Abstract: This paper describes the design and development of pico-hydro generation system using consuming water distributed to houses. Water flow in the domestic pipes has kinetic energy that potential to generate electricity for energy storage purposes in addition to the routine activities such as laundry, cook and bathe. The inherent water pressure and flow inside the pipe from utility-s main tank that used for those usual activities is also used to rotate small scale hydro turbine to drive a generator for electrical power generation. Hence, this project is conducted to develop a small scale hydro generation system using consuming water distributed to houses as an alternative electrical energy source for residential use.
Abstract: Cavitation, usually known as a destructive
phenomenon, involves turbulent unsteady two-phase flow. Having
such features, cavitating flows have been turned to a challenging
topic in numerical studies and many researches are being done for
better understanding of bubbly flows and proposing solutions to
reduce its consequent destructive effects. Aeration may be regarded
as an effective protection against cavitation erosion in many
hydraulic structures, like gated tunnels. The paper concerns
numerical simulation of flow in discharge gated tunnel of a dam
using ing RNG k -ε model coupled with the volume of fluid (VOF)
method and the zone which is susceptible of cavitation inception in
the tunnel is predicted. In the second step, a vent is considered in the
mentioned zone for aeration and the numerical simulation is done
again to study the effects of aeration. The results show that aeration
is an impressively useful method to exclude cavitation in mentioned
tunnels.
Abstract: This paper proposes an alternative control mechanism
for an interactive Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera control system.
Instead of using a mouse or a joystick, the proposed mechanism
utilizes a Nintendo Wii remote and infrared (IR) sensor bar. The Wii
remote has buttons that allows the user to control the movement of a
PTZ camera through Bluetooth connectivity. In addition, the Wii
remote has a built-in motion sensor that allows the user to give
control signals to the PTZ camera through pitch and roll movement.
A stationary IR sensor bar, placed at some distance away opposite the
Wii remote, enables the detection of yaw movement. In addition, the
Wii remote-s built-in IR camera has the ability to detect its spatial
position, and thus generates a control signal when the user moves the
Wii remote. Some experiments are carried out and their performances
are compared with an industry-standard PTZ joystick.
Abstract: In the Lost Foam Casting process, melting point
temperature of metal, as well as volume and rate of the foam
degradation have significant effect on the mold filling pattern.
Therefore, gas generation capacity and gas gap length are two
important parameters for modeling of mold filling time of the lost
foam casting processes. In this paper, the gas gap length at the liquidfoam
interface for a low melting point (aluminum) alloy and a high
melting point (Carbon-steel) alloy are investigated by the
photography technique. Results of the photography technique
indicated, that the gas gap length and the mold filling time are
increased with increased coating thickness and density of the foam.
The Gas gap lengths measured in aluminum and Carbon-steel,
depend on the foam density, and were approximately 4-5 and 25-60
mm, respectively. By using a new system, the gas generation
capacity for the aluminum and steel was measured. The gas
generation capacity measurements indicated that gas generation in
the Aluminum and Carbon-steel lost foam casting was about 50 CC/g
and 3200 CC/g polystyrene, respectively.
Abstract: Stormwater wetlands have been mainly designed in an
empirical approach for water quality improvement, with little
quantitative understanding of the internal microbial processes. This
study investigated into heterotrophic bacterial production rate,
heterotrophic bacterial mineralization percentage, and algal biomass
in hypertrophic and eutrophic surface flow stormwater wetlands.
Compared to a nearby wood leachate treatment wetland, the
stormwater wetlands had much higher chlorophyll-a concentrations.
The eutrophic stormwater wetland had improved water quality,
whereas the hypertrophic stormwater wetland had degraded water
quality. Heterotrophic bacterial activities in water were limited in the
stormwater wetlands due to competition of algal growth for nutrients.
The relative contribution of biofilms to the overall heterotrophic
activities was higher in the stormwater wetlands than that in the wood
leachate treatment wetland.
Abstract: This work discusses an innovative methodology for
deployment of service quality characteristics. Four groups of organizational features that may influence the quality of services are identified: human resource, technology, planning, and organizational
relationships. A House of Service Quality (HOSQ) matrix is built to
extract the desired improvement in the service quality characteristics
and to translate them into a hierarchy of important organizational
features. The Mean Square Error (MSE) criterion enables the
pinpointing of the few essential service quality characteristics to be
improved as well as selection of the vital organizational features. The
method was implemented in an engineering supply enterprise and
provides useful information on its vital service dimensions.
Abstract: Narratives are invaluable assets of human lives. Due to
the distinct features of narratives, they are useful for supporting human
reasoning processes. However, many useful narratives become
residuals in organizations or human minds nowadays. Researchers
have contributed effort to investigate and improve narrative generation
processes. This paper attempts to contemplate essential components in
narratives and explore a computational approach to acquire and extract
knowledge to generate narratives. The methodology and significant
benefit for decision support are presented.
Abstract: At present, the tendency to implement the conditionbased
maintenance (CBM), which allows the optimization of the
expenses for equipment monitoring, is more and more evident; also,
the transformer substations with remote monitoring are increasingly
used. This paper reviews all the advantages of the on-line monitoring
and presents an equipment for on-line monitoring of bushings, which
is the own contribution of specialists who are the authors of this
paper. The paper presents a study of the temperature field, using the
finite element method. For carrying out this study, the 3D modelling
of the above mentioned bushing was performed. The analysis study is
done taking into account the extreme thermal stresses, focusing at the
level of the first cooling wing section of the ceramic insulator. This
fact enables to justify the tanδ variation in time, depending on the
transformer loading and the environmental conditions. With a view
to reducing the variation of dielectric losses in bushing insulation, the
use of ferrofuids instead of mineral oils is proposed.
Abstract: The quality of a machined surface is becoming more and more important to justify the increasing demands of sophisticated component performance, longevity, and reliability. Usually, any machining operation leaves its own characteristic evidence on the machined surface in the form of finely spaced micro irregularities (surface roughness) left by the associated indeterministic characteristics of the different elements of the system: tool-machineworkpart- cutting parameters. However, one of the most influential sources in machining affecting surface roughness is the instantaneous state of tool edge. The main objective of the current work is to relate the in-process immeasurable cutting edge deformation and surface roughness to a more reliable easy-to-measure force signals using a robust non-linear time-dependent modeling regression techniques. Time-dependent modeling is beneficial when modern machining systems, such as adaptive control techniques are considered, where the state of the machined surface and the health of the cutting edge are monitored, assessed and controlled online using realtime information provided by the variability encountered in the measured force signals. Correlation between wear propagation and roughness variation is developed throughout the different edge lifetimes. The surface roughness is further evaluated in the light of the variation in both the static and the dynamic force signals. Consistent correlation is found between surface roughness variation and tool wear progress within its initial and constant regions. At the first few seconds of cutting, expected and well known trend of the effect of the cutting parameters is observed. Surface roughness is positively influenced by the level of the feed rate and negatively by the cutting speed. As cutting continues, roughness is affected, to different extents, by the rather localized wear modes either on the tool nose or on its flank areas. Moreover, it seems that roughness varies as wear attitude transfers from one mode to another and, in general, it is shown that it is improved as wear increases but with possible corresponding workpart dimensional inaccuracy. The dynamic force signals are found reasonably sensitive to simulate either the progressive or the random modes of tool edge deformation. While the frictional force components, feeding and radial, are found informative regarding progressive wear modes, the vertical (power) components is found more representative carrier to system instability resulting from the edge-s random deformation.
Abstract: Ovshinsky initiated scientific research in the field of
amorphous and disordered materials that continues to this day. The
Ovshinsky Effect where the resistance of thin GST films is
significantly reduced upon the application of low voltage is of
fundamental importance in phase-change - random access memory
(PC-RAM) devices.GST stands for GdSbTe chalcogenide type
glasses.However, the Ovshinsky Effect is not without controversy.
Ovshinsky thought the resistance of GST films is reduced by the
redistribution of charge carriers; whereas, others at that time including
many PC-RAM researchers today argue that the GST resistance
changes because the GST amorphous state is transformed to the
crystalline state by melting, the heat supplied by external heaters. In
this controversy, quantum mechanics (QM) asserts the heat capacity of
GST films vanishes, and therefore melting cannot occur as the heat
supplied cannot be conserved by an increase in GST film
temperature.By precluding melting, QM re-opens the controversy
between the melting and charge carrier mechanisms. Supporting
analysis is presented to show that instead of increasing GST film
temperature, conservation proceeds by the QED induced creation of
photons within the GST film, the QED photons confined by TIR. QED
stands for quantum electrodynamics and TIR for total internal
reflection. The TIR confinement of QED photons is enhanced by the
fact the absorbedheat energy absorbed in the GST film is concentrated
in the TIR mode because of their high surface to volume ratio. The
QED photons having Planck energy beyond the ultraviolet produce
excitons by the photoelectric effect, the electrons and holes of which
reduce the GST film resistance.
Abstract: A transient heat transfer mathematical model for the
prediction of temperature distribution in the car body during primer
baking has been developed by considering the thermal radiation and
convection in the furnace chamber and transient heat conduction
governing equations in the car framework. The car cockpit is
considered like a structure with six flat plates, four vertical plates
representing the car doors and the rear and front panels. The other
two flat plates are the car roof and floor. The transient heat
conduction in each flat plate is modeled by the lumped capacitance
method. Comparison with the experimental data shows that the heat
transfer model works well for the prediction of thermal behavior of
the car body in the curing furnace, with deviations below 5%.
Abstract: A method is presented for the construction of arbitrary
even-input sorting networks exhibiting better properties than the
networks created using a conventional technique of the same type.
The method was discovered by means of a genetic algorithm combined
with an application-specific development. Similarly to human
inventions in the area of theoretical computer science, the evolved
invention was analyzed: its generality was proven and area and time
complexities were determined.
Abstract: There is a growing body of evidence to support the
proposition of product take back for remanufacturing particularly
within the context of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).
Remanufacturing however presents challenges unlike that of
traditional manufacturing environments due to its high levels of
uncertainty which may further distract organizations from
considering its potential benefits. This paper presents a novel
modeling approach for evaluating the uncertainty of part failures
within the remanufacturing process and its impact on economic and
environmental performance measures. This paper presents both the
theoretical modeling approach and an example of its use in
application.
Abstract: Adhesion strength of exterior or interior coating of
steel pipes is too important. Increasing of coating adhesion on
surfaces can increase the life time of coating, safety factor of
transmitting line pipe and decreasing the rate of corrosion and costs.
Preparation of steel pipe surfaces before doing the coating process is
done by shot and grit blasting. This is a mechanical way to do it.
Some effective parameters on that process, are particle size of
abrasives, distance to surface, rate of abrasive flow, abrasive physical
properties, shapes, selection of abrasive, kind of machine and its
power, standard of surface cleanness degree, roughness, time of
blasting and weather humidity. This search intended to find some
better conditions which improve the surface preparation, adhesion
strength and corrosion resistance of coating. So, this paper has
studied the effect of varying abrasive flow rate, changing the
abrasive particle size, time of surface blasting on steel surface
roughness and over blasting on it by using the centrifugal blasting
machine. After preparation of numbers of steel samples (according to
API 5L X52) and applying epoxy powder coating on them, to
compare strength adhesion of coating by Pull-Off test. The results
have shown that, increasing the abrasive particles size and flow rate,
can increase the steel surface roughness and coating adhesion
strength but increasing the blasting time can do surface over blasting
and increasing surface temperature and hardness too, change,
decreasing steel surface roughness and coating adhesion strength.
Abstract: This paper presents the utilizing of ferroelectric
material on antenna application. There are two different ferroelectric
had been used on the proposed antennas which include of Barium
Strontium Titanate (BST) and Bismuth Titanate (BiT), suitable for
Access Points operating in the WLAN IEEE 802.11 b/g and WiMAX
IEEE 802.16 within the range of 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz application.
BST, which had been tested to own a dielectric constant of εr = 15
while BiT has a dielectric constant that higher than BST which is εr =
21 and both materials are in rectangular shaped. The influence of
various parameters on antenna characteristics were investigated
extensively using commercial electromagnetic simulations software
by Communication Simulation Technology (CST). From theoretical
analysis and simulation results, it was demonstrated that ferroelectric
material used have not only improved the directive emission but also
enhanced the radiation efficiency.
Abstract: This paper presents a VLSI design approach of a highspeed
and real-time 2-D Discrete Wavelet Transform computing. The
proposed architecture, based on new and fast convolution approach,
reduces the hardware complexity in addition to reduce the critical
path to the multiplier delay. Furthermore, an advanced twodimensional
(2-D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT)
implementation, with an efficient memory area, is designed to
produce one output in every clock cycle. As a result, a very highspeed
is attained. The system is verified, using JPEG2000
coefficients filters, on Xilinx Virtex-II Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) device without accessing any external memory. The
resulting computing rate is up to 270 M samples/s and the (9,7) 2-D
wavelet filter uses only 18 kb of memory (16 kb of first-in-first-out
memory) with 256×256 image size. In this way, the developed design
requests reduced memory and provide very high-speed processing as
well as high PSNR quality.
Abstract: Extracellular ubiquitin in vivo effect on regenerative liver cells and liver histoarchitectonics has been studied. Experiments were performed on mature female white rats. Partial hepatectomy was made using the modified method of Higgins and Anderson. Standard histopathological assessment of liver tissue was used. Proliferative activity of hepatocytes was analyzed by colchicine mitotic index and immunohistochemical staining on ki67. We have found that regardless of number of injections and dose of extracellular ubiquitin liver histology has not been changed, so at tissue level no effect was observed. In vivo double injection of ubiquitin significantly decreases the mitotic activity at 32 hour point after partial hepatectomy. Thus, we can conclude that in vivo injected extracellular ubiquitin inhibits proliferative activity of hepatocytes in partially hepatectomyzed rats.
Abstract: This study deals with the phenomena of reflection and transmission (refraction) of qSV-waves, for an incident of quasi transverse vertically waves, at a plane interface of two semi-infinite piezoelectric elastic media under the influence of the initial stresses. The relations governing the reflection and transmission coefficients of these reflected waves for various suitable boundary conditions are derived. We have shown analytically that reflection and transmission coefficients of (qP) and (qSV) waves depend upon the angle of incidence, the parameters of electric potential, the material constants of the medium as will as the initial stresses presented in the media. The numerical calculations of the reflection and transmission amplitude ratios for different values of initial stresses have been carried out by computer for different materials as examples and the results are given in the form of graphs. Finally, some of particular cases are considered.
Abstract: Effect of high temperature exposure on properties of cement mortar containing municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) bottom ash as partial natural aggregate replacement is analyzed in the paper. The measurements of mechanical properties, bulk density, matrix density, total open porosity, sorption and desorption isotherms are done on samples exposed to the temperatures of 20°C to 1000°C. TGA analysis is performed as well. Finally, the studied samples are analyzed by IR spectroscopy in order to evaluate TGA data.
Abstract: This paper describes a novel and effective approach to content-based image retrieval (CBIR) that represents each image in the database by a vector of feature values called “Standard deviation of mean vectors of color distribution of rows and columns of images for CBIR". In many areas of commerce, government, academia, and hospitals, large collections of digital images are being created. This paper describes the approach that uses contents as feature vector for retrieval of similar images. There are several classes of features that are used to specify queries: colour, texture, shape, spatial layout. Colour features are often easily obtained directly from the pixel intensities. In this paper feature extraction is done for the texture descriptor that is 'variance' and 'Variance of Variances'. First standard deviation of each row and column mean is calculated for R, G, and B planes. These six values are obtained for one image which acts as a feature vector. Secondly we calculate variance of the row and column of R, G and B planes of an image. Then six standard deviations of these variance sequences are calculated to form a feature vector of dimension six. We applied our approach to a database of 300 BMP images. We have determined the capability of automatic indexing by analyzing image content: color and texture as features and by applying a similarity measure Euclidean distance.