Abstract: In this paper, a motion generation algorithm for a six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) robotic hand in a static environment is presented. The purpose of developing this method is to be used in the path generation of the end-effector for edge finishing and inspection processes by utilizing the CAD model of the considered workpiece. Nonetheless, the proposed algorithm may be extended to be applicable for other similar manufacturing processes. A software package programmed in the application programming interface (API) of SolidWorks generates tool path data for the robot. The proposed method significantly simplifies the given problem, resulting in a reduction in the CPU time needed to generate the path, and offers an efficient overall solution. The ABB IRB2000 robot is chosen for executing the generated tool path.
Abstract: As everyday transit options are shifting from autocentric to pedestrian and bicycle oriented modes for healthy living, downtown streets are becoming more attractive places to live. However, tools and methods to measure the natural environment at the small scale of streets do not exist. Fortunately, a combination of mobile data collection technology and parametric urban design software now allows an interface to relate urban ecological conditions. This paper describes creation of an interactive tool to measure urban phenomena of air, water, and heat/light at the scale of new three-by-three block pedestrianized areas in Barcelona called Superilles. Each Superilla limits transit to the exterior of the blocks and to create more walkable and bikeable interior streets for healthy living. The research will describe the integration of data collection, analysis, and design output via a live interface using parametric software Rhino Grasshopper and the Human User Interface (UI) plugin.
Abstract: This study attempts to determine kinesthetic, verbal and visual intelligences among mechanical engineering undergraduate students and explores any probable relation with students’ learning styles and academic performance. The questionnaire used in this study is based on Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory comprising of five elements of learning style; environmental, sociological, emotional, physiological and psychological. Questionnaires are distributed amongst undergraduates in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Additional questions on students’ perception of learning styles and their academic performance are included in the questionnaire. The results show that one third of the students are strongly dominant in the kinesthetic intelligent (33%), followed by a combination of kinesthetic and visual intelligences (29%) and 21% are strongly dominant in all three types of intelligences. There is a statistically significant correlation between kinesthetic, verbal and visual intelligences and students learning styles and academic performances. The ANOVA analysis supports that there is a significant relationship between academic performances and level of kinesthetic, verbal and visual intelligences. In addition, it has also proven a remarkable relationship between academic performances and kinesthetic, verbal and visual learning styles amongst the male and female students. Thus, it can be concluded that, academic achievements can be enhanced by understanding as well as capitalizing the students’ types of intelligences and learning styles.
Abstract: Net fee and commission income is one of the key elements of a bank’s core income. In the current low-interest rate environment, this type of income is gaining importance relative to net interest income. This paper analyses the effects of bank and country specific determinants of net fee and commission income on a set of cooperative banks from European countries in the 2007-2014 period. In order to do that, dynamic panel data methods (system Generalized Methods of Moments) were employed. Subsequently, alternative panel data methods were run as robustness checks of the analysis. Strong positive impact of bank concentration on the share of net fee and commission income was found, which proves that cooperative banks tend to display a higher share of fee income in less competitive markets. This is probably connected with the fact that they stick with their traditional deposit-taking and loan-providing model and fees on these services are driven down by the competitors. Moreover, compared to commercial banks, cooperatives do not expand heavily into non-traditional fee bearing services under competition and their overall fee income share is therefore decreasing with the increased competitiveness of the sector.
Abstract: The paper addresses the problem of line-of-sight (LOS) vs. non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation link identification in ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless networks, which is necessary for improving the accuracy of radiolocation and positioning applications. A LOS/NLOS likelihood hypothesis testing approach is applied based on exploiting distinctive statistical features of the channel impulse response (CIR) using parameters related to the “skewness” of the CIR and its root mean square (RMS) delay spread. A log-normal fit is presented for the probability densities of the CIR parameters. Simulation results show that different environments (residential, office, outdoor, etc.) have measurable differences in their CIR parameters’ statistics, which is then exploited in determining the nature of the propagation channels. Correct LOS/NLOS channel identification rates exceeding 90% are shown to be achievable for most types of environments. Additional improvement is also obtained by combining both CIR skewness and RMS delay statistics.
Abstract: Lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) is a potential cathode material for lithium-ion batteries due to its promising characteristics. In this study, pure LiFePO4 (LFP) and carbon-coated nanograined LiFePO4 (LFP-C) is synthesized and characterized for its microstructural properties. X-ray diffraction patterns of the synthesized samples can be indexed to an orthorhombic LFP structure with about 63 nm crystallite size as calculated by using Scherrer’s equation. Agglomerated particles that range from 200 nm to 300 nm are observed from scanning electron microscopy images. Transmission electron microscopy images confirm the crystalline structure of LFP and coating of amorphous carbon layer. Elemental mapping using energy dispersive spectroscopy analysis revealed the homogeneous dispersion of the compositional elements. In addition, galvanostatic charge and discharge measurements were investigated for the cathode performance of the synthesized LFP and LFP-C samples. The results showed that the carbon-coated sample demonstrated the highest capacity of about 140 mAhg-1 as compared to non-coated and micrograined sized commercial LFP.
Abstract: The mineral and mining industry is necessary for countries to have an adequate and reliable supply of materials to meet their socio-economic development. Despite its importance, the environmental impacts from mineral exploration are hugely significant. This study aimed to investigate and quantify the amount of GHGs emissions emitted from both electricity and diesel vehicle fuel consumption in basalt mining in Thailand. Plant A, located in the northeastern region of Thailand, was selected as a case study. Results indicated that total GHGs emissions from basalt mining and operation (Plant A) were approximately 2,501,086 kgCO2e and 1,997,412 kgCO2e in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The estimated carbon intensity ranged between 1.824 kgCO2e to 2.284 kgCO2e per ton of rock product. Scope 1 (direct emissions) was the dominant driver of its total GHGs compared to scope 2 (indirect emissions). As such, transport related combustion of diesel fuels generated the highest GHGs emission (65%) compared to emissions from purchased electricity (35%). Some of the potential implications for mining entities were also presented.
Abstract: This paper is a literature review presented descriptively to review the concept of green building to face the challenge of sustainable development and food in urban areas. In this paper, researchers initiated the concept of green building with sky farming method. Sky farming use vertical landscape system in order to realizing food self-sufficient green city. Sky farming relying on plantings and irrigation system efficiency in the building which is adopted the principles of green building. Planting system is done by applying hydroponic plants with Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) using energy source of solar cell and grey water from the processing of waste treatment plant. The application of sky farming in urban areas can be a recommendation for the design of environmental-friendly construction. In order to keep the land and distance efficiency, this system is a futuristic idea that would be the connector of human civilization in the future.
Abstract: Making decisions is the core of management and a result of conscious activities which is under way in a particular environment and concrete conditions. The managers decide about the goals, procedures and about the methods how to respond to the changes and to the problems which developed. Their decisions affect the effectiveness, quality, economy and the overall successfulness in every organisation. In spite of this fact, they do not pay sufficient attention to the individual steps of the decision-making process. They emphasise more how to cope with the individual methods and techniques of making decisions and forget about the way how to cope with analysing the problem or assessing the individual solution variants. In many cases, the underestimating of the analytical phase can lead to an incorrect assessment of the problem and this can then negatively influence its further solution. Based on our analysis of the theoretical solutions by individual authors who are dealing with this area and the realised research in Slovakia and also abroad we can recognise an insufficient interest of the managers to assess the risks in the decision-making process. The goal of this paper is to assess the risks in the managers´ decision-making process relating to the conditions of the environment, to the subject’s activity (the manager’s personality), to the insufficient assessment of individual variants for solving the problems but also to situations when the arisen problem is not solved. The benefit of this paper is the effort to increase the need of the managers to deal with the risks during the decision-making process. It is important for every manager to assess the risks in his/her decision-making process and to make efforts to take such decisions which reflect the basic conditions, states and development of the environment in the best way and especially for the managers´ decisions to contribute to achieving the determined goals of the organisation as effectively as possible.
Abstract: The intensive use of natural aggregates, near cities and towns, associated to the increase of the global population, leads to its depletion and increases the transport distances. The uncontrolled deposition of construction and demolition waste in landfills and city outskirts, causes pollution and takes up space. The use of recycled aggregates in concrete preparation would contribute to mitigate the problem. However, it arises the problem that the high water absorption of recycled aggregate decreases the bleeding rate of concrete, and when this gets lower than the evaporation rate, plastic shrinkage cracking occurs. This phenomenon can be particularly problematic in hot and windy curing environments. Cracking facilitates the flow of liquid and gas into concrete which attacks the reinforcement and degrades the concrete. These factors reduce the durability of concrete structures and consequently the lifetime of buildings. A ring test was used, cured in a wind tunnel, to evaluate the plastic shrinkage cracking sensitivity of recycled aggregate concrete, in order to implement preventive means to control this phenomenon. The role of several aggregate properties on the concrete segregation and cracking mechanisms were also discussed.
Abstract: Many governments have tried to reduce CO2 emissions which are believed to be the main cause for global warming. The deployment of electric automobiles is regarded as an effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. The Korean government has planned to deploy about 200,000 electric automobiles. The policy for the deployment of electric automobiles aims at not only decreasing gasoline consumption but also increasing electricity production. However, if an electricity consuming regions is not consistent with an electricity producing region, the policy generates environmental problems between regions. Hence, this paper has established the energy multi-region input-output model to specifically analyze the impacts of the deployment of electric automobiles on regional energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Finally, the paper suggests policy directions regarding the deployment of electric automobiles.
Abstract: A comprehensive development towards the production of ultra-clean fuels as a feed stoke is getting to raise due to the increasing use of diesel fuels and global air pollution. Production of environmental-friendly fuels can be achievable by some limited single methods and most integrated ones. Oxidative desulfurization (ODS) presents vast ranges of technologies possessing suitable characteristics with regard to the Fenton process. Using toluene as a model fuel feed with dibenzothiophene (DBT) as a sulfur compound under various operating conditions is the attempt of this study. The results showed that this oxidative process followed a pseudo-first order kinetics. Removal efficiency of 77.43% is attained under reaction time of 40 minutes with (Fe+2/H2O2) molar ratio of 0.05 in acidic pH environment. In this research, temperature of 50 °C represented the most influential role in proceeding the reaction.
Abstract: Radio interference is one of the major concerns in
using the global positioning system (GPS) for civilian and military
applications. Interference signals are produced not only through
all electronic systems but also illegal jammers. Among different
types of interferences, continuous wave (CW) interference has strong
adverse impacts on the quality of the received signal. In this paper,
we make more detailed analysis for CW interference effects on
GPS signal quality. Based on the C/A code spectrum lines, the
influence of CW interference on the acquisition performance of
GPS receivers is further analysed. This influence is supported by
simulation results using GPS software receiver. As the most important
user parameter of GPS receivers, the mathematical expression of bit
error probability is also derived in the presence of CW interference,
and the expression is consistent with the Monte Carlo simulation
results. The research on CW interference provides some theoretical
gist and new thoughts on monitoring the radio noise environment and
improving the anti-jamming ability of GPS receivers.
Abstract: Buildings cause a variety of loads on the environment due to activities performed at each stage of the building life cycle. Construction is the first stage that affects both the natural and built environments at different steps of the process, which can be defined as transportation of materials within the construction site, formation and preparation of materials on-site and the application of materials to realize the building subsystems. All of these steps require the use of technology, which varies based on the facilities that contractors and subcontractors have. Hence, environmental consequences of the construction process should be tackled by focusing on construction technology options used in every step of the process. This paper presents an environmental decision-making model for assessing on-site performances of subcontractors based on the construction technology options which they can supply. First, construction technologies, which constitute information, tools and methods, are classified. Then, environmental performance criteria are set forth related to resource consumption, ecosystem quality, and human health issues. Finally, the model is developed based on the relationships between the construction technology components and the environmental performance criteria. The Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method is used for weighting the environmental performance criteria according to environmental priorities of decision-maker(s), while the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is used for ranking on-site environmental performances of subcontractors using quantitative data related to the construction technology components. Thus, the model aims to provide an insight to decision-maker(s) about the environmental consequences of the construction process and to provide an opportunity to improve the overall environmental performance of construction sites.
Abstract: Flaring emissions during abnormal operating conditions such as plant start-ups, shut-downs, and upsets in chemical process industries (CPI) are usually significant. Flare minimization can help to save raw material and energy for CPI plants, and to improve local environmental sustainability. In this paper, a systematic methodology based on plant-wide dynamic simulation is presented for CPI plant flare minimizations under abnormal operating conditions. Since off-specification emission sources are inevitable during abnormal operating conditions, to significantly reduce flaring emission in a CPI plant, they must be either recycled to the upstream process for online reuse, or stored somewhere temporarily for future reprocessing, when the CPI plant manufacturing returns to stable operation. Thus, the off-spec products could be reused instead of being flared. This can be achieved through the identification of viable design and operational strategies during normal and abnormal operations through plant-wide dynamic scheduling, simulation, and optimization. The proposed study includes three stages of simulation works: (i) developing and validating a steady-state model of a CPI plant; (ii) transiting the obtained steady-state plant model to the dynamic modeling environment; and refining and validating the plant dynamic model; and (iii) developing flare minimization strategies for abnormal operating conditions of a CPI plant via a validated plant-wide dynamic model. This cost-effective methodology has two main merits: (i) employing large-scale dynamic modeling and simulations for industrial flare minimization, which involves various unit models for modeling hundreds of CPI plant facilities; (ii) dealing with critical abnormal operating conditions of CPI plants such as plant start-up and shut-down. Two virtual case studies on flare minimizations for start-up operation (over 50% of emission savings) and shut-down operation (over 70% of emission savings) of an ethylene plant have been employed to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed study.
Abstract: With the ubiquitous computing’s emergence and the evolution of enterprises’ needs, one of the main challenges is to build context-aware applications based on Web services. These applications have become particularly relevant in the pervasive computing domain. In this paper, we introduce our approach that optimizes the use of Web services with context notions when dealing with contextual environments. We focus particularly on making Web services autonomous and natively context-aware. We implement and evaluate the proposed approach with a pedagogical example of a context-aware Web service treating temperature values.
Abstract: Organic compounds in wastewaters coming from textile and pharmaceutical industry generated multiple harmful effects on the environment and the human health. One of them is the methyl orange (MeO), an azoic dye considered to be a recalcitrant compound. The heterogeneous photocatalysis emerges as an alternative for treating this type of hazardous compounds, through the generation of OH radicals using radiation and a semiconductor oxide. According to the author’s knowledge, catalysts such as TiO2 doped with metals show high efficiency in degrading MeO; however, this presents economic limitations on industrial scale. Black sand can be considered as a naturally doped catalyst because in its structure is common to find compounds such as titanium, iron and aluminum oxides, also elements such as zircon, cadmium, manganese, etc. This study reports the photocatalytic activity of the mineral black sand used as semiconductor in the discoloration of MeO by oxidation and reduction photocatalytic techniques. For this, magnetic composites from the mineral were prepared (RM, M1, M2 and NM) and their activity were tested through MeO discoloration while TiO2 was used as reference. For the fractions, chemical, morphological and structural characterizations were performed using Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-Ray (SEM-EDX), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis. M2 fraction showed higher MeO discoloration (93%) in oxidation conditions at pH 2 and it could be due to the presence of ferric oxides. However, the best result to reduction process was using M1 fraction (20%) at pH 2, which contains a higher titanium percentage. In the first process, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) was used as electron donor agent. According to the results, black sand mineral can be used as natural semiconductor in photocatalytic process. It could be considered as a photocatalyst precursor in such processes, due to its low cost and easy access.
Abstract: The paper focuses on the study of the properties of cement-based composites produced using secondary crystallization (crystalline additive). In this study, cement mortar made with secondary crystallization was exposed to an aggressive environment and the influence of secondary crystallization on the degradation of the cementitious composite was investigated. The results indicate that the crystalline additive contributed to increasing the resistance of the cement-based composite to the attack of the selected environments (sodium sulphate solution and ammonium chloride solution).
Abstract: In this paper, we present an adaptive controller for decentralized coordination problem of multiple non-holonomic agents. The performance of the presented Multi-Agent Bounded Gain Forgetting (BGF) Composite Adaptive controller is compared against the tracking error criterion with a Feedback Linearization controller. By using the method, the sensor nodes move and reconfigure themselves in a coordinated way in response to a sensed environment. The multi-agent coordination is achieved through Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations and Coverage Control. Also, a consensus protocol is used for synchronization of the parameter vectors. The two controllers are given with their Lyapunov stability analysis and their stability is verified with simulation results. The simulations are carried out in MATLAB and ROS environments. Better performance is obtained with BGF Adaptive Controller.
Abstract: Air jet weaving is the most productive, but also the most energy consuming weaving method. Increasing energy costs and environmental impact are constantly a challenge for the manufacturers of weaving machines. Current technological developments concern with low energy costs, low environmental impact, high productivity, and constant product quality. The high degree of energy consumption of the method can be ascribed to the high need of compressed air. An energy efficiency method is applied to the air jet weaving technology. Such method identifies and classifies the main relevant energy consumers and processes from the exergy point of view and it leads to the identification of energy efficiency potentials during the weft insertion process. Starting from the design phase, energy efficiency is considered as the central requirement to be satisfied. The initial phase of the method consists of an analysis of the state of the art of the main weft insertion components in order to point out a prioritization of the high demanding energy components and processes. The identified major components are investigated to reduce the high demand of energy of the weft insertion process. During the interaction of the flow field coming from the relay nozzles within the profiled reed, only a minor part of the stream is really accelerating the weft yarn, hence resulting in large energy inefficiency. Different tools such as FEM analysis, CFD simulation models and experimental analysis are used in order to design a more energy efficient design of the involved components in the filling insertion. A different concept for the metal strip of the profiled reed is developed. The developed metal strip allows a reduction of the machine energy consumption. Based on a parametric and aerodynamic study, the designed reed transmits higher values of the flow power to the filling yarn. The innovative reed fulfills both the requirement of raising energy efficiency and the compliance with the weaving constraints.