Conceptual Design of an Airfoil with Temperature-Responsive Polymer

The accelerated growth in aircraft industries desire effectual schemes, programs, innovative designs of advanced systems and facilities to accomplish the augmenting need for home-free air transportation. In this paper, a contemporary conceptual design of a cambered airfoil has been proposed in order to providing augmented effective lift force relative to the airplane, and to eliminating drawbacks and limitations of an airfoil in a commercial airplane by using a kind of smart materials. This invention of an unsymmetrical airfoil structure utilizes the amplified air momentum around the airfoil and increased camber length to providing improved aircraft performance and assist to enhancing the reliability of the aircraft components. Moreover, this conjectured design helps to reducing airplane weight and total drag.

A 3D Virtual Navigation System Integrating User Positioning and Pre-Download Mechanism

This paper takes the actual scene of Aletheia University campus – the Class 2 national monument, the first educational institute in northern Taiwan as an example, to present a 3D virtual navigation system which supports user positioning and pre-download mechanism. The proposed system was designed based on the principle of Voronoi Diagra) to divide the virtual scenes and its multimedia information, which combining outdoor GPS positioning and the indoor RFID location detecting function. When users carry mobile equipments such as notebook computer, UMPC, EeePC...etc., walking around the actual scenes of indoor and outdoor areas of campus, this system can automatically detect the moving path of users and pre-download the needed data so that users will have a smooth and seamless navigation without waiting.

Kinematic and Dynamic Analysis of a Lower Limb Exoskeleton

This paper will provide the kinematic and dynamic analysis of a lower limb exoskeleton. The forward and inverse kinematics of proposed exoskeleton is performed using Denevit and Hartenberg method. The torques required for the actuators will be calculated using Lagrangian formulation technique. This research can be used to design the control of the proposed exoskeleton.

Color Image Segmentation Using Kekre-s Algorithm for Vector Quantization

In this paper we propose segmentation approach based on Vector Quantization technique. Here we have used Kekre-s fast codebook generation algorithm for segmenting low-altitude aerial image. This is used as a preprocessing step to form segmented homogeneous regions. Further to merge adjacent regions color similarity and volume difference criteria is used. Experiments performed with real aerial images of varied nature demonstrate that this approach does not result in over segmentation or under segmentation. The vector quantization seems to give far better results as compared to conventional on-the-fly watershed algorithm.

Predicting and Mitigating Dredging DispersionImpact: A Case of Phuket Port, Thailand

Dredging activities inevitably cause sediment dispersion. In certain locations, where there are important ecological areas such as mangroves or coral reefs, carefully planning the dredging can significantly reduce negative impacts. This article utilizes the dredging at Phuket port, Thailand, as a case study to demonstrate how computer simulations can be helpful to protect existing coral reefs. A software package named MIKE21 was applied. Necessary information required by the simulations was gathered. After calibrating and verifying the model, various dredging scenario were simulated to predict spoil movement. The simulation results were used as guidance to setting up an environmental measure. Finally, the recommendation to dredge during flood tide with silt curtains installed was made.

Hole Configuration Effect on Turbine Blade Cooling

In this paper a numerical technique is used to predict the metal temperature of a gas turbine vane. The Rising combustor exit temperatures in gas turbine engines necessitate active cooling for the downstream turbine section to avoid thermal failure. This study is performed the solution of external flow, internal convection, and conduction within the metal vane. Also the trade-off between the cooling performances in four different hole shapes and configurations is performed. At first one of the commonly used cooling hole geometry is investigated; cylindrical holes and then two other configurations are simulated. The average temperature magnitude in mid-plan section of each configuration is obtained and finally the lower temperature value is selected such as best arrangement.

Degradation of EE2 by Different Consortium of Enriched Nitrifying Activated Sludge

17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2) is a recalcitrant micropollutant which is found in small amounts in municipal wastewater. But these small amounts still adversely affect for the reproductive function of aquatic organisms. Evidence in the past suggested that full-scale WWTPs equipped with nitrification process enhanced the removal of EE2 in the municipal wastewater. EE2 has been proven to be able to be transformed by ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) via co-metabolism. This research aims to clarify the EE2 degradation pattern by different consortium of ammonia oxidizing microorganism (AOM) including AOA (ammonia oxidizing archaea) and investigate contribution between the existing ammonia monooxygenase (AMO) and new synthesized AOM. The result showed that AOA or AOB of N. oligotropha cluster in enriched nitrifying activated sludge (NAS) from 2mM and 5mM, commonly found in municipal WWTPs, could degrade EE2 in wastewater via co-metabolism. Moreover, the investigation of the contribution between the existing ammonia monooxygenase (AMO) and new synthesized AOM demonstrated that the new synthesized AMO enzyme may perform ammonia oxidation rather than the existing AMO enzyme or the existing AMO enzyme may has a small amount to oxidize ammonia.

HPM Solution of Momentum Equation for Darcy-Brinkman Model in a Parallel Plates Channel Subjected to Lorentz Force

In this paper an analytical solution is presented for fully developed flow in a parallel plates channel under the action of Lorentz force, by use of Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM). The analytical results are compared with exact solution and an excellent agreement has been observed between them for both Couette and Poiseuille flows. Moreover, the effects of key parameters have been studied on the dimensionless velocity profile.

VFAST TCP: A delay-based enhanced version of FAST TCP

This paper is aimed at describing a delay-based endto- end (e2e) congestion control algorithm, called Very FAST TCP (VFAST), which is an enhanced version of FAST TCP. The main idea behind this enhancement is to smoothly estimate the Round-Trip Time (RTT) based on a nonlinear filter, which eliminates throughput and queue oscillation when RTT fluctuates. In this context, an evaluation of the suggested scheme through simulation is introduced, by comparing our VFAST prototype with FAST in terms of throughput, queue behavior, fairness, stability, RTT and adaptivity to changes in network. The achieved simulation results indicate that the suggested protocol offer better performance than FAST TCP in terms of RTT estimation and throughput.

Spatial Services in Cloud Environment

Cloud Computing is an approach that provides computation and storage services on-demand to clients over the network, independent of device and location. In the last few years, cloud computing became a trend in information technology with many companies that transfer their business processes and applications in the cloud. Cloud computing with service oriented architecture has contributed to rapid development of Geographic Information Systems. Open Geospatial Consortium with its standards provides the interfaces for hosted spatial data and GIS functionality to integrated GIS applications. Furthermore, with the enormous processing power, clouds provide efficient environment for data intensive applications that can be performed efficiently, with higher precision, and greater reliability. This paper presents our work on the geospatial data services within the cloud computing environment and its technology. A cloud computing environment with the strengths and weaknesses of the geographic information system will be introduced. The OGC standards that solve our application interoperability are highlighted. Finally, we outline our system architecture with utilities for requesting and invoking our developed data intensive applications as a web service.

Hardness Variations as Affected by Bar Diameter of AISI 4140 Steel

Hardness of the widely used structural steel is of vital importance since it may help in the determination of many mechanical properties of a material under loading situations. In order to obtain reliable information for design, properties homogeneity should be validated. In the current study the hardness variation over the different diameters of the same AISI 4140 bar is investigated. Measurements were taken on the two faces of the stock at equally spaced eight sectors and fifteen layers. Statistical and graphical analysis are performed to asses the distribution of hardness measurements over the specified area. Hardness measurements showed some degree of dispersion with about ± 10% of its nominal value provided by manufacturer. Hardness value is found to have a slight decrease trend as the diameter is reduced. However, an opposite behavior is noticed regarding the sequence of the sector indicating a nonuniform distribution over the same area either on the same face or considering the corresponding sector on the other face (cross section) of the same material bar.

Mobile Robot Navigation Using Local Model Networks

Developing techniques for mobile robot navigation constitutes one of the major trends in the current research on mobile robotics. This paper develops a local model network (LMN) for mobile robot navigation. The LMN represents the mobile robot by a set of locally valid submodels that are Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). Training these submodels employs Back Propagation (BP) algorithm. The paper proposes the fuzzy C-means (FCM) in this scheme to divide the input space to sub regions, and then a submodel (MLP) is identified to represent a particular region. The submodels then are combined in a unified structure. In run time phase, Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) are employed as windows for the activated submodels. This proposed structure overcomes the problem of changing operating regions of mobile robots. Read data are used in all experiments. Results for mobile robot navigation using the proposed LMN reflect the soundness of the proposed scheme.

Dual Construction of Stern-based Signature Scheme

In this paper, we propose a dual version of the first threshold ring signature scheme based on error-correcting code proposed by Aguilar et. al in [1]. Our scheme uses an improvement of Véron zero-knowledge identification scheme, which provide smaller public and private key sizes and better computation complexity than the Stern one. This scheme is secure in the random oracle model.

Study of Some Innovant Reactors without on- Site Refueling with Triso and Cermet Fuel

The evaluation of unit cell neutronic parameters and lifetime for some innovant reactors without on sit-refuling will be held in this work. the behavior of some small and medium reactors without on site refueling with triso and cermet fuel. For the FBNR long life except we propose to change the enrichment of the Cermet MFE to 9%. For the AFPR reactor we can see that the use of the Cermet MFE can extend the life of this reactor but to maintain the same life period for AFPR-SC we most use burnup poison to have the same slope for Kinf (Burnup). PFPWR50 cell behaves almost in same way using both fuels Cermet and TRISO. So we can conclude that PFPWR50 reactor, with CERMET Fuel, is kept among the long cycle reactors and with the new configuration we avoid subcriticality at the beginning of cycle. The evaluation of unit cell neutronic parameters reveals a good agreement with the goal of BWR-PB concept. It is found out that the Triso fuel assembly lifetime can be extended for a reasonably long period without being refueled, approximately up to 48GWd/t burnup. Using coated particles fuels with the Cermet composition can be more extended the fuel assembly life time, approximately 52 GWd/t.

Airfoils Aerodynamic Efficiency Study in Heavy Rain via Two Phase Flow Approach

Heavy rainfall greatly affects the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft. There are many accidents of aircraft caused by aerodynamic efficiency degradation by heavy rain. In this Paper we have studied the heavy rain effects on the aerodynamic efficiency of NACA 64-210 & NACA 0012 airfoils. For our analysis, CFD method and preprocessing grid generator are used as our main analytical tools, and the simulation of rain is accomplished via two phase flow approach-s Discrete Phase Model (DPM). Raindrops are assumed to be non-interacting, non-deforming, non-evaporating and non-spinning spheres. Both airfoil sections exhibited significant reduction in lift and increase in drag for a given lift condition in simulated rain. The most significant difference between these two airfoils was the sensitivity of the NACA 64-210 to liquid water content (LWC), while NACA 0012 performance losses in the rain environment is not a function of LWC . It is expected that the quantitative information gained in this paper will be useful to the operational airline industry and greater effort such as small scale and full scale flight tests should put in this direction to further improve aviation safety.

Experimental Investigation on Excess Pore Water Pressure in Soft Soil-Foundations under Minor Shocks

In this study, shaking table tests are performed to investigate the behavior of excess pore water pressure in different soft soil-foundations of soil-structure interaction (SSI) system. The variation of the behaviors under cycled minor shock is observed. Moreover, The generation and variation mechanism of excess pore water pressure under earthquake excitation in different soft soilfoundations are analyzed and discussed.

Personalised Mobile Picture Puzzle

Mobile Picture Puzzle is a mobile game application where the player use existing images stored in the mobile phone to create a puzzle to be played. This traditional picture puzzle is not so challenging once the player is familiar with the game. The objective of the developed mobile game application is to have a similar mobile game application that can provide the player with more challenging gaming experience. The developed mobile game application is also a mobile picture puzzle game application to create a puzzle to be played but instead of just using existing images that are stored, the personalised capability allows the player to use the built-in camera phone to capture an image and use the newly captured image to create the puzzle. The development of the mobile game application uses Symbian Operating System (OS), Mobile Media API (Application Programming Interface), Record Management System (RMS) storage and TiledLayer class from Game API.

Conceptual Design of an Aircraft with Maglev Landing System

The accelerated growth in aircraft industries desire effectual schemes, programs, innovative designs of advanced systems to accomplishing the augmenting need for home-free air transportation. In this paper, a contemporary conceptual design of an airplane has been proposed without landing gear systems in order to reducing accidents, time consumption, and to eliminating drawbacks by using superconducting levitation phenomenon. This invention of an airplane with superconductive material coating, on the solar plexus region assist to reduce weight by approximately 4% of the total takeoff weight, and cost effective. Moreover, we conjectured that superconductor landing system reduces ground friction, mission fuel, total drag, take-off and landing distance.

Data Hiding in Images in Discrete Wavelet Domain Using PMM

Over last two decades, due to hostilities of environment over the internet the concerns about confidentiality of information have increased at phenomenal rate. Therefore to safeguard the information from attacks, number of data/information hiding methods have evolved mostly in spatial and transformation domain.In spatial domain data hiding techniques,the information is embedded directly on the image plane itself. In transform domain data hiding techniques the image is first changed from spatial domain to some other domain and then the secret information is embedded so that the secret information remains more secure from any attack. Information hiding algorithms in time domain or spatial domain have high capacity and relatively lower robustness. In contrast, the algorithms in transform domain, such as DCT, DWT have certain robustness against some multimedia processing.In this work the authors propose a novel steganographic method for hiding information in the transform domain of the gray scale image.The proposed approach works by converting the gray level image in transform domain using discrete integer wavelet technique through lifting scheme.This approach performs a 2-D lifting wavelet decomposition through Haar lifted wavelet of the cover image and computes the approximation coefficients matrix CA and detail coefficients matrices CH, CV, and CD.Next step is to apply the PMM technique in those coefficients to form the stego image. The aim of this paper is to propose a high-capacity image steganography technique that uses pixel mapping method in integer wavelet domain with acceptable levels of imperceptibility and distortion in the cover image and high level of overall security. This solution is independent of the nature of the data to be hidden and produces a stego image with minimum degradation.

EFL Learners- Perceptions of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) to Facilitate Communication in a Foreign Language

This study explores perceptions of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners on using computer mediated communication technology in their learner of English. The data consists of observations of both synchronous and asynchronous communication participants engaged in for over a period of 4 months, which included online, and offline communication protocols, open-ended interviews and reflection papers composed by participants. Content analysis of interview data and the written documents listed above, as well as, member check and triangulation techniques are the major data analysis strategies. The findings suggest that participants generally do not benefit from computer-mediated communication in terms of its effect in learning a foreign language. Participants regarded the nature of CMC as artificial, or pseudo communication that did not aid their authentic communicational skills in English. The results of this study sheds lights on insufficient and inconclusive findings, which most quantitative CMC studies previously generated.