Robust Stability in Multivariable Neural Network Control using Harmonic Analysis

Robust stability and performance are the two most basic features of feedback control systems. The harmonic balance analysis technique enables to analyze the stability of limit cycles arising from a neural network control based system operating over nonlinear plants. In this work a robust stability analysis based on the harmonic balance is presented and applied to a neural based control of a non-linear binary distillation column with unstructured uncertainty. We develop ways to describe uncertainty in the form of neglected nonlinear dynamics and high harmonics for the plant and controller respectively. Finally, conclusions about the performance of the neural control system are discussed using the Nyquist stability margin together with the structured singular values of the uncertainty as a robustness measure.

Relationship between Food Resources and Brooding Site by Asiatic Houbara (Chlamydotis macqueenii ) in Central Steppe of Iran

Knowledge of food resource of the houbara which an endangered species would be a important step toward the preservation of this bird. Adequate study has not been done in this field and therefore the food sources of the houbara during the brooding season was studied in the central steppe of Iran. In order to determine the density of insect in plant communities the pitfall trap was used , positioned in five linear transects divided between plant communities and in two repetitions. The results showed that the among communities there was a significant difference in term of the number beetles and ants ( p= 0.01, F2, 29= 4.66) collectively. Also bush steppe habitat had a higher arthropoda density in comparison with the shrub steppe habitat. Considering that most houbara nests were found in the bush steppe habitat .It seems this habitat provides the most available food supply for the houbara chicks.

A Numerical Study of the Effect of Side-Dump Angle on Fuel Droplets Sizing in a Three- Dimensional Side-Dump Combustor

A numerical study on the effect of side-dump angle on fuel droplets sizing and effective mass fraction have been investigated in present paper. The mass of fuel vapor inside the flammability limit is named as the effective mass fraction. In the first step we have considered a side-dump combustor with dump angle of 0o (acrossthe cylinder) and by increasing the entrance airflow velocity from 20 to 30, 40 and 50 (m/s) respectively, the mean diameter of fuel droplets sizing and effective mass fraction have been studied. After this step, we have changed the dump angle from 0o to 30o,45o and finally 60o in direction of cylinderand also we have increased the entrance airflow velocity from 20 up to 50 (m/s) with the amount of growth of 10(m/s) in each step, to examine its effects on fuel droplets sizing as well as effective mass fraction. With rise of entrance airflow velocity, these calculations are repeated in each step too. The results show, with growth of dump-angle the effective mass fraction has been decreased and the mean diameter of droplets sizing has been increased. To fulfill the calculations a modified version of KIVA-3V code which is a transient, three-dimensional, multiphase, multicomponent code for the analysis of chemically reacting flows with sprays, is used.

Efficiency in Urban Governance towards Sustainability and Competitiveness of City : A Case Study of Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia has successfully applied economic planning to guide the development of the country from an economy of agriculture and mining to a largely industrialised one. Now, with its sights set on attaining the economic level of a fully developed nation by 2020, the planning system must be made even more efficient and focused. It must ensure that every investment made in the country, contribute towards creating the desirable objective of a strong, modern, internationally competitive, technologically advanced, post-industrial economy. Cities in Malaysia must also be fully aware of the enormous competition it faces in a region with rapidly expanding and modernising economies, all contending for the same pool of potential international investments. Efficiency of urban governance is also fundamental issue in development characterized by sustainability, subsidiarity, equity, transparency and accountability, civic engagement and citizenship, and security. As described above, city competitiveness is harnessed through 'city marketing and city management'. High technology and high skilled industries, together with finance, transportation, tourism, business, information and professional services shopping and other commercial activities, are the principal components of the nation-s economy, which must be developed to a level well beyond where it is now. In this respect, Kuala Lumpur being the premier city must play the leading role.

The Fuel Consumption and Non Linear Model Metropolitan and Large City Transportation System

The national economy development affects the vehicle ownership which ultimately increases fuel consumption. The rise of the vehicle ownership is dominated by the increasing number of motorcycles. This research aims to analyze and identify the characteristics of fuel consumption, the city transportation system, and to analyze the relationship and the effect of the city transportation system on the fuel consumption. A multivariable analysis is used in this study. The data analysis techniques include: a Multivariate Multivariable Analysis by using the R software. More than 84% of fuel on Java is consumed in metropolitan and large cities. The city transportation system variables that strongly effect the fuel consumption are population, public vehicles, private vehicles and private bus. This method can be developed to control the fuel consumption by considering the urban transport system and city tipology. The effect can reducing subsidy on the fuel consumption, increasing state economic.

Influence of Heterogeneous Traffic on the Roadside Fine (PM2.5 and PM1) and Coarse(PM10) Particulate Matter Concentrations in Chennai City, India

In this paper the influence of heterogeneous traffic on the temporal variation of ambient PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 concentrations at a busy arterial route (Sardar Patel Road) in the Chennai city has been analyzed. The hourly PM concentration, traffic counts and average speed of the vehicles have been monitored at the study site for one week (19th-25th January 2009). Results indicated that the concentrations of coarse (PM10) and fine PM (PM2.5 and PM1) concentrations at SP road are having similar trend during peak and non-peak hours, irrespective of the days. The PM concentrations showed daily two peaks corresponding to morning (8 to 10 am) and evening (7 to 9 pm) peak hour traffic flow. The PM10 concentration is dominated by fine particles (53% of PM2.5 and 45% of PM1). The high PM2.5/PM10 ratio indicates that the majority of PM10 particles originate from re-suspension of road dust. The analysis of traffic flow at the study site showed that 2W, 3W and 4W are having similar diurnal trend as PM concentrations. This confirms that the 2W, 3W and 4W are the main emission source contributing to ambient PM concentration at SP road. The speed measurement at SP road showed that the average speed of 2W, 3W, 4W, LCV and HCV are 38, 40, 38, 40 and 38 km/hr and 43, 41, 42, 40 and 41 km/hr respectively for the weekdays and weekdays.

A Simple Approach of Three phase Distribution System Modeling for Power Flow Calculations

This paper presents a simple three phase power flow method for solution of three-phase unbalanced radial distribution system (RDN) with voltage dependent loads. It solves a simple algebraic recursive expression of voltage magnitude, and all the data are stored in vector form. The algorithm uses basic principles of circuit theory and can be easily understood. Mutual coupling between the phases has been included in the mathematical model. The proposed algorithm has been tested with several unbalanced radial distribution networks and the results are presented in the article. 8- bus and IEEE 13 bus unbalanced radial distribution system results are in agreements with the literature and show that the proposed model is valid and reliable.

Examining Organizational Improvisation: The Role of Strategic Reasoning and Managerial Factors

Recent environmental turbulence including financial crisis, intensified competitive forces, rapid technological change and high market turbulence have dramatically changed the current business climate. The managers firms have to plan and decide what the best approaches that best fit their firms in order to pursue superior performance. This research aims to examine the influence of strategic reasoning and top level managers- individual characteristics on the effectiveness of organizational improvisation and firm performance. Given the lack of studies on these relationships in the previous literature, there is significant contribution to the body of knowledge as well as for managerial practices. 128 responses from top management of technology-based companies in Malaysia were used as a sample. Three hypotheses were examined and the findings confirm that (a) there is no relationship between intuitive reasoning and organizational improvisation but there is a link between rational reasoning and organizational improvisation, (b) top level managers- individual characteristics as a whole affect organizational improvisation; and (c) organizational improvisation positively affects firm performance. The theoretical and managerial implications were discussed in the conclusions.

Robust Semi-Blind Digital Image Watermarking Technique in DT-CWT Domain

In this paper a new robust digital image watermarking algorithm based on the Complex Wavelet Transform is proposed. This technique embeds different parts of a watermark into different blocks of an image under the complex wavelet domain. To increase security of the method, two chaotic maps are employed, one map is used to determine the blocks of the host image for watermark embedding, and another map is used to encrypt the watermark image. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Audio Watermarking Using Spectral Modifications

In this paper, we present a non-blind technique of adding the watermark to the Fourier spectral components of audio signal in a way such that the modified amplitude does not exceed the maximum amplitude spread (MAS). This MAS is due to individual Discrete fourier transform (DFT) coefficients in that particular frame, which is derived from the Energy Spreading function given by Schroeder. Using this technique one can store double the information within a given frame length i.e. overriding the watermark on the host of equal length with least perceptual distortion. The watermark is uniformly floating on the DFT components of original signal. This helps in detecting any intentional manipulations done on the watermarked audio. Also, the scheme is found robust to various signal processing attacks like presence of multiple watermarks, Additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) and mp3 compression.

A Multiple Inlet Swirler for Gas Turbine Combustors

The central recirculation zone (CRZ) in a swirl stabilized gas turbine combustor has a dominant effect on the fuel air mixing process and flame stability. Most of state of the art swirlers share one disadvantage; the fixed swirl number for the same swirler configuration. Thus, in a mathematical sense, Reynolds number becomes the sole parameter for controlling the flow characteristics inside the combustor. As a result, at low load operation, the generated swirl is more likely to become feeble affecting the flame stabilization and mixing process. This paper introduces a new swirler concept which overcomes the mentioned weakness of the modern configurations. The new swirler introduces air tangentially and axially to the combustor through tangential vanes and an axial vanes respectively. Therefore, it provides different swirl numbers for the same configuration by regulating the ratio between the axial and tangential flow momenta. The swirler aerodynamic performance was investigated using four CFD simulations in order to demonstrate the impact of tangential to axial flow rate ratio on the CRZ. It was found that the length of the CRZ is directly proportional to the tangential to axial air flow rate ratio.

Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation Technique Based Design and Simulation of a Three-Phase Voltage Source Converter Systems

A Space Vector based Pulse Width Modulation control technique for the three-phase PWM converter is proposed in this paper. The proposed control scheme is based on a synchronous reference frame model. High performance and efficiency is obtained with regards to the DC bus voltage and the power factor considerations of the PWM rectifier thus leading to low losses. MATLAB/SIMULINK are used as a platform for the simulations and a SIMULINK model is presented in the paper. The results show that the proposed model demonstrates better performance and properties compared to the traditional SPWM method and the method improves the dynamic performance of the closed loop drastically. For the Space Vector based Pulse Width Modulation, Sine signal is the reference waveform and triangle waveform is the carrier waveform. When the value sine signal is large than triangle signal, the pulse will start produce to high. And then when the triangular signals higher than sine signal, the pulse will come to low. SPWM output will changed by changing the value of the modulation index and frequency used in this system to produce more pulse width. The more pulse width produced, the output voltage will have lower harmonics contents and the resolution increase.

Comparative Evaluation of Color-Based Video Signatures in the Presence of Various Distortion Types

The robustness of color-based signatures in the presence of a selection of representative distortions is investigated. Considered are five signatures that have been developed and evaluated within a new modular framework. Two signatures presented in this work are directly derived from histograms gathered from video frames. The other three signatures are based on temporal information by computing difference histograms between adjacent frames. In order to obtain objective and reproducible results, the evaluations are conducted based on several randomly assembled test sets. These test sets are extracted from a video repository that contains a wide range of broadcast content including documentaries, sports, news, movies, etc. Overall, the experimental results show the adequacy of color-histogram-based signatures for video fingerprinting applications and indicate which type of signature should be preferred in the presence of certain distortions.

Optimum Control Strategy of Three-Phase Shunt Active Filter System

The aim of this paper is to identify an optimum control strategy of three-phase shunt active filters to minimize the total harmonic distortion factor of the supply current. A classical PIPI cascade control solution of the output current of the active filterand the voltage across the DC capacitor based on Modulus–Optimum criterion is taken into consideration. The control system operation has been simulated using Matlab-Simulink environment and the results agree with the theoretical expectation. It is shown that there is an optimum value of the DC-bus voltage which minimizes the supply current harmonic distortion factor. It corresponds to the equality of the apparent power at the output of the active filter and the apparent power across the capacitor. Finally, predicted results are verified experimentally on a MaxSine active power filter.

Moving from Rule-based to Principle-based in Public Sector: Preparers' Perspective

The move from cash accounting to accrual accounting, or rule-based to principle-based accounting, by many governments is part of an ongoing efforts in promoting a more business-like and performance-focused public sector. Using questionnaire responses from preparers of financial statements of public universities in Malaysia, this study examines the implementation challenges and benefits of principle-based accounting. Results from these responses suggest that most respondents perceived significant costs would be incurred in relation to staff training and recruitment of staffs with relevant technical knowledge. In addition, most respondents also perceived that there will be significant changes in the current accounting system and structure in order to comply with the principle-based accounting requirements. However, most respondents perceived that these changes might not result in significant benefits for management purposes, for example, financial management, budgeting and allocation of resources. Nevertheless, most respondents perceived that principle-based accounting information would facilitate the monitoring function of the board. The general perception is that adoption of principle-based accounting information is not significantly useful than rule-based accounting information is expected to change over time as preparers of the financial statements gradually understand and appreciate the benefits of principle-based accounting information. This infers that the perceived usefulness of different accounting system is a function of familiarity by the preparers.

Active Suspension - Case Study on Robust Control

Automotive suspension system is important part of car comfort and safety. In this article automotive active suspension with linear motor as actuator is designed using H-infinity control. This paper is focused on comparison of different controller designed for quart, half or full-car model (and always used for “full" car). Special attention is placed on energy demand of the whole system. Each controller configuration is simulated and then verified on the hydraulic quarter car test bed.

Optimal Location of Multi Type Facts Devices for Multiple Contingencies Using Particle Swarm Optimization

In deregulated operating regime power system security is an issue that needs due thoughtfulness from researchers in the horizon of unbundling of generation and transmission. Electric power systems are exposed to various contingencies. Network contingencies often contribute to overloading of branches, violation of voltages and also leading to problems of security/stability. To maintain the security of the systems, it is desirable to estimate the effect of contingencies and pertinent control measurement can be taken on to improve the system security. This paper presents the application of particle swarm optimization algorithm to find the optimal location of multi type FACTS devices in a power system in order to eliminate or alleviate the line over loads. The optimizations are performed on the parameters, namely the location of the devices, their types, their settings and installation cost of FACTS devices for single and multiple contingencies. TCSC, SVC and UPFC are considered and modeled for steady state analysis. The selection of UPFC and TCSC suitable location uses the criteria on the basis of improved system security. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested for IEEE 6 bus and IEEE 30 bus test systems.

Numerical Analysis and Sensitivity Study of Non-Premixed Combustion Using LES

Non-premixed turbulent combustion Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been carried out in a simplified methanefuelled coaxial jet combustor employing Large Eddy Simulation (LES). The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of LES in modelling non-premixed combustion using a commercial software, FLUENT, and investigate the effects of the grid density and chemistry models employed on the accuracy of the simulation results. A comparison has also been made between LES and Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) predictions. For LES grid sensitivity test, 2.3 and 6.2 million cell grids are employed with the equilibrium model. The chemistry model sensitivity analysis is achieved by comparing the simulation results from the equilibrium chemistry and steady flamelet models. The predictions of the mixture fraction, axial velocity, species mass fraction and temperature by LES are in good agreement with the experimental data. The LES results are similar for the two chemistry models but influenced considerably by the grid resolution in the inner flame and near-wall regions.

Distribution Voltage Regulation Under Three- Phase Fault by Using D-STATCOM

This paper presents the voltage regulation scheme of D-STATCOM under three-phase faults. It consists of the voltage detection and voltage regulation schemes in the 0dq reference. The proposed control strategy uses the proportional controller in which the proportional gain, kp, is appropriately adjusted by using genetic algorithms. To verify its use, a simplified 4-bus test system is situated by assuming a three-phase fault at bus 4. As a result, the DSTATCOM can resume the load voltage to the desired level within 1.8 ms. This confirms that the proposed voltage regulation scheme performs well under three-phase fault events.

Analyzing of Public Transport Trip Generation in Developing Countries; A Case Study in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Yogyakarta, as the capital city of Yogyakarta Province, has important roles in various sectors that require good provision of public transportation system. Ideally, a good transportation system should be able to accommodate the amount of travel demand. This research attempts to develop a trip generation model to predict the number of public transport passenger in Yogyakarta city. The model is built by using multiple linear regression analysis, which establishes relationship between trip number and socioeconomic attributes. The data consist of primary and secondary data. Primary data was collected by conducting household surveys which randomly selected. The resulted model is further applied to evaluate the existing TransJogja, a new Bus Rapid Transit system serves Yogyakarta and surrounding cities, shelters.