Robust Quadratic Stabilization of Uncertain Impulsive Switched Systems

This paper focuses on the quadratic stabilization problem for a class of uncertain impulsive switched systems. The uncertainty is assumed to be norm-bounded and enters both the state and the input matrices. Based on the Lyapunov methods, some results on robust stabilization and quadratic stabilization for the impulsive switched system are obtained. A stabilizing state feedback control law realizing the robust stabilization of the closed-loop system is constructed.

Analysis of Permanence and Extinction of Enterprise Cluster Based On Ecology Theory

This paper is concerned with the permanence and extinction problem of enterprises cluster constituted by m satellite enterprises and a dominant enterprise. We present the model involving impulsive effect based on ecology theory, which effectively describe the competition and cooperation of enterprises cluster in real economic environment. Applying comparison theorem of impulsive differential equation, we establish sufficient conditions which ultimately affect the fate of enterprises: permanence, extinction, and co-existence. Finally, we present numerical examples to explain the economical significance of mathematical results.

A Numerical Study on Heat Transfer in Laminar Pulsed Slot Jets Impinging on a Surface

Numerical simulations are performed for laminar continuous and pulsed jets impinging on a surface in order to investigate the effects of pulsing frequency on the heat transfer characteristics. The time-averaged Nusselt number of pulsed jets is larger in the impinging jet region as compared to the continuous jet, while it is smaller in the outer wall jet region. At the stagnation point, the mean and RMS Nusselt numbers become larger and smaller, respectively, as the pulsing frequency increases. Unsteady behaviors of vortical fluid motions and temperature field are also investigated to understand the underlying mechanisms of heat transfer enhancement.

Challenges and Opportunities for Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development of Ecotourism in Lalzi Bay, Durres County, Albania - Today's Science for Tomorrow's Management. A Methodology Guide with a Concrete Example by Lalzi Bay, Durres County, Albania

Tourism and coastal lines are the business sectors since centuries especially in the European Nations and Albania is one such spots. However, in recent decades tourism is experienced as vulnerability of the surrounding ecological conditions of air, soil, water, land and the communities that are dependant and sharing the ecosystem among flora and fauna. Experts opine that apart from the maintenance of near-originality of ecological biodiversity the tourism rather known as ecotourism an indigenous socio-cultural maintenance of indigenous/traditional knowledge of the local people must be well cared in order to sustain on sustainable grounds. As a general tendency, growth of tourism has been affected by the deterioration in the economic conditions on one aspect and unsustainable ecological areas affected since human interventions earlier to this has negative impact on futuristic tourist spots. However, tourism in Albania as of now is 11% of GDP and coastal regions accounting to 2-4%. An amicable Mediterranean climate with 300 sunny days similar parameters of Greece and Spain throws up sustainable ecotourism in future decades provided public services namely, transportation, road safety, lodging, food availability, recreational regiments, banking accessibility are as per the World Tourism Organizations- protocols. Thus as of Albanian situation, classification of ecotourism activities to safe-guard the localities with its maintenance of ecological land, water and climate has become a paramount importance with a wanting and satisfactory options through harnessing human energy for profit and fitness of ecological flora and fauna. A check on anthropogenic wastes and their safer utilizations inclusive of agricultural and industrial operations in line with Lalzi Bay Coastal Line are of utmost importance for the reason that the Adriatic Sea Coast is the one long stretch of Albanian Lifeline. The present work is based on the methodology of the sustainable management of the same issue.

Stability Analysis of Impulsive Stochastic Fuzzy Cellular Neural Networks with Time-varying Delays and Reaction-diffusion Terms

In this paper, the problem of stability analysis for a class of impulsive stochastic fuzzy neural networks with timevarying delays and reaction-diffusion is considered. By utilizing suitable Lyapunov-Krasovskii funcational, the inequality technique and stochastic analysis technique, some sufficient conditions ensuring global exponential stability of equilibrium point for impulsive stochastic fuzzy cellular neural networks with time-varying delays and diffusion are obtained. In particular, the estimate of the exponential convergence rate is also provided, which depends on system parameters, diffusion effect and impulsive disturbed intention. It is believed that these results are significant and useful for the design and applications of fuzzy neural networks. An example is given to show the effectiveness of the obtained results.

Evaluation of Beauveria bassiana Spore Compatibility with Surfactants

The spores of entomopathogenic fungi, Beauveria bassiana was evaluated for their compatibility with four surfactants; SDS (sodium dodyl sulphate) and CABS-65 (calcium alkyl benzene sulphonate), Tween 20 (polyethylene sorbitan monolaureate) and Tween 80 (polyoxyethylene sorbitan monoleate) at six different concentrations (0.1%, 0.5%, 1%, 2.5%, 5% and 10%). Incubated spores showed decrease in concentrations due to conversion of spores to hyphae. The maximum germination recorded in 72 h incubated spores varied with surfactant concentration at 49-68% (SDS), 39- 53% (CABS), 78-92% (Tween 80) and 80-92% (Tween 20), while the optimal surfactant concentration for spore germination was found to be 2.5-5%. The surfactant effect on spores was more pronounced with SDS and CABS-65, where significant deterioration and loss in viability of the incubated spores was observed. The effect of Tween 20 and Tween 80 were comparatively less inhibiting. The results of the study would help in surfactant selection for B. bassiana emulsion preparation.

Numerical Analysis of Oil-Water Transport in Horizontal Pipes Using 1D Transient Mathematical Model of Thermal Two-Phase Flows

The paper presents a one-dimensional transient mathematical model of thermal oil-water two-phase emulsion flows in pipes. The set of the mass, momentum and enthalpy conservation equations for the continuous fluid and droplet phases are solved. Two friction correlations for the continuous fluid phase to wall friction are accounted for in the model and tested. The aerodynamic drag force between the continuous fluid phase and droplets is modeled, too. The density and viscosity of both phases are assumed to be constant due to adiabatic experimental conditions. The proposed mathematical model is validated on the experimental measurements of oil-water emulsion flows in horizontal pipe [1,2]. Numerical analysis on single- and two-phase oil-water flows in a pipe is presented in the paper. The continuous oil flow having water droplets is simulated. Predictions, which are performed by using the presented model, show excellent agreement with the experimental data if the water fraction is equal or less than 10%. Disagreement between simulations and measurements is increased if the water fraction is larger than 10%.

LFSR Counter Implementation in CMOS VLSI

As chip manufacturing technology is suddenly on the threshold of major evaluation, which shrinks chip in size and performance, LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) is implemented in layout level which develops the low power consumption chip, using recent CMOS, sub-micrometer layout tools. Thus LFSR counter can be a new trend setter in cryptography and is also beneficial as compared to GRAY & BINARY counter and variety of other applications. This paper compares 3 architectures in terms of the hardware implementation, CMOS layout and power consumption, using Microwind CMOS layout tool. Thus it provides solution to a low power architecture implementation of LFSR in CMOS VLSI.

Development and in vitro Characterization of Self-nanoemulsifying Drug Delivery Systems of Valsartan

The present study is aim to prepare and evaluate the selfnanoemulsifying drug delivery (SNEDDS) system of a poorly water soluble drug valsartan in order to achieve a better dissolution rate which would further help in enhancing oral bioavailability. The present research work describes a SNEDDS of valsartan using labrafil M 1944 CS, Tween 80 and Transcutol HP. The pseudoternary phase diagrams with presence and absence of drug were plotted to check for the emulsification range and also to evaluate the effect of valsartan on the emulsification behavior of the phases. The mixtures consisting of oil (labrafil M 1944 CS) with surfactant (tween 80), co-surfactant (Transcutol HP) were found to be optimum formulations. Prepared formulations were evaluated for its particle size distribution, nanoemulsifying properties, robustness to dilution, self emulsication time, turbidity measurement, drug content and invitro dissolution. The optimized formulations are further evaluated for heating cooling cycle, centrifugation studies, freeze thaw cycling, particle size distribution and zeta potential were carried out to confirm the stability of the formed SNEDDS formulations. The prepared formulation revealed t a significant improvement in terms of the drug solubility as compared with marketed tablet and pure drug.

Intelligent Path Planning for Rescue Robot

In this paper, a heuristic method for simultaneous rescue robot path-planning and mission scheduling is introduced based on project management techniques, multi criteria decision making and artificial potential fields path-planning. Groups of injured people are trapped in a disastrous situation. These people are categorized into several groups based on the severity of their situation. A rescue robot, whose ultimate objective is reaching injured groups and providing preliminary aid for them through a path with minimum risk, has to perform certain tasks on its way towards targets before the arrival of rescue team. A decision value is assigned to each target based on the whole degree of satisfaction of the criteria and duties of the robot toward the target and the importance of rescuing each target based on their category and the number of injured people. The resulted decision value defines the strength of the attractive potential field of each target. Dangerous environmental parameters are defined as obstacles whose risk determines the strength of the repulsive potential field of each obstacle. Moreover, negative and positive energies are assigned to the targets and obstacles, which are variable with respects to the factors involved. The simulation results show that the generated path for two cases studies with certain differences in environmental conditions and other risk factors differ considerably.

Comparative Study of Evolutionary Model and Clustering Methods in Circuit Partitioning Pertaining to VLSI Design

Partitioning is a critical area of VLSI CAD. In order to build complex digital logic circuits its often essential to sub-divide multi -million transistor design into manageable Pieces. This paper looks at the various partitioning techniques aspects of VLSI CAD, targeted at various applications. We proposed an evolutionary time-series model and a statistical glitch prediction system using a neural network with selection of global feature by making use of clustering method model, for partitioning a circuit. For evolutionary time-series model, we made use of genetic, memetic & neuro-memetic techniques. Our work focused in use of clustering methods - K-means & EM methodology. A comparative study is provided for all techniques to solve the problem of circuit partitioning pertaining to VLSI design. The performance of all approaches is compared using benchmark data provided by MCNC standard cell placement benchmark net lists. Analysis of the investigational results proved that the Neuro-memetic model achieves greater performance then other model in recognizing sub-circuits with minimum amount of interconnections between them.

Robust Digital Cinema Watermarking

With the advent of digital cinema and digital broadcasting, copyright protection of video data has been one of the most important issues. We present a novel method of watermarking for video image data based on the hardware and digital wavelet transform techniques and name it as “traceable watermarking" because the watermarked data is constructed before the transmission process and traced after it has been received by an authorized user. In our method, we embed the watermark to the lowest part of each image frame in decoded video by using a hardware LSI. Digital Cinema is an important application for traceable watermarking since digital cinema system makes use of watermarking technology during content encoding, encryption, transmission, decoding and all the intermediate process to be done in digital cinema systems. The watermark is embedded into the randomly selected movie frames using hash functions. Embedded watermark information can be extracted from the decoded video data. For that, there is no need to access original movie data. Our experimental results show that proposed traceable watermarking method for digital cinema system is much better than the convenient watermarking techniques in terms of robustness, image quality, speed, simplicity and robust structure.

Demulsification of Water-in-Oil Emulsions by Microwave Heating Technology

The mechanism of microwave heating is essentially that of dielectric heating. After exposing the emulsion to the microwave Electromagnetic (EM) field, molecular rotation and ionic conduction due to the penetration of (EM) into the emulsion are responsible for the internal heating. To determine the capability of microwave technology in demulsification of crude oil emulsions, microwave demulsification method was applied in a 50-50 % and 20- 80 % water-in-oil emulsions with microwave exposure time varied from 20-180 sec. Transient temperature profiles of water-in-oil emulsions inside a cylindrical container were measured. The temperature rise at a given location was almost horizontal (linear). The average rates of temperature increase of 50-50 % and 20-80 % water-in-oil emulsions are 0.351 and 0.437 oC/sec, respectively. The rate of temperature increase of emulsions decreased at higher temperature due to decreasing dielectric loss of water. These results indicate that microwave demulsification of water-in-oil emulsions does not require chemical additions. Microwave has the potential to be used as an alternative way in the demulsification process.

Fast and Efficient On-Chip Interconnection Modeling for High Speed VLSI Systems

Timing driven physical design, synthesis, and optimization tools need efficient closed-form delay models for estimating the delay associated with each net in an integrated circuit (IC) design. The total number of nets in a modern IC design has increased dramatically and exceeded millions. Therefore efficient modeling of interconnection is needed for high speed IC-s. This paper presents closed–form expressions for RC and RLC interconnection trees in current mode signaling, which can be implemented in VLSI design tool. These analytical model expressions can be used for accurate calculation of delay after the design clock tree has been laid out and the design is fully routed. Evaluation of these analytical models is several orders of magnitude faster than simulation using SPICE.

Synthesis and Applications of Heteronanostructured ZnO Nanowires Array

ZnO heteronanostructured nanowires arrays have been fabricated by low temperature solution method. Various heterostructures were synthesized including CdS/ZnO, CdSe/CdS/ZnO nanowires and Co3O4/ZnO, ZnO/SiC nanowires. These multifunctional heterostructure nanowires showed important applications in photocatalysts, sensors, wettability control and solar energy conversion.

Performance Evaluation of Para-virtualization on Modern Mobile Phone Platform

Emergence of smartphones brings to live the concept of converged devices with the availability of web amenities. Such trend also challenges the mobile devices manufactures and service providers in many aspects, such as security on mobile phones, complex and long time design flow, as well as higher development cost. Among these aspects, security on mobile phones is getting more and more attention. Microkernel based virtualization technology will play a critical role in addressing these challenges and meeting mobile market needs and preferences, since virtualization provides essential isolation for security reasons and it allows multiple operating systems to run on one processor accelerating development and cutting development cost. However, virtualization benefits do not come for free. As an additional software layer, it adds some inevitable virtualization overhead to the system, which may decrease the system performance. In this paper we evaluate and analyze the virtualization performance cost of L4 microkernel based virtualization on a competitive mobile phone by comparing the L4Linux, a para-virtualized Linux on top of L4 microkernel, with the native Linux performance using lmbench and a set of typical mobile phone applications.

Pruning Method of Belief Decision Trees

The belief decision tree (BDT) approach is a decision tree in an uncertain environment where the uncertainty is represented through the Transferable Belief Model (TBM), one interpretation of the belief function theory. The uncertainty can appear either in the actual class of training objects or attribute values of objects to classify. In this paper, we develop a post-pruning method of belief decision trees in order to reduce size and improve classification accuracy on unseen cases. The pruning of decision tree has a considerable intention in the areas of machine learning.

Derivation of Empirical Formulae to Predict Pressure and Impulsive Asymptotes for P-I Diagrams of One-way RC Panels

There are only limited studies that directly correlate the increase in reinforced concrete (RC) panel structural capacities in resisting the blast loads with different RC panel structural properties in terms of blast loading characteristics, RC panel dimensions, steel reinforcement ratio and concrete material strength. In this paper, numerical analyses of dynamic response and damage of the one-way RC panel to blast loads are carried out using the commercial software LS-DYNA. A series of simulations are performed to predict the blast response and damage of columns with different level and magnitude of blast loads. The numerical results are used to develop pressureimpulse (P-I) diagrams of one-way RC panels. Based on the numerical results, the empirical formulae are derived to calculate the pressure and impulse asymptotes of the P-I diagrams of RC panels. The results presented in this paper can be used to construct P-I diagrams of RC panels with different concrete and reinforcement properties. The P-I diagrams are very useful to assess panel capacities in resisting different blast loads.

Hydrodynamic Characteristics of Weis–Fogh Type Ship-s Propulsion Mechanism Having Elastic Wing

This experiment was conducted in attempt of improving hydrodynamic efficiency of the propulsion mechanism by installing a spring to the wing so that the opening angle of the wing in one stroke can be changed automatically, compared to the existing method of fixed maximum opening angle in Weis-Fogh type ship propulsion mechanism. Average thrust coefficient was almost fixed with all velocity ratio with the prototype, but with the spring type, thrust coefficient increased sharply as velocity ratio increased. Average propulsive efficiency was larger with bigger opening angle in the prototype, but in the spring type, the one with smaller spring coefficient had larger value. In the range over 1.0 in velocity ratio where big thrust can be generated, spring type had more than twice of propulsive efficiency increase compared to the prototype.