Abstract: We estimate snow velocity and snow drift density on hilly terrain under the assumption that the drifting snow mass can be represented using a micro-continuum approach (i.e. using a nonclassical mechanics approach assuming a class of fluids for which basic equations of mass, momentum and energy have been derived). In our model, the theory of coupled stress fluids proposed by Stokes [1] has been employed for the computation of flow parameters. Analyses of bulk drift velocity, drift density, drift transport and mass transport of snow particles have been carried out and computations made, considering various parametric effects. Results are compared with those of classical mechanics (logarithmic wind profile). The results indicate that particle size affects the flow characteristics significantly.
Abstract: At present, web Service is the first choice to reuse the
legacy system for the implementation of SOA. According to the status
of the implementation of SOA and the status of the legacy systems, we propose four encapsulating strategies. Base on the strategies, we
proposal the service-oriented encapsulating framework, the legacy system can be encapsulated by the service-oriented encapsulating
layer in three aspects, communication protocols, data and program.
The reuse rate of the legacy systems can be increased by using this framework
Abstract: This research aims at modeling and simulating the effects of nanofluids on cylindrical heat pipes thermal performance using the ANSYS-FLUENT CFD commercial software. The heat pipe outer wall temperature distribution, thermal resistance, liquid pressure and axial velocity in presence of suspended nano-scaled solid particle (i.e. Cu, Al2O3 and TiO2) within the fluid (water) were investigated. The effect of particle concentration and size were explored and it is concluded that the thermal performance of the heat pipe is improved when using nanofluid as the system working fluid. Additionally, it was observed that the thermal resistance of the heat pipe drops as the particle concentration level increases and particle radius decreases.
Abstract: In distributed resource allocation a set of agents must assign their resources to a set of tasks. This problem arises in many real-world domains such as distributed sensor networks, disaster rescue, hospital scheduling and others. Despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem, explaining the different sources of difficulties, and a formal explanation of the strengths and limitations of key approaches is missing. We take a step towards this goal by using a formalization of distributed resource allocation that represents both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem. In this paper we present a new idea for target tracking in sensor networks and compare it with previous approaches. The central contribution of the paper is a generalized mapping from distributed resource allocation to DDCSP. This mapping is proven to correctly perform resource allocation problems of specific difficulty. This theoretical result is verified in practice by a simulation on a realworld distributed sensor network.
Abstract: Field mapping activity for an active volcano mainly in
the Torrid Zone is usually hampered by several problems such as steep
terrain and bad atmosphere conditions. In this paper we present a
simple solution for such problem by a combination Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR) and geostatistical methods. By this combination, we
could reduce the speckle effect from the SAR data and then estimate
roughness distribution of the pyroclastic flow deposits. The main
purpose of this study is to detect spatial distribution of new pyroclastic
flow deposits termed as P-zone accurately using the β°data from two
RADARSAT-1 SAR level-0 data. Single scene of Hyperion data and
field observation were used for cross-validation of the SAR results.
Mt. Merapi in central Java, Indonesia, was chosen as a study site and
the eruptions in May-June 2006 were examined. The P-zones were
found in the western and southern flanks. The area size and the longest
flow distance were calculated as 2.3 km2 and 6.8 km, respectively. The
grain size variation of the P-zone was mapped in detail from fine to
coarse deposits regarding the C-band wavelength of 5.6 cm.
Abstract: In this study a two dimensional axisymmetric, steady state and incompressible laminar flow in a rotating single disk is numerically investigated. The finite volume method is used for solving the momentum equations. The numerical model and results
are validated by comparing it to previously reported experimental data for velocities, angles and moment coefficients. It is
demonstrated that increasing the axial distance increases the value of axial velocity and vice versa for tangential and total velocities. However, the maximum value of nondimensional radial velocity
occurs near the disk wall. It is also found that with increase rotational Reynolds number, moment coefficient decreases.
Abstract: Coagulation of water involves the use of coagulating
agents to bring the suspended matter in the raw water together for
settling and the filtration stage. Present study is aimed to examine the
effects of aluminum sulfate as coagulant in conjunction with Moringa
Oleifera Coagulant Protein as coagulant aid on turbidity, hardness,
and bacteria in turbid water. A conventional jar test apparatus was
employed for the tests. The best removal was observed at a pH of 7
to 7.5 for all turbidities. Turbidity removal efficiency was resulted
between % 80 to % 99 by Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein as
coagulant aid. Dosage of coagulant and coagulant aid decreased with
increasing turbidity. In addition, Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein
significantly has reduced the required dosage of primary coagulant.
Residual Al+3 in treated water were less than 0.2 mg/l and meets the
environmental protection agency guidelines. The results showed that
turbidity reduction of % 85.9- % 98 paralleled by a primary
Escherichia coli reduction of 1-3 log units (99.2 – 99.97%) was
obtained within the first 1 to 2 h of treatment. In conclusions,
Moringa Oleifera Coagulant Protein as coagulant aid can be used for
drinking water treatment without the risk of organic or nutrient
release. We demonstrated that optimal design method is an efficient
approach for optimization of coagulation-flocculation process and
appropriate for raw water treatment.
Abstract: Located within the tropical belt region, there are
certain rules which should implemented in creating a passive
sustainable housing design in Malaysia. Traditional Malay house
possess a strong character with certain special spaces to create a
sustainable house which suit to the tropical climate in Malaysia. One
of the special space known as verandah or serambi gantung, create
various advantages in solving various issues. However, this special
space is not extremely being applied currently which produce major
issues in term of social and environmental aspects. Hence, this
phenomena create a negative impact to the occupant while Malaysia
already has a best housing design previously. Therefore, this paper
aims to explore both of the main issues mentioned above and reveal
the advantages of implementing verandah into passive sustainable
housing design in Malaysia. A systematic literature review is the
main methodology in this research to identify the various advantages
about verandah.. The study reveals that verandah is the best solution
in term of social and environmental issues and should be
implemented in current housing design in Malaysia.
Abstract: The restoration of extinct ponds is considered as one
of ways to gain new retention capacities for water which is getting
much more important issue with respect to expected impacts of a
climate change. However, there are also other pressures on the
landscape which must be all taken into consideration when making a
decision on the possible restoration of extinct ponds. The research
presented here focuses besides others on the restoration of former
ponds which could be important for both the flood protection and
drought impacts prevention. The first step of the methodology
development for the assessment of such areas is the assessment of
their present state. In this paper, the results of land use types
assessment for 22 localities are presented. These results confirm the
assumption that the most present land use type in such areas is the
permanent grassland. However, the spectra of land use types present
in extinct pond areas is very diverse and include besides others also
airport areas and industry.
Abstract: Fully customized hardware based technology provides high performance and low power consumption by specializing the tasks in hardware but lacks design flexibility since any kind of changes require re-design and re-fabrication. Software based solutions operate with software instructions due to which a great flexibility is achieved from the easy development and maintenance of the software code. But this execution of instructions introduces a high overhead in performance and area consumption. In past few decades the reconfigurable computing domain has been introduced which overcomes the traditional trades-off between flexibility and performance and is able to achieve high performance while maintaining a good flexibility. The dramatic gains in terms of chip performance and design flexibility achieved through the reconfigurable computing systems are greatly dependent on the design of their computational units being integrated with reconfigurable logic resources. The computational unit of any reconfigurable system plays vital role in defining its strength. In this research paper an RFU based computational unit design has been presented using the tightly coupled, multi-threaded reconfigurable cores. The proposed design has been simulated for VLIW based architectures and a high gain in performance has been observed as compared to the conventional computing systems.
Abstract: PCMs have always been viewed as a suitable
candidate for off peak thermal storage, particularly for refrigeration
systems, due to the high latent energy densities of these materials.
However, due to the need to have them encapsulated within a
container this density is reduced. Furthermore, PCMs have a low
thermal conductivity which reduces the useful amount of energy
which can be stored. To consider these factors, the true energy
storage density of a PCM system was proposed and optimised for
PCMs encapsulated in slabs. Using a validated numerical model of
the system, a parametric study was undertaken to investigate the
impact of the slab thickness, gap between slabs and the mass flow
rate. The study showed that, when optimised, a PCM system can
deliver a true energy storage density between 53% and 83% of the
latent energy density of the PCM.
Abstract: Semantic Web services will enable the semiautomatic
and automatic annotation, advertisement, discovery,
selection, composition, and execution of inter-organization business
logic, making the Internet become a common global platform where
organizations and individuals communicate with each other to carry
out various commercial activities and to provide value-added
services. There is a growing consensus that Web services alone will
not be sufficient to develop valuable solutions due the degree of
heterogeneity, autonomy, and distribution of the Web. This paper
deals with two of the hottest R&D and technology areas currently
associated with the Web – Web services and the Semantic Web. It
presents the synergies that can be created between Web Services and
Semantic Web technologies to provide a new generation of eservices.
Abstract: The mechanical properties including flexural and
tensile of neat vinyl ester and polymer based on layered silicate
nanocomposite materials are discussed. The addition of layered
silicate into the polymer matrix increased the tensile and flexural
modulus up to 1 wt.% clay loading. The incorporation of more clay
resulted in decreasing the mechanical properties which was traced to
the existence of aggregation layers. Likewise, up to 1 wt.% clay
loading, the thermal behaviour showed significant improvements and
at higher clay loading the thermal pattern was reduced. The
aggregation layers imparted a negative impact on the overall
mechanical and thermal properties. Wide Angle X-ray Diffraction,
Scanning Electron Microscopy and Transmission Electron
Microscopy were utilised in order to characterise the interlamellar
structure of nanocomposites.
Abstract: The traditional method for essential oil extraction from agarwood (Aquilaria Crassna) is to soak it in water and follow with hydrodistillation. The effect of various agarwood pretreatments: ethanol, acid, alkaline, enzymes, and ultrasound, and the effect of subcritical water extraction(SWE) was studied to compare with the traditional method. The major compositions of agarwood oil from hydrodistillation were aroma compounds as follow: aristol-9-en-8- one (21.53%), selina-3, 7(11)-diene (12.96%), τ-himachalene (9.28%), β-guaiene (5.79%), hexadecanoic acid (4.90%) and guaia- 3,9-diene (4.21%). Whereas agarwood oil from pretreatments with ethanol and ultrasound, and SWE got fatty acid compounds. Extraction of agarwood oil using these pretreatments could improve the agarwood oil yields up to 2 times that of the traditional method. The components of the pretreated sample with diluted acid (H2SO4) at pH 4 gave quite similar results as the traditional method. Therefore, the enhancement of essential oil from agarwood depends on requirement of type of extracted oil that involved extraction methods.
Abstract: Process-oriented software development is a new
software development paradigm in which software design is modeled
by a business process which is in turn translated into a process
execution language for execution. The building blocks of this
paradigm are software units that are composed together to work
according to the flow of the business process. This new paradigm
still exhibits the characteristic of the applications built with the
traditional software component technology. This paper discusses an
approach to apply a traditional technique for software component
fabrication to the design of process-oriented software units, called
process components. These process components result from
decomposing a business process of a particular application domain
into subprocesses, and these process components can be reused to
design the business processes of other application domains. The
decomposition considers five managerial goals, namely cost
effectiveness, ease of assembly, customization, reusability, and
maintainability. The paper presents how to design or decompose
process components from a business process model and measure
some technical features of the design that would affect the
managerial goals. A comparison between the measurement values
from different designs can tell which process component design is
more appropriate for the managerial goals that have been set. The
proposed approach can be applied in Web Services environment
which accommodates process-oriented software development.
Abstract: One of the main environmental problems which affect extensive areas in the world is soil salinity. Traditional data collection methods are neither enough for considering this important environmental problem nor accurate for soil studies. Remote sensing data could overcome most of these problems. Although satellite images are commonly used for these studies, however there are still needs to find the best calibration between the data and real situations in each specified area. Neyshaboor area, North East of Iran was selected as a field study of this research. Landsat satellite images for this area were used in order to prepare suitable learning samples for processing and classifying the images. 300 locations were selected randomly in the area to collect soil samples and finally 273 locations were reselected for further laboratory works and image processing analysis. Electrical conductivity of all samples was measured. Six reflective bands of ETM+ satellite images taken from the study area in 2002 were used for soil salinity classification. The classification was carried out using common algorithms based on the best composition bands. The results showed that the reflective bands 7, 3, 4 and 1 are the best band composition for preparing the color composite images. We also found out, that hybrid classification is a suitable method for identifying and delineation of different salinity classes in the area.
Abstract: The threshold voltage and capacitance voltage characteristics of ultra-thin Silicon-on-Insulator MOSFET are greatly influenced by the thickness and doping concentration of the silicon film. In this work, the capacitance voltage characteristics and threshold voltage of the device have been analyzed with quantum mechanical effects using the Self-Consistent model. Reduction of channel thickness and adding doping impurities cause an increase in the threshold voltage. Moreover, the temperature effects cause a significant amount of threshold voltage shift. The temperature dependence of threshold voltage has also been observed with Self- Consistent approach which are well supported from experimental performance of practical devices.
Abstract: The analytical solution of functionally graded
piezoelectric hollow cylinder which is under radial electric potential
and non-axisymmetric thermo-mechanical loads, are presented in this
paper. Using complex Fourier series and estimation of power law for
variations of material characterizations through the thickness, the
electro thermo mechanical behavior of the FGPM cylinder is
obtained. The stress and displacement distributions and the effect of
electric potential field on the cylinder behavior are also presented and
some applicable results are offered at the end of the paper.
Abstract: Microwave energy is a superior alternative to several other thermal treatments. Extraction techniques are widely employed for the isolation of bioactive compounds and vegetable oils from oil seeds. Among the different and new available techniques, microwave pretreatment of seeds is a simple and desirable method for production of high quality vegetable oils. Microwave pretreatment for oil extraction has many advantages as follow: improving oil extraction yield and quality, direct extraction capability, lower energy consumption, faster processing time and reduced solvent levels compared with conventional methods. It allows also for better retention and availability of desirable nutraceuticals, such as phytosterols and tocopherols, canolol and phenolic compounds in the extracted oil such as rapeseed oil. This can be a new step to produce nutritional vegetable oils with improved shelf life because of high antioxidant content.
Abstract: Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a recent class of statistical classification and regression techniques playing an increasing role in applications to detection problems in various engineering problems, notably in statistical signal processing, pattern recognition, image analysis, and communication systems. In this paper, SVM is applied to an infrared (IR) binary communication system with different types of channel models including Ricean multipath fading and partially developed scattering channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) at the receiver. The structure and performance of SVM in terms of the bit error rate (BER) metric is derived and simulated for these channel stochastic models and the computational complexity of the implementation, in terms of average computational time per bit, is also presented. The performance of SVM is then compared to classical binary signal maximum likelihood detection using a matched filter driven by On-Off keying (OOK) modulation. We found that the performance of SVM is superior to that of the traditional optimal detection schemes used in statistical communication, especially for very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ranges. For large SNR, the performance of the SVM is similar to that of the classical detectors. The implication of these results is that SVM can prove very beneficial to IR communication systems that notoriously suffer from low SNR at the cost of increased computational complexity.