Abstract: The operating control parameters of injection
flushing type of electrical discharge machining process on stainless
steel 304 workpiece with copper tools are being optimized
according to its individual machining characteristic i.e. material
removal rate (MRR). Lower MRR during EDM machining process
may decrease its- machining productivity. Hence, the quality
characteristic for MRR is set to higher-the-better to achieve the
optimum machining productivity. Taguchi method has been used
for the construction, layout and analysis of the experiment for each
of the machining characteristic for the MRR. The use of Taguchi
method in the experiment saves a lot of time and cost of preparing
and machining the experiment samples. Therefore, an L18
Orthogonal array which was the fundamental component in the
statistical design of experiments has been used to plan the
experiments and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is used to
determine the optimum machining parameters for this machining
characteristic. The control parameters selected for this
optimization experiments are polarity, pulse on duration, discharge
current, discharge voltage, machining depth, machining diameter
and dielectric liquid pressure. The result had shown that the higher
the discharge voltage, the higher will be the MRR.
Abstract: Liveable city is referred to as the quality of life in an
area that contributes towards a safe, healthy and enjoyable place. This
paper discusses the role of the streets- activities in making Kuala
Lumpur a liveable city and the happiness level of the residents
towards the city-s street activities. The study was conducted using the
residents of Kuala Lumpur. A mixed method technique is used with
the quantitative data as a main data and supported by the qualitative
data. Data were collected using questionnaires, observation and also
an interview session with a sample of residents of Kuala Lumpur.
The sampling technique is based on multistage cluster data sampling.
The findings revealed that, there is still no significant relationship
between the length of stay of the resident in Kuala Lumpur with the
happiness level towards the street activities that occurred in the city.
Abstract: Nowadays due to globalization of economy and
competition environment, innovation and technology plays key role
at creation of wealth and economic growth of countries. In fact
prompt growth of practical and technologic knowledge may results in
social benefits for countries when changes into effective innovation.
Considering the importance of innovation for the development of
countries, this study addresses the radical technological innovation
introduced by nanopapers at different stages of producing paper
including stock preparation, using authorized additives, fillers and
pigments, using retention, calender, stages of producing conductive
paper, porous nanopaper and Layer by layer self-assembly. Research
results show that in coming years the jungle related products will lose
considerable portion of their market share, unless embracing radical
innovation. Although incremental innovations can make this industry
still competitive in mid-term, but to have economic growth and
competitive advantage in long term, radical innovations are
necessary. Radical innovations can lead to new products and
materials which their applications in packaging industry can produce
value added. However application of nanotechnology in this industry
can be costly, it can be done in cooperation with other industries to
make the maximum use of nanotechnology possible. Therefore this
technology can be used in all the production process resulting in the
mass production of simple and flexible papers with low cost and
special properties such as facility at shape, form, easy transportation,
light weight, recovery and recycle marketing abilities, and sealing.
Improving the resistance of the packaging materials without reducing
the performance of packaging materials enhances the quality and the
value added of packaging. Improving the cellulose at nano scale can
have considerable electron optical and magnetic effects leading to
improvement in packaging and value added. Comparing to the
specifications of thermoplastic products and ordinary papers,
nanopapers show much better performance in terms of effective
mechanical indexes such as the modulus of elasticity, tensile strength,
and strain-stress. In densities lower than 640 kgm -3, due to the
network structure of nanofibers and the balanced and randomized
distribution of NFC in flat space, these specifications will even
improve more. For nanopapers, strains are 1,4Gpa, 84Mpa and 17%,
13,3 Gpa, 214Mpa and 10% respectively. In layer by layer self
assembly method (LbL) the tensile strength of nanopaper with Tio3
particles and Sio2 and halloysite clay nanotube are 30,4 ±7.6Nm/g
and 13,6 ±0.8Nm/g and 14±0.3,3Nm/g respectively that fall within
acceptable range of similar samples with virgin fiber. The usage of
improved brightness and porosity index in nanopapers can create
more competitive advantages at packaging industry.
Abstract: The research study was based on an evaluation of the
ability of glued test samples to pass the criterion of sufficient
bondline adhesion under the exposure conditions defined in EN 302-
1. Additionally, an infrared spectroscopic analysis of the evaluated
adhesives (phenol-resorcinol-formaldehyde PRF and melamine-ureaformaldehyde
MUF) with different mix ratios was carried out to
evaluate the possible effects of a faulty technological process.
Abstract: Nowadays increasingly the population makes use of
Information Technology (IT). As such, in recent year the Portuguese
government increased its focus on using the IT for improving
people-s life and began to develop a set of measures to enable the
modernization of the Public Administration, and so reducing the gap
between Public Administration and citizens.Thus the Portuguese
Government launched the Simplex Program. However these
SIMPLEX eGov measures, which have been implemented over the
years, present a serious challenge: how to forecast its impact on
existing Information Systems Architecture (ISA). Thus, this research
is focus in addressing the problem of automating the evaluation of the
actual impact of implementation an eGovSimplification and
Modernization measures in the Information Systems Architecture. To
realize the evaluation we proposes a Framework, which is supported
by some key concepts as: Quality Factors, ISA modeling,
Multicriteria Approach, Polarity Profile and Quality Metrics
Abstract: We suggest a novel method to incorporate longterm
redundancy (LTR) in signal time domain compression
methods. The proposition is based on block-sorting and curve
simplification. The proposition is illustrated on the ECG
signal as a post-processor for the FAN method. Test
applications on the new so-obtained FAN+ method using the
MIT-BIH database show substantial improvement of the
compression ratio-distortion behavior for a higher quality
reconstructed signal.
Abstract: The textile industry produces highly coloured
effluents containing polar and non-polar compounds. The textile mill
run by the Assam Polyester Co-operative Society Limited (APOL) is
situated at Rangia, about 55 km from Guwahati (26011' N, 91047' E)
in the northern bank of the river Brahmaputra, Assam (India). This
unit was commissioned in June 1988 and started commercial
production in November 1988. The installed capacity of the weaving
unit was 8000 m/day and that of the processing unit was 20,000
m/day. The mill has its own dyeing unit with a capacity of 1500-2000
kg/day. The western side of the mill consists of vast agricultural land
and the far northern and southern side of the mill has scattered human
population. The eastern side of the mill has a major road for
thoroughfare. The mill releases its effluents into the agricultural land
in the western side of the mill. The present study was undertaken to
assess the impact of the textile mill on surface soil quality in and
around the mill with particular reference to Cr, Mn, Ni and Zn.
Surface soil samples, collected along different directions at 200, 500
and 1000 m were digested and the metals were estimated with
Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. The metals were found in the
range of: Cr 50.9 – 105.0 mg kg-1, Mn 19.2- 78.6 mg kg-1, Ni 41.9 –
50.6 mg kg-1 and Zn 187.8 – 1095.8 mg kg-1. The study reveals
enrichment of Cr, Mn, Ni and Zn in the soil near the textile mill.
Abstract: Free Hemoglobin promotes the accumulation of
hydroxyl radicals by the heme iron, which can react with endogenous
hydrogen peroxide to produce free radicals which may cause severe
oxidative cell damage. Haptoglobin binds to Hemoglobin strongly
and Haptoglobin-Hemoglobin binding is irreversible. Peroxidase
activity of Haptoglobin(2-2)-Hemoglobin complex was assayed by
following increase of absorption of produced tetraguaiacol as the
second substrate of Haptoglobin-Hemoglobin complex at 470 nm and
42°C by UV-Vis spectrophotometer. The results have shown that
peroxidase activity of Haptoglobin(2-2)-Hemoglobin complex is
modulated via homotropic effect of hydrogen peroxide as allostric
substrate. On the other hand antioxidant property of Haptoglobin(2-
2)-Hemoglobin was increased via heterotropic effect of the two drugs
(especially ampicillin) on peroxidase activity of the complex. Both
drugs also have mild effect on quality of homotropic property of
peroxidase activity of Haptoglobin(2-2)-Hemoglobin complex.
Therefore, in vitro studies show that the two drugs may help Hp-Hb
complex to remove hydrogen peroxide from serum at pathologic
temperature ature (42 C).
Abstract: Clustering is the process of subdividing an input data set into a desired number of subgroups so that members of the same subgroup are similar and members of different subgroups have diverse properties. Many heuristic algorithms have been applied to the clustering problem, which is known to be NP Hard. Genetic algorithms have been used in a wide variety of fields to perform clustering, however, the technique normally has a long running time in terms of input set size. This paper proposes an efficient genetic algorithm for clustering on very large data sets, especially on image data sets. The genetic algorithm uses the most time efficient techniques along with preprocessing of the input data set. We test our algorithm on both artificial and real image data sets, both of which are of large size. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the k-means algorithm in terms of running time as well as the quality of the clustering.
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel approach for face image coding. The proposed method makes a use of the features of video encoders like motion prediction. At first encoder selects appropriate prototype from the database and warps it according to features of encoding face. Warped prototype is placed as first I frame. Encoding face is placed as second frame as P frame type. Information about features positions, color change, selected prototype and data flow of P frame will be sent to decoder. The condition is both encoder and decoder own the same database of prototypes. We have run experiment with H.264 video encoder and obtained results were compared to results achieved by JPEG and JPEG2000. Obtained results show that our approach is able to achieve 3 times lower bitrate and two times higher PSNR in comparison with JPEG. According to comparison with JPEG2000 the bitrate was very similar, but subjective quality achieved by proposed method is better.
Abstract: Trace element speciation of an integrated soil
amendment matrix was studied with a modified BCR sequential
extraction procedure. The analysis included pseudo-total
concentration determinations according to USEPA 3051A and
relevant physicochemical properties by standardized methods. Based
on the results, the soil amendment matrix possessed neutralization
capacity comparable to commercial fertilizers. Additionally, the
pseudo-total concentrations of all trace elements included in the
Finnish regulation for agricultural fertilizers were lower than the
respective statutory limit values. According to chemical speciation,
the lability of trace elements increased in the following order: Hg <
Cr < Co < Cu < As < Zn < Ni < Pb < Cd < V < Mo < Ba. The
validity of the BCR approach as a tool for chemical speciation was
confirmed by the additional acid digestion phase. Recovery of trace
elements during the procedure assured the validity of the approach
and indicated good quality of the analytical work.
Abstract: In this paper we proposed comparison of four content based objective metrics with results of subjective tests from 80 video sequences. We also include two objective metrics VQM and SSIM to our comparison to serve as “reference” objective metrics because their pros and cons have already been published. Each of the video sequence was preprocessed by the region recognition algorithm and then the particular objective video quality metric were calculated i.e. mutual information, angular distance, moment of angle and normalized cross-correlation measure. The Pearson coefficient was calculated to express metrics relationship to accuracy of the model and the Spearman rank order correlation coefficient to represent the metrics relationship to monotonicity. The results show that model with the mutual information as objective metric provides best result and it is suitable for evaluating quality of video sequences.
Abstract: Automatic currency note recognition invariably
depends on the currency note characteristics of a particular country
and the extraction of features directly affects the recognition ability.
Sri Lanka has not been involved in any kind of research or
implementation of this kind. The proposed system “SLCRec" comes
up with a solution focusing on minimizing false rejection of notes.
Sri Lankan currency notes undergo severe changes in image quality
in usage. Hence a special linear transformation function is adapted to
wipe out noise patterns from backgrounds without affecting the
notes- characteristic images and re-appear images of interest. The
transformation maps the original gray scale range into a smaller
range of 0 to 125. Applying Edge detection after the transformation
provided better robustness for noise and fair representation of edges
for new and old damaged notes. A three layer back propagation
neural network is presented with the number of edges detected in row
order of the notes and classification is accepted in four classes of
interest which are 100, 500, 1000 and 2000 rupee notes. The
experiments showed good classification results and proved that the
proposed methodology has the capability of separating classes
properly in varying image conditions.
Abstract: A new topology of unified power quality conditioner
(UPQC) is proposed for different power quality (PQ) improvement in
a three-phase four-wire (3P-4W) distribution system. For neutral
current mitigation, a star-hexagon transformer is connected in shunt
near the load along with three-leg voltage source inverters (VSIs)
based UPQC. For the mitigation of source neutral current, the uses of
passive elements are advantageous over the active compensation due
to ruggedness and less complexity of control. In addition to this, by
connecting a star-hexagon transformer for neutral current mitigation
the over all rating of the UPQC is reduced. The performance of the
proposed topology of 3P-4W UPQC is evaluated for power-factor
correction, load balancing, neutral current mitigation and mitigation
of voltage and currents harmonics. A simple control algorithm based
on Unit Vector Template (UVT) technique is used as a control
strategy of UPQC for mitigation of different PQ problems. In this
control scheme, the current/voltage control is applied over the
fundamental supply currents/voltages instead of fast changing APFs
currents/voltages, thereby reducing the computational delay.
Moreover, no extra control is required for neutral source current
compensation; hence the numbers of current sensors are reduced. The
performance of the proposed topology of UPQC is analyzed through
simulations results using MATLAB software with its Simulink and
Power System Block set toolboxes.
Abstract: This paper deals with condition monitoring of electric switch machine for railway points. Point machine, as a complex electro-mechanical device, switch the track between two alternative routes. There has been an increasing interest in railway safety and the optimal management of railway equipments maintenance, e.g. point machine, in order to enhance railway service quality and reduce system failure. This paper explores the development of Kolmogorov- Smirnov (K-S) test to detect some point failures (external to the machine, slide chairs, fixing, stretchers, etc), while the point machine (inside the machine) is in its proper condition. Time-domain stator Current signatures of normal (healthy) and faulty points are taken by 3 Hall Effect sensors and are analyzed by K-S test. The test is simulated by creating three types of such failures, namely putting a hard stone and a soft stone between stock rail and switch blades as obstacles and also slide chairs- friction. The test has been applied for those three faults which the results show that K-S test can effectively be developed for the aim of other point failures detection, which their current signatures deviate parametrically from the healthy current signature. K-S test as an analysis technique, assuming that any defect has a specific probability distribution. Empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDF) are used to differentiate these probability distributions. This test works based on the null hypothesis that ECDF of target distribution is statistically similar to ECDF of reference distribution. Therefore by comparing a given current signature (as target signal) from unknown switch state to a number of template signatures (as reference signal) from known switch states, it is possible to identify which is the most likely state of the point machine under analysis.
Abstract: In this paper, stabilization of an Active Magnetic Bearing (AMB) system with varying rotor speed using Sliding Mode Control (SMC) technique is considered. The gyroscopic effect inherited in the system is proportional to rotor speed in which this nonlinearity effect causes high system instability as the rotor speed increases. Also, transformation of the AMB dynamic model into a new class of uncertain system shows that this gyroscopic effect lies in the mismatched part of the system matrix. Moreover, the current gain parameter is allowed to be varied in a known bound as an uncertainty in the input matrix. SMC design method is proposed in which the sufficient condition that guarantees the global exponential stability of the reduced-order system is represented in Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI). Then, a new chattering-free control law is established such that the system states are driven to reach the switching surface and stay on it thereafter. The performance of the controller applied to the AMB model is demonstrated through simulation works under various system conditions.
Abstract: In the age of global communications, heterogeneous
networks are seen to be the best choice of strategy to ensure continuous and uninterruptible services. This will allow mobile
terminal to stay in connection even they are migrating into different segment coverage through the handoff process. With the increase of
teletraffic demands in mobile cellular system, hierarchical cellular systems have been adopted extensively for more efficient channel
utilization and better QoS (Quality of Service). This paper presents a
bidirectional call overflow scheme between two layers of microcells and macrocells, where handoffs are decided by the velocity of mobile
making the call. To ensure that handoff calls are given higher priorities, it is assumed that guard channels are assigned in both
macrocells and microcells. A hysteresis value introduced in mobile velocity is used to allow mobile roam in the same cell if its velocity
changes back within the set threshold values. By doing this the number of handoffs is reduced thereby reducing the processing overhead and enhancing the quality of service to the end user.
Abstract: Currently, there are many local area industrial networks
that can give guaranteed bandwidth to synchronous traffic, particularly
providing CBR channels (Constant Bit Rate), which allow
improved bandwidth management. Some of such networks operate
over Ethernet, delivering channels with enough capacity, specially
with compressors, to integrate multimedia traffic in industrial monitoring
and image processing applications with many sources. In
these industrial environments where a low latency is an essential
requirement, JPEG is an adequate compressing technique but it
generates VBR traffic (Variable Bit Rate). Transmitting VBR traffic
in CBR channels is inefficient and current solutions to this problem
significantly increase the latency or further degrade the quality. In
this paper an R(q) model is used which allows on-line calculation of
the JPEG quantification factor. We obtained increased quality, a lower
requirement for the CBR channel with reduced number of discarded
frames along with better use of the channel bandwidth.
Abstract: Prediction of fault-prone modules provides one way to
support software quality engineering. Clustering is used to determine
the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. Among various
clustering techniques available in literature K-Means clustering
approach is most widely being used. This paper introduces K-Means
based Clustering approach for software finding the fault proneness of
the Object-Oriented systems. The contribution of this paper is that it
has used Metric values of JEdit open source software for generation
of the rules for the categorization of software modules in the
categories of Faulty and non faulty modules and thereafter
empirically validation is performed. The results are measured in
terms of accuracy of prediction, probability of Detection and
Probability of False Alarms.
Abstract: The objective of the research was to evaluate the
quality of milk pomade sweet – sherbet packed in different packaging
materials (Multibarrier 60, met.BOPET/PE, Aluthen), by several
packaging technologies – active and modified atmosphere (MAP)
(consisting of 100% CO2), and control – in air ambiance.
Experiments were carried out at the Faculty of Food Technology of
Latvia University of Agriculture. Samples were stored at the room
temperature +21±1 °C. The physiochemical properties – weight
losses, moisture, hardening, colour and changes in headspace
atmosphere concentration (CO2 and O2) of packs were analysed
before packaging and after 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 storage weeks.