Abstract: In modern agriculture, polymeric hydrogels are
known as a component able to hold an amount of water due to their
3-dimensional network structure and their tendency to absorb water
in humid environments. In addition, these hydrogels are able to
controllably release the fertilisers and pesticides loaded in them.
Therefore, they deliver these materials to the plants' roots and help
them with growing. These hydrogels also reduce the pollution of
underground water sources by preventing the active components
from leaching. In this study, sIPN acrylamide based hydrogels are
synthesised by using acrylamide free radical, potassium acrylate, and
linear polyvinyl alcohol. Ammonium nitrate is loaded in the hydrogel
as the fertiliser. The effect of various amounts of monomers and
linear polymer, measured in molar ratio, on the swelling rate,
equilibrium swelling, and release of ammonium nitrate is studied.
Abstract: In the present article, a new method has been developed to enhance the application of equipment monitoring, which in turn results in improving condition-based maintenance economic impact in an automobile parts manufacturing factory. This study also describes how an effective software with a simple database can be utilized to achieve cost-effective improvements in maintenance performance. The most important results of this project are indicated here: 1. 63% reduction in direct and indirect maintenance costs. 2. Creating a proper database to analyse failures. 3. Creating a method to control system performance and develop it to similar systems. 4. Designing a software to analyse database and consequently create technical knowledge to face unusual condition of the system. Moreover, the results of this study have shown that the concept and philosophy of maintenance has not been understood in most Iranian industries. Thus, more investment is strongly required to improve maintenance conditions.
Abstract: Nanoemulsions are a class of emulsions with a droplet
size in the range of 50–500 nm and have attracted a great deal of
attention in recent years because it is unique characteristics. The
physicochemical properties of nanoemulsion suggests that it can be
successfully used to recover the residual oil which is trapped in the
fine pore of reservoir rock by capillary forces after primary and
secondary recovery. Oil-in-water nanoemulsion which can be formed
by high-energy emulsification techniques using specific surfactants
can reduce oil-water interfacial tension (IFT) by 3-4 orders of
magnitude. The present work is aimed on characterization of oil-inwater
nanoemulsion in terms of its phase behavior, morphological
studies; interfacial energy; ability to reduce the interfacial tension and
understanding the mechanisms of mobilization and displacement of
entrapped oil blobs by lowering interfacial tension both at the
macroscopic and microscopic level. In order to investigate the
efficiency of oil-water nanoemulsion in enhanced oil recovery
(EOR), experiments were performed to characterize the emulsion in
terms of their physicochemical properties and size distribution of the
dispersed oil droplet in water phase. Synthetic mineral oil and a series
of surfactants were used to prepare oil-in-water emulsions.
Characterization of emulsion shows that it follows pseudo-plastic
behaviour and drop size of dispersed oil phase follows lognormal
distribution. Flooding experiments were also carried out in a
sandpack system to evaluate the effectiveness of the nanoemulsion as
displacing fluid for enhanced oil recovery. Substantial additional
recoveries (more than 25% of original oil in place) over conventional
water flooding were obtained in the present investigation.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study in depth some
methodological aspects of social interventation, focusing on desirable
passage from social maternage method to peer advocacy method. For
this purpose, we intend analyze social and organizative components,
that affect operator-s professional action and that are part of his
psychological environment, besides the physical and social one. In
fact, operator-s interventation should not be limited to a pure supply
of techniques, nor to take shape as improvised action, but “full of
good purposes".
Abstract: This paper presents an indirect adaptive stabilization
scheme for first-order continuous-time systems under saturated input
which is described by a sigmoidal function. The singularities are
avoided through a modification scheme for the estimated plant
parameter vector so that its associated Sylvester matrix is guaranteed
to be non-singular and then the estimated plant model is controllable.
The modification mechanism involves the use of a hysteresis
switching function. An alternative hybrid scheme, whose estimated
parameters are updated at sampling instants is also given to solve a
similar adaptive stabilization problem. Such a scheme also uses
hysteresis switching for modification of the parameter estimates so as
to ensure the controllability of the estimated plant model.
Abstract: In this paper, an algorithm for detecting and attenuating
puff noises frequently generated under the mobile environment is
proposed. As a baseline system, puff detection system is designed
based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and 39th Mel Frequency
Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) is extracted as feature parameters. To
improve the detection performance, effective acoustic features for puff
detection are proposed. In addition, detected puff intervals are
attenuated by high-pass filtering. The speech recognition rate was
measured for evaluation and confusion matrix and ROC curve are used
to confirm the validity of the proposed system.
Abstract: New lead-free ferroelectric relaxor ceramics were
prepared by conventional solid-state synthesis in the BaTiO3-Bi2O3-
Y2O3 systems. Some of these ceramics present a ferroelectric relaxor
with transition temperature close to room temperature. These new
materials are very interesting for applications and can replace leadbased
ceramic to prevent the toxic pollutions during the preparation
state. In the other hand, the energy band diagram shows the
potentiality of these compounds for the solar energy conversion.
Thus, some compositions have been tested successfully for H2
production upon visible light. The best activity occurs in alkaline
media with a rate evolution of about 0.15 mL g-1 mn-1 and a quantum
yield of 1% under polychromatic light.
Abstract: We propose an enhanced key management scheme
based on Key Infection, which is lightweight scheme for tiny sensors.
The basic scheme, Key Infection, is perfectly secure against node
capture and eavesdropping if initial communications after node
deployment is secure. If, however, an attacker can eavesdrop on
the initial communications, they can take the session key. We use
common neighbors for each node to generate the session key. Each
node has own secret key and shares it with its neighbor nodes. Then
each node can establish the session key using common neighbors-
secret keys and a random number. Our scheme needs only a few
communications even if it uses neighbor nodes- information. Without
losing the lightness of basic scheme, it improves the resistance against
eavesdropping on the initial communications more than 30%.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to present explicit analytical formulas for evaluating important characteristics of Double Moving Average control chart (DMA) for Poisson distribution. The most popular characteristics of a control chart are Average Run Length ( 0 ARL ) - the mean of observations that are taken before a system is signaled to be out-of control when it is actually still incontrol, and Average Delay time ( 1 ARL ) - mean delay of true alarm times. An important property required of 0 ARL is that it should be sufficiently large when the process is in-control to reduce a number of false alarms. On the other side, if the process is actually out-ofcontrol then 1 ARL should be as small as possible. In particular, the explicit analytical formulas for evaluating 0 ARL and 1 ARL be able to get a set of optimal parameters which depend on a width of the moving average ( w ) and width of control limit ( H ) for designing DMA chart with minimum of 1 ARL
Abstract: Digital news with a variety topics is abundant on the
internet. The problem is to classify news based on its appropriate
category to facilitate user to find relevant news rapidly. Classifier
engine is used to split any news automatically into the respective
category. This research employs Support Vector Machine (SVM) to
classify Indonesian news. SVM is a robust method to classify
binary classes. The core processing of SVM is in the formation of an
optimum separating plane to separate the different classes. For
multiclass problem, a mechanism called one against one is used to
combine the binary classification result. Documents were taken
from the Indonesian digital news site, www.kompas.com. The
experiment showed a promising result with the accuracy rate of 85%.
This system is feasible to be implemented on Indonesian news
classification.
Abstract: In this paper, based on a novel synthesis, a set of new simplified circuit design to implement the linguistic-hedge operations for adjusting the fuzzy membership function set is presented. The circuits work in current-mode and employ floating-gate MOS (FGMOS) transistors that operate in weak inversion region. Compared to the other proposed circuits, these circuits feature severe reduction of the elements number, low supply voltage (0.7V), low power consumption (60dB). In this paper, a set of fuzzy linguistic hedge circuits, including absolutely, very, much more, more, plus minus, more or less and slightly, has been implemented in 0.18 mm CMOS process. Simulation results by Hspice confirm the validity of the proposed design technique and show high performance of the circuits.
Abstract: Sugarcane Shoots is an abundantly available
residual resources consisting of lignocelluloses which take it into
the benefit. The present study was focused on utilizing of
sugarcane shoot for reducing sugar production as a substrate in
ethanol production. Physical and chemical pretreatments of
sugarcane shoot were investigated. Results showed that the size of
sugarcane shoot influenced the cellulose content. The maximum
cellulose yield (60 %) can be obtained from alkaline pretreated
sugarcane shoot with 1.0 M NaOH at 30 oC for 90 min. The
cellulose yield reached up to 93.9% (w/w). Enzymatically
hydrolyzed of cellulosic residual in 0.04 citrate buffer (pH 5) with
celluclast 1.5L (0.7 FPU/ml) resulted in the highest amount of
reducing sugar at a rate of 32.1 g/l after 4 h incubation at 50°C,
and 100 oC for 5 min . Cellulose conversion was 55.5%.
Abstract: The goals of the present research are to estimate Six Sigma implementation in Latvian commercial banks and to identify the perceived benefits of its implementation. To achieve the goals, the authors used sequential explanatory method. To obtain empirical data, the authors have developed the questionnaire and adapted it for the employees of Latvian commercial banks. The questions are related to Six Sigma implementation and its perceived benefits. The questionnaire mainly consists of closed questions, the evaluation of which is based on 5 point Likert scale. The obtained empirical data has shown that of the two hypotheses put forward in the present research – Hypothesis 1 – has to be rejected, while Hypothesis 2 has been partially confirmed. The authors have also faced some research limitations related to the fact that the participants in the questionnaire belong to different rank of the organization hierarchy.
Abstract: This paper presents the analysis of duct design using
static and dynamic approaches. The static approach is used to find
out applicability between the design and material applied. The
material used in this paper is Thermoplastic Olefins (TPO). For the
dynamic approach, the focusing is only on the CFD simulations. The
fatigue life in this design and material applied also covered.
Abstract: The method of modeling is the key technology for
digital mockup (DMU). Based upon the developing for mechanical
product DMU, the theory, method and approach for virtual
environment (VE) and virtual object (VO) were studied. This paper
has expounded the design goal and architecture of DMU system,
analyzed the method of DMU application, and researched the general
process of physics modeling and behavior modeling.
Abstract: The study of proteomics reached unexpected levels of
interest, as a direct consequence of its discovered influence over
some complex biological phenomena, such as problematic diseases
like cancer. This paper presents a new technique that allows for an
accurate analysis of the human interactome network. It is basically
a two-step analysis process that involves, at first, the detection of
each protein-s absolute importance through the betweenness centrality
computation. Then, the second step determines the functionallyrelated
communities of proteins. For this purpose, we use a community
detection technique that is based on the edge betweenness
calculation. The new technique was thoroughly tested on real biological
data and the results prove some interesting properties of those proteins that are involved in the carcinogenesis process. Apart from its
experimental usefulness, the novel technique is also computationally
effective in terms of execution times. Based on the analysis- results, some topological features of cancer mutated proteins are presented
and a possible optimization solution for cancer drugs design is suggested.
Abstract: This paper shows a new method for design of fuzzy observers for Takagi-Sugeno systems. The method is based on Linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and it allows to insert H constraint into the design procedure. The speed of estimation can tuned be specification of a decay rate of the observer closed loop system. We discuss here also the influence of parametric uncertainties at the output control system stability.
Abstract: Project managers are the ultimate responsible for the
overall characteristics of a project, i.e. they should deliver the project
on time with minimum cost and with maximum quality. It is vital for
any manager to decide a trade-off between these conflicting
objectives and they will be benefited of any scientific decision
support tool. Our work will try to determine optimal solutions (rather
than a single optimal solution) from which the project manager will
select his desirable choice to run the project. In this paper, the
problem in project scheduling notated as
(1,T|cpm,disc,mu|curve:quality,time,cost) will be studied. The
problem is multi-objective and the purpose is finding the Pareto
optimal front of time, cost and quality of a project
(curve:quality,time,cost), whose activities belong to a start to finish
activity relationship network (cpm) and they can be done in different
possible modes (mu) which are non-continuous or discrete (disc), and
each mode has a different cost, time and quality . The project is
constrained to a non-renewable resource i.e. money (1,T). Because
the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem, a meta-heuristic is
developed based on a version of genetic algorithm specially adapted
to solve multi-objective problems namely FastPGA. A sample project
with 30 activities is generated and then solved by the proposed
method.
Abstract: Despite the fact that Arabic language is currently one
of the most common languages worldwide, there has been only a
little research on Arabic speech recognition relative to other
languages such as English and Japanese. Generally, digital speech
processing and voice recognition algorithms are of special
importance for designing efficient, accurate, as well as fast automatic
speech recognition systems. However, the speech recognition process
carried out in this paper is divided into three stages as follows: firstly,
the signal is preprocessed to reduce noise effects. After that, the
signal is digitized and hearingized. Consequently, the voice activity
regions are segmented using voice activity detection (VAD)
algorithm. Secondly, features are extracted from the speech signal
using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) algorithm.
Moreover, delta and acceleration (delta-delta) coefficients have been
added for the reason of improving the recognition accuracy. Finally,
each test word-s features are compared to the training database using
dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. Utilizing the best set up
made for all affected parameters to the aforementioned techniques,
the proposed system achieved a recognition rate of about 98.5%
which outperformed other HMM and ANN-based approaches
available in the literature.
Abstract: The notions of I-vague normal groups with membership
and non-membership functions taking values in an involutary dually
residuated lattice ordered semigroup are introduced which generalize
the notions with truth values in a Boolean algebra as well as those
usual vague sets whose membership and non-membership functions
taking values in the unit interval [0, 1]. Various operations and
properties are established.