Abstract: A climate dependent model is proposed to simulate
the population of Aedes aegypti mosquito. In developing the model,
average temperature of Shah Alam, Malaysia was used to determine
the development rate of each stage of the life cycle of mosquito.
Rainfall dependent function was proposed to simulate the hatching
rate of the eggs under several assumptions. The proposed transition
matrix was obtained and used to simulate the population of eggs,
larvae, pupae and adults mosquito. It was found that the peak of
mosquito abundance comes during a relatively dry period following a
heavy rainfall. In addition, lag time between the peaks of mosquito
abundance and dengue fever cases in Shah Alam was estimated.
Abstract: Using 1km grid datasets representing monthly mean
precipitation, monthly mean temperature, and dry matter production
(DMP), we considered the regional plant production ability in
Southeast and South Asia, and also employed pixel-by-pixel
correlation analysis to assess the intensity of relation between climate
factors and plant production. While annual DMP in South Asia was
approximately less than 2,000kg, the one in most part of Southeast
Asia exceeded 2,500 - 3,000kg. It suggested that plant production in
Southeast Asia was superior to South Asia, however, Rain-Use
Efficiency (RUE) representing dry matter production per 1mm
precipitation showed that inland of Indochina Peninsula and India
were higher than islands in Southeast Asia. By the results of
correlation analysis between climate factors and DMP, while the area
in most parts of Indochina Peninsula indicated negative correlation
coefficients between DMP and precipitation or temperature, the area
in Malay Peninsula and islands showed negative correlation to
precipitation and positive one to temperature, and most part of India
dominating South Asia showed positive to precipitation and negative
to temperature. In addition, the areas where the correlation coefficients
exceeded |0.8| were regarded as “susceptible" to climate factors, and
the areas smaller than |0.2| were “insusceptible". By following the
discrimination, the map implying expected impacts by climate change
was provided.
Abstract: In this study the mixed mode fracture mechanics
parameters were investigated for high tensile steel butt welded joint
based on modified Arcan test and finite element analysis was used to
evaluate the effect of crack length on fracture criterion. The nondimensional
stress intensity factors, strain energy release rates and Jintegral
energy on crack tip were obtained for various in-plane
loading combinations on Arcan specimen starting from pure mode-I
to pure mode-II loading conditions. The specimen and apparatus were
modeled by finite element method and analyzed under various
loading angles (between 0 to 90 degrees with 15 degree interval) to
simulate the pure mode-I, II and mixed mode fracture. Since the
analytical results are independent from elasticity modules for
isotropic materials, therefore the results in elastic fields can be used
for Arcan specimens. The main objective of this study was to
evaluate the geometric calibration factors for modified Arcan test
specimen in order to obtain fracture toughness under mixed mode
loading conditions.
Abstract: We report on the results of a pilot study in which a data-mining tool was developed for mining audiology records. The records were heterogeneous in that they contained numeric, category and textual data. The tools developed are designed to observe associations between any field in the records and any other field. The techniques employed were the statistical chi-squared test, and the use of self-organizing maps, an unsupervised neural learning approach.
Abstract: Almost all Libyan industries (both private and public) have struggled with many difficulties during the past three decades due to many problems. These problems have created a strongly negative impact on the productivity and utilization of many companies within Libya. This paper studies the current awareness and implementation levels of Just-In-Time (JIT) within the Libyan Textile private industry. A survey has been applied in this study using an intensive detailed questionnaire. Based on the analysis of the survey responses, the results show that the management body within the surveyed companies has a modest strategy towards most of the areas that are considered as being very crucial in any successful implementation of JIT. The results also show a variation within the implementation levels of the JIT elements as these varies between Low and Acceptable levels. The paper has also identified limitations within the investigated areas within this industry, and has pointed to areas where senior managers within the Libyan textile industry should take immediate actions in order to achieve effective implementation of JIT within their companies.
Abstract: Amount of dissolve oxygen in a river has a great direct affect on aquatic macroinvertebrates and this would influence on the region ecosystem indirectly. In this paper it is tried to predict dissolved oxygen in rivers by employing an easy Fuzzy Logic Modeling, Wang Mendel method. This model just uses previous records to estimate upcoming values. For this purpose daily and hourly records of eight stations in Au Sable watershed in Michigan, United States are employed for 12 years and 50 days period respectively. Calculations indicate that for long period prediction it is better to increase input intervals. But for filling missed data it is advisable to decrease the interval. Increasing partitioning of input and output features influence a little on accuracy but make the model too time consuming. Increment in number of input data also act like number of partitioning. Large amount of train data does not modify accuracy essentially, so, an optimum training length should be selected.
Abstract: The third generation (3G) of cellular system adopted
the spread spectrum as solution for the transmission of the data in the
physical layer. Contrary to systems IS-95 or CDMAOne (systems
with spread spectrum of the preceding generation), the new standard,
called Universal Mobil Telecommunications System (UMTS), uses
long codes in the down link. The system is conceived for the vocal
communication and the transmission of the data. In particular, the
down link is very important, because of the asymmetrical request of
the data, i.e., more remote loading towards the mobiles than towards
the basic station. Moreover, the UMTS uses for the down link an
orthogonal spreading out with a variable factor of spreading out
(OVSF for Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor). This
characteristic makes it possible to increase the flow of data of one or
more users by reducing their factor of spreading out without
changing the factor of spreading out of other users. In the current
standard of the UMTS, two techniques to increase the performances
of the down link were proposed, the diversity of sending antenna and
the codes space-time. These two techniques fight only fainding. The
receiver proposed for the mobil station is the RAKE, but one can
imagine a receiver more sophisticated, able to reduce the interference
between users and the impact of the coloured noise and interferences
to narrow band. In this context, where the users have long codes
synchronized with variable factor of spreading out and ignorance by
the mobile of the other active codes/users, the use of the sequences of
code pseudo-noises different lengths is presented in the form of one
of the most appropriate solutions.
Abstract: The structure of retinal vessels is a prominent feature,
that reveals information on the state of disease that are reflected in
the form of measurable abnormalities in thickness and colour.
Vascular structures of retina, for implementation of clinical diabetic
retinopathy decision making system is presented in this paper.
Retinal Vascular structure is with thin blood vessel, whose accuracy
is highly dependent upon the vessel segmentation. In this paper the
blood vessel thickness is automatically detected using preprocessing
techniques and vessel segmentation algorithm. First the capture
image is binarized to get the blood vessel structure clearly, then it is
skeletonised to get the overall structure of all the terminal and
branching nodes of the blood vessels. By identifying the terminal
node and the branching points automatically, the main and branching
blood vessel thickness is estimated. Results are presented and
compared with those provided by clinical classification on 50 vessels
collected from Bejan Singh Eye hospital..
Abstract: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a methodology
that computes efficiency values for decision making units (DMU) in a
given period by comparing the outputs with the inputs. In many cases,
there are some time lag between the consumption of inputs and the
production of outputs. For a long-term research project, it is hard to
avoid the production lead time phenomenon. This time lag effect
should be considered in evaluating the performance of organizations.
This paper suggests a model to calculate efficiency values for the
performance evaluation problem with time lag. In the experimental
part, the proposed methods are compared with the CCR and an
existing time lag model using the data set of the 21st century frontier
R&D program which is a long-term national R&D program of Korea.
Abstract: This paper examined the influence of matching
students- learning preferences with the teaching methodology
adopted, on their academic performance in an accounting course in
two types of learning environment in one university in Lebanon:
classes with PowerPoint (PPT) vs. conventional classes. Learning
preferences were either for PPT or for Conventional methodology. A
statistically significant increase in academic achievement is found in
the conventionally instructed group as compared to the group taught
with PPT. This low effectiveness of PPT might be attributed to the
learning preferences of Lebanese students. In the PPT group, better
academic performance was found among students with
learning/teaching match as compared with students with
learning/teaching mismatch. Since the majority of students display a
preference for the conventional methodology, the result might
suggest that Lebanese students- performance is not optimized by PPT
in the accounting classrooms, not because of PPT itself, but because
it is not matching the Lebanese students- learning preferences in such
a quantitative course.
Abstract: In this paper we investigate the electrical
characteristics of a new structure of gate all around strained silicon
nanowire field effect transistors (FETs) with dual dielectrics by
changing the radius (RSiGe) of silicon-germanium (SiGe) wire and
gate dielectric. Indeed the effect of high-κ dielectric on Field Induced
Barrier Lowering (FIBL) has been studied. Due to the higher electron
mobility in tensile strained silicon, the n-type FETs with strained
silicon channel have better drain current compare with the pure Si
one. In this structure gate dielectric divided in two parts, we have
used high-κ dielectric near the source and low-κ dielectric near the
drain to reduce the short channel effects. By this structure short
channel effects such as FIBL will be reduced indeed by increasing
the RSiGe, ID-VD characteristics will be improved. The leakage
current and transfer characteristics, the threshold-voltage (Vt), the
drain induced barrier height lowering (DIBL), are estimated with
respect to, gate bias (VG), RSiGe and different gate dielectrics. For
short channel effects, such as DIBL, gate all around strained silicon
nanowire FET have similar characteristics with the pure Si one while
dual dielectrics can improve short channel effects in this structure.
Abstract: In this paper an algorithm is used to detect the color defects of ceramic tiles. First the image of a normal tile is clustered using GCMA; Genetic C-means Clustering Algorithm; those results in best cluster centers. C-means is a common clustering algorithm which optimizes an objective function, based on a measure between data points and the cluster centers in the data space. Here the objective function describes the mean square error. After finding the best centers, each pixel of the image is assigned to the cluster with closest cluster center. Then, the maximum errors of clusters are computed. For each cluster, max error is the maximum distance between its center and all the pixels which belong to it. After computing errors all the pixels of defected tile image are clustered based on the centers obtained from normal tile image in previous stage. Pixels which their distance from their cluster center is more than the maximum error of that cluster are considered as defected pixels.
Abstract: A structural study of an aqueous electrolyte whose
experimental results are available. It is a solution of LiCl-6H2O type
at glassy state (120K) contrasted with pure water at room temperature
by means of Partial Distribution Functions (PDF) issue from neutron
scattering technique. Based on these partial functions, the Reverse
Monte Carlo method (RMC) computes radial and angular correlation
functions which allow exploring a number of structural features of
the system. The obtained curves include some artifacts. To remedy
this, we propose to introduce a screened potential as an additional
constraint. Obtained results show a good matching between
experimental and computed functions and a significant improvement
in PDFs curves with potential constraint. It suggests an efficient fit of
pair distribution functions curves.
Abstract: Clean air in subway station is important to passengers. The Platform Screen Doors (PSDs) can improve indoor air quality in the subway station; however the air quality in the subway tunnel is degraded. The subway tunnel has high CO2 concentration and indoor particulate matter (PM) value. The Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) level in subway environment degrades by increasing the frequency of the train operation and the number of the train. The ventilation systems of the subway tunnel need improvements to have better air-quality. Numerical analyses might be effective tools to analyze the performance of subway twin-track tunnel ventilation systems. An existing subway twin-track tunnel in the metropolitan Seoul subway system is chosen for the numerical simulations. The ANSYS CFX software is used for unsteady computations of the airflow inside the twin-track tunnel when the train moves. The airflow inside the tunnel is simulated when one train runs and two trains run at the same time in the tunnel. The piston-effect inside the tunnel is analyzed when all shafts function as the natural ventilation shaft. The supplied air through the shafts is mixed with the pollutant air in the tunnel. The pollutant air is exhausted by the mechanical ventilation shafts. The supplied and discharged airs are balanced when only one train runs in the twin-track tunnel. The pollutant air in the tunnel is high when two trains run simultaneously in opposite direction and all shafts functioned as the natural shaft cases when there are no electrical power supplies in the shafts. The remained pollutant air inside the tunnel enters into the station platform when the doors are opened.
Abstract: The reduction in vehicle exhaust emissions achieved
in the last two decades is offset by the growth in traffic, as well as by
changes in the composition of emitted pollutants. The present
investigation illustrates the emissions of in-use gasoline and diesel
passenger cars using the official European driving cycle and the
ARTEMIS real-world driving cycle. It was observed that some of the
vehicles do not comply with the corresponding regulations.
Significant differences in emissions were observed between driving
cycles. Not all pollutants showed a tendency to decrease from Euro 3
to Euro 5.
Abstract: Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a statistical learning tool that was initially developed by Vapnik in 1979 and later developed to a more complex concept of structural risk minimization (SRM). SVM is playing an increasing role in applications to detection problems in various engineering problems, notably in statistical signal processing, pattern recognition, image analysis, and communication systems. In this paper, SVM was applied to the detection of medical ultrasound images in the presence of partially developed speckle noise. The simulation was done for single look and multi-look speckle models to give a complete overlook and insight to the new proposed model of the SVM-based detector. The structure of the SVM was derived and applied to clinical ultrasound images and its performance in terms of the mean square error (MSE) metric was calculated. We showed that the SVM-detected ultrasound images have a very low MSE and are of good quality. The quality of the processed speckled images improved for the multi-look model. Furthermore, the contrast of the SVM detected images was higher than that of the original non-noisy images, indicating that the SVM approach increased the distance between the pixel reflectivity levels (detection hypotheses) in the original images.
Abstract: Antimicrobial resistant is becoming a major factor in
virtually all hospital acquired infection may soon untreatable is a
serious public health problem. These concerns have led to major
research effort to discover alternative strategies for the treatment of
bacterial infection. Nanobiotehnology is an upcoming and fast
developing field with potential application for human welfare. An
important area of nanotechnology for development of reliable and
environmental friendly process for synthesis of nanoscale particles
through biological systems In the present studies are reported on the
use of fungal strain Aspergillus species for the extracellular synthesis
of bionanoparticles from 1 mM silver nitrate (AgNO3) solution. The
report would be focused on the synthesis of metallic bionanoparticles
of silver using a reduction of aqueous Ag+ ion with the
culture supernatants of Microorganisms. The bio-reduction of the
Ag+ ions in the solution would be monitored in the aqueous
component and the spectrum of the solution would measure through
UV-visible spectrophotometer The bionanoscale particles were
further characterized by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Fourier
Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Thin layer
chromatography. The synthesized bionanoscale particle showed a
maximum absorption at 385 nm in the visible region. Atomic Force
Microscopy investigation of silver bionanoparticles identified that
they ranged in the size of 250 nm - 680 nm; the work analyzed the
antimicrobial efficacy of the silver bionanoparticles against various
multi drug resistant clinical isolates. The present Study would be
emphasizing on the applicability to synthesize the metallic
nanostructures and to understand the biochemical and molecular
mechanism of nanoparticles formation by the cell filtrate in order to
achieve better control over size and polydispersity of the
nanoparticles. This would help to develop nanomedicine against
various multi drug resistant human pathogens.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper isunavailability of the two main types of conveSwedish traction power supply (TPS) system, i.e.static converter. The number of outages and the ouused to analyze and compare the unavailability oconverters. The mean cumulative function (MCF)analyze the number of outages and the unavailabthe forced outage rate (FOR) concept has been uoutage rates. The study shows that the outagesfailure occur at a constant rate by calendar timconverter stations, while very few stations havedecreasing rate. It has also been found that the stata higher number of outages and a higher outage ratcompared to the rotary converter types. The resultsthat combining the number of outages and the fgives a better view of the converters performasupport for the maintenance decision. In fact, usingdoes not reflect reality. Comparing these two indein identifying the areas where extra resources are maintenance planning and where improvementsoutage in the TPS system.KeywordsFrequency Converter, Forced OuCumulative Function, Traction Power Supply, ESystems.
Abstract: In this study, an ablation, mechanical and thermal properties of a rocket motor insulation from phenolic/ fiber matrix composites forming a laminate with different fiber between fiberglass and locally available synthetic fibers. The phenolic/ fiber matrix composites was mechanics and thermal properties by means of tensile strength, ablation, TGA and DSC. The design of thermal insulation involves several factors.Determined the mechanical properties according to MIL-I-24768: Density >1.3 g/cm3, Tensile strength >103 MPa and Ablation
Abstract: It is necessary to evaluate the bridges conditions and
strengthen bridges or parts of them. The reinforcement necessary due
to some reasons can be summarized as: First, a changing in use of
bridge could produce internal forces in a part of structural which
exceed the existing cross-sectional capacity. Second, bridges may
also need reinforcement because damage due to external factors
which reduced the cross-sectional resistance to external loads. One of
other factors could listed here its misdesign in some details, like
safety of bridge or part of its.This article identify the design demands
of Qing Shan bridge located in is in Heilongjiang Province He gang -
Nen Jiang Road 303 provincial highway, Wudalianchi area, China, is
an important bridge in the urban areas. The investigation program
was include the observation and evaluate the damage in T- section
concrete beams , prestressed concrete box girder bridges section in
additional evaluate the whole state of bridge includes the pier ,
abutments , bridge decks, wings , bearing and capping beam, joints,
........etc. The test results show that the bridges in general structural
condition are good. T beam span No 10 were observed, crack
extended upward along the ribbed T beam, and continue to the T
beam flange. Crack width varying between 0.1mm to 0.4mm, the
maximum about 0.4mm. The bridge needs to be improved flexural
bending strength especially at for T beam section.