A Visco-elastic Model for High-density Cellulose Insulation Materials

A macroscopic constitutive equation is developed for a high-density cellulose insulation material with emphasis on the outof- plane stress relaxation behavior. A hypothesis is proposed where the total stress is additively composed by an out-of-plane visco-elastic isotropic contribution and an in-plane elastic orthotropic response. The theory is validated against out-of-plane stress relaxation, compressive experiments and in-plane tensile hysteresis, respectively. For large scale finite element simulations, the presented model provides a balance between simplicity and capturing the materials constitutive behaviour.

Moving Area Filter to Detect Object in Video Sequence from Moving Platform

Detecting object in video sequence is a challenging mission for identifying, tracking moving objects. Background removal considered as a basic step in detected moving objects tasks. Dual static cameras placed in front and rear moving platform gathered information which is used to detect objects. Background change regarding with speed and direction moving platform, so moving objects distinguished become complicated. In this paper, we propose framework allows detection moving object with variety of speed and direction dynamically. Object detection technique built on two levels the first level apply background removal and edge detection to generate moving areas. The second level apply Moving Areas Filter (MAF) then calculate Correlation Score (CS) for adjusted moving area. Merging moving areas with closer CS and marked as moving object. Experiment result is prepared on real scene acquired by dual static cameras without overlap in sense. Results showing accuracy in detecting objects compared with optical flow and Mixture Module Gaussian (MMG), Accurate ratio produced to measure accurate detection moving object.

Exploiting Query Feedback for Efficient Query Routing in Unstructured Peer-to-peer Networks

Unstructured peer-to-peer networks are popular due to its robustness and scalability. Query schemes that are being used in unstructured peer-to-peer such as the flooding and interest-based shortcuts suffer various problems such as using large communication overhead long delay response. The use of routing indices has been a popular approach for peer-to-peer query routing. It helps the query routing processes to learn the routing based on the feedbacks collected. In an unstructured network where there is no global information available, efficient and low cost routing approach is needed for routing efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for query-feedback oriented routing indices to achieve routing efficiency in unstructured network at a minimal cost. The approach also applied information retrieval technique to make sure the content of the query is understandable and will make the routing process not just based to the query hits but also related to the query content. Experiments have shown that the proposed mechanism performs more efficient than flood-based routing.

Identification of Roadway Wavelengths Affecting the Dynamic Responses of Bridges due to Vehicular Loading

The bridge vibration due to traffic loading has been a subject of extensive research during the last decades. A number of these studies are concerned with the effects of the unevenness of roadways on the dynamic responses of highway bridges. The road unevenness is often described as a random process that constitutes of different wavelengths. Thus, the study focuses on examining the effects of the random description of roadways on the dynamic response and its variance. A new setting of variance based sensitivity analysis is proposed and used to identify and quantify the contributions of the roadway-s wavelengths to the variance of the dynamic response. Furthermore, the effect of the vehicle-s speed on the dynamic response is studied.

Exponential Stability of Numerical Solutions to Stochastic Age-Dependent Population Equations with Poisson Jumps

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the exponential stability of the Euler method for a stochastic age-dependent population equations with Poisson random measures. It is proved that the Euler scheme is exponentially stable in mean square sense. An example is given for illustration.

Multivariable Control of Smart Timoshenko Beam Structures Using POF Technique

Active Vibration Control (AVC) is an important problem in structures. One of the ways to tackle this problem is to make the structure smart, adaptive and self-controlling. The objective of active vibration control is to reduce the vibration of a system by automatic modification of the system-s structural response. This paper features the modeling and design of a Periodic Output Feedback (POF) control technique for the active vibration control of a flexible Timoshenko cantilever beam for a multivariable case with 2 inputs and 2 outputs by retaining the first 2 dominant vibratory modes using the smart structure concept. The entire structure is modeled in state space form using the concept of piezoelectric theory, Timoshenko beam theory, Finite Element Method (FEM) and the state space techniques. Simulations are performed in MATLAB. The effect of placing the sensor / actuator at 2 finite element locations along the length of the beam is observed. The open loop responses, closed loop responses and the tip displacements with and without the controller are obtained and the performance of the smart system is evaluated for active vibration control.

Investigation of Artificial Neural Networks Performance to Predict Net Heating Value of Crude Oil by Its Properties

The aim of this research is to use artificial neural networks computing technology for estimating the net heating value (NHV) of crude oil by its Properties. The approach is based on training the neural network simulator uses back-propagation as the learning algorithm for a predefined range of analytically generated well test response. The network with 8 neurons in one hidden layer was selected and prediction of this network has been good agreement with experimental data.

The Organizational Innovativeness of Public Listed Housing Developers in Malaysia

This paper investigated the organizational innovativeness of public listed housing developers in Malaysia. We conceptualized organizational innovativeness as a multi-dimensional construct consisting of 5 dimensions: market innovativeness, product innovativeness, process innovativeness, behavior innovativeness and strategic innovativeness. We carried out questionnaire survey with all accessible public listed developers in Malaysia and received a 56 percent response. We found that the innovativeness of public listed housing developers is low. The paper ends by providing some explanations for the results.

Experimental Study on Smart Anchor Head

Since prestressed concrete members rely on the tensile strength of the prestressing strands to resist loads, loss of even few them could result catastrophic. Therefore, it is important to measure present residual prestress force. Although there are some techniques for obtaining present prestress force, some problems still remain. One method is to install load cell in front of anchor head but this may increase cost. Load cell is a transducer using the elastic material property. Anchor head is also an elastic material and this might result in monitoring monitor present prestress force. Features of fiber optic sensor such as small size, great sensitivity, high durability can assign sensing function to anchor head. This paper presents the concept of smart anchor head which acts as load cell and experiment for the applicability of it. Test results showed the smart anchor head worked good and strong linear relationship between load and response.

A Neural-Network-Based Fault Diagnosis Approach for Analog Circuits by Using Wavelet Transformation and Fractal Dimension as a Preprocessor

This paper presents a new method of analog fault diagnosis based on back-propagation neural networks (BPNNs) using wavelet decomposition and fractal dimension as preprocessors. The proposed method has the capability to detect and identify faulty components in an analog electronic circuit with tolerance by analyzing its impulse response. Using wavelet decomposition to preprocess the impulse response drastically de-noises the inputs to the neural network. The second preprocessing by fractal dimension can extract unique features, which are the fed to a neural network as inputs for further classification. A comparison of our work with [1] and [6], which also employs back-propagation (BP) neural networks, reveals that our system requires a much smaller network and performs significantly better in fault diagnosis of analog circuits due to our proposed preprocessing techniques.

Issues in Spectral Source Separation Techniques for Plant-wide Oscillation Detection and Diagnosis

In the last few years, three multivariate spectral analysis techniques namely, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) have emerged as effective tools for oscillation detection and isolation. While the first method is used in determining the number of oscillatory sources, the latter two methods are used to identify source signatures by formulating the detection problem as a source identification problem in the spectral domain. In this paper, we present a critical drawback of the underlying linear (mixing) model which strongly limits the ability of the associated source separation methods to determine the number of sources and/or identify the physical source signatures. It is shown that the assumed mixing model is only valid if each unit of the process gives equal weighting (all-pass filter) to all oscillatory components in its inputs. This is in contrast to the fact that each unit, in general, acts as a filter with non-uniform frequency response. Thus, the model can only facilitate correct identification of a source with a single frequency component, which is again unrealistic. To overcome this deficiency, an iterative post-processing algorithm that correctly identifies the physical source(s) is developed. An additional issue with the existing methods is that they lack a procedure to pre-screen non-oscillatory/noisy measurements which obscure the identification of oscillatory sources. In this regard, a pre-screening procedure is prescribed based on the notion of sparseness index to eliminate the noisy and non-oscillatory measurements from the data set used for analysis.