order to avoid self-collision of space manipulators
during operation process, a real-time detection method is proposed in
this paper. The manipulator is fitted into a cylinder-enveloping
surface, and then, a kind of detection algorithm of collision between
cylinders is analyzed. The collision model of space manipulator
self-links can be detected by using this algorithm in real-time detection
during the operation process. To ensure security of the operation, a
safety threshold is designed. The simulation and experiment results
verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for a 7-DOF space
manipulator.
Abstract: Rehabilitation of dam components such as foundations, buttresses, spillways and overtopping protection require a wide range of construction and design methodologies. Geotechnical Engineering considerations play an important role in the design and construction of foundations of new dams. Much investigation is required to assess and evaluate the existing dams. The application of roller compacting concrete (RCC) has been accepted as a new method for constructing new dams or rehabilitating old ones. In the past 40 years there have been so many changes in the usage of RCC and now it is one of most satisfactory solutions of water and hydropower resource throughout the world. The considerations of rehabilitation and construction of dams might differ due to upstream reservoir and its influence on penetrating and dewatering of downstream, operations requirements and plant layout. One of the advantages of RCC is its rapid placement which allows the dam to be operated quickly. Unlike ordinary concrete it is a drier mix, and stiffs enough for compacting by vibratory rollers. This paper evaluates some different aspects of RCC and focuses on its preparation progress.
Abstract: An adaptive nonparametric method is proposed for
stable real-time detection of seismoacoustic sources in multichannel
C-OTDR systems with a significant number of channels. This
method guarantees given upper boundaries for probabilities of Type I
and Type II errors. Properties of the proposed method are rigorously
proved. The results of practical applications of the proposed method
in a real C-OTDR-system are presented in this report.
Abstract: Agro-industry is one of major industries that have
strong impacts on national economic incomes, growth, stability, and
sustainable development. Moreover, this industry also has strong
influences on social, cultural and political issues. Furthermore, this
industry, as producing primary and secondary products, is facing
challenges from such diverse factors such as demand inconsistency,
intense international competition, technological advancements and
new competitors. In order to maintain and to improve industry’s
competitiveness in both domestics and international markets, science
and technology are key factors. Besides hard sciences and
technologies, modern industrial engineering concepts such as Just in
Time (JIT) Total Quality Management (TQM), Quick Response
(QR), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Lean can be very
effective to support to increase efficiency and effectiveness of these
agricultural products on world stage. Onion is one of Thailand’s
major export products which bring back national incomes. But, it is
also facing challenges in many ways. This paper focused its interests
in onion packing process and its related activities such as storage and
shipment from one of major packing plant and storage in Mae Wang
District, Chiang Mai, Thailand, by applying Toyota Production
System (TPS) or Lean concepts, to improve process capability
throughout the entire packing and distribution process which will be
profitable for the whole onion supply chain. And it will be beneficial
to other related agricultural products in Thailand and other ASEAN
countries.
Abstract: Roadway planning and design is a very complex
process involving five key phases before a project is completed;
planning, project development, final design, right-of-way, and
construction. The planning phase for a new roadway transportation
project is a very critical phase as it greatly affects all latter phases of
the project. A location study is usually performed during the
preliminary planning phase in a new roadway project. The objective
of the location study is to develop alignment alternatives that are cost
efficient considering land acquisition and construction costs. This
paper describes a methodology to develop optimal preliminary
roadway alignments utilizing spatial-data. Four optimization criteria
are taken into consideration; roadway length, land cost, land slope,
and environmental impacts. The basic concept of the methodology is
to convert the proposed project area into a grid, which represents the
search space for an optimal alignment. The aforementioned
optimization criteria are represented in each of the grid’s cells. A
spatial-data optimization technique is utilized to find the optimal
alignment in the search space based on the four optimization criteria.
Two case studies for new roadway projects in Duval County in the
State of Florida are presented to illustrate the methodology. The
optimization output alignments are compared to the proposed Florida
Department of Transportation (FDOT) alignments. The comparison is
based on right-of-way costs for the alignments. For both case studies,
the right-of-way costs for the developed optimal alignments were
found to be significantly lower than the FDOT alignments.
Abstract: The article presents two mathematical models of the
interaction between a rotating shaft and an incompressible fluid. The
mathematical model includes both the journal bearings and the
axially traversed hydrodynamic sealing gaps of hydraulic machines.
A method is shown for the identification of additional effects of the
fluid acting on the rotor of the machine, both for a linear and a nonlinear
model. The interaction is expressed by matrices of mass,
stiffness and damping.
Abstract: In this paper, an analytical simplified method for
calculating elasto-plastic stresses strains of notched bodies subject to
non-proportional loading paths is discussed. The method was based
on the Neuber notch correction, which relates the incremental elastic
and elastic-plastic strain energy densities at the notch root and the
material constitutive relationship. The validity of the method was
presented by comparing computed results of the proposed model
against finite element numerical data of notched shaft. The
comparison showed that the model estimated notch-root elasto-plastic
stresses strains with good accuracy using linear-elastic stresses. The
prosed model provides more efficient and simple analysis method
preferable to expensive experimental component tests and more
complex and time consuming incremental non-linear FE analysis.
The model is particularly suitable to perform fatigue life and fatigue
damage estimates of notched components subjected to nonproportional
loading paths.