Abstract: Curing of paints by exposure to UV radiations is
emerging as one of the best film forming technique as an alternative
to traditional solvent borne oxidative and thermal curing coatings.
The composition and chemistry of UV curable coatings and role of
multifunctional and monofunctional monomers, oligomers, and
photoinitiators have been discussed. The limitations imposed by
thermodynamic equilibrium and tendency for acrylic double bond
polymerizations during synthesis of multifunctional acrylates have
been presented. Aim of present investigation was thus to explore the
reaction variables associated with synthesis of multifunctional
acrylates. Zirconium oxychloride was evaluated as catalyst against
regular acid functional catalyst. The catalyzed synthesis of glyceryl
acrylate and neopentyl glycol acrylate was conducted by variation of
following reaction parameters: two different reactant molar ratios-
1:4 and 1:6; catalyst usage in % by moles on polyol- 2.5, 5.0 and 7.5
and two different reaction temperatures- 45 and 75 0C. The reaction
was monitored by determination of acid value and hydroxy value at
regular intervals, besides TLC, HPLC, and FTIR analysis of
intermediates and products. On the basis of determination of reaction
progress over 1-60 hrs, the esterification reaction was observed to
follow 2nd order kinetics with rate constant varying from 1*10-4 to
7*10-4. The thermal and catalytic components of second order rate
constant and energy of activation were also determined. Uses of
these kinetic and thermodynamic parameters in design of reactor for
manufacture of multifunctional acrylate ester have been presented.
The synthesized multifunctional acrylates were used to formulate and
apply UV curable clear coat followed by determination of curing
characteristics and mechanical properties of cured film. The overall
curing rates less than 05 min. were easily attained indicating
economical viability of radiation curable system due to faster
production schedules
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a recreational workout program for adults with disabilities over two semesters. This investigation was an action study conducted in a naturalistic setting. Participants included equal numbers of adults with severe cognitive impairments (n = 35) and adults without disabilities (n = 35). Adults with disabilities severe cognitive impairments were trained 6 self-initiated workout activities over two semesters by adults without disabilities. The numbers of task-analyzed steps of each activity performed correctly by each participant at the first and last weeks of each semester were used for data analysis. Results of the paired t-tests indicate that across two semesters, significant differences between the first and last weeks were found on 4 out of the 6 task-analyzed workout activities at a statistical level of significance p < .05. The recreational workout program developed in this study was effective.
Abstract: In this work we report on preliminary analysis of a novel optoelectronic gas sensor based on an optical fiber integrated with a tetrakis(4-sulfonatophenyl)porphyrin (TPPS) thin film. The sensitive materials are selectively deposited on the core region of a fiber tip by UV light induced deposition technique. A simple and cheap process which can be easily extended to different porphyrin derivatives. When the TPPS film on the fiber tip is exposed to acid and/or base vapors, dramatic changes occur in the aggregation structure of the dye molecules in the film, from J- to H-type, resulting in a profound modification of their corresponding reflectance spectra. From the achieved experimental results it is evident that the presence of intense and narrow band peaks in the reflected spectra could be monitored to detect hazardous vapors.
Abstract: A dynamic software risk assessment model is
presented. Analogies between dynamic financial analysis and
software risk assessment models are established and based on these
analogies it suggested that dynamic risk model for software projects
is the way to move forward for the risk assessment of software
project. It is shown how software risk assessment change during
different phases of a software project and hence requires a dynamic
risk assessment model to capture these variations. Further evolution
of dynamic financial analysis models is discussed and mapped to the
evolution of software risk assessment models.
Abstract: Lacking an inherent “natural" dissimilarity measure
between objects in categorical dataset presents special difficulties in
clustering analysis. However, each categorical attributes from a given
dataset provides natural probability and information in the sense of
Shannon. In this paper, we proposed a novel method which
heuristically converts categorical attributes to numerical values by
exploiting such associated information. We conduct an experimental
study with real-life categorical dataset. The experiment demonstrates
the effectiveness of our approach.
Abstract: This paper investigates the influence of various
parameters on the behaviour of water droplets on polymeric surfaces
under high electric fields. An inclined plane test was carried out to
understand the droplet behaviour in strong electric field. Parameters
such as water droplet conductivity, droplet volume, polymeric
surface roughness and droplet positioning with respect to the
electrodes were studied. The flashover voltage is affected by all
aforementioned parameters. The droplet positioning is in some cases
more vital than the droplet volume. Surface damages were analysed
using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) studies and by Energy
dispersive X-ray Analysis (EDAX). It is observes that magnitude of
discharge have direct influence on amount of surface da
Abstract: Inspired by the recent experiments [1]-[3] indicating
unusual doubly magic nucleus 24O which lies just at the neutron
drip-line and encouraged by the success of our relativistic mean-field
(RMF) plus state dependent BCS approach for the description of
the ground state properties of the drip-line nuclei [23]-[27], we have
further employed this approach, across the entire periodic table, to
explore the unusual shell closures in exotic nuclei. In our RMF+BCS
approach the single particle continuum corresponding to the RMF is
replaced by a set of discrete positive energy states for the calculations
of pairing energy. Detailed analysis of the single particle spectrum,
pairing energies and densities of the nuclei predict the unusual proton
shell closures at Z = 6, 14, 16, 34, and unusual neutron shell closures
at N = 6, 14, 16, 34, 40, 70, 112.
Abstract: In the fifteenth century, the Malacca Empire emerged
as the centre of Islamic civilization in the Malay Archipelago. The
history had been recorded in Sulalat Al-Salatin, an important literary
source about the genealogy of all Kings in Malacca. The objective of
this study was to analyze the understanding of sayings from Prophet
Muhammad among Malays in Malacca during the fifteenth century
through all of the hadith quoted in Sulalat Al-Salatin. This study used
content analysis methodology to validate the sayings where all of
them were critically analyzed and compared with the classical hadith
sources from prominent Muslim scholars. As a result, only two out of
the four quotations were considered as authentic sayings of Prophet
Muhammad. This study also showed the importance of the palace as
the centre of the Islamic education system and the role played by
Muslim preachers from outside of Malacca to propagate Islam in
Malacca.
Abstract: Network on a chip (NoC) has been proposed as a viable solution to counter the inefficiency of buses in the current VLSI on-chip interconnects. However, as the silicon chip accommodates more transistors, the probability of transient faults is increasing, making fault tolerance a key concern in scaling chips. In packet based communication on a chip, transient failures can corrupt the data packet and hence, undermine the accuracy of data communication. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of transient fault tolerant techniques including end-to-end, node-by-node, and stochastic communication based on flooding principle.
Abstract: In this paper, half bridge DC-DC converters with
transformer isolation presented in the literature are analyzed for highcurrent
and low-voltage applications under the same operation
conditions, and compared in terms of losses and efficiency. The
conventional and improved half-bridge DC-DC converters are
simulated, and current and voltage waveforms are obtained for input
voltage Vdc=500V, output current IO=450A, output voltage VO=38V
and switching frequency fS=20kHz. IGBTs are used as power
semiconductor switches. The power losses of the semiconductor
devices are calculated from current and voltage waveforms. From
simulation results, it is seen that the capacitor switched half bridge
converter has the best efficiency value, and can be preferred at high
power and high frequency applications.
Abstract: Through the analysis of the process digital design
based on digital mockup, the fact indicates that a distributed
cooperative supporting environment is the foundation conditions to
adopt design approach based on DMU. Data access authorization is
concerned firstly because the value and sensitivity of the data for the
enterprise. The access control for administrators is often rather weak
other than business user. So authors established an enhanced system to
avoid the administrators accessing the engineering data by potential
approach and without authorization. Thus the data security is
improved.
Abstract: The 9/11 suicide attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, triggered a number of security responses both in the United States of America and other Countries in the World. Kenya, which is an ally and a close partner to North America and Europe, was not left behind. While many states had been parties to numerous terrorism conventions, their response in implementing them had been slow and needed this catalyst. This special case offered a window of opportunity for many “security conscious" regimes in cementing their legal-criminological and political security apparatus. At the international level, the 9/11 case led to the hasty adoption of Security Council resolution 1373 in 2001, which called upon states to adopt wide-ranging and comprehensive steps and strategies to combat international terrorism and to become parties to the relevant international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism. Since then, Kenya has responded with speed in devising social-legal-criminological-political actions.
Abstract: This paper proposes a fast tree join scheme to provide
seamless multicast handover in the mobile networks based on the Fast
Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6). In the existing FMIPv6-based multicast
handover scheme, the bi-directional tunnelling or the remote
subscription is employed with the packet forwarding from the previous
access router (AR) to the new AR. In general, the remote subscription
approach is preferred to the bi-directional tunnelling one, since in the
remote subscription scheme we can exploit an optimized multicast
path from a multicast source to many mobile receivers. However, in
the remote subscription scheme, if the tree joining operation takes a
long time, the amount of data packets to be forwarded and buffered for
multicast handover will increase, and thus the corresponding buffer
may overflow, which results in severe packet losses. In order to reduce
these costs associated with packet forwarding and buffering, this paper
proposes the fast join to multicast tree, in which the new AR will join
the multicast tree as fast as possible, so that the new multicast data
packets can also arrive at the new AR, by which the packet forwarding
and buffering costs can be reduced. From numerical analysis, it is
shown that the proposed scheme can give better performance than the
existing FMIPv6-based multicast handover schemes in terms of the
multicast packet delivery costs.
Abstract: The textural parameters, together with appearance and
flavor, are sensory attributes of great importance for the product to be
accepted by the consumer. The objective of the present study was the
evaluation of the textural attributes of Packhams pears in the fresh
state, after drying in a chamber with forced convection at 50ºC,
lyophilized and re-hydrated. In texture analysis it was used the
method of Texture Profile Analysis (TPA). The parameters analyzed
were hardness, cohesiveness, adhesiveness, elasticity and chewiness.
From the results obtained is possible to see that the drying operation
greatly affected some textural properties of the pears, so that the
hardness diminished very much with drying, for both drying
methods.
Abstract: Due to the Rapid Urbanization in China, the influence of metropolises to surrounding areas grows by a tremendous speed in developed region. One of the most obvious influences is the expansion of the urban built-up areas which covers the land belongs to small towns. Around metropolitan fringe, the boundary between city and village becomes more and more obscure. So being the most sensitive area, the small towns on the fringe of metropolises have the special meaning on the research into the small towns- development. This paper chooses Sandun Town in Hangzhou of Zhejiang Province as an example, emphatically focus on aspects such as the central area proliferation, the industrial shift, the position effect, the subway effect and the commercial development, reviews a few problems of small towns in the future and the important problems in their planning by the analysis of the characteristics of the present conditions and the developing motive mechanism, so that guides small towns to develop properly by liking with these small towns and center metropolises.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is applied Taguchi method on the optimization for PEMFC performance, and a representative Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model is selectively performed for statistical analysis. The studied factors in this paper are pressure of fuel cell, operating temperature, the relative humidity of anode and cathode, porosity of gas diffusion electrode (GDE) and conductivity of GDE. The optimal combination for maximum power density is gained by using a three-level statistical method. The results confirmed that the robustness of the optimum design parameters influencing the performance of fuel cell are founded by pressure of fuel cell, 3atm; operating temperature, 353K; the relative humidity of anode, 50%; conductivity of GDE, 1000 S/m, but the relative humidity of cathode and porosity of GDE are pooled as error due to a small sum of squares. The present simulation results give designers the ideas ratify the effectiveness of the proposed robust design methodology for the performance of fuel cell.
Abstract: The effect of flooding can be a serious problem for
wheat farmers, even at dry land condition. Amount of flooding
damage depends on duration flooding, developmental stage, wheat
type and variety. Therefore as a factorial experiment in randomized
complete design based on winter bread wheat cultivars (Pishtaz,
Marvdasht, Shiraz, Zarin, Shahriar, C-81-4, Sardari, Agosta seed,
FGS and Azar2) at stages (Non- flooding stress, flooding at tillering
and stem elongation stages for 15 days) carried out in Faculty of
Agriculture, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran. During flooding,
soil environment of plant roots were water saturated. Analysis of
variance showed that flooding had a significant effect on the number
of grains per spike, grain weight per spike and a grain weight. Hence
flooding reduces the number of grain per spike between 27.1 to 42.5
percent, grain weight per spike between 34.7 to 54.4 percent and
single grain weight between 12.1 to 15.1 percent. Effects of flooding
at the tillering stage reduced higher than stem elongation stage on
studied traits. The result also showed that flooding at tillering stage
delayed spikelet primordial and floret. Between wheat cultivars was
significant for traits, but were different reactions. "Shiraz", "Zarin"
and "Shahriar" had the most no. grain per spike, but "Zarin" and
"Sardari" had the most grain weight per spike and single grain
weight, respectively. Also, interaction between start of flooding and
cultivar was significant.
Abstract: Image mosaicing techniques are usually employed to offer researchers a wider field of view of microscopic image of biological samples. a mosaic is commonly achieved using automated microscopes and often with one “color" channel, whether it refers to natural or fluorescent analysis. In this work we present a method to achieve three subsequent mosaics of the same part of a stem cell culture analyzed in phase contrast and in fluorescence, with a common non-automated inverted microscope. The mosaics obtained are then merged together to mark, in the original contrast phase images, nuclei and cytoplasm of the cells referring to a mosaic of the culture, rather than to single images. The experiments carried out prove the effectiveness of our approach with cultures of cells stained with calcein (green/cytoplasm and nuclei) and hoechst (blue/nuclei) probes.
Abstract: In automotive systems almost all steps concerning the
calibration of several control systems, e.g., low idle governor or
boost pressure governor, are made with the vehicle because the timeto-
production and cost requirements on the projects do not allow for
the vehicle analysis necessary to build reliable models. Here is
presented a procedure using parametric and NN (neural network)
models that enables the generation of vehicle system models based
on normal ECU engine control unit) vehicle measurements. These
models are locally valid and permit pre and follow-up calibrations so
that, only the final calibrations have to be done with the vehicle.
Abstract: Ethnicity identification of face images is of interest in
many areas of application, but existing methods are few and limited.
This paper presents a fusion scheme that uses block-based uniform
local binary patterns and Haar wavelet transform to combine local
and global features. In particular, the LL subband coefficients of the
whole face are fused with the histograms of uniform local binary
patterns from block partitions of the face. We applied the principal
component analysis on the fused features and managed to reduce the
dimensionality of the feature space from 536 down to around 15
without sacrificing too much accuracy. We have conducted a number
of preliminary experiments using a collection of 746 subject face
images. The test results show good accuracy and demonstrate the
potential of fusing global and local features. The fusion approach is
robust, making it easy to further improve the identification at both
feature and score levels.