Abstract: Factoring Boolean functions is one of the basic operations in algorithmic logic synthesis. A novel algebraic factorization heuristic for single-output combinatorial logic functions is presented in this paper and is developed based on the set theory paradigm. The impact of factoring is analyzed mainly from a low power design perspective for standard cell based digital designs in this paper. The physical implementation of a number of MCNC/IWLS combinational benchmark functions and sub-functions are compared before and after factoring, based on a simple technology mapping procedure utilizing only standard gate primitives (readily available as standard cells in a technology library) and not cells corresponding to optimized complex logic. The power results were obtained at the gate-level by means of an industry-standard power analysis tool from Synopsys, targeting a 130nm (0.13μm) UMC CMOS library, for the typical case. The wire-loads were inserted automatically and the simulations were performed with maximum input activity. The gate-level simulations demonstrate the advantage of the proposed factoring technique in comparison with other existing methods from a low power perspective, for arbitrary examples. Though the benchmarks experimentation reports mixed results, the mean savings in total power and dynamic power for the factored solution over a non-factored solution were 6.11% and 5.85% respectively. In terms of leakage power, the average savings for the factored forms was significant to the tune of 23.48%. The factored solution is expected to better its non-factored counterpart in terms of the power-delay product as it is well-known that factoring, in general, yields a delay-efficient multi-level solution.
Abstract: This paper focuses on the development of bond graph
dynamic model of the mechanical dynamics of an excavating mechanism
previously designed to be used with small tractors, which are
fabricated in the Engineering Workshops of Jomo Kenyatta University
of Agriculture and Technology. To develop a mechanical dynamics
model of the manipulator, forward recursive equations similar to
those applied in iterative Newton-Euler method were used to obtain
kinematic relationships between the time rates of joint variables
and the generalized cartesian velocities for the centroids of the
links. Representing the obtained kinematic relationships in bondgraphic
form, while considering the link weights and momenta as
the elements led to a detailed bond graph model of the manipulator.
The bond graph method was found to reduce significantly the number
of recursive computations performed on a 3 DOF manipulator for a
mechanical dynamic model to result, hence indicating that bond graph
method is more computationally efficient than the Newton-Euler
method in developing dynamic models of 3 DOF planar manipulators.
The model was verified by comparing the joint torque expressions
of a two link planar manipulator to those obtained using Newton-
Euler and Lagrangian methods as analyzed in robotic textbooks. The
expressions were found to agree indicating that the model captures
the aspects of rigid body dynamics of the manipulator. Based on
the model developed, actuator sizing and valve sizing methodologies
were developed and used to obtain the optimal sizes of the pistons
and spool valve ports respectively. It was found that using the pump
with the sized flow rate capacity, the engine of the tractor is able to
power the excavating mechanism in digging a sandy-loom soil.
Abstract: The study of the fouling deposition of pink guava
juice (PGJ) is relatively new research compared to milk fouling
deposit. In this work, a new experimental set-up was developed to
imitate the fouling formation in heat exchanger, namely a continuous
flow experimental set-up heat exchanger. The new experimental setup
was operated under industrial pasteurization temperature of PGJ,
which was at 93°C. While the flow rate and pasteurization period
were based on the experimental capacity, which were 0.5 and 1
liter/min for the flow rate and the pasteurization period was set for 1
hour. Characterization of the fouling deposit was determined by
using various methods. Microstructure of the deposits was carried
out using ESEM. Proximate analyses were performed to determine
the composition of moisture, fat, protein, fiber, ash and carbohydrate
content. A study on the hardness and stickiness of the fouling deposit
was done using a texture analyzer. The presence of seedstone in pink
guava juice was also analyzed using a particle analyzer. The findings
shown that seedstone from pink guava juice ranging from 168 to
200μm and carbohydrate was found to be a major composition
(47.7% of fouling deposit consists of carbohydrate). Comparison
between the hardness and stickiness of the deposits at two different
flow rates showed that fouling deposits were harder and denser at
higher flow rate. Findings from this work provide basis knowledge
for further study on fouling and cleaning of PGJ.
Abstract: 98% of the energy needed in Taiwan has been
imported. The prices of petroleum and electricity have been
increasing. In addition, facility capacity, amount of electricity
generation, amount of electricity consumption and number of Taiwan
Power Company customers have continued to increase. For these
reasons energy conservation has become an important topic. In the
past linear regression was used to establish the power consumption
models for chillers. In this study, grey prediction is used to evaluate
the power consumption of a chiller so as to lower the total power
consumption at peak-load (so that the relevant power providers do not
need to keep on increasing their power generation capacity and facility
capacity).
In grey prediction, only several numerical values (at least four
numerical values) are needed to establish the power consumption
models for chillers. If PLR, the temperatures of supply chilled-water
and return chilled-water, and the temperatures of supply cooling-water
and return cooling-water are taken into consideration, quite accurate
results (with the accuracy close to 99% for short-term predictions)
may be obtained. Through such methods, we can predict whether the
power consumption at peak-load will exceed the contract power
capacity signed by the corresponding entity and Taiwan Power
Company. If the power consumption at peak-load exceeds the power
demand, the temperature of the supply chilled-water may be adjusted
so as to reduce the PLR and hence lower the power consumption.
Abstract: In this paper, naturally immobilized lipase, Carica
papaya lipase, catalyzed biodiesel production from fish oil was
studied. The refined fish oil, extracted from the discarded parts of
fish, was used as a starting material for biodiesel production. The
effects of molar ratio of oil: methanol, lipase dosage, initial water
activity of lipase, temperature and solvent were investigated. It was
found that Carica papaya lipase was suitable for methanolysis of fish
oil to produce methyl ester. The maximum yield of methyl ester
could reach up to 83% with the optimal reaction conditions: oil:
methanol molar ratio of 1: 4, 20% (based on oil) of lipase, initial
water activity of lipase at 0.23 and 20% (based on oil) of tert-butanol
at 40oC after 18 h of reaction time. There was negligible loss in
lipase activity even after repeated use for 30 cycles.
Abstract: Motion detection is very important in image
processing. One way of detecting motion is using optical flow.
Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent
measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while
the flow velocity has two components. A second constraint is needed.
The method used for finding the optical flow in this project is
assuming that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies
smoothly almost everywhere in the image. This technique is later
used in developing software for motion detection which has the
capability to carry out four types of motion detection. The motion
detection software presented in this project also can highlight motion
region, count motion level as well as counting object numbers. Many
objects such as vehicles and human from video streams can be
recognized by applying optical flow technique.
Abstract: Tasks of an application program of an embedded system are managed by the scheduler of a real-time operating system
(RTOS). Most RTOSs adopt just fixed priority scheduling, which is not optimal in all cases. Some applications require earliest deadline
first (EDF) scheduling, which is an optimal scheduling algorithm.
In order to develop an efficient real-time embedded system, the
scheduling algorithm of the RTOS should be selectable. The paper presents a method to customize the scheduler using aspectoriented
programming. We define aspects to replace the fixed priority scheduling mechanism of an OSEK OS with an EDF scheduling
mechanism. By using the aspects, we can customize the scheduler
without modifying the original source code. We have applied the
aspects to an OSEK OS and get a customized operating system with
EDF scheduling. The evaluation results show that the overhead of
aspect-oriented programming is small enough.
Abstract: The use and management of projects has risen to
a new prominence, with projects seen as critical to economic in
both the private and public sectors due challenging and dynamic
business environment. However, failure in managing project is
encountered regularly, which cause the waste of company
resources. The impacts of projects that failed to meet
stakeholders expectations have left behind long lasting negative
consequences in organization. Therefore, this research aims to
investigate on key success factors of project management in an
organization. It is believed that recognizing important factors
that contribute to successful project will help companies to
increase the overall profitability. 150 questionnaires were
distributed to respondents and 110 questionnaires were collected
and used in performing the data analysis. The result has strongly
supported the relationship between independent variables and
project performance.
Abstract: Software organizations are constantly looking for
better solutions when designing and using well-defined software
processes for the development of their products and services.
However, while the technical aspects are virtually easier to arrange,
many software development processes lack more support on project
management issues. When adopting such processes, an organization
needs to apply good project management skills along with technical
views provided by those models. This research proposes the
definition of a new model that integrates the concepts of PMBOK
and those available on the OPEN metamodel, helping not only
process integration but also building the steps towards a more
comprehensive and automatable model.
Abstract: This paper will first describe predictor controllers
when the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are
inactive for procedures that have large delay time (LDT) in transfer
stage. Therefore in those states, the predictor controllers are better
than the PID controllers, then compares three types of predictor
controllers. The value of these controller-s parameters are obtained
by trial and error method, so here an effort has been made to obtain
these parameters by Ziegler-Nichols method. Eventually in this paper
Ziegler-Nichols method has been described and finally, a PIP
controller has been designed for a thermal system, which circulates
hot air to keep the temperature of a chamber constant.
Abstract: The two-dimensional gel electrophoresis method
(2-DE) is widely used in Proteomics to separate thousands of proteins
in a sample. By comparing the protein expression levels of proteins in
a normal sample with those in a diseased one, it is possible to identify
a meaningful set of marker proteins for the targeted disease. The major
shortcomings of this approach involve inherent noises and irregular
geometric distortions of spots observed in 2-DE images. Various
experimental conditions can be the major causes of these problems. In
the protein analysis of samples, these problems eventually lead to
incorrect conclusions. In order to minimize the influence of these
problems, this paper proposes a partition based pair extension method
that performs spot-matching on a set of gel images multiple times and
segregates more reliable mapping results which can improve the
accuracy of gel image analysis. The improved accuracy of the
proposed method is analyzed through various experiments on real
2-DE images of human liver tissues.
Abstract: The purpose of this work is to identify the positive and negative aspects of parties- participation in the country-s modernization, which in turn, will help a country to determine the necessary steps to improve the social-economic development. The article considers a question of the role of the dominating party of Kazakhstan and ruling party of China in the country-s modernization. Using a comparative analysis reveals differences between the People's Democratic Party “Nur Otan" and the Communist Party of China. It is discussed the policy of carrying out of modernization, the main actions of political parties of both countries with a view of modernization implementation.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to examine the reading
comprehension scores of Turkish 5th grade students according to the
variables given in the student questionnaire. In this descriptive
survey study research participated 279 5th grade students, who
studied at 10 different primary schools in four provinces of Ankara in
2008-2009 academic year. Two different data collection tools were
made use of in the study: “Reading Comprehension Test" and
“Student Information Questionnaire". Independent sample t-test, oneway
Anova and two-way Anova tests were used in the analyses of
the gathered data. The results of the study indicate that the reading
comprehension scores of the students differ significantly according to
sex of the students, the number of books in their houses, the
frequency of summarizing activities on the reading text of free and
the frequency reading hours provided by their teachers; but, differ
not significantly according to educational level of their mothers and
fathers.
Abstract: This paper is a part of research, in which the way the
biomedical engineers follow in their work is analyzed. The goal of
this paper is to present a method for specification of user
requirements in the medical devices maintenance process. Data
Gathering Methods, Research Model Phases and Descriptive
Analysis is presented. These technology and verification rules can be
implemented in Medical devices maintenance management process to
the maintenance process.
Abstract: Droplet size distributions in the cold spray of a fuel
are important in observed combustion behavior. Specification of
droplet size and velocity distributions in the immediate downstream
of injectors is also essential as boundary conditions for advanced
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and two-phase spray transport
calculations. This paper describes the development of a new model to
be incorporated into maximum entropy principle (MEP) formalism
for prediction of droplet size distribution in droplet formation region.
The MEP approach can predict the most likely droplet size and
velocity distributions under a set of constraints expressing the
available information related to the distribution.
In this article, by considering the mechanisms of turbulence
generation inside the nozzle and wave growth on jet surface, it is
attempted to provide a logical framework coupling the flow inside the
nozzle to the resulting atomization process. The purpose of this paper
is to describe the formulation of this new model and to incorporate it
into the maximum entropy principle (MEP) by coupling sub-models
together using source terms of momentum and energy. Comparison
between the model prediction and experimental data for a gas turbine
swirling nozzle and an annular spray indicate good agreement
between model and experiment.
Abstract: We report in this paper the model adopted by our
system of continuous speech recognition in Arab language SySRA
and the results obtained until now. This system uses the database
Arabdic-10 which is a corpus of word for the Arab language and
which was manually segmented. Phonetic decoding is represented
by an expert system where the knowledge base is translated in the
form of production rules. This expert system transforms a vocal
signal into a phonetic lattice. The higher level of the system takes
care of the recognition of the lattice thus obtained by deferring it in
the form of written sentences (orthographical Form). This level
contains initially the lexical analyzer which is not other than the
module of recognition. We subjected this analyzer to a set of
spectrograms obtained by dictating a score of sentences in Arab
language. The rate of recognition of these sentences is about 70%
which is, to our knowledge, the best result for the recognition of the
Arab language. The test set consists of twenty sentences from four
speakers not having taken part in the training.
Abstract: In this paper we promote the Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) NAND gate to replace either partly or entirely the encryption block of a design to withstand power analysis attack.
Abstract: A passive system "Qanat" is collection of some
underground wells. A mother-well was dug in a place far from the
city where they could reach to the water table maybe 100 meters
underground, they dug other wells to direct water toward the city,
with minimum possible gradient. Using the slope of the earth they
could bring water close to the surface in the city. The source of water
or the appearance of Qanat, land slope and the ownership lines are
the important and effective factors in the formation of routes and the
segment division of lands to the extent that making use of Qanat as
the techniques of extracting underground waters creates a channel of
routes with an organic order and hierarchy coinciding the slope of
land and it also guides the Qanat waters in the tradition texture of salt
desert and border provinces of it. Qanats are excavated in a specified
distinction from each other. The quantity of water provided by
Qanats depends on the kind of land, distance from mountain,
geographical situation of them and the rate of water supply from the
underground land. The rate of underground waters, possibility of
Qanat excavation, number of Qanats and rate of their water supply
from one hand and the quantity of cultivable fertile lands from the
other hand are the important natural factors making the size of cities.
In the same manner the cities with several Qanats have multi central
textures. The location of cities is in direct relation with land quality,
soil fertility and possibility of using underground water by excavating
Qanats. Observing the allowable distance for Qanat watering is a
determining factor for distance between villages and cities.
Topography, land slope, soil quality, watering system, ownership,
kind of cultivation, etc. are the effective factors in directing Qanats
for excavation and guiding water toward the cultivable lands and it
also causes the formation of different textures in land division of
farming provinces. Several divisions such as orderly and wide, inorderly,
thin and long, comb like, etc. are the introduction to organic
order. And at the same time they are complete coincidence with
environmental conditions in the typical development of ecological
architecture and planning in the traditional cities and settlements
order.
Abstract: In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed for ownership identification and authentication using color images by deploying Cryptography and Digital Watermarking as underlaying technologies. The former is used to compute the contents based hash and the latter to embed the watermark. The host image that will claim to be the rightful owner is first transformed from RGB to YST color space exclusively designed for watermarking based applications. Geometrically YS ÔèÑ T and T channel corresponds to the chrominance component of color image, therefore suitable for embedding the watermark. The T channel is divided into 4×4 nonoverlapping blocks. The size of block is important for enhanced localization, security and low computation. Each block along with ownership information is then deployed by SHA160, a one way hash function to compute the content based hash, which is always unique and resistant against birthday attack instead of using MD5 that may raise the condition i.e. H(m)=H(m'). The watermark payload varies from block to block and computed by the variance factorα . The quality of watermarked images is quite high both subjectively and objectively. Our scheme is blind, computationally fast and exactly locates the tampered region.
Abstract: In this research, we study a control method of a multivehicle
system while considering the limitation of communication
range for each vehicles. When we control networked vehicles with
limitation of communication range, it is important to control the
communication network structure of a multi-vehicle system in order
to keep the network-s connectivity. From this, we especially aim to
control the network structure to the target structure. We formulate
the networked multi-vehicle system with some disturbance and the
communication constraints as a hybrid dynamical system, and then
we study the optimal control problems of the system. It is shown
that the system converge to the objective network structure in finite
time when the system is controlled by the receding horizon method.
Additionally, the optimal control probrems are convertible into the
mixed integer problems and these problems are solvable by some
branch and bound algorithm.