Abstract: This paper aims to study at the use of local knowledge
to develop community self-protection in flood prone residential area,
Ayutthaya Island has been chosen as a case study. This study tries to
examine the strength of local knowledge which is able to develop
community self-protection and cope with flood disaster. In-depth, this
paper focuses on the influence of social network on knowledge
transfer. After conducted the research, authors reviewed the strength
of local knowledge and also mentioned the obstacles of community to
use and also transfer local knowledge. Moreover, the result of the
study revealed that local knowledge is not always transferred by the
strongest-tie social network (family or kinship) as we used to believe.
Surprisingly, local knowledge could be also transferred by the
weaker-tie social network (teacher/ monk) with the better
effectiveness in some knowledge.
Abstract: Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker-s yeast) can exhibit
sustained oscillations during the operation in a continuous bioreactor
that adversely affects its stability and productivity. Because of
heterogeneous nature of cell populations, the cell population balance
models can be used to capture the dynamic behavior of such cultures.
In this paper an unstructured, segregated model is used which is
based on population balance equation(PBE) and then in order to
simulation, the 4th order Rung-Kutta is used for time dimension and
three methods, finite difference, orthogonal collocation on finite
elements and Galerkin finite element are used for discretization of the
cell mass domain. The results indicate that the orthogonal collocation
on finite element not only is able to predict the oscillating behavior of
the cell culture but also needs much little time for calculations.
Therefore this method is preferred in comparison with other methods.
In the next step two controllers, a globally linearizing control (GLC)
and a conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller are designed
for controlling the total cell mass per unit volume, and performances
of these controllers are compared through simulation. The results
show that although the PI controller has simpler structure, the GLC
has better performance.
Abstract: Bone growth factors, such as Bone Morphogenic
Protein-2 (BMP-2) have been approved by the FDA to replace grafting for some surgical interventions, but the high dose requirement limits its use in patients. Noggin, an extracellular protein, blocks the effect of BMP-2 by binding to BMP. Preventing
the BMP-2/noggin interaction will help increase the free
concentration of BMP-2 and therefore should enhance its efficacy to
induce bone formation. The work presented here involves
computational design of novel small molecule inhibitory agents of BMP-2/noggin interaction, based on our current understanding of
BMP-2, and its known putative ligands (receptors and antagonists). A
successful acquisition of such an inhibitory agent of BMP-2/noggin interaction would allow clinicians to reduce the dose required of
BMP-2 protein in clinical applications to promote osteogenesis. The
available crystal structures of the BMPs, its receptors, and the binding partner noggin were analyzed to identify the critical residues
involved in their interaction. In presenting this study, LUDI de novo design method was utilized to perform virtual screening of a large
number of compounds from a commercially available library against the binding sites of noggin to identify the lead chemical compounds
that could potentially block BMP-noggin interaction with a high specificity.
Abstract: In the paper the research of flat textile products for use
as electrodes was presented. Material-s resistance measurements were
carried out to determine the suitability of the textiles. Based on the received results of studies different types of textile electrodes were
designed. Textile electrodes tests were carried out on human
phantoms. The electro-conductive properties of human forearm
phantom were also described. Based on this results special electroconductive
hydrogels with electro-conductive particles were feasible. The hydrogel is an important element of the forearm-s phantom
model of a survey of electrodes for muscle electrostimulation. The
hydrogel is an equivalent human skin and tissue. The hydrogel should
have a permanence and recurrence of the electro-conductive properties.
Abstract: In this study, in order to clarify wind-induced
phenomena, especially vertical mixing of density stratification in a
closed water area with floating-leaved plants, we conducted hydraulic
experiments on wind flow characteristics, wind wave characteristics,
entrainment phenomena and turbulent structure by using a wind tunnel
test tank and simulated floating-leaved plants. From the experimental
results of wind flow and wind wave characteristics, we quantified the
impact of the occupancy rate of the plants on their resistance
characteristics. From the experimental results of entrainment
phenomena, we defined the parameter that could explain the
magnitude of mixing between the density stratifications, and
quantified the impact of the occupancy rate on vertical mixing
between stratifications. From the experimental results of the turbulent
structure of the upper layer, we clarified the differences in small-scale
turbulence components at each occupancy rate and quantified the
impact of the occupancy rate on the turbulence characteristics. For a
summary of this study, we theoretically quantified wind-induced
entrainment phenomena in a closed water area with luxuriant growth
of floating-leaved plants. The results indicated that the impact of
luxuriant growth of floating-leaved plants in a closed water body
could be seen in the difference in small-scale fluid characteristics, and
these characteristics could be expressed using the small-scale
turbulent components.
Abstract: A power cable is widely used for power supply in
power distributing networks and power transmission lines. Due to
limitations in the production, delivery and setting up power cables,
they are produced and delivered in several separate lengths. Cable
itself, consists of two cable terminations and arbitrary number of
cable joints, depending on the cable route length. Electrical stress
control is needed to prevent a dielectric breakdown at the end of the
insulation shield in both the air and cable insulation. Reliability of
cable joint depends on its materials, design, installation and operating
environment. The paper describes design and performance results for
new modeled cable joints. Design concepts, based on numerical
calculations, must be correct. An Equivalent Electrodes
Method/Boundary Elements Method-hybrid approach that allows
electromagnetic field calculations in multilayer dielectric media,
including inhomogeneous regions, is presented.
Abstract: Biodiesel production results in glycerol production as
the main by-product in biodiesel industry.One of the utilizations of
glycerol obtained from biodiesel production is as a cement grinding
aid (CGA). Results showed that crude glycerol content was 40.19%
whereas pure glycerol content was 82.15%. BSS value of the cement
with CGA supplementation was higher than that of nonsupplemented
cement (blank) indicating that CGA-supplemented
cement had higher fineness than the non-supplemented one. It was
also found that pure glycerol 95% and TEA 5% at 80ºC was the
optimum CGA used to result in finest cement with BSS value of
4.836 cm2/g. Residue test showed that the smallest percent residue
value (0.11%) was obtained in cement with supplementation of pure
glycerol 95% and TEA 5%. Results of residue test confirmed those of
BSS test showing that cement with supplementation of pure glycerol
95% and TEA 5% had the finest particle size.
Abstract: Increase in using internet makes some problems that
one of them is "internet anxiety". Internet anxiety is a type of anxious
that people may feel during surfing internet or using internet for their
educational purpose, blogging or streaming to digital libraries. The
goal of this study is evaluating of internet anxiety among the
management students. In this research Ealy's internet anxiety
questionnaire, consists of positive and negative items, is completed
by 310 participants. According to the findings, about 64.7% of them
were equal or below to mean anxiety score (50). The distribution of
internet anxiety scores was normal and there was no meaningful
difference between men-s and women's anxiety level in this sample.
Results also showed that there is no meaningful difference of internet
anxiety level between different fields of study in Management. This
evaluation will help managers to perform gap analysis between the
existent level and the desired one. Future work would be providing
techniques for abating human anxiety while using internet via human
computer interaction techniques.
Abstract: A high performance clarification system has been
discussed for advanced aqueous reprocessing of FBR spent fuel.
Dissolver residue gives the cause of troubles on the plant operation of
reprocessing. In this study, the new clarification system based on the
hybrid of centrifuge and filtration was proposed to get the high
separation ability of the component of whole insoluble sludge. The
clarification tests of simulated solid species were carried out to
evaluate the clarification performance using small-scale test apparatus
of centrifuge and filter unit. The density effect of solid species on the
collection efficiency was mainly evaluated in the centrifugal
clarification test. In the filtration test using ceramic filter with pore
size of 0.2μm, on the other hand, permeability and filtration rate
were evaluated in addition to the filtration efficiency. As results, it was
evaluated that the collection efficiency of solid species on the new
clarification system was estimated as nearly 100%. In conclusion, the
high clarification performance of dissolver liquor can be achieved by
the hybrid of the centrifuge and filtration system.
Abstract: Today modern simulations solutions in the wind turbine industry have achieved a high degree of complexity and detail in result. Limitations exist when it is time to validate model results against measurements. Regarding Model validation it is of special interest to identify mode frequencies and to differentiate them from the different excitations. A wind turbine is a complex device and measurements regarding any part of the assembly show a lot of noise. Input excitations are difficult or even impossible to measure due to the stochastic nature of the environment. Traditional techniques for frequency analysis or features extraction are widely used to analyze wind turbine sensor signals, but have several limitations specially attending to non stationary signals (Events). A new technique based on autoregresive analysis techniques is introduced here for a specific application, a comparison and examples related to different events in the wind turbine operations are presented.
Abstract: Reasonably priced and well-constructed housing must
be an integral and element supporting a healthy society. The absence
of housing everyone in society can afford negatively affects the
people's health, education, ability to get jobs, develop their
community. Without access to decent housing, economic
development, integration of immigrants and inclusiveness, the society
is negatively impacted. Canada has a sterling record in creating
housing compared to many other nations around the globe. Canadian
housing gets support from a mature and responsive mortgage network
and a top-quality construction industry as well as safe and excellent
quality building materials that are readily available. Yet 1.7 million
Canadian households occupy substandard abodes. During the past
hundred years, Canada's government has made a wide variety of
attempts to provide decent residential facilities every Canadian can
afford. Despite these laudable efforts, today Canada is left with
housing that is inadequate for many Canadians. People who own their
housing are given all kinds of privileges and perks, while people with
relatively low incomes who rent their apartments or houses are
discriminated against.
To help solve these problems, zoning that is based on an
"inclusionary" philosophy is tool developed to help provide people
the affordable residences that they need. No, thirty years after its
introduction, this type of zoning has been shown effective in helping
build and provide Canadians with a houses or apartments they can
afford to pay for. Using this form of zoning can have different results
+depending on where and how it is used. After examining Canadian
affordable housing and four American cases where this type of
zoning was enforced in the USA, this makes various
recommendations for expanding Canadians' access to housing they
can afford.
Abstract: Transition theory has been used to derive the elasticplastic
and transitional stresses. Results obtained have been discussed
numerically and depicted graphically. It is observed that the rotating
disk made of incompressible material with inclusion require higher
angular speed to yield at the internal surface as compared to disk
made of compressible material. It is seen that the radial and
circumferential stresses are maximum at the internal surface with and
without edge load (for flat disk). With the increase in thickness
parameter (k = 2, 4), the circumferential stress is maximum at the
external surface while the radial stress is maximum at the internal
surface. From the figures drawn the disk with exponentially varying
thickness (k = 2), high angular speed is required for initial yielding at
internal surface as compared to flat disk and exponentially varying
thickness for k = 4 onwards. It is concluded that the disk made of
isotropic compressible material is on the safer side of the design as
compared to disk made of isotropic incompressible material as it
requires higher percentage increase in an angular speed to become
fully plastic from its initial yielding.
Abstract: People from different cultures favor web pages
characterized by the values of their culture and, therefore, tend to
prefer different characteristics of a website according to their cultural
values in terms of navigation, security, product information, customer
service, shopping and design tools. For a company aiming to
globalize its market it is useful to implement country specific cultural
interfaces and different web sites for countries with different cultures.
This paper, following the conclusions proposed by two models of
Hall and Hofstede, and the studies of Marcus and Gould, defines,
through an empirical analysis, the guidelines of web design for both
the Scandinavian countries and Malaysia.
Abstract: This paper describes an automated event detection and location system for water distribution pipelines which is based upon low-cost sensor technology and signature analysis by an Artificial
Neural Network (ANN). The development of a low cost failure sensor which measures the opacity or cloudiness of the local water
flow has been designed, developed and validated, and an ANN based system is then described which uses time series data produced by
sensors to construct an empirical model for time series prediction and
classification of events. These two components have been installed,
tested and verified in an experimental site in a UK water distribution
system. Verification of the system has been achieved from a series of
simulated burst trials which have provided real data sets. It is concluded that the system has potential in water distribution network
management.
Abstract: The Learning Management Systems present learning
environment which offers a collection of e-learning tools in a
package that allows a common interface and information sharing
among the tools. South East European University initial experience
in LMS was with the usage of the commercial LMS-ANGEL. After a
three year experience on ANGEL usage because of expenses that
were very high it was decided to develop our own software. As part
of the research project team for the in-house design and development
of the new LMS, we primarily had to select the features that would
cover our needs and also comply with the actual trends in the area of
software development, and then design and develop the system. In
this paper we present the process of LMS in-house development for
South East European University, its architecture, conception and
strengths with a special accent on the process of migration and
integration with other enterprise applications.
Abstract: Electronic seal is an electronic device to check the
authenticity and integrity of freight containers at the point of arrival.
While RFID-based eSeals are gaining more acceptances and there are
also some standardization processes for these devices, a recent
research revealed that the current RFID-based eSeals are vulnerable to
various attacks. In this paper, we provide a feasible solution to
enhance the security of active RFID-based eSeals. Our approach is to
use an authentication and key agreement protocol between eSeal and
reader device, enabling data encryption and integrity check. Our
protocol is based on the use of block cipher AES, which is reasonable
since a block cipher can also be used for many other security purposes
including data encryption and pseudo-random number generation. Our
protocol is very simple, and it is applicable to low-end active RFID
eSeals.
Abstract: This paper presents a design method of self-tuning
Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) by using improved deadbeat
control algorithm. QFT is a technique to achieve robust control with
pre-defined specifications whereas deadbeat is an algorithm that
could bring the output to steady state with minimum step size.
Nevertheless, usually there are large peaks in the deadbeat response.
By integrating QFT specifications into deadbeat algorithm, the large
peaks could be tolerated. On the other hand, emerging QFT with
adaptive element will produce a robust controller with wider
coverage of uncertainty. By combining QFT-based deadbeat
algorithm and adaptive element, superior controller that is called selftuning
QFT-based deadbeat controller could be achieved. The output
response that is fast, robust and adaptive is expected. Using a grain
dryer plant model as a pilot case-study, the performance of the
proposed method has been evaluated and analyzed. Grain drying
process is very complex with highly nonlinear behaviour, long delay,
affected by environmental changes and affected by disturbances.
Performance comparisons have been performed between the
proposed self-tuning QFT-based deadbeat, standard QFT and
standard dead-beat controllers. The efficiency of the self-tuning QFTbased
dead-beat controller has been proven from the tests results in
terms of controller’s parameters are updated online, less percentage
of overshoot and settling time especially when there are variations in
the plant.
Abstract: The aim of this work is to study the possible use of
stone cutting sludge waste in concrete production, which would
reduce both the environmental impact and the production cost .Slurry
sludge was used a source of water in concrete production, which was
obtained from Samara factory/Jordan, The physico-chemical and
mineralogical characterization of the sludge was carried out to
identify the major components and to compare it with the typical
sand used to produce concrete. Samples analysis showed that 96% of
slurry sludge volume is water, so it should be considered as an
important source of water. Results indicated that the use of slurry
sludge as water source in concrete production has insignificant effect
on compression strength, while it has a sharp effect on the slump
values. Using slurry sludge with a percentage of 25% of the total
water content obtained successful concrete samples regarding slump
and compression tests. To clarify slurry sludge, settling process can
be used to remove the suspended solid. A settling period of 30 min.
obtained 99% removal efficiency. The clarified water is suitable for
using in concrete mixes, which reduce water consumption, conserve
water recourses, increase the profit, reduce operation cost and save
the environment. Additionally, the dry sludge could be used in the
mix design instead of the fine materials with sizes < 160 um. This
application could conserve the natural materials and solve the
environmental and economical problem caused by sludge
accumulation.
Abstract: Natural gas is the most popular fossil fuel in the
current era and future as well. Natural gas is existed in underground
reservoirs so it may contain many of non-hydrocarbon components
for instance, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen and water vapor. These
impurities are undesirable compounds and cause several technical
problems for example, corrosion and environment pollution.
Therefore, these impurities should be reduce or removed from natural
gas stream. Khurmala dome is located in southwest Erbil-Kurdistan
region. The Kurdistan region government has paid great attention for
this dome to provide the fuel for Kurdistan region. However, the
Khurmala associated natural gas is currently flaring at the field.
Moreover, nowadays there is a plan to recover and trade this gas and
to use it either as feedstock to power station or to sell it in global
market. However, the laboratory analysis has showed that the
Khurmala sour gas has huge quantities of H2S about (5.3%) and CO2
about (4.4%). Indeed, Khurmala gas sweetening process has been
removed in previous study by using Aspen HYSYS. However,
Khurmala sweet gas still contents some quintets of water about 23
ppm in sweet gas stream. This amount of water should be removed or
reduced. Indeed, water content in natural gas cause several technical
problems such as hydrates and corrosion. Therefore, this study aims
to simulate the prospective Khurmala gas dehydration process by
using Aspen HYSYS V. 7.3 program. Moreover, the simulation
process succeeded in reducing the water content to less than 0.1ppm.
In addition, the simulation work is also achieved process
optimization by using several desiccant types for example, TEG and
DEG and it also study the relationship between absorbents type and
its circulation rate with HCs losses from glycol regenerator tower.
Abstract: A design of communication area for infrared
electronic-toll-collection systems to provide an extended
communication interval in the vehicle traveling direction and
regular boundary between contiguous traffic lanes is proposed.
By utilizing two typical low-cost commercial infrared LEDs with
different half-intensity angles Φ1/2 = 22◦ and 10◦, the radiation
pattern of the emitter is designed to properly adjust the spatial
distribution of the signal power. The aforementioned purpose
can be achieved with an LED array in a three-piece structure
with appropriate mounting angles. With this emitter, the influence
of the mounting parameters, including the mounting height and
mounting angles of the on-board unit and road-side unit, on the
system performance in terms of the received signal strength and
communication area are investigated. The results reveal that, for
our emitter proposed in this paper, the ideal ”long-and-narrow”
characteristic of the communication area is very little affected by
these mounting parameters. An optimum mounting configuration is
also suggested.