Abstract: REY area has been located in Tehran Province and several archaeological ruins of this area indicate that the settlement in this area has been started since several thousand years ago. In this paper, the main investigation items consist of analysis of oil components and groundwater quality inside the wells. By finding the contents of oil in the well, it is possible to find out the pollution source by comparing the oil contents of well with other oil products that are used inside and outside of the oil farm. Investigation items consist of analysis of BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethyl-benzene, Xylene), Gas chromatographic distillation characteristics, Water content, Density, Sulfur content, Lead content, Atmospheric distillation, MTBE(Methyl tertiary butyl ether). Analysis of polluting oil components showed that except MW(Monitoring Well)10 and MW 15 that oil with slightly heavy components was detected in them; with a high possibility the polluting oil is light oil.
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 two-dimensional numerical simulation of the contribution
of both inertial and aerodynamic forces on the blade loads of
a Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) is presented. After describing
the computational model and the relative validation procedure, a
complete campaign of simulations - based on full RANS unsteady
calculations - is proposed for a three-bladed rotor architecture characterized
by a NACA 0021 airfoil. For each analyzed angular velocity,
the combined effect of pressure and viscous forces acting on every
rotor blade are compared to the corresponding centrifugal forces,
due to the revolution of the turbine, thus achieving a preliminary
estimation of the correlation between overall rotor efficiency and
structural blade loads.
Abstract: A total of 33,680 nuclear power plants (NPPs) workers were monitored and recorded from 1990 to 2007. According to the record, the average individual radiation dose has been decreasing continually from it 3.20 mSv/man in 1990 to 1.12 mSv/man at the end of 2007. After the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) 60 recommendation was generalized in South Korea, no nuclear power plant workers received above 20 mSv radiation, and the numbers of relatively highly exposed workers have been decreasing continuously. The age distribution of radiation workers in nuclear power plants was composed of mainly 20-30- year-olds (83%) for 1990 ~ 1994 and 30-40-year-olds (75%) for 2003 ~ 2007. The difference in individual average dose by age was not significant. Most (77%) of NPP radiation exposures from 1990 to 2007 occurred mostly during the refueling period. With regard to exposure type, the majority of exposures were external exposures, representing 95% of the total exposures, while internal exposures represented only 5%. External effective dose was affected mainly by gamma radiation exposure, with an insignificant amount of neutron exposure. As for internal effective dose, tritium (3H) in the pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) was the biggest cause of exposure.
Abstract: In this paper, genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed for
the design of an optimization algorithm to achieve the bandwidth
allocation of ATM network. In Broadband ISDN, the ATM is a highbandwidth;
fast packet switching and multiplexing technique. Using
ATM it can be flexibly reconfigure the network and reassign the
bandwidth to meet the requirements of all types of services. By
dynamically routing the traffic and adjusting the bandwidth
assignment, the average packet delay of the whole network can be
reduced to a minimum. M/M/1 model can be used to analyze the
performance.
Abstract: Attachment of the circulating monocytes to the
endothelium is the earliest detectable events during formation of
atherosclerosis. The adhesion molecules, chemokines and matrix
proteases genes were identified to be expressed in atherogenesis.
Expressions of these genes may influence structural integrity of the
luminal endothelium. The aim of this study is to relate changes in the
ultrastructural morphology of the aortic luminal surface and gene
expressions of the endothelial surface, chemokine and MMP-12 in
normal and hypercholesterolemic rabbits. Luminal endothelial
surface from rabbit aortic tissue was examined by scanning electron
microscopy (SEM) using low vacuum mode to ascertain
ultrastructural changes in development of atherosclerotic lesion. Gene
expression of adhesion molecules, MCP-1 and MMP-12 were studied
by Real-time PCR. Ultrastructural observations of the aortic luminal
surface exhibited changes from normal regular smooth intact
endothelium to irregular luminal surface including marked globular
appearance and ruptures of the membrane layer. Real-time PCR
demonstrated differentially expressed of studied genes in
atherosclerotic tissues. The appearance of ultrastructural changes in
aortic tissue of hypercholesterolemic rabbits is suggested to have
relation with underlying changes of endothelial surface molecules,
chemokine and MMP-12 gene expressions.
Abstract: Space exploration is a highly visible endeavour of
humankind to seek profound answers to questions about the origins
of our solar system, whether life exists beyond Earth, and how we
could live on other worlds. Different platforms have been utilized in
planetary exploration missions, such as orbiters, landers, rovers, and
penetrators.
Having low mass, good mechanical contact with the surface,
ability to acquire high quality scientific subsurface data, and ability to
be deployed in areas that may not be conducive to landers or rovers,
Penetrators provide an alternative and complimentary solution that
makes possible scientific exploration of hardly accessible sites (icy
areas, gully sites, highlands etc.).
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has put space exploration as
one of the pillars of its space program, and established ExCo program
to prepare Canada for future international planetary exploration.
ExCo sets surface mobility as its focus and priority, and invests
mainly in the development of rovers because of Canada's niche space
robotics technology. Meanwhile, CSA is also investigating how
micro-penetrators can help Canada to fulfill its scientific objectives
for planetary exploration.
This paper presents a review of the micro-penetrator technologies,
past missions, and lessons learned. It gives a detailed analysis of the
technical challenges of micro-penetrators, such as high impact
survivability, high precision guidance navigation and control, thermal
protection, communications, and etc. Then, a Canadian perspective of
a possible micro-penetrator mission is given, including Canadian
scientific objectives and priorities, potential instruments, and flight
opportunities.
Abstract: This paper describes new computer vision algorithms
that have been developed to track moving objects as part of a
long-term study into the design of (semi-)autonomous vehicles. We
present the results of a study to exploit variable kernels for tracking in
video sequences. The basis of our work is the mean shift
object-tracking algorithm; for a moving target, it is usual to define a
rectangular target window in an initial frame, and then process the data
within that window to separate the tracked object from the background
by the mean shift segmentation algorithm. Rather than use the
standard, Epanechnikov kernel, we have used a kernel weighted by the
Chamfer distance transform to improve the accuracy of target
representation and localization, minimising the distance between the
two distributions in RGB color space using the Bhattacharyya
coefficient. Experimental results show the improved tracking
capability and versatility of the algorithm in comparison with results
using the standard kernel. These algorithms are incorporated as part of
a robot test-bed architecture which has been used to demonstrate their
effectiveness.
Abstract: Bioinformatics and computational biology involve
the use of techniques including applied mathematics,
informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence,
chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems
usually on the molecular level. Research in computational
biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research
efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding,
genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure
prediction, prediction of gene expression and proteinprotein
interactions, and the modeling of evolution. Various
global rearrangements of permutations, such as reversals and
transpositions,have recently become of interest because of their
applications in computational molecular biology. A reversal is
an operation that reverses the order of a substring of a permutation.
A transposition is an operation that swaps two adjacent
substrings of a permutation. The problem of determining the
smallest number of reversals required to transform a given
permutation into the identity permutation is called sorting by
reversals. Similar problems can be defined for transpositions
and other global rearrangements. In this work we perform a
study about some genome rearrangement primitives. We show
how a genome is modelled by a permutation, introduce some
of the existing primitives and the lower and upper bounds
on them. We then provide a comparison of the introduced
primitives.
Abstract: This paper explores the knowledge and attitude of
women and men in decision making on pap smear screening. This
qualitative study recruited 52 respondents with 44 women and 8 men,
using the purposive sampling with snowballing technique through indepth
interviews. This study demonstrates several key findings:
Female respondents have better knowledge compared to male. Most
of the women perceived that pap smear screening is beneficial and
important, but to proceed with the test is still doubtful. Male
respondents were supportive in terms of sending their spouses to the
health facilities or give more freedom to their wives to choose and
making decision on their own health due to prominent reason that
women know best on their own health. It is expected that the results
from this study will provide useful guideline for healthcare providers
to prepare any action/intervention to provide an extensive education
to improve people-s knowledge and attitude towards pap smear.
Abstract: Support vector machines (SVMs) have shown
superior performance compared to other machine learning techniques,
especially in classification problems. Yet one limitation of SVMs is
the lack of an explanation capability which is crucial in some
applications, e.g. in the medical and security domains. In this paper, a
novel approach for eclectic rule-extraction from support vector
machines is presented. This approach utilizes the knowledge acquired
by the SVM and represented in its support vectors as well as the
parameters associated with them. The approach includes three stages;
training, propositional rule-extraction and rule quality evaluation.
Results from four different experiments have demonstrated the value
of the approach for extracting comprehensible rules of high accuracy
and fidelity.
Abstract: During recent years wind turbine technology has
undergone rapid developments. Growth in size and the optimization
of wind turbines has enabled wind energy to become increasingly
competitive with conventional energy sources. As a result today-s
wind turbines participate actively in the power production of several
countries around the world. These developments raise a number of
challenges to be dealt with now and in the future. The penetration of
wind energy in the grid raises questions about the compatibility of the
wind turbine power production with the grid. In particular, the
contribution to grid stability, power quality and behavior during fault
situations plays therefore as important a role as the reliability. In the
present work, we addressed two fault situations that have shown their
influence on the generator and the behavior of the wind over the
defects which are briefly discussed based on simulation results.
Abstract: A generalized Digital Modulation Identification algorithm for adaptive demodulator has been developed and presented in this paper. The algorithm developed is verified using wavelet Transform and histogram computation to identify QPSK and QAM with GMSK and M–ary FSK modulations. It has been found that the histogram peaks simplifies the procedure for identification. The simulated results show that the correct modulation identification is possible to a lower bound of 5 dB and 12 dB for GMSK and QPSK respectively. When SNR is above 5 dB the throughput of the proposed algorithm is more than 97.8%. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) has been computed to measure the performance of the proposed algorithm and the analysis shows that the probability of detection (Pd) drops rapidly when SNR is 5 dB and probability of false alarm (Pf) is smaller than 0.3. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been compared with existing methods and found it will identify all digital modulation schemes with low SNR.
Abstract: Video Mosaicing is the stitching of selected frames of
a video by estimating the camera motion between the frames and
thereby registering successive frames of the video to arrive at the
mosaic. Different techniques have been proposed in the literature for
video mosaicing. Despite of the large number of papers dealing with
techniques to generate mosaic, only a few authors have investigated
conditions under which these techniques generate good estimate of
motion parameters. In this paper, these techniques are studied under
different videos, and the reasons for failures are found. We propose
algorithms with incorporation of outlier removal algorithms for better
estimation of motion parameters.
Abstract: Ethanol has been known for a long time, being
perhaps the oldest product obtained through traditional biotechnology
fermentation. Agriculture waste as substrate in fermentation is vastly
discussed as alternative to replace edible food and utilization of
organic material. Pineapple peel, highly potential source as substrate
is a by-product of the pineapple processing industry. Bio-ethanol
from pineapple (Ananas comosus) peel extract was carried out by
controlling fermentation without any treatment. Saccharomyces
ellipsoides was used as inoculum in this fermentation process as it is
naturally found at the pineapple skin. In this study, the capability of
Response Surface Methodology (RSM) for optimization of ethanol
production from pineapple peel extract using Saccharomyces
ellipsoideus in batch fermentation process was investigated. Effect of
five test variables in a defined range of inoculum concentration 6-
14% (v/v), pH (4.0-6.0), sugar concentration (14-22°Brix),
temperature (24-32°C) and time of incubation (30-54 hrs) on the
ethanol production were evaluated. Data obtained from experiment
were analyzed with RSM of MINITAB Software (Version 15)
whereby optimum ethanol concentration of 8.637% (v/v) was
determined. The optimum condition of 14% (v/v) inoculum
concentration, pH 6, 22°Brix, 26°C and 30hours of incubation. The
significant regression equation or model at the 5% level with
correlation value of 99.96% was also obtained.
Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to establish a
methodology for testing and optimizing GPRS performance over
Libya GSM network as well as to propose a suitable optimization
technique to improve performance. Some measurements of
download, upload, throughput, round-trip time, reliability, handover,
security enhancement and packet loss over a GPRS access network
were carried out. Measured values are compared to the theoretical
values that could be calculated beforehand. This data should be
processed and delivered by the server across the wireless network to
the client. The client on the fly takes those pieces of the data and
process immediately. Also, we illustrate the results by describing the
main parameters that affect the quality of service. Finally, Libya-s
two mobile operators, Libyana Mobile Phone and Al-Madar al-
Jadeed Company are selected as a case study to validate our
methodology.
Abstract: The paper proposes the novel design of a 3T XOR gate combining complementary CMOS with pass transistor logic. The design has been compared with earlier proposed 4T and 6T XOR gates and a significant improvement in silicon area and power-delay product has been obtained. An eight transistor full adder has been designed using the proposed three-transistor XOR gate and its performance has been investigated using 0.15um and 0.35um technologies. Compared to the earlier designed 10 transistor full adder, the proposed adder shows a significant improvement in silicon area and power delay product. The whole simulation has been carried out using HSPICE.
Abstract: Positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) is a
technique in which a single radioactive tracer particle can be
accurately tracked as it moves. A limitation of PET is that in order to
reconstruct a tomographic image it is necessary to acquire a large
volume of data (millions of events), so it is difficult to study rapidly
changing systems. By considering this fact, PEPT is a very fast
process compared with PET.
In PEPT detecting both photons defines a line and the annihilation
is assumed to have occurred somewhere along this line. The location
of the tracer can be determined to within a few mm from coincident
detection of a small number of pairs of back-to-back gamma rays and
using triangulation. This can be achieved many times per second and
the track of a moving particle can be reliably followed. This
technique was invented at the University of Birmingham [1].
The attempt in PEPT is not to form an image of the tracer particle
but simply to determine its location with time. If this tracer is
followed for a long enough period within a closed, circulating system
it explores all possible types of motion.
The application of PEPT to industrial process systems carried out
at the University of Birmingham is categorized in two subjects: the
behaviour of granular materials and viscous fluids. Granular
materials are processed in industry for example in the manufacture of
pharmaceuticals, ceramics, food, polymers and PEPT has been used
in a number of ways to study the behaviour of these systems [2].
PEPT allows the possibility of tracking a single particle within the
bed [3]. Also PEPT has been used for studying systems such as: fluid
flow, viscous fluids in mixers [4], using a neutrally-buoyant tracer
particle [5].
Abstract: Automatic detection of bleeding is of practical
importance since capsule endoscopy produces an extremely large
number of images. Algorithm development of bleeding detection in
the digestive tract is difficult due to different contrasts among the
images, food dregs, secretion and others. In this study, were assigned
weighting factors derived from the independent features of the
contrast and brightness between bleeding and normality. Spectral
analysis based on weighting factors was fast and accurate. Results
were a sensitivity of 87% and a specificity of 90% when the accuracy
was determined for each pixel out of 42 endoscope images.
Abstract: Social, culture and artistic status of a society in
various historical eras is affected by numerous, and sometimes
imposed, factors that better understanding requires analysis of such
conditions. Throughout history Iran has been involved with
determining and significant events that examining each of these
events can improve the understanding of social conditions of this
country in the intended time. Mongolian conquest of Iran is one of
most significant events in the history of Iran with consequences that
never left Iranian societies. During this tragic invasion and
subsequent devastating wars, which led to establishment of Ilkhanate
dynasty, numerous cultural and artistic changes occurred both in
Mongolian conquerors and Iranian society. This study examines these
changes with a glimpse towards art and architecture as important part
of cultural aspects and social communication.