Abstract: An IEC technique is described for a multi-objective
search of conceptual solutions. The survivability of solutions is
influenced by both model-based fitness and subjective human
preferences. The concepts- preferences are articulated via a hierarchy
of sub-concepts. The suggested method produces an objectivesubjective
front. Academic example is employed to demonstrate the
proposed approach.
Abstract: This paper features the proposed modeling and design
of a Robust Decentralized Periodic Output Feedback (RDPOF)
control technique for the active vibration control of smart flexible
multimodel Euler-Bernoulli cantilever beams for a multivariable
(MIMO) case by retaining the first 6 vibratory modes. The beam
structure is modeled in state space form using the concept of
piezoelectric theory, the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and the Finite
Element Method (FEM) technique by dividing the beam into 4 finite
elements and placing the piezoelectric sensor / actuator at two finite
element locations (positions 2 and 4) as collocated pairs, i.e., as
surface mounted sensor / actuator, thus giving rise to a multivariable
model of the smart structure plant with two inputs and two outputs.
Five such multivariable models are obtained by varying the
dimensions (aspect ratios) of the aluminum beam, thus giving rise to
a multimodel of the smart structure system. Using model order
reduction technique, the reduced order model of the higher order
system is obtained based on dominant eigen value retention and the
method of Davison. RDPOF controllers are designed for the above 5
multivariable-multimodel plant. The closed loop responses with the
RDPOF feedback gain and the magnitudes of the control input are
observed and the performance of the proposed multimodel smart
structure system with the controller is evaluated for vibration control.
Abstract: Many water supply systems in Australia are currently
undergoing significant reconfiguration due to reductions in long term
average rainfall and resulting low inflows to water supply reservoirs
since the second half of the 20th century. When water supply systems
undergo change, it is necessary to develop new operating rules,
which should consider climate, because the climate change is likely
to further reduce inflows. In addition, water resource systems are
increasingly intended to be operated to meet complex and multiple
objectives representing social, economic, environmental and
sustainability criteria. This is further complicated by conflicting
preferences on these objectives from diverse stakeholders. This paper
describes a methodology to develop optimum operating rules for
complex multi-reservoir systems undergoing significant change,
considering all of the above issues. The methodology is demonstrated
using the Grampians water supply system in northwest Victoria,
Australia. Initial work conducted on the project is also presented in
this paper.
Abstract: The move towards internationalization of accounting encountered a great boost, when in 2002 EU delegated the IASB to provide the accounting standards to be applied inside its frontiers. Among the incentives of the standardization of accounting on the international level, is the reduction of the cost of capital. Romania made the move towards IFRS before EU, when the country was not yet a member of it. Even if this made Romania a special case, it was scarcely approached. The leak of real data is usually the reason for avoiding. The novelty of this paper is that it offers an insight from the reality of Romanian companies and their view regarding the IFRS. The paper is based on a survey that the authors made among the companies listed on the first two tiers of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE), which are basically, the most important companies in the country.
Abstract: A compact 1x3 power splitter based on Photonic
Crystal Waveguides (PCW) with flexible power splitting ratio is
presented in this paper. Multimode interference coupler (MMI) is
integrated with PCW. The device size reduction compared with the
conventional MMI power splitter is attributed to the large dispersion
of the PCW. Band Solve tool is used to calculate the band structure of
PCW. Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is adopted to
simulate the relevant structure at 1550nm wavelength. The device is
polarization insensitive and allows the control of output (o/p) powers
within certain percentage points for both polarizations.
Abstract: Phytotoxicity of Daphne gnidium L. was evaluated
through the effect of incorporating leaves, stems and roots biomass
into soil (at 12.5, 25, 50g/Kg) and irrigation by their aqueous extracts
(50g/L), on the growth of two crops (Lactuca sativa L. and Raphanus
sativus L.) and two weeds (Peaganum harmala L. and Scolymus
maculatus L.). Results revealed a perceptible phytotoxic effect which
increased with dose and concentration. At the highest dose, roots and
leaves residues was the most toxic and caused total inhibition
respectively, for lettuce and thistle seedling growth. Irrigation with
aqueous extracts of D. gnidium different organs decreased also
seedlings length of all test species. Stems extract was more inhibitor
on thistle than peganum seedling growth; it induced a significant
reduction of 80% and 67%, for, respectively, roots and shoots.
Results of the present study suggest that different organs of D.
gnidium could be exploited in the management of agro-ecosystems.
Abstract: The quality and shelf life of foods of containing lipids (fats and oils) significantly reduces due to rancidity.Applications of natural antioxidants are one of the most effective manners to prevent the oxidation of oils and lipids. The antioxidant properties of juice extracted from barberry fruit (Berberris vulgaris.L) using maceration and SWE (10 bars and 120 - 180°C) methods were investigated and compared with conventional method. The amount of phenolic compound and reduction power of all samples were determined and the data were statistically analyzed using multifactor design. The results showed that the total amount of phenolic compound increased with increasing of pressure and temprature from 1861.9 to 2439.1 (mg Gallic acid /100gr Dry matter). The ability of reduction power of SWE obtained antioxidant extract compared with BHA (synthetic antioxidant) and ascorbic acid (natural antioxidant). There were significant differences among reduction power of extracts and there were remarkable difference with BHA and Ascorbic acid (P
Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on the frequency of
earnings managements towards small positive profits. We focus on
two emerging markets IFRS adopters: South Africa and Turkey.
We tested our logistic regression using appropriate panelestimation
techniques over a sample of 330 South African and 210
Turkish firm-year observations over the period 2002-2008. Our
results document that mandatory adoption of IFRS is not associated
with a reduction in earnings management towards small positive
profits in emerging markets. These results contradict most of the
previous findings of the studies conducted in developed countries.
Based on the legal system factor, we compare the intensity of
earnings management between a code law country (Turkey) and a
common law country (South Africa) over the pre and post-adoption
periods. Our findings show that the frequency of such earnings
management practice increases significantly for the code law
country.
Abstract: This paper presents an efficient emission constrained
economic dispatch algorithm that deals with nonlinear cost function
and constraints. It is then incorporated into the dynamic
programming based hydrothermal coordination program. The
program has been tested on a practical utility system having 32
thermal and 12 hydro generating units. Test results show that a slight
increase in production cost causes a substantial reduction in
emission.
Abstract: The present work analyses different parameters of pressure die casting to minimize the casting defects. Pressure diecasting is usually applied for casting of aluminium alloys. Good surface finish with required tolerances and dimensional accuracy can be achieved by optimization of controllable process parameters such as solidification time, molten temperature, filling time, injection pressure and plunger velocity. Moreover, by selection of optimum process parameters the pressure die casting defects such as porosity, insufficient spread of molten material, flash etc. are also minimized. Therefore, a pressure die casting component, carburetor housing of aluminium alloy (Al2Si2O5) has been considered. The effects of selected process parameters on casting defects and subsequent setting of parameters with the levels have been accomplished by Taguchi-s parameter design approach. The experiments have been performed as per the combination of levels of different process parameters suggested by L18 orthogonal array. Analyses of variance have been performed for mean and signal-to-noise ratio to estimate the percent contribution of different process parameters. Confidence interval has also been estimated for 95% consistency level and three conformational experiments have been performed to validate the optimum level of different parameters. Overall 2.352% reduction in defects has been observed with the help of suggested optimum process parameters.
Abstract: The impact of noise upon live quality has become an
important aspect to make both urban and environmental policythroughout
Europe and in Turkey. Concern over the quality of urban
environments, including noise levels and declining quality of green
space, is over the past decade with increasing emphasis on designing
livable and sustainable communities. According to the World Health
Organization, noise pollution is the third most hazardous
environmental type of pollution which proceeded by only air (gas
emission) and water pollution. The research carried out in two
phases, the first stage of the research noise and plant types providing
the suction of noise was evaluated through literature study and at the
second stage, definite types (Juniperus horizontalis L., Spirea
vanhouetti Briot., Cotoneaster dammerii C.K., Berberis thunbergii
D.C., Pyracantha coccinea M. etc.) were selected for the city of
Konya. Trials were conducted on the highway of Konya. The biggest
value of noise reduction was 6.3 dB(A), 4.9 dB(A), 6.2 dB(A) value
with compared to the control which includes the group that formed
by the bushes at the distance of 7m, 11m, 20m from the source and
5m, 9m, 20m of plant width, respectively. In this paper, definitions
regarding to noise and its sources were made and the precautions
were taken against to noise that mentioned earlier with the adverse
effects of noise. Plantation design approaches and suggestions
concerning to the diversity to be used, which are peculiar to roadside,
were developed to discuss the role and the function of plant material
to reduce the noise of the traffic.
Abstract: In this paper we present a noise reduction filter for video processing. It is based on the recently proposed two dimensional steering kernel, extended to three dimensions and further augmented to suit the spatial-temporal domain of video processing. Two alternative filters are proposed - the time symmetric kernel and the time asymmetric kernel. The first reduces the noise on single sequences, but to handle the problems at scene shift the asymmetric kernel is introduced. The performance of both are tested on simulated data and on a real video sequence together with the existing steering kernel. The proposed kernels improves the Rooted Mean Squared Error (RMSE) compared to the original steering kernel method on video material.
Abstract: In this paper we discuss the problems of the long-term management policy of Lake Peipsi and the roles of natural and anthropogenic factors in the ecological state of the lake. The reduction of the pollution during the last 15 years could not give significant changes of the chemical composition of the water, what implicates the essential role that natural factors have on the ecological state of lake. One of the most important factors having impact on the hydrochemical cycles and ecological state is the hydrological regime which is clearly expressed in L. Peipsi. The absence on clear interrelations of climate cycles and nutrients suggest that complex abiotic and biotic interactions, which take place in the lake ecosystem, plays a significant role in the matter circulation mechanism within lake.
Abstract: In this study, aerobic digestion of tannery industry
wastewater was carried out using mixed culture obtained from
common effluent treatment plant treating tannery wastewater. The
effect of pH, temperature, inoculum concentration, agitation speed
and initial substrate concentration on the reduction of organic matters
were found. The optimum conditions for COD reduction was found
to be pH - 7 (60%), temperature - 30ÔùªC (61%), inoculum
concentration - 2% (61%), agitation speed - 150rpm (65%) and initial
substrate concentration - 1560 mg COD/L (74%). Kinetics studies
were carried by using Monod model, First order, Diffusional model
and Singh model. From the results it was found that the Monod
model suits well for the degradation of tannery wastewater using
mixed microbial consortium.
Abstract: The building sector is the largest energy consumer and
CO2 emitter in the European Union (EU) and therefore the active
reduction of energy consumption and elimination of energy wastage
are among the main goals in it. Healthy housing and energy
efficiency are affected by many factors which set challenges to
monitoring, control and research of indoor air quality (IAQ) and
energy consumption, especially in old buildings. These challenges
include measurement and equipment costs, for example.
Additionally, the measurement results are difficult to interpret and
their usage in the ventilation control is also limited when taking into
account the energy efficiency of housing at the same time. The main
goal of this study is to develop a cost-effective building monitoring
and control system especially for old buildings. The starting point or
keyword of the development process is a wireless system; otherwise
the installation costs become too high. As the main result, this paper
describes an idea of a wireless building monitoring and control
system. The first prototype of the system has been installed in 10
residential buildings and in 10 school buildings located in the City of
Kuopio, Finland.
Abstract: We succeeded to produce a high performance and flexible graphene/Manganese dioxide (G/MnO2) electrode coated on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. The graphene film is initially synthesized by drop-casting the graphene oxide (GO) solution on the PET substrate, followed by simultaneous reduction and patterning of the dried film using carbon dioxide (CO2) laser beam with power of 1.8 W. Potentiostatic Anodic Deposition method was used to deposit thin film of MnO2 with different loading mass 10 – 50 and 100 μg.cm-2 on the pre-prepared graphene film. The electrodes were fully characterized in terms of structure, morphology, and electrochemical performance. A maximum specific capacitance of 973 F.g-1 was attributed when depositing 50μg.cm-2 MnO2 on the laser reduced graphene oxide rGO (or G/50MnO2) and over 92% of its initial capacitance was retained after 1000 cycles. The good electrochemical performance and long-term cycling stability make our proposed approach a promising candidate in the supercapacitor applications.
Abstract: Stochastic modeling of network traffic is an area of
significant research activity for current and future broadband
communication networks. Multimedia traffic is statistically
characterized by a bursty variable bit rate (VBR) profile. In this
paper, we develop an improved model for uniform activity level
video sources in ATM using a doubly stochastic autoregressive
model driven by an underlying spatial point process. We then
examine a number of burstiness metrics such as the peak-to-average
ratio (PAR), the temporal autocovariance function (ACF) and the
traffic measurements histogram. We found that the former measure is
most suitable for capturing the burstiness of single scene video
traffic. In the last phase of this work, we analyse statistical
multiplexing of several constant scene video sources. This proved,
expectedly, to be advantageous with respect to reducing the
burstiness of the traffic, as long as the sources are statistically
independent. We observed that the burstiness was rapidly
diminishing, with the largest gain occuring when only around 5
sources are multiplexed. The novel model used in this paper for
characterizing uniform activity video was thus found to be an
accurate model.
Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a method to reduce
quantization error. In order to reduce quantization error, low pass
filtering is applied on neighboring samples of current block in
H.264/AVC. However, it has a weak point that low pass filtering is
performed regardless of prediction direction. Since it doesn-t consider
prediction direction, it may not reduce quantization error effectively.
Proposed method considers prediction direction for low pass filtering
and uses a threshold condition for reducing flag bit. We compare our
experimental result with conventional method in H.264/AVC and we
can achieve the average bit-rate reduction of 1.534% by applying the
proposed method. Bit-rate reduction between 0.580% and 3.567% are
shown for experimental results.
Abstract: We develop new nonlinear methods of
immunofluorescence analysis for a sensitive technology of
respiratory burst reaction of DNA fluorescence due to oxidative
activity in the peripheral blood neutrophils. Histograms in flow
cytometry experiments represent a fluorescence flashes frequency as
functions of fluorescence intensity. We used the Shannon-Weaver
index for definition of neutrophils- biodiversity and Hurst index for
definition of fractal-s correlations in immunofluorescence for
different donors, as the basic quantitative criteria for medical
diagnostics of health status. We analyze frequencies of flashes,
information, Shannon entropies and their fractals in
immunofluorescence networks due to reduction of histogram range.
We found the number of simplest universal correlations for
biodiversity, information and Hurst index in diagnostics and
classification of pathologies for wide spectra of diseases. In addition
is determined the clear criterion of a common immunity and human
health status in a form of yes/no answers type. These answers based
on peculiarities of information in immunofluorescence networks and
biodiversity of neutrophils. Experimental data analysis has shown the
existence of homeostasis for information entropy in oxidative activity
of DNA in neutrophil nuclei for all donors.
Abstract: This paper presents the experimental results of salt fog ageing test of silicone rubber housing material for outdoor polymer insulator based on IEC 61109. Four types of HTV silicone rubber sheet with different amount of ATH were tested continuously 1000