Abstract: The building sector is the largest energy consumer and
CO2 emitter in the European Union (EU) and therefore the active
reduction of energy consumption and elimination of energy wastage
are among the main goals in it. Healthy housing and energy
efficiency are affected by many factors which set challenges to
monitoring, control and research of indoor air quality (IAQ) and
energy consumption, especially in old buildings. These challenges
include measurement and equipment costs, for example.
Additionally, the measurement results are difficult to interpret and
their usage in the ventilation control is also limited when taking into
account the energy efficiency of housing at the same time. The main
goal of this study is to develop a cost-effective building monitoring
and control system especially for old buildings. The starting point or
keyword of the development process is a wireless system; otherwise
the installation costs become too high. As the main result, this paper
describes an idea of a wireless building monitoring and control
system. The first prototype of the system has been installed in 10
residential buildings and in 10 school buildings located in the City of
Kuopio, Finland.
Abstract: In this paper, a new approach for design of a fully
differential second order current mode continuous-time sigma-delta
modulator is presented. For circuit implementation, square root
domain (SRD) translinear loop based on floating-gate MOS
transistors that operate in saturation region is employed. The
modulator features, low supply voltage, low power consumption
(8mW) and high dynamic range (55dB). Simulation results confirm
that this design is suitable for data converters.
Abstract: Attitude control of aerospace system with liquid containers may face to a problem associate with fuel sloshing. The sloshing phenomena can degrade the stability of control system and in the worst case, interaction between the attitude control system and fuel vibration leading to resonance. In this paper, a full process of nonlinear dynamic modeling of an aerospace launch vehicle with fuel sloshing is given. Then, a new control system based on model reference adaptive filter is proposed and its algorithm is extracted. This controller implemented on the main attitude control system. Finally, numerical simulation of nonlinear model and control system is carried out to examine the performance of the new controller. Results of simulations show that the inconvenient effects of the fuel sloshing by augmenting this control system are reduced and attitude control system performs, satisfactorily.
Abstract: The flow and heat transfer mechanism in convex
corrugated tubes have been investigated through numerical
simulations in this paper. Two kinds of tube types named as symmetric
corrugated tube (SCT) and asymmetric corrugated tube (ACT) are
modeled and studied numerically based on the RST model. The
predictive capability of RST model is examined in the corrugation wall
in order to check the reliability of RST model under the corrugation
wall condition. We propose a comparison between the RST modelling
the corrugation wall with existing direct numerical simulation of Maaß
C and Schumann U [14]. The numerical results pressure coefficient at
different profiles between RST and DNS are well matched. The
influences of large corrugation tough radii to heat transfer and flow
characteristic had been considered. Flow and heat transfer comparison
between SCT and ACT had been discussed. The numerical results
show that ACT exhibits higher overall heat transfer performance than
SCT.
Abstract: Simultaneous effects of temperature, immersion time, salt concentration, sucrose concentration, pressure and convective dryer temperature on the combined osmotic dehydration - convective drying of edible button mushrooms were investigated. Experiments were designed according to Central Composite Design with six factors each at five different levels. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was used to determine the optimum processing conditions that yield maximum water loss and rehydration ratio and minimum solid gain and shrinkage in osmotic-convective drying of edible button mushrooms. Applying surfaces profiler and contour plots optimum operation conditions were found to be temperature of 39 °C, immersion time of 164 min, salt concentration of 14%, sucrose concentration of 53%, pressure of 600 mbar and drying temperature of 40 °C. At these optimum conditions, water loss, solid gain, rehydration ratio and shrinkage were found to be 63.38 (g/100 g initial sample), 3.17 (g/100 g initial sample), 2.26 and 7.15%, respectively.
Abstract: Nowadays, butyl acetate, a pineapple flavor has been applied widely in food, beverage, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. In this study, Butyl acetate, a flavor ester was successfully synthesized via green synthesis of enzymatic reaction route. Commercial immobilized lipase from Rhizomucor miehei (Lipozyme RMIM) was used as biocatalyst in the esterification reaction between acetic acid and butanol. Various reaction parameters such as reaction time (RT), temperature (T) and amount of enzyme (E) were chosen to optimize the reaction synthesis in solvent-free system. The optimum condition to produce butyl acetate was at reaction time (RT), 18 hours; temperature (T), 37°C and amount of enzyme, 25 % (w/w of total substrate). Analysis of yield showed that at optimum condition, >78 % of butyl acetate was produced. The product was confirmed as butyl acetate from FTIR analysis whereby the presence of an ester group was observed at wavenumber of 1742 cm-1.
Abstract: This paper presents a watermarking protocol able to
solve the well-known “customer-s right problem" and “unbinding
problem". In particular, the protocol has been purposely designed
to be adopted in a web context, where users wanting to buy digital
contents are usually neither provided with digital certificates issued
by certification authorities (CAs) nor able to autonomously perform
specific security actions. Furthermore, the protocol enables users to
keep their identities unexposed during web transactions as well as
allows guilty buyers, i.e. who are responsible distributors of illegal
replicas, to be unambiguously identified. Finally, the protocol has
been designed so that web content providers (CPs) can exploit
copyright protection services supplied by web service providers (SPs)
in a security context. Thus, CPs can take advantage of complex
services without having to directly implement them.
Abstract: This research is a collaborative narrative research, which is mixed with issues of selected papers and researcher's experience as an anonymous user on social networking sites. The objective of this research is to understand the reasons of the regular users who reject to contact with anonymous users, and to study the communication traditions used in the selected studies. Anonymous users are rejected by regular users, because of the fear of cyber bully, the fear of unpleasant behaviors, and unwillingness of changing communication norm. The suggestion for future research design is to use longitudinal design or quantitative design; and the theory in rhetorical tradition should be able to help develop a strong trust message.
Abstract: Article devoted to the development of technologies
for medicine and agroecology by using plant organelle – spherosome.
Technological method of purification and isolation of this organelle
by using novel nanostructured carbon sorbent – “nanocarbosorb"
ARK type are presented. Also the methods of preparation of
nanocontainers based on using of spherosome with loaded isosorbide
dinitrate, piroxicam or diclofenak are exhibited. We found that the
spherosome could be applied for ecological aims as bioregulator and
also as biosensor for determination of ammonia ions in water
reservoirs at concentration range 1mM to 100mM.
Abstract: The emergence of information technology has
resulted in an ever-increasing demand to use computers for the
efficient management and dissemination of information. Keeping in
view the strong need of farmers to collect important and updated
information for interactive, flexible and quick decision-making, a
model of Decision Support System for Farm Management is
developed. The paper discusses the use of Internet technology for the
farmers to take decisions. A model is developed for the farmers to
access online interactive and flexible information for their farm
management. The workflow of the model is presented highlighting
the information transfer between different modules.
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) segmentation is necessary
to help reduce the time consuming task of manually annotating
ECG-s. Several algorithms have been developed to segment the ECG
automatically. We first review several of such methods, and then
present a new single lead segmentation method based on Adaptive
piecewise constant approximation (APCA) and Piecewise derivative
dynamic time warping (PDDTW). The results are tested on the QT
database. We compared our results to Laguna-s two lead method. Our
proposed approach has a comparable mean error, but yields a slightly
higher standard deviation than Laguna-s method.
Abstract: A methodology to design a nonlinear observer in a
bond graph approach is proposed. The class of nonlinear observer
with multivariable nonlinearities is considered. A junction structure
of the bond graph observer is proposed. The proposed methodology
to an electrical transformer and a DC motor including the nonlinear
saturation is applied. Nonlinear observers for the transformer and DC
motor based on multivariable circle criterion in the physical domain
are proposed. In order to show the saturation effects on the
transformer and DC motor, simulation results are obtained. Finally,
the paper describes that convergence of the estimates to the true
states is achieved.
Abstract: Dorsal hand vein pattern is an emerging biometric which is attracting the attention of researchers, of late. Research is being carried out on existing techniques in the hope of improving them or finding more efficient ones. In this work, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) , which is a successful method, originally applied on face biometric is being modified using Cholesky decomposition and Lanczos algorithm to extract the dorsal hand vein features. This modified technique decreases the number of computation and hence decreases the processing time. The eigenveins were successfully computed and projected onto the vein space. The system was tested on a database of 200 images and using a threshold value of 0.9 to obtain the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). This modified algorithm is desirable when developing biometric security system since it significantly decreases the matching time.
Abstract: The present paper discusses the basic concepts and the underlying principles of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) along with an interdisciplinary exploitation of these principles. It has been found that they have been utilized for lots of research and studies on various systems spanning across diverse engineering and scientific realms showing the need of development of a proper generalized framework. Such framework has been developed for the Multi-Agent Systems and it has been generalized keeping in mind the diverse areas where they find application. All the related aspects have been categorized and a general definition has been given where ever possible.
Abstract: This paper presents preliminary results regarding system-level power awareness for FPGA implementations in wireless sensor networks. Re-configurability of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) allows for significant flexibility in its applications to embedded systems. However, high power consumption in FPGA becomes a significant factor in design considerations. We present several ideas and their experimental verifications on how to optimize power consumption at high level of designing process while maintaining the same energy per operation (low-level methods can be used additionally). This paper demonstrates that it is possible to estimate feasible power consumption savings even at the high level of designing process. It is envisaged that our results can be also applied to other embedded systems applications, not limited to FPGA-based.
Abstract: Water leakage is a serious problem in the maintenance of a waterworks facility. Monitoring the water flow rate is one way to locate leakage. However, conventional flowmeters such as the wet-type flowmeter and the clamp-on type ultrasonic flowmeter require additional construction for their installation and are therefore quite expensive. This paper proposes a novel estimation system for the flow rate in a water pipeline, which employs a vibration sensor. This assembly can be attached to any water pipeline without the need for additional high-cost construction. The vibration sensor is designed based on a condenser microphone. This sensor detects vibration caused by water flowing through a pipeline. It is possible to estimate the water flow rate by measuring the amplitude of the output signal from the vibration sensor. We confirmed the validity of the proposed sensing system experimentally.
Abstract: The modeling of inelastic behavior of plastic materials requires measurements providing information on material response to different multiaxial loading conditions. Different triaxiality conditions and values of Lode parameters have to be
covered for complex description of the material plastic behavior.
Samples geometries providing material plastic behavoiur over the range of interest are proposed with the use of FEM analysis. Round samples with 3 different notches and smooth surface are used
together with butterfly type of samples tested at angle ranging for 0 to
90°. Identification of ductile damage parameters is carried out on
the basis of obtained experimental data for austenitic stainless steel.
The obtained material plastic damage parameters are subsequently applied to FEM simulation of notched CT normally samples used for
fracture mechanics testing and results from the simulation are
compared with real tests.
Abstract: In order to alleviate the mental and physical problems
of persons with disabilities, animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is one of
the possible modalities that employs the merit of the human-animal
interaction. Nevertheless, to achieve the purpose of AAT for persons
with severe disabilities (e.g. spinal cord injury, stroke, and
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), real-time animal language
interpretation is desirable. Since canine behaviors can be visually
notable from its tail, this paper proposes the automatic real-time
interpretation of canine tail language for human-canine interaction in
the case of persons with severe disabilities. Canine tail language is
captured via two 3-axis accelerometers. Directions and frequencies
are selected as our features of interests. The novel fuzzy rules based
on Gaussian-Trapezoidal model and center of gravity (COG)-based
defuzzification method are proposed in order to interpret the features
into four canine emotional behaviors, i.e., agitate, happy, scare and
neutral as well as its blended emotional behaviors. The emotional
behavior model is performed in the simulated dog and has also been
evaluated in the real dog with the perfect recognition rate.
Abstract: In this paper, a Markovian risk model with two-type claims is considered. In such a risk model, the occurrences of the two type claims are described by two point processes {Ni(t), t ¸ 0}, i = 1, 2, where {Ni(t), t ¸ 0} is the number of jumps during the interval (0, t] for the Markov jump process {Xi(t), t ¸ 0} . The ruin probability ª(u) of a company facing such a risk model is mainly discussed. An integral equation satisfied by the ruin probability ª(u) is obtained and the bounds for the convergence rate of the ruin probability ª(u) are given by using key-renewal theorem.
Abstract: The energy consumption and delay in read/write
operation of conventional SRAM is investigated analytically as well
as by simulation. Explicit analytical expressions for the energy
consumption and delay in read and write operation as a function of
device parameters and supply voltage are derived. The expressions are
useful in predicting the effect of parameter changes on the energy
consumption and speed as well as in optimizing the design of
conventional SRAM. HSPICE simulation in standard 0.25μm CMOS
technology confirms precision of analytical expressions derived from
this paper.