Statistics patient dementia in Malaysia shown that, age play and important role that lead a person to become a memory lost or also know as Dementia patient. Dementia illness is a condition where the patient lost the ability to recall memory 100%. Depending on level of dementia, this illness may cause the patient inability to remember their families or even worst they cannot develop new memory for the long-term life. Thus, many researchers have tried to develop a new alternative to cure this illness unfortunately they are still no one specific treatment to cure this illness. So, in this research a new alternative treatment is proposed by utilizing Augmented Reality (AR) in the treatment. This is not meant to cure, but to enhance dementia patient quality of life. The AR system generates a virtual object in the real world using marked AR system to project 3D image in the patient view or LCD display. A hybrid of case based reasoning will classifying what to be display based on that particular patient requirement. This is based in the patient life style. Extending the previous treatment of using mobile phone to make a note to remind the patient about their daily life , remove the two dimensional image limitation. Based on the survey distribute out of 50 person 90% will prefer 3D image compare to 2D image. It is expected that this research will decrease the memory lost between 9% to 19%. Preliminary data shows that alpha wave brain will increase to about 2 Hz compare the previous brain wave. The patient will able to have a good quality of life, which might able to make a new memory for a long-term life.

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This paper presents the evaluation made on the properties of porous asphalt mixtures practiced in different countries. In order to fully understand the properties of porous asphalt mixtures, investigation should be conducted from different perspectives. Therefore this study was carried out to investigate the air voids properties and functional performance of porous asphalt simultaneously. An image analysis technique was conducted to analyze the air void properties within the gyratory compacted samples captured using a non-destructive scanning technique of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT). The results were then compared to the functional performance in terms of permeability. Four aggregate gradations of porous asphalt used in different countries i.e. Malaysia, Australia, Singapore and the United States were adopted for comparison. From the analysis, Australian mixture was found with the most homogeneous air voids distribution throughout the sample compared to other mixtures. The air void properties investigated have successfully described the air voids formation within the mixtures which reflects the result of permeability. This shows that air voids distribution within the sample plays an important role in determining the effectiveness of water transmission.

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Training neural networks particularly back propagation algorithm is a complex task of great importance in the field of supervised learning. One of the nature inspired meta-heuristic Bat algorithm is becoming a popular method in solving many complex optimization problems. Thus, this study investigates the use of Bat algorithm along with back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm in-order to gain optimal weights to solve the local minima problem and also to enhance the convergence rate. This study intends to show the superiority (time performance and quality of solution) of the proposed meta-heuristic Bat-BP algorithm over other more standard neural network training algorithms. The performance of the proposed Bat-BP algorithm is then compared with Artificial Bee Colony using BPNN (ABC-BP), Artificial Bee Colony using Levenberg-Marquardt (ABC-LM) and BPNN algorithm. Classification datasets from UCI machine learning repository are used to train the network. The simulation results show that the efficiency of BPNN training process is highly enhanced when combined with BAT algorithm.

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Chitosan is an abundantly common, naturally occurring, polysaccharide biopolymer. In this study, chitosan was used to coat previously fabricated conductive Polycaprolactone/Hydroxyapatite/Polypyrrole (PCL/HA/PPY) composite scaffold and the properties of the coated and non-coated scaffolds were investigated and compared. The morphology of the chitosan coated and non-coated scaffolds were characterized using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The wettability was determined using a water contact angle measuring system. Furthermore, water uptake was determined by measuring the water absorption of each sample before and after coated with chitosan. Water contact angle result revealed an increase in wettability of the scaffolds ranging from 108º ± 4.2 down to 59.4º ± 0.7. On the other hand, the coated sample showed a higher water uptake than the non-coated sample. The results indicated that coating with chitosan was important to increase water absorption of composite scaffold, rendering it more hydrophilic.

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This paper presents the simulation study of voltage clamp technique that enables to analyze current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of ion currents based on Luo-Rudy Phase-I (LR-I) model by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Here, the I-V relationship presents the characterization of each ion channel by a relation between membrane voltage, Vm and resulting channel current. In addition, the voltage clamp technique also allows the detection of single channel currents in biological membranes and is known to be applicable in identifying variety of electrophysiological problems in the cellular level. As computational simulations devote a vast amount of time to run due to the increasing complexity of cardiac models, a real-time hardware implementation using FPGA could be the solution as it provides high configurability and performance, and able to executes in parallel mode operation for high-performance real-time systems. For shorter time development while retaining high confidence results, FPGA-based rapid prototyping through HDL Coder from MATLAB software has been used to construct the algorithm for the simulation system. Basically, the HDL Coder is capable to convert the designed MATLAB Simulink blocks into hardware description language (HDL) for the FPGA implementation. As a result, the MATLAB Simulink successfully simulates the voltage clamp of the LR-I excitation model and identifies the I-V characteristics of the ionic currents through Xilinx Virtex-6 XC6VLX240T development board.

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Catalyst deposition is a key step in synthesis of carbon nanotubes. In this work, iron catalyst has been deposited on to carbon fibre surface by impregnation method. The carbon fibre was impregnated in difference concentration of iron nitrate solution (5wt%, 1wt%, 0.5%, 0.1wt% and 0.01wt%). In order to get a good dispersion of iron catalyst, the fibre was treated by oxidation in reflux of 12 M hydrogen peroxide (H202). The treatment has improved the bond between fibre and iron catalyst. XRD results proved the existence of iron oxide as iron precursor on the fibre surface but for the fibre impregnated at very low concentration (0.01wt%), the peaks of iron oxide were not exist. However EDX and TGA analysis revealed that iron oxide has been deposited on the fibre even impregnated at very low concentration of iron nitrate but at little amount. More, SEM micrographs showed that when impregnated at very high concentration of iron nitrate solution (more than 1wt%), the catalyst precursor tended to coat the fibre surface with a thick layer, while a thin layer will be formed when impregnated in low concentration (less than 1wt%).

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A lane changing event can be defined as a purposeful and considerable move in the sideways position of a vehicle on a carriageway. This paper discusses driver's lane changing behavior at urban signalized intersections with respect to critical gap analysis. The objectives of this study are to determine the lane changing factors with regards to the vehicle and geometrical characteristics as well as to determine critical gap of drivers whom change lane. This study were carried out at study locations which lane changing activities are identified as a frequent event due to presence of trap lanes and also due to drivers tendency to seek for shortest queue’s lane. In this study, the maximum likelihood method is used to determine critical gap. Based on the observation, the main factor which influences lane changing event is the flow rate of vehicle movements. Other factors that might as well influence are lane width of the roadway and traffic composition. The critical gap values are varying from 2.4 to 2.7 seconds which generally shows the aggressive behavior of drivers. Aggressive driving behavior may contribute to road accident and therefore with the findings in this study, responsible authority should consider a proper road safety intervention as accident mitigation measure.

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This paper focus on designing and modeling of Linear Back Projection (LBP) algorithm for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) application. The features provided in FPGA make it the most suitable for embedded system for optical tomography system in data acquisition system. The language supported by FPGA is a Hardware Description Language (HDL). However, manual coding for HDL code spend more time to program. In addition, it increase chances of human error. Therefore, the usage of Matlab Simulink has encouraged many researchers to use it in order to generate HDL code while minimize human error. The LBP algorithm is designed by using Matlab Simulink. From the Matlab Simulink, the HDL code will be generated automatically by using HDL coder which is provided by MathWorks. The HDL code obtained will be downloaded into an FPGA platform of Altera DE2-115. The result obtained shows that the LBP algorithm has been successfully modelled. Therefore, this approach provides an effective method flow for the LBP algorithm to implement in FPGA.

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The unreliability data reading such as noise, missed reading and duplicate reading that were produced by RFID reader has become the primary factor limiting the widespread adoption of RFID technology. It is compulsory to filter the raw data to maintain its reliability of data reading because a slight decreasing of effective read rate will reduce the accuracy and reliability of RFID. One of the approaches that used to filter data in RFID is Bloom filter. Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure that checks whether the data in the filter or not. It is a typical approach that filters incorrect raw data, such as noise and redundancy in the distributed system. This paper provides overview of various techniques that used Bloom filter approach to filter RFID data reading to maintain its reliability and efficiency.

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Despites the advances in computer hardware and software, most of programming language introductory courses today still uses same old method to teach programming to the beginners. This made the acceptance towards the subject is quite slow and low where in most cases the concept only been grasped after the student had finished their study and started working. This paper presents available online modules that can be used to attract student interests towards the subject. There are many modules available that cover from basic programming up to the advanced apps development. We select three modules and conduct an introductory programming course to the primary school and diploma students. The result from the study shows that their perception about computer programming changed drastically when using these modules. They discover that computer programming is actually a fun and very interesting subject to be learned.

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It is paramount to provide seamless and ubiquitous access to rich contents available online to interested users via a wide range of devices with varied characteristics. However, mobile devices accessing these rich contents are constrained by different capabilities e.g., display size, thus resulting poor browsing experiences e.g., unorganized layout. Recently, a service-oriented content adaptation (SOCA) scheme has emerged to address this content-device mismatch problem. In this scheme, content adaptation functions are provided as services by multiple providers. This elevates service discovery as an important problem. A QoS-based service discovery approach has been proposed and widely used to matchmaking the client QoS preference with the service advertised QoS. Most of these solutions assume that the client’s QoS is known a priori. However, these approaches suffer from unknown or partially specified client QoS. In this paper, we propose an approximation approach to deal with QoS uncertainty. Our solution considers the statistical approach to discover the suitable content adaptation services. The performance analysis verifies that our approach performs reasonably well.

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This study presents the effect of waste engine oil (WEO) on the mechanical properties of hot mix asphalt mixtures. It was added into mixture at 0%, 3%, 5%, 7%, 10% and 15% by weight of binder. The mechanical properties of the mixes were evaluated by conducting indirect tensile stiffness modulus (ITSM) at temperatures of 25?C and 40?C. The results indicated that modified mixes exhibited lower stiffness modulus with the increasing amount of WEO as well as testing temperature. The increasing amount of WEO was found to have a good linear correlation to the decreasing of stiffness modulus. The finding showed that the WEO has the significant role as a softening agent which affected the stiffness modulus even at low percentage.

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Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) and Average Daily Traffic (ADT) are two parameters that are commonly required by traffic engineers and road designers to design and analyze the traffic operational performance of a road segment. In Malaysia, ADT is normally used to forecast the volume of traffic in the design year as well as to design the pavement thickness. Basically, ADT can be generated using expansion factor estimates from Peak Hour Volume (PHV). Current practice in Malaysia uses an expansion of 10% to estimate ADT from PHV. This paper discusses the results of a study carried out to establish a model for estimating ADT using PHV for single carriageway road. The 24-hours traffic data were collected at 9 sites in the districts of Johor, Malaysia for the period of 14 days. The 7-days data were used to establish the model and the other 7-days data were used to validate the model. For validation purposes, the absolute percent error (APE) for each estimate of ADT obtained from the model was calculated and compared with observed ADT. The statistical test at 95% confidence level was conducted to determine the significance difference between the ADT from actual data and the estimate ADT from model. The result shows that a power-formed trend line (y=axb) suits to the observed data with the coefficient of determination of about 0.90. Validation result shows that the ADT for the model has lesser APE compared with the ADT estimated using the factoring approach. A comparison of both estimated and actual ADT values using t-Test shows that there is no significant difference between the estimated ADT using models and the actual ADT. However, the ADT estimated using the expansion factor of 10% shows the vice versa. Such a finding implies that the model obtained from this study predicts ADT accurately than the current practice.

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The sintering behavior of Magnesium-doped nanocrystalline hydroxyapatite (MgHA) synthesized by mechanochemical method was investigated over the temperature range of 1000oC to 1300oC. The properties were investigated in terms of phase stability, bulk density and Vickers hardness. In the present research, a dry mechanochemical synthesis was successfully employed to synthesis a nanocrystalline MgHA powder without any secondary phases. Lower sintering temperature at 1000oC produced ß-TCP phase in MgHA in all concentrations. Hence, doping Mg2+ into HA has induced the formation of brushite and a-TCP where these phases were averagely increased with Mg2+ concentration. Increasing Mg2+ concentrations have led to the decreased of HA phase and increased the secondary phases.Mg2+ did not significantly improved the density of HA as the density decreased with Mg2+ doping at 1200oC - 1250oC. However, Mg2+ increased the hardness of HA when sintered from 1000oC to 1300oC. The maximum hardness was obtained by 3% MgHA sintered at 1250oC with 5.47 GPa.

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Road infrastructure is one of the main factors determining the level of safety road transport system. Installation of good and complete infrastructure components along the road would reduce the rate of accidents from happening. Accidents are the most undesirable things happen, but no doubt every year, millions of road users were killed and injured due to road accidents. Therefore, the authorities should take steps to create a program that will periodically monitor, restore and also do the improvement on road infrastructure to ensure that the road infrastructure is able to function properly, thus helping to reduce the rate of accidents in Malaysia. The main goal of this study was to analyze the audit road infrastructural along F050 route which is from KM 7 to KM 28 based on Road Safety Audit. Several methods were used to obtain data such as observations and research, accident statistics and simple statistics. Through these methods, the data were analyzed by using average index, HIRARC and simple statistics. From the analysis, it was found that the road infrastructure level in the study area was less satisfying. Besides that, research results show that the level of risk due to road infrastructure gradually increases at certain places. Hence, the authority should be play more important roles to conduct maintenance and improvement on road infrastructures that poses high risk of accidents to ensure the safety of road users. It is hoped that through continuously this research it will provide sufficient information to public and researches to curb with the ever growing road accidents.

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Carbon emissions released by automobiles has spurred the invention of hybrid car as a green initiative that may solve one of the world’s primary environmental problems. Numerous efforts have been undertaken by the car manufacturers to grab the market attention for hybrid cars. One of the efforts that could be considered effective is via advertising. Advertising is a powerful marketing tool to acquire consumers’ attention, create product awareness, provide information, generate cues for the sales force, influence consumers’ perception, and reassure consumers by confirming a purchase. However, what kind of advertising appeal is best suited to market hybrid cars to Malaysian consumers. This conceptual research paper explores two different advertising appeals, namely rational versus emotional appeal, and further hypothesises their effects on Malaysians’ purchase intentions towards hybrid cars. Using an experimental design with two types of Toyota Prius advertisements as stimuli, this research investigates the relationships between consumers’ perceived psychological risk, financial risk, performance risk, and environmental concern on their purchase intention of hybrid cars when different appeals are used in the hybrid car advertisements. This research is significant for marketers in the automobile industry, as it may emphasis the importance of a proper choice of advertising appeal in constructing a marketing plan for hybrid cars in Malaysia.

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Image compression is a very important issue for many applications in the field of visual communications. The purpose of image compression is to reduce the storage and transmission costs while maintaining the image quality. Nowadays, image previewing on a mobile device is a practice that takes a great implementation of everyday live. However, the image compression with very low bit rates that is typically used on mobile platforms, usually may introduce visible compression artifacts, which is referred to blocky artifacts. This displaced blocky artifacts, although visually noticeable and annoying, is particularly difficult for automated detection because its location is a priori unknown, and its appearance might be easily mistaken for some real edges or fine details in the image. Therefore, the detection of the blocky artifacts is important to ensure the de blocking process is performed on the blocky artifacts only, not on real edges or fine details of the image. This paper proposes the development of a technique which aims in blocky artifacts detection for compressed digital image. The detection of blocky artifacts presented in this paper is performed in two parts that are vertical and horizontal detections utilizing proposed detection algorithms. The effectiveness of to detect the blocky artifacts detection without including the image edges and fine details is depending on the threshold value setting in the vertical and horizontal detections algorithms. After both detections are completed, then the last step is to combine both edge maps into a new image which includes the blocky artifacts at the boundary between two different luminance gradients. The algorithm is developed in MATLAB software. The analysis for the result is made based on qualitative observation. For blocky artifacts detection, the proposed technique has achieved its objectives in detecting blocky artifacts at the boundary between two different luminance gradients. Thresholding process separated the unwanted image fine details and edges, providing an output image a view of clearer blocky artifacts existing in the compressed image. It is also found that the proposed technique could detect blocky artifacts more effectively (without including image fine details and edges) in comparison to conventional techniques.

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Presently, the thermal based power plants caters majority of the demand of power in developing countries like India. Development of an electricity allocation model will help in the proper allocation of the energy sources in meeting the future electricity demand in such countries. In this paper, an energy planning model has been developed that minimizes the cost of power generation and determines the optimum allocation of different energy sources for the centralized and decentralized power generation in India with special emphasis on cost factor for the coal power plants. The electricity distribution pattern is obtained for the year 2020. The results indicate that the electricity generation mix would be 15,800 GWh (4 %) from the coal based plants. The OEAM model is validated by the sensitivity analysis. This study can be used by the policy makers for framing energy policies in developing countries.

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Students with mental health issues often encounter a variety of difficult challenges at institutions of higher education students with good mental health are more successful in school. Students with good mental health can cope with the normal stress of life, can work productively and able to make a contribution to their community. However, rapidly changing society has been impacted on students’ mental health. Mental health may be deteriorated and negatively influence on their studied if it is not controlled. This article reports on a study of the mental health level comparison among the engineering and non-engineering students. Based on the DASS model, the most dominant element in student mental health problems were highlighted in three elements, namely depression, anxiety and stress. Also, students preferred method for dealing with mental health problems were identified through this study. A total number of 180 students from five faculties in UTHM were random selected to be the samples. The results showed that the levels of mental health among the students are normal. Besides, the results also showed that there is no significant difference in mental health level between engineering and non-engineering students. The method of choice to handle mental health problems for the students are closer to the Gods, but taking medicines is the least preferred method. In conclusion, the role of the university counseling unit should be reinforced, creating a module of Mental Health Education at the tertiary education level, and to diversify infrastructure for student’s recreational facilities.

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The addition of conductive fillers into insulating matrix will improve its shielding effectiveness (SE). In this work, the graphite fine powder is added into the cement powder for SE enhancement. The SE of the mixture can be calculated analytically but this requires dielectric properties of the mixture. When there are changes of mixture proportion, a new dielectric measurement must be repeated. This is inconvenient especially to the civil engineers who are more concern on the relationship between the percentages of additive to the resultant SE. A piecewise empirical model which is working in between 100 MHz to 2000 MHz is proposed in this work. The model able to estimate the SE of the graphite-cement mixture with thickness of 1 cm. Different graphite-cement samples with different percentage of graphite fine powder are prepared and dielectric measurements are executed to obtain their dielectric properties. Their SE is analytical calculated based on the measured properties and it is used to establish the model for SE prediction. Based on this model the users able to predict the resultant SE of the mixture and hence proposed the best graphite-cement proportion to fulfill the cost effective requirement.

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Water Cycle algorithm is a modern nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithm to provide derivative-free solution to optimize complex problems. The back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm performs well on many complex data types but it possess the problem of network stagnancy and local minima. Therefore, this paper proposed the use of WC algorithm in combination with Back-Propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm to solve the local minima problem in gradient descent trajectory. The performance of the proposed Water Cycle based Back-Propagation (WCBP) algorithm is compared with the conventional BPNN, ABC-BP and ABC-LM algorithms on selected benchmark classification problems from UCI Machine Learning Repository. The simulation results show that the BPNN training process is highly enhanced when combined with WC algorithm.

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In this study the time evolution of entanglement between the terminal components of five or six-qubits spin chain under the effect of time-dependent magnetic fields is investigated. The interaction between the components of considered spin chain can be express with Heisenberg XX model. The most important result of this study is that if we want to have entanglement with high domain and low vibrations in an appropriate period of time; first, the magnetic field domain should be low, second, the magnetic field periodicity should be low and third we have to give enough time to the system to increase entanglement domain of the system.

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A model for a coherent orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system as well as Fast-OFDM system in both terrestrial and underwater wireless optical communication, has been proposed, that can be tuned with the virtual local oscillator, under the Gamma-Gamma atmospheric turbulence channel. Not only just considering the intensity scintillation but also considering the phase noise caused by atmospheric turbulence effect on the performance of the system. Analysis will be done under the premise of the different number of sub carriers, the influence of each parameter of atmospheric channel on the bit error, and the communication interrupt performance of the OFDM-FSO and F-OFDM-FSO systems, respectively. The result will confirm that the Fast-OFDM in both terrestrial and underwater wireless optical system may obtain higher sensitivity and hence overcome the bad atmosphere influence to obtain good performance of the system, even after the sub carrier spacing is reduced to half of that in the conventional OFDM systems.

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One of the most important aspects of traffic management system is to track the moment of the vehicles on the roadways. Tracking requires identifying a vehicle which is generally recognized through number plates attached to a vehicle while the location of a vehicle can be known through longitude and latitude. Digital cameras can be used to scan the images of the number plates while the vehicle is on the move. From the images one can extract the number plate and characterize the same into data equivalent. In this paper, a method of scanning the images of number plates connected to the vehicle are taken through a digital camera from a fixed position having both rotational axis considering that the vehicles are on the move and are positioned at the signal post in variable angles. The paper also presents a method of extracting the number plate characters form the scanned images.

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Tunnel underground structure often exposed to an extensive deterioration especially on the tunnel lining. Water leakage is the most common distress occurred in tunnel subsequently causing other distresses to form. After providing services over years, evaluation of shotcrete tunnel lining of underground hydroelectric power station is increasing the degree of importance in order to ascertain its reliability. This study is conducted to generate condition rating of distress simultaneously identify how combining distresses would affect the condition of shotcrete tunnel lining rather than presenting in a single distress rating. It can be time prohibitive to conduct an assessment to identify the causes that triggered the deterioration of shotcrete using visual inspection and non-destructive test including electrical resistivity and ground penetrating radar. The results from these tests will then be analyzed using statistical analysis to determine every respective condition. There are four distresses were identified as major contribution to the deterioration of shotcrete lining involving water leakage, crack, water saturated zone and rock fractured. Based on the findings, the condition rating that has been developed able to represent more conscious descriptive meaning to each distress. Even tough when it is compared to the single parameter of assessment i.e. the water leakage; there are average different ratings from 4% to 15%.

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This article presents the design and implementation of a system for detection of license plates for a public parking located at the municipality of Altamira at the state of Huila in Colombia. The system includes also, a module of surveillance cameras for remote monitoring. The detection system consists of three steps: the first step consists in locating and cutting the vehicle license plate from an image taken by an IP camera. The second step is an optical character recognition (OCR), responsible for identifying alphanumeric characters included in the license plate obtained in the first step. And the third step consists in the date and time register operation for the vehicles entry and exit. This data base stores also the license plate number, information about the contract between parking and vehicle owner and billing.

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The spatial econometrics models has been developed covering from estimation method, selection of appropriate weight matrix (W) and the issue of spatial spillover. In regional science, spatial spillovers are the main interest. They can be defined as the impact of changes to explanatory variables in a particular unit i on the dependent variable values in other units j (i?j). The spatial spillover appears because there are endogenous interaction effects among the dependent variable and exogenous interaction effects among the explanatory variables. There are several spatial econometrics model that have been used to cover those interaction effects i.e.: General Nesting Spatial model (GNS), Spatial Lag Combined model (SAC), Spatial Durbin Error Model (SDEM), Spatial Lag Model (SEM) and Spatial Lag of X model (SLX). Compared to the other models, the last model is the simplest model proposed to estimate spatial spillover effect Vega et al (2015) have compared this model to estimate the spillover effect based on empirical study. This paper tries to make a general conclusion of a better model to estimate the spillover effect based on minimum bias and mean square error of regression and spillover effect. The comparison has been done by Monte Carlo Simulation using several conditions. The SDM model is the simplest model which can explain the spillover effect easier and results in minimum bias.

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We study numerically transonic flow past a cylinder located above a convex corner. The cylinder produces a detached shock which interacts with the expansion flow region over the corner. Solutions of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations are obtained with a finite-volume solver of second-order accuracy on fine meshes. The dependence of 2D shock position on the free-stream Mach number, Reynolds number, corner angle, and rounding arc is studied. Also 3D flow simulations for two spans of the cylinder are discussed.

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In this article we show a study on the functioning and performance of the 802.11p protocol which was designed for Ad-Hoc vehicular networks. The assessment scenario of the protocol is a stretch of avenue in Bogota, and simulation is performed on the omnet ++. network simulator. The parameters evaluated were the response of the connection venue, delays in data transfer, data loss and connection feasibility in a noisy environment. A mathematical operation was applied to the data obtained in order to achieve a correct interpretation of them. From the analysis it was concluded that the standard meets the requirements necessary to be implemented in a vehicular network, however a disadvantage is evident when traffic density is low, since each node fails to establish a connection, or if it succeeds the packet loss rate is high.

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Topology optimization is an optimization technique used to find optimal material distribution with in a given design domain under applied loads and boundary conditions. Most of the developments in structural topology optimization have been formulated and solved for minimizing compliance. The absence of considering the displacement and stress constraints in the formulation and solution of topology optimization problems may lead the unfeasible optimal solutions where stress and displacement constraints are crucial criteria for the design considered. To include these two crucial elements in the optimization process some efforts have been devoted to formulate and solve the optimization problem by including stress constraints. Though considering the stress constraint in the optimization model is closer to the engineering point of view it facing three main challenges associated with the constraints. This paper aims to explore and discuss the three challenges in stress based topology optimization along with the proposed solutions.

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Emission from diesel engine has been considered as major air pollution sources. The blending of feedstock's is motivated by property enhancement and cost reduction. In this study rubber seed/palm oil mixture at equal blend ratio was used to produce biodiesel. Parametric effect on transesterification were studied using response surface methodology (RSM). Maximum yield was determined. Methyl ester at optimized condition was produced. Thermo physical properties were studied. Methyl ester effect on the emissions and performance of unmodified indirect injection diesel engine (IDI) at full load was examined. The results show that blends torque and brake mean effective pressure (BMEP) were 1.1% and 1% lower. Compared to diesel fuel, power and brake thermal efficiency (BTE) were 1.1% and 1.3 % lower, but brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) was 1.4% higher. The CO was reduced 2% while CO2, NOx and exhaust temperature increased on averages of 1%, 1.2% and 1.1% respectively.

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Studying gas turbine degradation causes and their consequences helps to obtain profound comprehension in how performance deterioration affects the dependent parameters and to explore relevant information about the nature of the fault signatures for fault diagnostics purpose. In this paper, the effects of compressor fouling, gas generator turbine erosion, and power turbine erosion on the engine dependant parameters were considered separately and together. In this regard, firstly, performance prediction model was developed to LM2500 engine using gas turbine simulation program. It was then used to simulate the deterioration effects by means of artificially implanted fault case patterns. Comparison of the clean and deteriorated measurement gives the deviation due to performance degradation. Accordingly, sensitivity order of the gas path parameters to the corresponding performance deterioration was assessed. This helps to select the key parameters, which are crucial in the process of fault detection and isolation. The results showed that, in most of the cases, air mass flow rate, compressor delivery pressure and temperature, gas generator rotational speed, power turbine inlet pressure, and exhaust gas temperature showed significant deviations. Particularly, the compressor delivery pressure and exhaust gas temperature were the parameters highly influenced by all the fault cases. Moreover, faults that have similar impacts are identified, in order to show the difficulty of gas turbine health assessment through direct observation to the measurement deviations.

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Cyclic stresses imposed on the piping system are the potential cause of severe fatigue damage and failure. These stresses are induced due to pressure fluctuations which occurred as result of the slug flow motion inside the pipe. In this study, a coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction approach based on file coupling technique between the CFD code for the flow domain and the Finite Element Analysis code for the structure domain was utilized to address the induced stresses on the structural pipe. Three cases of air-water have been investigated and the CFD results reveal that the slug frequency and slug velocity increased with increasing the water velocity while the slug length decreased with increasing the water velocity. On the other hand, the maximum principal stresses increased by 10.2% and 23.7% when the slug velocity increased from 2.26 m/s to 3.39 m/s respectively.

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This paper investigates the compatibility of three types of thermoplastic: low density polyethylene (LDPE), high density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) with ethanol blended gasoline. These polymeric materials have been applied as components in automotive fuel system and the material integrity is important. The commercial RON97 unleaded gasoline were blended with 5, 10 and 20 vol.% of ethanol to make the fuel blends. The plastic specimens were immersed in the fuel blend for 14 and 28 days at ambient conditions. Baseline tests using neat gasoline without ethanol were included for comparison purpose. The weight change, tensile strength and hardness properties were measured to assess the impact of the immersion tests. Results showed that the immersed specimens showed similar change of colour but no swelling was observed. Greater percentage of ethanol contributed to greater mass gain and incremental loss of tensile strength and hardness.

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In oil and gas industry, transportation of crude oil from terminal to terminal is costing enormous amount of money in order to restore back the pressure, which is lost due to the inner surface friction of the pipeline, through pumping operation. In this study, a new method has been proposed to reduce the drag in pipe flow by installing energy promoter at the inner wall to change the turbulence structure in the flow. CFD simulation was used to study the drag reduction at various number and various heights of energy promoters. Mesh independency study was conducted to ensure the integrity of the result. ANSYS CFX was used to simulate the flow inside the pipeline with a section of energy promoter embedded at the inner wall. The pipeline with energy promoter is modelled using Solid works and imported to ANSYS CFX Fluid Flow to undergo simulation. With water as working fluid, the results obtained were compared with the empirical correlation results to ensure the validity of the simulation procedure. Results have demonstrated drag reduction in all cases of energy promoter s height, number, and flow rates. 1.0 mm height showed better drag reduction, and the 12 energy promoters installed on the internal surface of the pipe showed larger reduction in the drag compared to 8 and 4 promoters. The maximum drag reduction efficiency of energy promoter is approximately 7% and it is possible to further push the boundary for drag reduction efficiency limit. In summary, it is feasible to reduce drag in flow through insertion of energy promoters, and it is highly recommended to investigate the technique experimentally and extended numerically cases.

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This paper reports an attempt to produce thin embossing mould by using micro-milling process and subsequently tested in fabricating polymer microfluidic devices using hot roller embossing process. Two embossing moulds with thicknesses of 260 5m (thin) and 500 5m (thick) made of Al6061-T6 are fabricated using micro-milling process. The thin and thick moulds subsequently will be used for hot roller embossing process and conventional hot embossing process respectively to produce PMMA microfluidic devices. The performance of the micro-milled thin embossing mould in the hot roller embossing process will be compared with the thick mould used in hot embossing process. The diamond end-mill tool is used for finishing the profile in order to reduce burr formations. The adhesive will be used to hold the thin and thick workpiece in the fabrication of moulds. The experimental results show that the micro-milling is capable to create the features necessary for a microfluidic in thin embossing mould. The thin embossing mould with thickness of about 160 5m with feature height of about 100 5m has been produced successfully using the micro-milling process. The surface quality of the thin embossing mould produced by micro-milling and held using adhesive is comparable with the thick mould.

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Recently, the world s dependence on conventional fuels as the primary source of energy and the environmental impact as a consequence of utilizing these fuels, it is found that the use of renewable energy is in urgent need at the present time. Currently, utilization of biomass residue as a source of energy is becoming very promising as it not only reduces the dependence on fossil fuels and the related environmental impact but also assist in solving the long-term problems related to the disposal of these materials. The problem with as-received biomass residue is, however, the difficulty of use as a source of energy due to its high moisture content, low density and issues related with handling, storage and transportation. One of the ideal solution to dispose the sludge is by converting it into useful energy in form of solid fuel such as pallet and briquette. This solution not only solve the sludge disposal problem but also generate energy to mankind. However, the main problem faced in order to convert this sludge into energy is it contains high moisture content which is more than 90% of moisture content. In order to convert it into useful energy, the moisture content of the sludge need to reduce into acceptable level which is below 20% . One of the method to remove the moisture content is by using thermal dryer. This paper discussing about the moisture content of the sewage sludge dried using the thermal dryer. The preliminary result obtain from the research found that the moisture content of the sewage sludge can be reduce up to 10.82% depending on the speed and the temperature of the dryer.

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T-junctions have been used in piping networks to fuse or split incoming fluids for decades. It is because of their massive utization specially in petroleum industry, that it is the subject of interest for many researchers to this date. In oil and gas sector, T-junctions are usually used as a partial two phase separator. Two-phase separation in a T-junction is a complex phenomena because of its dependence upon many parameters, one of which is the geometrical features of the T-junction. Here, in this paper the effect of different geometrical features of the T-junction on two-phase separation will be discussed to compile different concepts governing the phase separation in a T-junction. It was felt that further research is required to explore the effects of various inserts and combination of more than one T-junctions on phase separation.

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Corrosion under insulation (CUI) is a severe problem for 304 stainless steel pressure vessel. This study is to identify factors responsible for loss of production due to problems in plant and equipment. The combined action of tensile stress with corrosive environment can lead to chloride stress corrosion cracking (CSCC). Chloride stress corrosion cracking initiates from sites of localized pitting or crevice corrosion. The initiation of crack is more dependent on chloride concentration but less dependent on temperature. However, the growth and propagation of a crack is widely affected by temperature and less affected by chloride concentration and pH. In austenitic stainless steel, the main forms of corrosion are pitting and stress corrosion cracking caused by chlorides. In this study the influence of operating conditions such as chloride concentration, temperature on stress corrosion cracking of austenitic stainless steel will be investigated. Corrosion problems arise in situations due to cycling temperatures which vary from below the dew point to above ambient temperatures. The investigations will be carried out under thermal insulation, which modifies the local corrosion conditions and it has never been investigated to the best of our knowledge. At the end of the research, the conditions where SCC occurs will be defined and documented.

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Due to the complex flow structures of two-phase flow, the holdup measurement is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we use the finite element method to analyze a three-dimensional model of concave capacitance sensor. Both two-plate and four-plate sensors are investigated and compared in terms of the average sensitivity and sensitivity variation parameters. The average sensitivity of sensors is greatly increased during the shift from two-plate design to four-plate design. However, this causes the sensitivity variation parameter to be increased despite the usage of more plates. The geometry of the concave capacitance sensor is determined be 400 electrode angle for four-plate design has a better result as compared to 800 electrode angle of two-plate design.

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With a worldwide aging pipeline infrastructure and increasing economic and regulatory constraints for pipeline operators, pipeline integrity issues need to be solved. While pipeline regulations not only demand inspections or monitoring of structural integrity at certain intervals, but a continuous process of verification of pipeline integrity and fitness-for-purpose. In-Field Linear Hose (IFL) offer complemented solution for both maximizing pipeline integrity preventing; corrosion, wear, leakage etc. as well as, a health monitoring tool. IFL has short rehabilitation times and rapid re-commissioning, and thus represents not only an inexpensive alternative to open rehabilitation, but also a high-quality method for the renewal of pressure petroleum pipes with an anti-corroded solution. Although, IFL structure can be coiled or uncoiled several times, it embedded optical fibre for health monitoring tool assessing pipeline integrity by inspecting the pipe corrosion, metal loss, deformations, and position. Technical Acceptance Assurance for IFL over its 20 years of design life are key deliverables of this study. Whereas, IFL failure mode is typically caused by a succession of defects or degradation that leads to loss of structural integrity. IFL Collapse, Burst, Tensile failure, Torsional failure, Fatigue failure, and Erosion are failure mechanisms expected cause potential IFL failure and need to scrutinize. This paper focuses on wrinkling of IFL under verities loading, deformation and its interaction with the outer pipe. Stresses and strains will scrutinized throughout the deformation stage, detecting possible detachment of the liner from the outer pipe and minimum loads induce wrinkles.

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The effectiveness of the nature of the ASP on the zeta potential, growth of mean droplet size and viscosity of emulsions have been investigated. Water in oil based emulsion was prepared and inspected the emulsion stability by analyzing droplet zeta potential, growth of drop size and viscosity. An electric mechanism of dispersed phase stabilization is projected to make clear the long term stability observed for EOR implemented fields in Malaysia. Experiments results of droplet zeta potential for the different emulsions, showed that emulsions with low concentration of alkaline, polymer and high concentration of surfactant observed strong stability. By contrast, ASP stabilized emulsions of high alkaline, polymer and low surfactant, formed less stable emulsions. Cross polarized measurements were performed to analyze the drop size of water dispersed in oil stabilized at various compositions of ASP. The growth of drop sizes showed linear like behavior with droplets zeta potential tests. Present results show that viscosity is not effected by temperature. It is also observed that increase in salinity concentration is contributing in the separation.

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Magnesium (Mg) alloys have always attracted researchers for being a light weight metal and now they have also found that it can also be used in the biomedical implants because of its compatibility with human body environment especially AZ31 Mg alloy. Machining of Mg alloy is a challenge itself because of its low melting point and ignition risks. Cryogenic machining can significantly reduce the temperature during machining. Which not only reduces the risk of ignition but also improved surface integrity of AZ31 Mg alloy. In this paper, a finite element analysis has been done to get the temperature distribution occur during the machining of Mg alloy. We have done the analysis in two different machining condition which were dry and cryogenic machining. The results have been validated from the experiments results and are found to be in good agreement. The temperature distribution at the tool surface and at the machined surface of the work piece were shown in the forms of colored figures. Temperature distribution at the tool surface has been shown in the form of isothermal lines. In case of cryogenic machining, a notable decrease in the temperature was shown by the results.

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pyOpt is an open source python based object oriented framework for nonlinear constrained optimization problems. In this study, we used pyOpt to solve pressure vessel design problem. Among the available optimizers in pyOpt, SLSQP (Sequential least squares programming), COBYLA (Constrained Optimization by Linear Approximation), ALPSO (Augmented Lagrangian Particle Swarm Optimizer), NSGAII (Non Sorting Genetic Algorithm II), MIDACO (Mixed Integer Distributed Ant Colony Optimization), and ALGENCAN (Augmented Lagrangian with GENCAN) were used. The effect of initial design variables on convergence was investigated for six different regions. The initial design variables for MIDACO and SLSQP should be within the design variable bound while COBYLA and ALPSO provide good result when the initial point is greater than the upper bound. On the other hand, NSGAII and ALGENCAN converge to the optimum value regardless of the initial value. The optimum results from all optimizers were compared with published literatures. Except for ALPSO with mixed discrete variables, the results are in good agreement with maximum percentage error of less than 5%. Therefore, pyOpt can be considered as an alternative option to solve engineering design optimization problems.

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The present study aims to investigate the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for the performance-based condition monitoring of industrial gas turbine engines. Toward this end, a health assessment tool is presented by developing a Multi-Nets ANN model. A number of key performance parameters that are commonly measurable on the most industrial gas turbines are monitored and their associated neural networks for the healthy condition are trained. Three-layer feed-forward configuration is chosen to construct the networks, the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is used as the training function, and the k-fold cross-validation process is employed to obtain the optimum number of neurons in the hidden layers. The model is developed and tested using the gas path performance data collected from an 18.7 MW twin-shaft industrial gas turbine. A special attention is also devoted to the system theory interpretation in order to evaluate the effect of the input neurons on each output of the Multi-Nets. To that end, the sensitivity analysis is formulated using derivatives based on an interpretation of the neural network s weights.

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Sustainable initiatives are increasingly getting attention from the research community and one of the aspects in achieving sustainable development is to enhance the efficiency and optimize the technology used to generate and utilize energy. Fault detection and diagnosis is a critical optimization factor in power generation sector. Early faults detection ensures that correct mitigation measures can be taken, whilst false alarms should be eschewed to avoid unnecessary cost of operation, interruption and downtime. Pure Intelligent Condition Monitoring System (ICMS) represented by artificial neural network (ANN), developed by training the network with real operational data, may be proven to be useful for real-time monitoring of a power plant. In this work, an integrated data preparation method has been proposed and the development of ANN models to detect steam turbine trip for Malaysia MNJ power station will be presented. Two models adopting feed forward with back propagation ANN were trained with real data from the MNJ station. The developed models were capable of detecting the specific trip within a period of 32 minutes before the actual trip occurrence, which is considered to provide good and satisfactory early fault detection.

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The influence of engine loads of a single cylinder diesel engine on engine performance and exhaust emissions when using water-in-diesel fuels were experimentally studied in this work. The work aims to determine the parameter that influence pollutants reduction capability of emulsified fuel at different engine loads and to ascertain the type of fuel blend for optimum engine performance. Physical characterization analyses were performed on 16 stable WiDE samples to evaluate the viscosity, the density and the water droplet size of each sample with various water content, hydrophilic-lipophilic balance values and surfactant percentages. The analyses revealed that only a few samples satisfy the CWA15145 requirements. Hence, this paper only discusses the results of engine performances and emission measurements when using 4 types of emulsified fuels, i.e. percentage of water content of 9, 12, 15 and 18 with HLB value of 6.31 and surfactant percentage of 10% volume of water. Engine torque, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions were recorded and analyzed from the engine operating at a speed of 2600 rpm, with variation of engine load between 0 to 100 percent. The results showed that in general, no significant change in brake power was observed but there was a prominent reduction in nitrogen oxides (NOx). The average nitrogen oxides emission was observed to be reduced by 40 percent for WiDE-12 compared to the B5 diesel fuel. The average brake power for WiDE-12 has slightly improved by 5 percent compared to the B5 diesel.

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The main objective of this work is to analyze the feasible joining in microstructure and the inter diffusion of elements on the reaction layer of diffusion bonded sialon with duplex stainless steel. Combination of these two materials is a complex task due to dissimilar in thermal expansion coefficient. Diffusion bonding of sialon and duplex stainless steel was conducted by applying pressure of 16 MPa at 12000C for 30 minutes and 1 hour in a vacuum hot press furnace. The reaction layer that connected sialon and duplex stainless steel was analyzed using optical microscopy and scanning electron microscope for its microstructure while energy dispersive x-ray was used for elemental diffusion analysis. The samples of 30 minutes and 1 hour diffusion bonding time show good joining were attained due to ductile layer. Formation of pearlite near to the steel was also revealed in both samples. Small gaps can be discovered on the reaction layer in 30 minutes diffusion bonding time as compared to 1 hour. However, the joining on both samples remained intact due to presence of reaction layer.

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Higher-powered electronics are being integrated into daily used devices rapidly. With these electronics, the need to remove the excessive heat generated from those devices efficiently and more economically became essential. In response to these critical needs, a unique nanocomposite material made of copper reinforced by carbon nanotubes was developed via powder injection molding technique (PIM). This work aims to study the effect of different PIM sintering parameters on the microstructural characteristics of carbon nanotubes reinforced copper nanocomposites (Cu/CNTs). The effect of these parameters has a significant effect on the mechanical and thermal properties of the produced composites. For instance, the influences of varying the sintering dwell time on the densification process showed that short sintering dwell times (90 and 120 min at 10500C) were insufficient for achieving complete sintered samples. Meanwhile, attempts were applied to increase the diffusion rate between the Cu particles and CNTs by increasing the sintering dwell time up to 180 min at 10500C. The results showed a clear enhancement on the densification process but led to a decomposition of the CNTs into amorphous carbon. The optimal sintering temperature for achieving fully dense nanocomposite was optimized to be 10500C. Fully dense nanocomposite can provide large phonon mean free path inside the microstructure resulting high thermally conductive material.

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Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy (SECM) is used for studying the corrosion of metals in fluid environments with high sensitivity. This microscope measures the current in an ultra fine electrode with a radius between a few nanometers to 25 microns when it is in a solution and near the matrix. Scanning of the surface reactions in microscopic scale will be possible by the use of this technique. The scanning electrochemical microscope with sensitivity of 100 5v and 50 5m displacement in longitudinal and latitudinal axes was designed and fabricated in this research. Au and Pt electrodes were used as working and reference electrodes. Producing topographic images of potential variations in area scan is one of the most important outputs of this microscope which images are presented in colorful and 3-dimensional features on the intensity-based potential variations. Some experiments were done by using the fabricated SECM for assessment of corrosion of coated steel. Investigations were carried out on scratched samples. Examination of results of utilizing SECM showed that the potential of scratched surfaces is significantly higher than that in sound surfaces. So it can be deduced that this microscope can detect the initiation of corrosion and nucleation of pits in its initial stages of nucleation in a corrosive solution.

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Puffing and micro explosion characteristics of water in bio diesel emulsion droplets were investigated. Emulsified fuel droplets were visualized on a hot surface during Leidenfrost effect. The emulsions tested were with 9%, 12% and 15% of water stabilized by 5%, 10% and 15% of surfactant dosages with an HLB value of 6. The results show that the emulsion stabilized with 5% and 10% surfactant dosage undergoes micro explosion phenomenon, whereas emulsion with maximum surfactant dosage did not developed micro explosion. The puffing frequency was found to be increasing as the Sauter mean diameter of the dispersed water droplets in the emulsions decreased.

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The concept of the reflective solar tower is based on the reflection of the solar radiations from heliostats toward reflective mirror at the top of the tower and then redirected the radiation to one of its foci on the ground. This new arrangement would allow setup the energy collection at the ground level; hence the heavy tower top setup is avoided. For the suggested beam down solar tower located at University Teknologi Petronas, three reflective shapes are examined, i.e. ellipsoidal/concave, hyperboloid/convex and a flat surface. A comparative study is carried out using lightXlab simulation platform to investigate the effect of focal point distance on the radiation spread at the ground level and the effect of angle change of the second reflector on the radiation concentration as well as the beam travel. The results of the simulation showed that the flat surface reflector is having superiority and better control over the other two reflectors, in terms of beam concentration and beam travel.

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Thin-walled hybrid tubes developed by a combination of metal and composite merge the benefits of metal and composite that is a high axial load carrying capacity, stable collapse modes, which result in maximum total energy absorption (TEA), specific energy absorption (SEA), and crush force efficiency (CFE). The improvement in energy absorption competency of round aluminium tube, having applications in transportation vehicles as well as aircraft, is meted out throughout this examination. Impact properties for partially wrapped tube are not well addressed in all previous studies. In order to improve energy absorption features, partial wrapping and full wrapping of the circular aluminium tube with glass/epoxy by applying 90? fiber angle and 6 numbers of layers of composite is performed, using filament winding process. Moreover, impact properties of partially wrapped tube and fully wrapped tubes are determined by applying quasi-static loading. In addition to this, TEA, SEA, axial load carrying capacity (Pmax) and CFE are analyzed to achieve improvement in energy absorption capability of partially wrapped aluminium tube with glass/epoxy. The result revealed that SEA of partially wrapped aluminium tube is 49.09% and 14.84% more as compared with partially wrapped steel and fully wrapped aluminium tube respectively.

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Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is the one of the advance welding techniques in current years. It is solid state welding and efficiently can overcome the conventional fusion welding technique weaknesses. FSW involve rotational tool and move along the edge of the two workpieces. The frictional heat and plastic deformation process provide firm condition for the solid state welding to occur. Due to the advantages of solid state welding, formerly the FSW was applied to aluminium alloys rather than hard material. The developments of knowledge in tool level up the FSW application to the hard materials such as steel, stainless steel and even Inconel. Other than that, researchers found that the heat input during welding process is the one of the factor in order to enhance the quality of the joint. Therefore, in FSW areas, researches exploring Underwater Friction Stir Welding (UFSW) to control the heat input during the process and produce good quality of the joint in term of microstructure and mechanical properties. In this paper, relevant researches in UFSW will be discussed and until now, it is found that researches in UFSW are still in basic stage and not many researchers deeply explore it yet.

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Both the onshore and offshore power generating plants use gas turbines for power generation. The normal practice is to evaluate feasibility of the plants using rate of return approach. This approach does not incorporate the energy and exergy analysis. The more appropriate approach is to apply the exergoeconomic method. By adopting this method both the economic as well as exergetic analysis are incorporated in the evaluation. This study investigated the application of exergoeconomic method to evaluate the cost rates of electricity produced by the gas turbines for both the onshore and offshore power generating plants. The methodology incorporates cost rates associated to capital investment, operation and maintenance and exergy transfers into and out of the turbine. The cost rates for the capital investment of the turbine cover the capital recovery cost. The cost rates for the operations cover the fuel cost and the maintenance cost rates cover the maintenance cost throughout the whole life of the turbine. The cost rates associated with exergy transfers include all the cost rates due to entering and exiting material streams as well as both heat and work interactions with the surrounding and exergy destructions. Data for the study were obtained from the operating onshore and offshore gas turbines. The exergetic cost rates were established using the first and second law themodynamics. EES and Mathlab were used to analyse the model. In both cases the cost rates decrease with increased of power output assuming ten per cent interest rates and service life of twenty years. For future study sensitivity analysis on interest rates, service life, CAPEX and OPEX will be done. The model could them provides more accurate costing of power rates for industrial application.

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In the current economic challenge, methods to accurately predict system failure has become a holy grail in maintenance with the goal to reduce the cost of unavailability due to unscheduled shutdown. This has led to the current research with the aim to achieve a more accurate fault diagnosis for rotating machinery using a neural network (NN) with principal component analysis (PCA) as a pre-processing step to fuse multiple sensor data. The multisensor data fusion has been proven to improve the fault detection ability for machinery compared to single source condition monitoring. In this paper, an NN-based methodology is presented, where PCA is applied as preprocessing step to detect the rotating machinery faults during operation. The effectiveness of the proposed model is illustrated by a case study on two shaft industrial gas turbine where the real-time performance monitoring data collected from the plant and used to train and test the proposed algorithm. The analysis results show that the PCA-based fusion process has significantly enhanced the performance of NN-based model when compared against NN algorithm without PCA.

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Persistently growing High-power LED packaging is used in various flux applications especially microelectronics, aerospace, oil and gas as well. Thermo-compression die-attach layer is perceived to be the most critical element in high-power LED packages as the increase in operating temperature requires new materials with suitable thermo-chemical properties also with suitable melting points of next generation lead free die attachment material. In this situation, Hi-lead solder (RM218: Pb92.5Sn5Ag2.5) which known as high temperature material is widely being used in most semiconductor assembly for die attach, yet it deduces few reliability challenges like solder voids, the tilt performance and also solder splash which has been considered as major quality issue in assembly of high-power LED packages. As a solution, sintering epoxy paste (SPC073-3: Sn96.5/Ag3/Cu0.5) is being considered as a replacement due to the challenges faced by using Hi-lead solder paste. In this case, sintering epoxy paste demonstrating excellent electrical and thermal performance for High-power LED packages that is known to be demanded in market. Thus, this study investigates the differential pastes sintering paste and solder paste, in order to identify best die attachment material to be used in thermo-compression bonding method. Therefore, the shear strength was resulting good indication where the sintering paste was recorded 2.4 Kg/mm meanwhile the solder paste was recorded 0Kg/mm at peak temperature of 2600C. Besides of that, the pot life seems promising as the sintering paste seems to have constant viscosity of 100Pa*s throughout the 48 hours tested while, high lead solder paste records viscosity from 100Pa*s marginally increase as the time increase which effects the inconsistency of pot life. The voids performance proves sintering epoxy paste has the same pinhole voids as its individual, but the solder paste s pinhole voids are not same as individuals which easily can fail when the particular shear force was applied. Hence, sintering epoxy paste could resolve the quality issue by using thermo-compression bonding method and produce the better reliability than the solder paste.

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Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation increased significantly each year impacted to the increasingly critical landfill area. This study aims to determine the critical MSW flow in the landfill to be repaired and developed for sustainable waste infrastructure, to design the best scenario tackling the MSW flow into the landfill based on the potential to recycle, recovery materials (compost) and recovery energy/fuel from MSW (RDF/Refuse Derived Fuel). The method is about direct measurement at the landfill for MSW composition according to SNI 19-3964-1994 and physical characteristics; testing the samples in the laboratory for chemical characteristics; empirical calorific value and doing survey to scavengers. Then make modeling scenarios to tackle MSW by using MFA-STAN (Material Flow Analysis-short for Substance Flow Analysis) integrative method for each year over a period of five years. MSW critical flow in the landfill to be repaired and developed for sustainable MSW infrastructure contained in the composition of organics (65,75%) and plastics (11,937%). Based on laboratory tests and surveys, waste processing technology potentially applicated by composting (58,906%), recycling (25,417%) and RDF (27,619%). Scenario 3 is appropriate scenario to reduce MSW to be dumped (about more than 50%) also to increase the lifespan of serviceability landfill.

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Mass movement is downslope movement of soil or rock debris due to gravitational pull or vertical sinking of the ground surface. Mass movements may occur for a considerably long duration or an extremely short period, such as landslides or rockfalls, and cause devastating consequences. Mass movement is a challenging subject because it cannot be explained by Mohr Coulomb theorem. As such, an approach for predicting movement patterns must be developed. This research modeled a mass movement in Cihonje Hamlet in Parungponteng Village, Tasikmalaya District, West Java, Indonesia. The influence of viscosity and yield stress on the behavior of the mass movement was also investigated through back analysis. Results showed that viscosity and yield stress are inversely proportional to water content and both decrease as the water content approaches the liquid limit. Thus, low viscosity induces flow coverage.

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Premature deterioration on highway pavement is still considered as one of the main issues in Indonesian related to the road problems. Premature deterioration of pavements not only occurs on relatively new roads but also prevails on roads that have just been repaired. The premature damage on roads is allegedly caused by the overloaded heavy trucks. This paper will discuss the condition of overloading of heavy trucks on an important highway in East Java, Indonesia, by means of weighing the trucks carrying construction materials in the weighbridge and measure their tire pressures. The data obtained are the total weights of trucks, the weights of each axle, and tire pressures. By calculating the EAL value for each axle and simple statistical analysis, the value of the vehicle axle load distribution and a tire pressure will be obtained. It was found that the effect of overloaded heavy vehicle are: a) higher axle-load distribution for the rear wheels than those of standard of Bina Marga (Indonesian Directorate General of Highways, 1987); b) higher average EAL value per type of truck than those of average EAL based on Bina Marga (1987), which is from 2.2 to 8.3 times higher; and 3) higher tire pressures for heavy trucks, ranging from the lowest of 130 psi to as high as 185 psi, very much higher than the recommenced tire pressures of 80 to 100 psi.

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The type and the location where the stratum hold the foundation affect its bearing capacity value. This study aims to map the bearing capacity of the foundation and the distribution of the depth of the hard stratum to support it. To achieve those targets, this research uses the data in the form of soil investigation equipped with boring logs and N-SPT from several locations in Jakarta. The performed methods are: collecting, selecting, grouping and plotting the data location on Jakarta map. The data shows that the hard stratum is found about 10 meters depth in most places in Jakarta. The calculation of static empirical method are used to estimate bearing capacity of close ended-spun pile types with a diameter of 50 cm based on the data of N SPT. The result shows that in West Jakarta has relatively larger bearing capacity compared with other regions which is about 100.04 to 194.55 tons, South Jakarta 69.36 to 177.1 tons, East Jakarta 59.16 to 188.5 tons, North Jakarta to 64.1 163.56 tons, and Central Jakarta 67.8 to 186.6 tons.

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In 2013, Indonesia has been published new reinforced concrete (RC) design code, which called SNI 2847 2013. This code improved the previous reinforced concrete provision. This standard also specified detailing for RC buildings in the high-risk earthquake region. For reinforced concrete columns at special moment resisting frame, transverse reinforcement is provided to allow column to have large deformation demand without degradation in lateral load resistance. In this study, the confinement design equations of SNI 2847 2013 are evaluated with column test data with several parameters. The result of study exhibited that this confinement design provisions are needed to improve.

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Failure of steel truss bridge members could lead to a further damage or even to the collapses of the bridge. The collapse of a bridge often occurred in Indonesia due to various factors, such as over loads, dynamic live loads, earthquake and deteriorated material. Push-over analysis was used to analyze the failure mechanism of a steel truss bridge, which gave a point load at the mid-span and to be gradually increased. Six models of the bridge were analyzed, which are three continuous span and three single span bridge models. The study shows that the failures of the continuous steel truss bridge occurred in the diagonal chord of the end portal. All single span bridge models failure occurred on the chord at the mid span. The performance level of structure shows all models of the truss bridges are in the Immediate Occupancy (IO) based on the target displacement of FEMA 356. The actual ductility occurred in all models of bridges is compliant with Indonesian Standard.

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Snap force in tether may cause fracture in the tether system or plate which connecting tether and tunnel body. In this paper, snap force in tether of Submerged Floating Tunnel (SFT) were investigated by hydrodynamic testing on the SFT model. The case study of the shallow waters refers to one of the waterways crossing which connecting the Panggang island and the Karya island in Indonesia is used. Hydrodynamic testing model is carried out by applying regular waves with different variation of wave and structural parameters. Experimental models use PVC cylindrical pipe where the dimension of the model testing use 1:100 scale from the real environmental conditions. In the SFT model testing, the forces on the mooring lines were measured using a PVDF transducer type which is based on the sensor piezoelectric material. Results show that snap force occurs in certain condition of wave and structure parameter.

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U-turn with high arrival rate and high traffic on urban road can decrease the Level of Service (LOS) of road itself. To revitalize the current condition, storage lane for vehicle queue must be provide. To set length of storage lane, we should know the queue length. Based on current condition, queue occurs because service time or turning movement is too long. The other factor of queue is high traffic on the opposite lane. Poisson distribution for arrival rate of vehicle on U-turn and model of service time of U-turn is used for this research. Model of service time is gained from cumulative frequency distribution of service time data from each U-turn. The result of simulation is queue length and the minimum length of storage lane On Pndugo U-turn, Nirwana U-turn, Galaxy U-turn which are 150 meter (correction factor:0.96s), 102 meter (correction factor: 0.85s), and 114 meter (correction factor: 0.95s), respectively. Simulation model is accepted when correction factor is close to 0s. Based on the result, the Simulation model of queue is accepted.

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In home construction, rigid polyurethane foams have been widely used as nonstructural component such as thermal insulation or sound absorber material, and as structural component such as core of sandwich panel. For structural component, it is necessary to study the behavior of the material first, how the cells are constructed, also to get the physical and mechanical properties. Those two properties are the main items to be able to design the sandwich panel or to make a further analysis. This investigation was made to reveal several things such as density, microscopic foam structure, material strength, modulus, poison s ratio, and failure mode in tension, compression and shear, based on American Standard Testing Method (ASTM). This research, by microscopic observation, states that this foam is categorized as an anisotropic material, where strength in longitudinal (L) direction (foam rise direction) is stronger than that in transverse (T) direction, with geometric anisotropic ratio of 2.2. For the foam density of 48.5 kg/m3, the test yielded compressive strength and modulus of, respectively, 358.221 kPa, and 11602.8 kPa. Consistent with the results from other researchers, higher density gives higher compressive strength and modulus. For tensile mode, it is also obtained values of tensile strength 229 kPa in L direction and 393 kPa in T direction, tensile modulus in L and T direction, respectively, are 929 kPa and 3256 kPa, strains to failure are respectively 0.276 and 0.334 and poisson s ratio is 0.184 on longitudinal based specimen. For shear mode, we get 228 kPa for shear strength and 3240 kPa for shear modulus. The patterns of stress stress curve from compression and tension test, give us an indication that this foam is classified as elastic plastic foam.

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People living around the volcano utilize material from the eruption of mount Kelud to rehabilitate buildings that have been damaged by the eruption of the volcano. They believe that such material is good as aggregate substitute for fine aggregate, without knowing the effect of the use of these materials. The study aimed to examine the physical characteristics of the sand from the eruption of Mount Kelud in early 2014 and its effects in normal concrete compressive strength. The sand of Mount Kelud were obtained from Ngantang, Kediri, Indonesia. The experimental study of physical properties of sand from mount Kelud s eruption include: density, absorption, mowasture content and gradation of sand, using a standard test ASTM C 128 and ASTM C 117. Concrete mix design and the method of testing the compressive strength of the sample were using ACI method.Test results of the characteristics of the sand from the eruption of mount Kelud obtained SSD density of sand: 2.68 gr/ cm3 (as most of the natural sand). Absorption, moisture content and modulus finenness Kelud sands are in the range that was ideal specified in ASTM C33 , which was 2.17 % ; 2.167 % and 1.52 . A combination of 20 % sand of Kelud with 80 % sand of Karawang can increase the compressive strength of concrete by 15 % at the age of 3 days, compared to concrete without sand of Kelud, but in general the use of sand of Kelud caused a decline in the compressive strength of concrete.

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Bengawan Solo River is the longest river in Java Island. The river have length is approximately 600 km and 16.100 km2 in area of watershed. Bengawan Solo watershed is divided into three zones that are Upper Solo River, Middle Solo River, and Lower Solo River. In this case, The Middle Solo River is represented by Kali Madiun Catchment Area. Bengawan Solo River is often flooded. A flood is an unusually high stage in a river. Discharge exceed than full bank capacity can be flood in the river. The damages caused by floods are loss of life, property and economic due to disruption of economic activity. There are many solutions to minimize of effect of flood. In this study make a model of Bengawan Solo River to analysis of Hydraulics River. The results of hydraulics analysis are used to create map of flood inundation. The map of flood inundation is used as information for peoples who stay in Bengawan Solo Watershed as warning of flood. If information could be known early then it can help people to be careful and minimize of damages. Model of Bengawan Solo River is produced from hydraulic analysis of HEC-RAS. HEC-RAS process is using flow hydrograph from hydrological analysis. HEC-HMS is software is used to hydrological analysis in Bengawan Solo Watershed. Input data needed to process of HEC-HMS is average of rainfall data, return periods of rainfall at 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, and 25 years. The area rainfall is determined by Polygon Thiessen methods. The return periods of rainfall data is determinable using Gumbel s method. The last result of this process is discharge data, elevation of surface water, and prediction of flood inundation. In this study produced a map of flood inundation. This map is referring of flood and non inundation area at Bengawan Solo Watershed. It is a benefit to minimize of flood damages.

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Asphalt concrete is used as the surface layer for roads and airport pavement. Road pavement has experienced a more rapid deterioration due to increasing traffic loads and changing environmental circumstances. Road damage often occurs due to heavy traffic loads that damage the rutting performance of asphalt mixtures. Some researchers have added additives to improve the performance of asphalt concrete. The utilization additives can improve the performance of asphalt mixtures with the aim to increase the strength of the road pavement structure. In this study, laboratory investigations studied Crumb Rubber Powder (CRP) and Buton Asphalt Natural Rubber (BNA-R) additives to asphalt mixtures. The laboratory analyses used a series of tests: Marshall Standard, Marshall immersion and Wheel Tracking Machine (WTM). Both material additives were added at 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, or 25% to Asphalt Concrete Wearing Course (AC-WC) with bitumen pen 60/70. Both additive materials showed an increase in the value of the Marshall stability and Marshall immersion compared to the virgin asphalt mixture. However, this condition does not occur with the WTM test results; the addition of 10% CRP had the deepest rutting compared to asphalt mixture without additive. The addition of 10% BNA-R was better able to support the wheel load, resulting is decreased rut depth. The results indicated the ability to predict the asphalt mixture rut depth using WTM. The number of cycles of the WTM test determines the level of the accuracy of the prediction of asphalt mixtures resistance to the pressure of the wheels of the vehicle. The limited ability of WTM is often an obstacle, which can be overcome using an empirical model of the behavior of the rut depth, as presented in this paper.

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The impact of spatial land use variability on the accuracy of runoff simulation was investigated in order to define the optimal spatial discretization of the watershed to be adopted in rainfall-runoff modeling. The correlation between the types of land cover, soil characteristic and soil humidity on the runoff coefficient determining is very important. Using SCS- CN model and GIS we try to identify the effect of spatial land use on the runoff simulation. The case study presented is located in the upstream Ciliwung watershed; it is based on the detailed information from the Geographic Information System (GIS) available for upstream Ciliwung Watershed. We made the limitation on the soil humidity, we choose directly CN with the normal condition. The comparison between the averaged and distributed CN will calculate in order to analyze the effect of spatial land use variability on the surface runoff. The result is highly depends on the level of organization of land use. According to the model, the behavior of the studied watersheds may sometimes remain very similar with a homogeneous CN input, whereas for some cases the differences in the peak discharges can give the important indication of the influence of spatial land use variability.

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Bengawan Solo river has the largest river basin in Java Island. This river flows from upstream in Central Java Province to downstream in East Java Province and empties into the Madura strait. Big flood of Bengawan Solo river occurred in 1966, then in 1974, 1995, 2002, 2005 and 2007. Flood disaster has resulted in an impact on losses of people and possessions. In this study, flood disaster assessment of Bengawan Solo river was conducted to obtain information and detailed pictures of flood causes, condition during flood, problem solutions of flood, and losses because of it. Flood assessment was carried out by analyzing flood causes, inundations, flood losses, flood handling programs and recommendations to manage flood in the future. The result of flood assessment shows clear pictures of flood and they can be used to determine flood prone area, the risk of flooding and to create an evacuation route in order to minimize losses due to flood disaster in the future.

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Currently shrimp farming is still unreliable as an economic commodity due to climate and environmental conditions around the pond waters. When both of them are environmentally friendly, harvest of shrimps can make farmers rich. Instead, farmers could go bankrupt because of the invasion of a disease caused by a virus. Efforts usually carried out by farmers are to let their ponds neglegted until conditions are restored, and it could be years left neglected ponds. Prospective efforts are needed to address chronic problems that always afflict farmers in this sector to improve water quality and provide adequate nutrition so that shrimp farming can be sustainable. Water recovery system configuration will provide quality of water that meets water quality standards for shrimp farming system water. Roughing filters have been shown to reduce levels of turbidity, bacteria, organic, and detergent by 60%, 88%, 40% and 10% respectively. While slow sand filter proved to lower turbidity, bacteria, organic, and detergent by 96%, 99%, 45% and 18% respectively. With a perfect insulation system, the treated water is returned to the pond and only small amount.

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It is already known that the Portland Cement process manufacturing produces CO2 as emission that interfere in environment. therefore it is necessary to find an alternative materials as a substitute for PC or alternative concrete . Today one of the alternative solution is geopolymer concrete, it is based on fly-ash or other material pozzolanic. By adding some alkali activator in fly-ash would make geopolymer concrete. The addition of high-range water-reducing admixture up to approximately 2% of fly-ash mass have improved the workability of fresh geopolymer concrete. In this study the mixtures of geopolymer binder were made with the ratio of fly-ash and alkali activator were 74%: 26%, molarity of sodium hydroxide was 12 M. Ratio of sodium silicate to sodium hydroxide were varies from 1.5 to 3, the percentage of naphthalene-based super plasticizer (SP) were varies from 1.5 to 3 of fly-ash mass. Tests performed were compressive strength, tensile strength and density. The results showed that the highest compressive strength achieved for the proportion of Na2SiO3/NaOH = 2 and for the percentage of SP 1.5, the highest tensile strength achieved for the proportion Na2SiO3/NaOH = 2,5 and for the percentage of SP 1.5. The average density of geopolymer was 2400 kg / m3.

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Inconsiderable fraction of the hydrocarbon can be produced by the natural drive of the reservoir. Practical knowledge has proven that when the reservoir pressure is depleted, the recovery factor nearly reaches 20%. Some of heavy fluid reservoirs cannot be produced by all natural energy drivers. As a result, improved oil recovery is introduced as a strategy to increase oil recovery. Prior implementing an improved oil recovery process in a field, it is essential to investigate its potential for achievement. However, the objective of this project is to evaluate the improved oil recovery in a sandstone reservoir is considered in this study. GEM compositional reservoir simulator has been utilized, having injection and production wells. A model is developed to perform history matching with a field production data to verify the model results and to examine an improved oil recovery method on cumulative production and recovery factor. The results showed that the water flooding has insignificant impact on the cumulative oil production, while implementing horizontal production wells had improved and doubled the reservoir performance by a factor of 2 and reducing oil saturation from 80% to 30%.

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A novel parameter extraction method based on Adaptive Differential Evolution Technique (ADET) is introduced for various types of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules. Cracks can isolate large portion of a module and increases the electrical resistance, thus current-voltage (I-V) drop will be increased and it leads to power loss. The parameter extraction and crack identification problem is based on the single diode model of a solar cell. The simulation is performed using an objective function for minimizing the difference between the estimated and measured values. The simulation result is compared with the I-V data set showed that the proposed ADET outperforms other techniques such as chaos particle swam optimization (CPSO), genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA) and organic and inorganic solar cells (OIS). Finally, the proposed ADET method is practically validated with three different types of solar modules such as thin film, mono-crystalline and multi-crystalline. The performance of different solar cell modules has been verified and the result shows that the proposed method is suitable for parameter extraction of PV modules.

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Nowadays composites are finding wide application in all fields of Engineering as a result of their desirable properties and qualities. Drilling is the most widely recognized machining operation performed on composites and the nature of drilled hole has a vital bearing. The tools used for drilling play a major role in increasing the profitability of a cutting process. Although the price of such tools are moderately low, the wastages caused by tool failures are relatively higher. Therefore, from the perspective of expense and efficiency, optimization of drilling processes are of much importance for the assembling and manufacturing industries. The poor expulsion of chips in deep and fine drilling of small diameter holes is often the cause of breakage of tools as well as the low quality surface. The effect of different drilling parameters on quality of drilled holes in drilling Aluminium based hybrid composites has been discussed in detail. The experiments were conducted on a Vertical machining centre using Solid Carbide twist drill and step drills of diameter 5mm, 7.5mm and 10mm. Response surface model is developed to correlate the quality of drilled holes namely surface roughness and circularity error with respect to different drilling parameters. The machining parameters considered for the experiments are spindle speed, feed rate, diameter and type of drills. The results proved that the developed model can be effectively used for the prediction of drilled hole quality of the hybrid composites.

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R wave is an important morphological feature in ECG which plays a vital role in identifying Cardiac arrhythmias. A band pass filter is used to detect QRS complex which after rectification is shaped into a 200ms square pulse utilizing comparator circuit with auto threshold. This is implemented in 180nm technology and is simulated using Cadence Virtuoso. The circuit is tested with simulated ECG with heart beat ranging from 40 beats/min to 200 beats/min with an operating voltage of 0.4V and total power measured is 3.997µW.

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It is widely known that energy efficiency is very important in wireless sensor networks (WSN). As a result, a common protocol design guideline has been to trade off some performance metrics such as throughput and delay for energy, which also goes well in line with many WSN applications. However, there are other applications with real-time constraints, such as those involved in surveillance or control loops, for which WSN still need to be energy efficient but also need to provide better performance, particularly latency and jitter. This article presents LEMR, a cross-layer design-based communication stack that not only preserves the energy efficiency of current alternatives but also coordinates the transfer of packets from source to destination in such a way that latency and jitter are improved considerably. Coordination is based on hop-distance to the sink, a new MAC layer, and physical layer information. Our approach adopts the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) and Low Power Listening (LPL) strategies along with channel polling, which is a proven energy-saving method involving the physical and MAC layers. Simulation experiments demonstrate the superiority of LERM in terms of latency and jitter and energy when compared with well-known protocols, such as TMAC, S-MAC and SCP-MAC.

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Review, analysis and comparison of explicit and implicit methods of recent development (2009-2015) for the calculation of normal depth in rectangular channels are performed; an adaptation of Newton Raphson method is developed as an alternative calculation of the problem and formulate a new method (called non-orthogonal directions NOD) is presented, this method is based on the modification of the fixed-point iteration method which is recognized for being simple but divergent with application limitations and restrictions. The proposed method determines the start value for the normal depth wisely, its formulation is simple, it has fast convergence and low computational cost that make it competitive with recognized and widely used methods (for example, Newton Raphson) as evidenced by the findings.

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Resource allocation approaches play a very important role in improving the performance of a communication system. Load matrix (LM) [3] is a resource allocation approach used in single carrier mobile communication systems in a multi-cell scenario to reduce the interference (both inter-cell and intra –cell) to increase the system throughput decrease the packet delay. In this paper a resource allocation scheme called Modified Load Matrix (MLM) is proposed for Multi -Carrier –DS-CDMA systems .Simulation results show that using MLM there is a significant improvement in throughput and packet delay of the system compared to bench mark schedulers.

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Mechanization of paddy harvesting is on the rise in Pakistan by the introduction of combine harvesters. However, milling quality in terms of head rice recovery has been low due to paddy harvesting at higher moisture content by combine harvesters. Due to shortage of combine harvester, farmers have no choice, but to harvest their paddy crop even at higher moisture content when a combine harvester is available in a village. The objective of the study was to determine the effect of prevailing harvesting methods and different crop maturity levels on milling quality of Super Basmati rice. In this study Super Basmati rice variety was harvested at 0-5 green grains maturity levels (known as harvesting stages) by manual harvesting and threshing, head feeding combine harvester, and conventional combine harvester. Paddy samples from threshed or combine harvested paddy were sun dried, cleaned and milled using laboratory rice milling equipment. Data on milling yield, head rice and broken rice were collected and analyzed using MSTAT statistical package. The effect of harvesting methods was statistically significant at 5 % probability level on milling yield in terms of head rice recovery and broken rice. The mean value of head rice recovery (49.5 %) of manual harvesting and threshing method was higher than conventional combine harvester (44.9 %) and head feeding combine harvester (46.5 %). Due to shortage of manual labour for harvesting rice, a head-feeding combine harvester is recommended for harvesting Super Basmati rice in Pakistan.

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The target of this paper is to build up a well-organized algorithm hinged on Automatic Vehicle Registration Plate Recognition system. It is the mining of License Plate data from vehicle pictures or videos, which accommodates three parts such as License Plate Localization, Character Segmentation and Character Recognition. In this paper, we have projected an efficient License Plate Localization algorithm subjected to Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System. This proposal involves a mixture phases of pre-processing such as Gray Scale conversion, Sobel edge map detection and morphological image binarization. Followed by the Maximally Stable External Region text region detection, geometrical and texture features are drawn out to be granted as input to ANFIS for the training purpose for localizing the License Plates. The proposed method is deliberated to achieve localization of any category of License Plates covering at all categories of environmental surroundings. In this efficient method of License Plate Localization, the empirical results express reasonably forceful localization rate as 93.61%. The proposed system provides a rapid sprouting technology and a fundamental constituent for the Intelligent Transport Systems.

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The problem of the MHD free convection flow past an impulsively started vertical porous plate through a porous medium, taking into account the heat due to viscous dissipation, is investigated and simulated. A generic computer program using the Galerkin finite element method is employed to obtain solutions for velocity and temperature fields. The energy equation, the momentum equation, and the parameters entering into the description of the flow, are transformed into an interpretable code. The influences of the dimensionless parameters entering into the description of the problem are investigated.

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With the evolution of computer technology in geosciences, finite element modeling can be easily applied to the treated areas by stone columns, which are a method of improving the soil having low geotechnical properties and likely to deform significantly under load action , by incorporating granular material (commonly called ballast) compacted by remounting passes. This numerical modeling is a simple and effective alternative to approach the real behavior of soils reinforced by stone columns, it allows settlement analysis, lateral deformation, vertical and horizontal stresses in order to understand the behavior of columns and soil. It also has the advantage of integrating the settlements of the underlying layers, especially those of least resistance. This paper aims to study the behavior of column groups by establishing the relationship between the columns spacing, columns properties, columns length and the settlement improvement. Based on the finite element modeling of the "ground / Columns" and taking as a case study the reinforcement of “Bouregreg Valley” ground.

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The influence of constant proportion of fly ash and varying proportions of silicon carbide on aluminum alloy /SiC/ fly ash composite processed through powder metallurgy route was investigated. Elemental composition of each constituents were calculated as per weight fractions in the hybrid metal matrix composite (HMMC) containing 5 wt. % to 15 wt. % silicon carbide with the addition of 7.5 wt. % fly ash as additional reinforcement. Powders were cold compacted under unidirectional pressing followed by sintering at 600°C in nitrogen atmosphere under controlled conditions. From micrograph images, the surfaces of the novel composite were studied for homogeneous mixture of silicon carbide and fly ash particles to identify dry sliding wear performance of hybrid metal matrix composite. Wear testing of the developed composite was carried out at different loads and sliding velocities for 3000m using Pin-on-disc setup. The result of experiments supports the fact that the wear resistance of AA6061/ SiC/Fly ash processed through powder metallurgy route was influenced by applied load, mass fraction of reinforcement while varying sliding velocity and keeping sliding distance constant. The analysis establishes chances of improved hardness and wear resistance with fly ash addition for silicon carbide reinforced AA6061 alloy hybrid metal matrix composite.

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Manual fodder cutting for dairy and livestock industry is a time-consuming and laborious practice. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of locally available fodder cutters and to identity a suitable machine for cutting oats and berseem fodders. Four fodder cutters were identified available across the country. They included Agritec rotary mower, Taj rotary mower, Mobi reaper-windrower and AMRI sickle bar. All machines were acquired at Remount Depot, Sargodha for comprehensive field testing to cut oats and berseem fodders. Results revealed that Agritec and Taj rotary mowers were suitable for cutting berseem and oats, whereas Mobi reaper-windrower and AMRI sickle bar were only suitable for cutting oats and other long fodders. The performance of Agritec rotary mower was the best for cutting berseem as well oats. The field capacity of Agritec rotary mower was 0.35 and 0.25 ha/h with field efficiency of 64.8 and 59.7 % for cutting oats and berseem, respectively. Using fodder cutters, the cost of operation and cutting time can be decreased up to 70-80 % as compared with manual cutting. For dairy farming, suitable fodder cutters should be promoted in the country for speedy work. However, reliability of machine is the prerequisite for commercialization of a machine.

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This paper presents a fracture model of brittle materials subjected to high velocity impact. The verification of the model is carried out by comparing computational results with the data obtained from shock compression tests. The model is used to simulate the deformation and fracture of Al3Ti - Ti metallic-intermetallic laminate composite under dynamic loading.

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