Abstract: In this paper, two centrifugal model tests (case 1: raft
foundation, case 2: 2x2 piled raft foundation) were conducted in
order to evaluate the effect of ground subsidence on load sharing
among piles and raft and settlement of raft and piled raft
foundations. For each case, two conditions consisting of undrained
(without groundwater pumping) and drained (with groundwater
pumping) conditions were considered. Vertical loads were applied
to the models after the foundations were completely consolidated by
selfweight at 50g. The results show that load sharing by the piles in
piled raft foundation (piled load share) for drained condition
decreases faster than that for undrained condition. Settlement of
both raft and piled raft foundations for drained condition increases
more quickly than that for undrained condition. In addition, the
settlement of raft foundation increases more largely than the
settlement of piled raft foundation for drained condition.
Abstract: In this contribution, the use of a new genetic operator is proposed. The main advantage of using this operator is that it is able to assist the evolution procedure to converge faster towards the optimal solution of a problem. This new genetic operator is called ''intuition'' operator. Generally speaking, one can claim that this operator is a way to include any heuristic or any other local knowledge, concerning the problem, that cannot be embedded in the fitness function. Simulation results show that the use of this operator increases significantly the performance of the classic Genetic Algorithm by increasing the convergence speed of its population.
Abstract: One of the purposes of the robust method of
estimation is to reduce the influence of outliers in the data, on the
estimates. The outliers arise from gross errors or contamination from
distributions with long tails. The trimmed mean is a robust estimate.
This means that it is not sensitive to violation of distributional
assumptions of the data. It is called an adaptive estimate when the
trimming proportion is determined from the data rather than being
fixed a “priori-.
The main objective of this study is to find out the robustness
properties of the adaptive trimmed means in terms of efficiency, high
breakdown point and influence function. Specifically, it seeks to find
out the magnitude of the trimming proportion of the adaptive
trimmed mean which will yield efficient and robust estimates of the
parameter for data which follow a modified Weibull distribution with
parameter λ = 1/2 , where the trimming proportion is determined by a
ratio of two trimmed means defined as the tail length. Secondly, the
asymptotic properties of the tail length and the trimmed means are
also investigated. Finally, a comparison is made on the efficiency of
the adaptive trimmed means in terms of the standard deviation for the
trimming proportions and when these were fixed a “priori".
The asymptotic tail lengths defined as the ratio of two trimmed
means and the asymptotic variances were computed by using the
formulas derived. While the values of the standard deviations for the
derived tail lengths for data of size 40 simulated from a Weibull
distribution were computed for 100 iterations using a computer
program written in Pascal language.
The findings of the study revealed that the tail lengths of the
Weibull distribution increase in magnitudes as the trimming
proportions increase, the measure of the tail length and the adaptive
trimmed mean are asymptotically independent as the number of
observations n becomes very large or approaching infinity, the tail
length is asymptotically distributed as the ratio of two independent
normal random variables, and the asymptotic variances decrease as
the trimming proportions increase. The simulation study revealed
empirically that the standard error of the adaptive trimmed mean
using the ratio of tail lengths is relatively smaller for different values
of trimming proportions than its counterpart when the trimming
proportions were fixed a 'priori'.
Abstract: Pattern matching based on regular tree grammars have been widely used in many areas of computer science. In this paper, we propose a pattern matcher within the framework of code generation, based on a generic and a formalized approach. According to this approach, parsers for regular tree grammars are adapted to a general pattern matching solution, rather than adapting the pattern matching according to their parsing behavior. Hence, we first formalize the construction of the pattern matches respective to input trees drawn from a regular tree grammar in a form of the so-called match trees. Then, we adopt a recently developed generic parser and tightly couple its parsing behavior with such construction. In addition to its generality, the resulting pattern matcher is characterized by its soundness and efficient implementation. This is demonstrated by the proposed theory and by the derived algorithms for its implementation. A comparison with similar and well-known approaches, such as the ones based on tree automata and LR parsers, has shown that our pattern matcher can be applied to a broader class of grammars, and achieves better approximation of pattern matches in one pass. Furthermore, its use as a machine code selector is characterized by a minimized overhead, due to the balanced distribution of the cost computations into static ones, during parser generation time, and into dynamic ones, during parsing time.
Abstract: This work involved the use of phytoremediation to
remediate an aged soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs). At microcosm scale, tests were prepared using soil samples
that have been collected in an industrial area with a total PCBs
concentration of about 250 μg kg-1. Medicago sativa and Lolium
italicum were the species selected in this study that is used as
“feasibility test" for full scale remediation. The experiment was
carried out with the addition of a mixture of randomly methylatedbeta-
cyclodextrins (RAMEB). At the end of the experiment analysis
of soil samples showed that in general the presence of plants has led
to a higher degradation of most congeners with respect to not
vegetated soil. The two plant species efficiencies were comparable
and improved by RAMEB addition with a final reduction of total
PCBs near to 50%. With increasing the chlorination of the congeners
the removal percentage of PCBs progressively decreased.
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the design and
implementation of an online rule-based Expert Systems for Islamic
medication. T his Online Islamic Medication Expert System (OIMES)
focuses on physical illnesses only. Knowledge base of this Expert
System contains exhaustively the types of illness together with their
related cures or treatments/therapies, obtained exclusively from the
Quran and Hadith. Extensive research and study are conducted to
ensure that the Expert System is able to provide the most suitable
treatment with reference to the relevant verses cited in Quran or
Hadith. These verses come together with their related 'actions'
(bodily actions/gestures or some acts) to be performed by the patient
to treat a particular illness/sickness. These verses and the instructions
for the 'actions' are to be displayed unambiguously on the computer
screen. The online platform provides the advantage for patient getting
treatment practically anytime and anywhere as long as the computer
and Internet facility exist. Patient does not need to make appointment
to see an expert for a therapy.
Abstract: Avalanche release of snow has been modeled in the present studies. Snow is assumed to be represented by semi-solid and the governing equations have been studied from the concept of continuum approach. The dynamical equations have been solved for two different zones [starting zone and track zone] by using appropriate initial and boundary conditions. Effect of density (ρ), Eddy viscosity (η), Slope angle (θ), Slab depth (R) on the flow parameters have been observed in the present studies. Numerical methods have been employed for computing the non linear differential equations. One of the most interesting and fundamental innovation in the present studies is getting initial condition for the computation of velocity by numerical approach. This information of the velocity has obtained through the concept of fracture mechanics applicable to snow. The results on the flow parameters have found to be in qualitative agreement with the published results.
Abstract: Due to increased number of terrorist attacks in recent years, loads induced by explosions need to be incorporated in building designs. For safer performance of a structure, its foundation should have sufficient strength and stability. Therefore, prior to any reconstruction or rehabilitation of a building subjected to blast, it is important to examine adverse effects on the foundation caused by blast induced ground shocks. This paper evaluates the effects of a buried explosion on a pile foundation. It treats the dynamic response of the pile in saturated sand, using explicit dynamic nonlinear finite element software LS-DYNA. The blast induced wave propagation in the soil and the horizontal deformation of pile are presented and the results are discussed. Further, a parametric study is carried out to evaluate the effect of varying the explosive shape on the pile response. This information can be used to evaluate the vulnerability of piled foundations to credible blast events as well as develop guidance for their design.
Abstract: This paper investigates the structure and content of the
wine lists in upscale restaurants in Portugal (N=61). The respondents
considered that a wine list should be easy to use and to modify, welldesigned,
modern and varied. Respondents also stated that they
perform on average 6 revisions to the wine list per year. The
restaurant owner, the restaurant manager and the sommelier were the
main persons in charge of the wine list design. One of the most
important reasons for selecting wines across most restaurants was to
‘complement the menu’ and ‘pairing food with wine’. Restaurants
also reported to be relatively independent from suppliers and
magazine evaluations. Moreover, this work revealed that the
restaurant wine list is considered by restaurateurs as a strategic tool to
sell wine as a complement to the menu, to improve customer
satisfaction and loyalty, to increase restaurant value and to enhance a
successful positioning.
Abstract: This paper presents a speed fuzzy sliding mode
controller for a vector controlled induction machine (IM) fed by a
voltage source inverter (PWM).
The sliding mode based fuzzy control method is developed to
achieve fast response, a best disturbance rejection and to maintain a
good decoupling.
The problem with sliding mode control is that there is high
frequency switching around the sliding mode surface. The FSMC is
the combination of the robustness of Sliding Mode Control (SMC)
and the smoothness of Fuzzy Logic (FL). To reduce the torque
fluctuations (chattering), the sign function used in the conventional
SMC is substituted with a fuzzy logic algorithm.
The proposed algorithm was simulated by Matlab/Simulink
software and simulation results show that the performance of the
control scheme is robust and the chattering problem is solved.
Abstract: Some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)
are the strongest known carcinogens compounds; the majority of
them are mostly produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil
fuels; Motor vehicles are a significant source of polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbon (PAH) where diesel emission is one of the main sources
of such compounds available in the ambient air. There is a big
concern about the increasing concentration of PAHs in the
environment. Researchers are trying to explore optimal methods to
reduce those pollutants and improve the quality of air. Water blended
fuel is one of the possible approaches to reduce emission of PAHs
from the combustion of diesel in urban and domestic vehicles. In this
work a modeling study was conducted using CHEMKIN-PRO
software to simulate spray combustion at similar diesel engine
conditions. Surrogate fuel of (80 % n-heptane and 20 % toluene) was
used due to detailed kinetic and thermodynamic data needed for
modeling is available for this kind of fuel but not available for diesel.
An emulsified fuel with 3, 5, 8, 10 and 20 % water by volume is used
as an engine feed for this study. The modeling results show that water
has a significant effect on reducing engine soot and PAHs precursors
formation up to certain extent.
Abstract: The main goal of the study is to analyze all relevant
properties of the electro hydraulic systems and based on that to make
a proper choice of the control strategy that may be used for the
control of the servomechanism system. A combination of electronic
and hydraulic systems is widely used since it combines the
advantages of both. Hydraulic systems are widely spread because of
their properties as accuracy, flexibility, high horsepower-to-weight
ratio, fast starting, stopping and reversal with smoothness and
precision, and simplicity of operations. On the other hand, the
modern control of hydraulic systems is based on control of the circuit
fed to the inductive solenoid that controls the position of the
hydraulic valve. Since this circuit may be easily handled by PWM
(Pulse Width Modulation) signal with a proper frequency, the
combination of electrical and hydraulic systems became very fruitful
and usable in specific areas as airplane and military industry.
The study shows and discusses the experimental results obtained
by the control strategy (classical feedback (PID) & neural network)
using MATLAB and SIMULINK [1]. Finally, the special attention
was paid to the possibility of neuro-controller design and its
application to control of electro-hydraulic systems and to make
comparative with classical control.
Abstract: Mixed model assembly lines (MMAL) are a type of
production line where a variety of product models similar in product
characteristics are assembled. The effective design of these lines
requires that schedule for assembling the different products is
determined. In this paper we tried to fit the sequencing problem with
the main characteristics of make to order (MTO) environment. The
problem solved in this paper is a multiple objective sequencing
problem in mixed model assembly lines sequencing using weighted
Sum Method (WSM) using GAMS software for small problem and
an effective GA for large scale problems because of the nature of
NP-hardness of our problem and vast time consume to find the
optimum solution in large problems. In this problem three practically
important objectives are minimizing: total utility work, keeping a
constant production rate variation, and minimizing earliness and
tardiness cost which consider the priority of each customer and
different due date which is a real situation in mixed model assembly
lines and it is the first time we consider different attribute to
prioritize the customers which help the company to reduce the cost of
earliness and tardiness. This mechanism is a way to apply an advance
available to promise (ATP) in mixed model assembly line sequencing
which is the main contribution of this paper.
Abstract: This paper presented a novel combined cycle of air separation and natural gas liquefaction. The idea is that natural gas can be liquefied, meanwhile gaseous or liquid nitrogen and oxygen are produced in one combined cryogenic system. Cycle simulation and exergy analysis were performed to evaluate the process and thereby reveal the influence of the crucial parameter, i.e., flow rate ratio through two stages expanders β on heat transfer temperature difference, its distribution and consequent exergy loss. Composite curves for the combined hot streams (feeding natural gas and recycled nitrogen) and the cold stream showed the degree of optimization available in this process if appropriate β was designed. The results indicated that increasing β reduces temperature difference and exergy loss in heat exchange process. However, the maximum limit value of β should be confined in terms of minimum temperature difference proposed in heat exchanger design standard and heat exchanger size. The optimal βopt under different operation conditions corresponding to the required minimum temperature differences was investigated.
Abstract: The anti-lock braking systems installed on vehicles
for safe and effective braking, are high-order nonlinear and timevariant.
Using fuzzy logic controllers increase efficiency of such
systems, but impose a high computational complexity as well. The
main concept introduced by this paper is reducing computational
complexity of fuzzy controllers by deploying problem-solution data
structure. Unlike conventional methods that are based on
calculations, this approach is based on data oriented modeling.
Abstract: At very high speeds, bubbles form in the underwater vehicles because of sharp trailing edges or of places where the local pressure is lower than the vapor pressure. These bubbles are called cavities and the size of the cavities grows as the velocity increases. A properly designed cavitator can induce the formation of a single big cavity all over the vehicle. Such a vehicle travelling in the vaporous cavity is called a supercavitating vehicle and the present research work mainly focuses on the dynamic modeling of such vehicles. Cavitation of the fins is also accounted and the effect of the same on trajectory is well explained. The entire dynamics has been developed using the state space approach and emphasis is given on the effect of size and angle of attack of the cavitator. Control law has been established for the motion of the vehicle using Non-linear Dynamic Inverse (NDI) with cavitator as the control surface.
Abstract: Cardiovascular disease mostly in the form of atherosclerosis is responsible for 30% of all world deaths amounting to 17 million people per year. Atherosclerosis is due to the formation of plaque. The fatty plaque may be at risk of rupture, leading typically to stroke and heart attack. The plaque is usually associated with a high degree of lumen reduction, called a stenosis. The initiation and progression of the disease is strongly linked to the hemodynamic environment near the vessel wall. The aim of this study is to validate the flow of blood mimic through an arterial stenosis model with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package. In experiment, an axisymmetric model constructed consists of contraction and expansion region that follow a mathematical form of cosine function. A 30% diameter reduction was used in this study. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to characterize the flow. The fluid consists of rigid spherical particles suspended in waterglycerol- NaCl mixture. The particles with 20 μm diameter were selected to follow the flow of fluid. The flow at Re=155, 270 and 390 were investigated. The experimental result is compared with FLUENT simulated flow that account for viscous laminar flow model. The results suggest that laminar flow model was sufficient to predict flow velocity at the inlet but the velocity at stenosis throat at Re =390 was overestimated. Hence, a transition to turbulent regime might have been developed at throat region as the flow rate increases.
Abstract: It has formed an essential issue that Climate Change, composed of highly knowledge complexity, reveals its significant impact on human existence. Therefore, specific national policies, some of which present the educational aspects, have been published for overcoming the imperative problem. Accordingly, the study aims to analyze as well as integrate the relationship between Climate Change and environmental education and apply the perspective of concept map to represent the knowledge contents and structures of Climate Change; by doing so, knowledge contents of Climate Change could be represented in an even more comprehensive way and manipulated as the tool for environmental education. The method adapted for this study is knowledge conversion model compounded of the platform for experts and teachers, who were the participants for this study, to cooperate and combine each participant-s standpoints into a complete knowledge framework that is the foundation for structuring the concept map. The result of this research contains the important concepts, the precise propositions and the entire concept map for representing the robust concepts of Climate Change.
Abstract: This paper presents design trade-off and performance impacts of
the amount of pipeline phase of control path signals in a wormhole-switched
network-on-chip (NoC). The numbers of the pipeline phase of the control
path vary between two- and one-cycle pipeline phase. The control paths
consist of the routing request paths for output selection and the arbitration
paths for input selection. Data communications between on-chip routers are
implemented synchronously and for quality of service, the inter-router data
transports are controlled by using a link-level congestion control to avoid
lose of data because of an overflow. The trade-off between the area (logic
cell area) and the performance (bandwidth gain) of two proposed NoC router
microarchitectures are presented in this paper. The performance evaluation is
made by using a traffic scenario with different number of workloads under
2D mesh NoC topology using a static routing algorithm. By using a 130-nm
CMOS standard-cell technology, our NoC routers can be clocked at 1 GHz,
resulting in a high speed network link and high router bandwidth capacity
of about 320 Gbit/s. Based on our experiments, the amount of control path
pipeline stages gives more significant impact on the NoC performance than
the impact on the logic area of the NoC router.
Abstract: A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system
requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker
modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features.
Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)
modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard
acoustic feature set for speech related applications. On a recent
contribution by authors, it has been shown that the Inverted Mel-
Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (IMFCC) is useful feature set for
SI, which contains complementary information present in high
frequency region. This paper introduces the Gaussian shaped filter
(GF) while calculating MFCC and IMFCC in place of typical
triangular shaped bins. The objective is to introduce a higher
amount of correlation between subband outputs. The performances
of both MFCC & IMFCC improve with GF over conventional
triangular filter (TF) based implementation, individually as well as
in combination. With GMM as speaker modeling paradigm, the
performances of proposed GF based MFCC and IMFCC in
individual and fused mode have been verified in two standard
databases YOHO, (Microphone Speech) and POLYCOST
(Telephone Speech) each of which has more than 130 speakers.