Abstract: The refueling of a transparent rectangular fuel tank
fitted with a standard filler pipe and roll-over valve was
experimentally studied. A fuel-conditioning cart, capable of
handling fuels of different Reid vapor pressure at a constant
temperature, was used to dispense fuel at the desired rate. The
experimental protocol included transient recording of the tank and
filler tube pressures while video recording the flow patterns in the
filler tube and tank during the refueling process. This information
was used to determine the effect of changes in the vent tube
diameter, fuel-dispense flow rate and fuel Reid vapor pressure on the
pressure-time characteristics and the occurrence of premature fuel
filling shut-off and fuel spill-back. Pressure-time curves for the case
of normal shut-off demonstrated the classic, three-phase
characteristic noted in the literature. The variation of the maximum
values of tank dome and filler tube pressures are analyzed in relation
to the occurrence of premature shut-off.
Abstract: In this paper, an adaptive polarized Multiple-Input
Multiple-Output (MIMO) Multicarrier Spread Spectrum Code Division Multiple Access (MC-SS-CDMA) system is designed for downlink mobile communications. The proposed system will be
examined in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) mode for both macro urban and suburban environments. For the same transmission
bandwidth, a performance comparison between both nonoverlapped and orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) schemes will be presented. Also, the proposed system will be compared with
both the closed loop vertical MIMO MC-SS-CDMA system and the
synchronous vertical STBC-MIMO MC-SS-CDMA system. As will
be shown, the proposed system introduces a significant performance
gain as well as reducing the spatial dimensions of the MIMO system
and simplifying the receiver implementation. The effect of the
polarization diversity characteristics on the BER performance will be
discussed. Also, the impact of excluding the cross-polarization MCSS-
CDMA blocks in the base station will be investigated. In addition,
the system performance will be evaluated under different Feedback
Information (FBI) rates for slowly-varying channels. Finally, a
performance comparison for vehicular and pedestrian environments
will be presented
Abstract: Hospital staff and managers are under pressure and
concerned for effective use and management of scarce resources. The
hospital admissions require many decisions that have complex and
uncertain consequences for hospital resource utilization and patient
flow. It is challenging to predict risk of admissions and length of stay
of a patient due to their vague nature. There is no method to capture
the vague definition of admission of a patient. Also, current methods
and tools used to predict patients at risk of admission fail to deal with
uncertainty in unplanned admission, LOS, patients- characteristics.
The main objective of this paper is to deal with uncertainty in
health system variables, and handles uncertain relationship among
variables. An introduction of machine learning techniques along with
statistical methods like Regression methods can be a proposed
solution approach to handle uncertainty in health system variables. A
model that adapts fuzzy methods to handle uncertain data and
uncertain relationships can be an efficient solution to capture the
vague definition of admission of a patient.
Abstract: To respond to the Kyoto Protocol, the policy of Payment for Environmental Service (PES), which was entitled “Plain Landscape Afforestation Program (PLAP)", was certified by Executive Yuan in Taiwan on 31 August 2001 and has been implementing for six years since 1 January 2002. Although the PLAP has received a lot of positive comments, there are still many difficulties during the process of implementation, such as insufficient technology for afforestation, private landowners- low interests in participating in PLAP, insufficient subsidies, and so on, which are potential threats that hinder the PLAP from moving forward in future. In this paper, selecting Ping-Tung County in Taiwan as a sample region and targeting those private landowners with and without intention to participate in the PLAP, respectively, we conduct an empirical analysis based on the Logit model to investigate the factors that determine whether those private landowners join the PLAP, so as to realize the incentive effects of the PLAP upon the personal decision on afforestation. The possible factors that might determine private landowner-s participation in the PLAP include landowner-s characteristics, cropland characteristics, as well as policy factors. Among them, the policy factors include afforestation subsidy amount (+), duration of afforestation subsidy (+), the rules on adjoining and adjacent areas (+), and so on, which do not reach the remarkable level in statistics though, but the directions of variable signs are consistent with the intuition behind the policy. As for the landowners- characteristics, each of age (+), education level (–), and annual household income (+) variables reaches 10% of the remarkable level in statistics; as for the cropland characteristics, each of cropland area (+), cropland price (–), and the number of cropland parcels (–) reaches 1% of the remarkable level in statistics. In light of the above, the cropland characteristics are the dominate factor that determines the probability of landowner-s participation in the PLAP. In the Logit model established by this paper, the probability of correctly estimating nonparticipants is 98%, the probability of correctly estimating the participants is 71.8%, and the probability for the overall estimation is 95%. In addition, Hosmer-Lemeshow test and omnibus test also revealed that the Logit model in this paper may provide fine goodness of fit and good predictive power in forecasting private landowners- participation in this program. The empirical result of this paper expects to help the implementation of the afforestation programs in Taiwan.
Abstract: The study aimed to investigate characteristics of
vegetative tissue for taxonomic purpose and possibly trend of waste
application in industry. Stems and branches of 15 species in Solanum
found in Thailand were prepared for fiber and examined by light
microscopy. Microstructural characteristic data of fiber i.e. fiber
length and width, fiber lumen diameter and fiber cell wall thickness
were recorded. The longest average fiber cell length (>3.9 mm.) were
obtained in S. lycopersicum L. and S. tuberosum L. Fiber cells from
S. lycopersicum also revealed the widest average diameter of whole
cell and its lumen at >45.5 μm and >29 μm respectively. However
fiber cells with thickest wall of > 9.6 μm were belonged to the
ornamental tree species, S. wrightii Benth. The results showed that
the slenderness ratio, Runkel ratio, and flexibility coefficient, with
potentially suitable for feedstock in paper industry fell in 4 exotic
species, i.e. Solanumamericanum L., S. lycopersicum, S.
seaforthianum Andr., and S. tuberosum L
Abstract: Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a
practical non-invasive optical technique to detect characteristic of
hemoglobin density dynamics response during functional activation of
the cerebral cortex. In this paper, fNIRS measurements were made in
the area of motor cortex from C4 position according to international
10-20 system. Three subjects, aged 23 - 30 years, were participated in
the experiment.
The aim of this paper was to evaluate the effects of different motor
activation tasks of the hemoglobin density dynamics of fNIRS signal.
The chaotic concept based on deterministic dynamics is an important
feature in biological signal analysis. This paper employs the chaotic
properties which is a novel method of nonlinear analysis, to analyze
and to quantify the chaotic property in the time series of the
hemoglobin dynamics of the various motor imagery tasks of fNIRS
signal. Usually, hemoglobin density in the human brain cortex is
found to change slowly in time. An inevitable noise caused by various
factors is to be included in a signal. So, principle component analysis
method (PCA) is utilized to remove high frequency component. The
phase pace is reconstructed and evaluated the Lyapunov spectrum, and
Lyapunov dimensions. From the experimental results, it can be
conclude that the signals measured by fNIRS are chaotic.
Abstract: This paper reported an experimental research of
steady-state heat transfer behaviour of a gas flowing through a fixed
bed under the different operating conditions. Studies had been carried
out in a fixed-bed packed methanol synthesis catalyst percolated by air
at appropriate flow rate. Both radial and axial direction temperature
distribution had been investigated under the different operating
conditions. The effects of operating conditions including the reactor
inlet air temperature, the heating pipe temperature and the air flow rate
on temperature distribution was investigated and the experimental
results showed that a higher inlet air temperature was conducive to
uniform temperature distribution in the fixed bed. A large temperature
drop existed at the radial direction, and the temperature drop increased
with the heating pipe temperature increasing under the experimental
conditions; the temperature profile of the vicinity of the heating pipe
was strongly affected by the heating pipe temperature. A higher air
flow rate can improve the heat transfer in the fixed bed. Based on the
thermal distribution, heat transfer models of the fixed bed could be
established, and the characteristics of the temperature distribution in
the fixed bed could be finely described, that had an important practical
significance.
Abstract: InGaAsN and GaAsN epitaxial layers with similar
nitrogen compositions in a sample were successfully grown on a
GaAs (001) substrate by solid source molecular beam epitaxy. An
electron cyclotron resonance nitrogen plasma source has been used to
generate atomic nitrogen during the growth of the nitride layers. The
indium composition changed from sample to sample to give
compressive and tensile strained InGaAsN layers. Layer
characteristics have been assessed by high-resolution x-ray
diffraction to determine the relationship between the lattice constant
of the GaAs1-yNy layer and the fraction x of In. The objective was to
determine the In fraction x in an InxGa1-xAs1-yNy epitaxial layer which
exactly cancels the strain present in a GaAs1-yNy epitaxial layer with
the same nitrogen content when grown on a GaAs substrate.
Abstract: A dissimilarity measure between the empiric
characteristic functions of the subsamples associated to the different
classes in a multivariate data set is proposed. This measure can be
efficiently computed, and it depends on all the cases of each class. It
may be used to find groups of similar classes, which could be joined
for further analysis, or it could be employed to perform an
agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis of the set of classes. The
final tree can serve to build a family of binary classification models,
offering an alternative approach to the multi-class SVM problem. We
have tested this dendrogram based SVM approach with the oneagainst-
one SVM approach over four publicly available data sets,
three of them being microarray data. Both performances have been
found equivalent, but the first solution requires a smaller number of
binary SVM models.
Abstract: The paper discusses optimising work on a method of processing ceramic / metal composite coatings for various applications and is based on preliminary work on processing anodes for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). The composite coating is manufactured by the electroless co-deposition of nickel and yttria stabilised zirconia (YSZ) simultaneously on to a ceramic substrate. The effect on coating characteristics of substrate surface treatments and electroless nickel bath parameters such as pH and agitation methods are also investigated. Characterisation of the resulting deposit by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDXA) is also discussed.
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel design for boring bar with enhanced damping capability. The principle followed in the design phase was to enhance the damping capability minimizing the loss in static stiffness through implementation of composite material interfaces. The newly designed tool has been compared to a conventional tool. The evaluation criteria were the dynamic characteristics, frequency and damping ratio, of the machining system, as well as the surface roughness of the machined workpieces. The use of composite material in the design of damped tool has been demonstrated effective. Furthermore, the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models presented in this paper take into consideration the interaction between the elastic structure of the machine tool and the cutting process and can therefore be used to characterize the machining system in operational conditions.
Abstract: Microstrip lines, widely used for good reason, are
broadband in frequency and provide circuits that are compact and
light in weight. They are generally economical to produce since they
are readily adaptable to hybrid and monolithic integrated circuit (IC)
fabrication technologies at RF and microwave frequencies. Although,
the existing EM simulation models used for the synthesis and
analysis of microstrip lines are reasonably accurate, they are
computationally intensive and time consuming. Neural networks
recently gained attention as fast and flexible vehicles to microwave
modeling, simulation and optimization. After learning and
abstracting from microwave data, through a process called training,
neural network models are used during microwave design to provide
instant answers to the task learned.This paper presents simple and
accurate ANN models for the synthesis and analysis of Microstrip
lines to more accurately compute the characteristic parameters and
the physical dimensions respectively for the required design
specifications.
Abstract: The exact gain shape profile of erbium doped fiber
amplifiers (EDFA`s) are depends on fiber length and Er3 ion
densities. This paper optimized several of erbium doped fiber
parameters to obtain high performance characteristic at pump
wavelengths of λp= 980 nm and λs= 1550 nm for three different
pump powers. The maximum gain obtained for pump powers (10, 30
and 50mw) is nearly (19, 30 and 33 dB) at optimizations. The
required numerical aperture NA to obtain maximum gain becomes
less when pump power increased. The amplifier gain is increase
when Er+3doped near the center of the fiber core. The simulation has
been done by using optisystem 5.0 software (CAD for Photonics, a
license product of a Canadian based company) at 2.5 Gbps.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a Connect6 solver which
adopts a hybrid approach based on a tree-search algorithm and image
processing techniques. The solver must deal with the complicated
computation and provide high performance in order to make real-time
decisions. The proposed approach enables the solver to be
implemented on a single Spartan-6 XC6SLX45 FPGA produced by
XILINX without using any external devices. The compact
implementation is achieved through image processing techniques to
optimize a tree-search algorithm of the Connect6 game. The tree
search is widely used in computer games and the optimal search brings
the best move in every turn of a computer game. Thus, many
tree-search algorithms such as Minimax algorithm and artificial
intelligence approaches have been widely proposed in this field.
However, there is one fundamental problem in this area; the
computation time increases rapidly in response to the growth of the
game tree. It means the larger the game tree is, the bigger the circuit
size is because of their highly parallel computation characteristics.
Here, this paper aims to reduce the size of a Connect6 game tree using
image processing techniques and its position symmetric property. The
proposed solver is composed of four computational modules: a
two-dimensional checkmate strategy checker, a template matching
module, a skilful-line predictor, and a next-move selector. These
modules work well together in selecting next moves from some
candidates and the total amount of their circuits is small. The details of
the hardware design for an FPGA implementation are described and
the performance of this design is also shown in this paper.
Abstract: The purpose of the article is to illustrate the main
characteristics of the corporate governance challenge facing the
countries of South-Eastern Europe (SEE) and to subsequently
determine and assess the extensiveness and effectiveness of corporate
governance regulations in these countries. Therefore, we start with an
overview on the subject of the key problems of corporate governance
in transition. We then address the issue of corporate governance
measurement for SEE countries. To this end, we include a review of
the methodological framework for determining both the
extensiveness and the effectiveness of corporate governance
legislation. We then focus on the actual analysis of the quality of
corporate governance codes, as well as of legal institutions
effectiveness and provide a measure of corporate governance in
Romania and other SEE emerging markets. The paper concludes by
emphasizing the corporate governance enforcement gap and by
identifying research issues that require further study.
Abstract: A triangular fin with variable fin base thickness is analyzed and optimized using a two-dimensional analytical method. The influence of fin base height and fin base thickness on the temperature in the fin is listed. For the fixed fin volumes, the maximum heat loss, the corresponding optimum fin effectiveness, fin base height and fin tip length as a function of the fin base thickness, convection characteristic number and dimensionless fin volume are represented. One of the results shows that the optimum heat loss increases whereas the corresponding optimum fin effectiveness decreases with the increase of fin volume.
Abstract: Today, design requirements are extending more and
more from electronic (analogue and digital) to multidiscipline design.
These current needs imply implementation of methodologies to make
the CAD product reliable in order to improve time to market, study
costs, reusability and reliability of the design process.
This paper proposes a high level design approach applied for the
characterization and the optimization of Switched-Current Sigma-
Delta Modulators. It uses the new hardware description language
VHDL-AMS to help the designers to optimize the characteristics of
the modulator at a high level with a considerably reduced CPU time
before passing to a transistor level characterization.
Abstract: An approach for experimental measurement of the
dynamic characteristics of linear electromagnet actuators is
presented. It uses accelerometer sensor to register the armature
acceleration. The velocity and displacement of the moving parts can
be obtained by integration of the acceleration results. The armature
movement of permanent magnet linear actuator is acquired using this
technique. The results are analyzed and the performance of the
supposed approach is compared with the most commonly used
experimental setup where the displacement of the armature vs. time
is measured instead of its acceleration.
Abstract: The objective of this research was to study the
influence of marketing mix on customers purchasing behavior. A
total of 397 respondents were collected from customers who were the
patronages of the Chatuchak Plaza market. A questionnaire was
utilized as a tool to collect data. Statistics utilized in this research
included frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and
multiple regression analysis. Data were analyzed by using Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences. The findings revealed that the
majority of respondents were male with the age between 25-34 years
old, hold undergraduate degree, married and stay together. The
average income of respondents was between 10,001-20,000 baht. In
terms of occupation, the majority worked for private companies. The
research analysis disclosed that there were three variables of
marketing mix which included price (X2), place (X3), and product
(X1) which had an influence on the frequency of customer
purchasing. These three variables can predict a purchase about 30
percent of the time by using the equation; Y1 = 6.851 + .921(X2) +
.949(X3) + .591(X1). It also found that in terms of marketing mixed,
there were two variables had an influence on the amount of customer
purchasing which were physical characteristic (X6), and the process
(X7). These two variables are 17 percent predictive of a purchasing
by using the equation: Y2 = 2276.88 + 2980.97(X6) + 2188.09(X7).
Abstract: Renewable energy systems are becoming a topic of
great interest and investment in the world. In recent years wind
power generation has experienced a very fast development in the
whole world. For planning and successful implementations of good
wind power plant projects, wind potential measurements are
required. In these projects, of great importance is the effective choice
of the micro location for wind potential measurements, installation of
the measurement station with the appropriate measuring equipment,
its maintenance and analysis of the gained data on wind potential
characteristics. In this paper, a wavelet transform has been applied to
analyze the wind speed data in the context of insight in the
characteristics of the wind and the selection of suitable locations that
could be the subject of a wind farm construction. This approach
shows that it can be a useful tool in investigation of wind potential.