This paper focuses on Chan vese active contour (CV) model for segmenting the rolling stock. We present a modified version of Chan vese using morphological differential gradient (CVMDG) to segment rolling stock. The rolling stock videos are captured under four different lighting conditions near Guntur railway station in India. Rolling examination as it is called by railway maintenance staff of Indian railways is visual and auditory examination of moving bogies of a train for defects. The undercarriage moving parts of the train are called rolling stock. This paper makes an attempt to segment the rolling stock from video frames of the rolling stock for further analysis. For better segmentation of rolling stock, video frames are contrast enhanced with virtual exposure wavelet image fusion. The segmented rolling stock is compared with ground truth model to assess the usability of the proposed method for rolling stock segmentation.

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The behavior of green concrete, having partial replacement of cement or sand with granite waste was studied. Laboratory testing of flexural strength, splitting tensile strength, and pull out for the samples mixtures were carried out to study the replacement effect on the mechanical properties of produced concrete. The study revealed that by comparing the mechanical properties of the control mix to the green concrete mixes containing 5% of fine granite waste as a partial replacement of cement, the splitting tensile strength was 20% higher, the flexural strength was 19% lower and the bond strength was slightly lower by 1%. Whereas, replacing sand in the concrete mixes by 10% granite waste granules led to significant increase in the splitting tensile strength and the flexural strength while the bond was slightly affected when compared to the control mix.

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This study presents the numerical results of liquid flow distribution in parallel flow heat exchanger. The basic header has a hydraulic diameter of 12mm with 120mm header length, and is distributed to nine parallel tubes with a 3mm diameter of 400mm length. Here, the flow distribution for different header cross section (like circle, square, rectangle and triangle) and inlet flow rate are numerically analyzed. It was found that for circular cross sectional header, at lower inlet velocity, the flow ratio at the front part of the header was higher when compared with the rear part. With increasing the inlet flow rate, the flow ratio is found to be lower at the front part of header tube, and is higher for the rear part of header. For square and rectangular header it is found that the flow ratio is low at the front part of the header when compared with the rear part of header at all the inlet flow conditions. For triangular cross sectional header up to Re 10000, the flow rate at the fourth tube is higher when compared with all other tubes, but at higher flow rate the flow distribution is uniform. When compared with all the four types of headers at various inlet flow rates, the triangular header produces more uniform distribution.

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The problem of Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) by the use of methods of fault accommodation and reconfiguration is one of the most updated and versatile problems of modern science in control systems engineering. Occurrence of a fault in every components of a system (actuators, sensors, and internal structure) can remove the control loop from the desired state or even destabilize it. The purpose of the fault tolerant control by the accommodation method is to present operational solutions, by the use of which the control loop stability can be maintained and an acceptable performance is obtained (probably weaker than the no-fault condition) in fault occurrence conditions without the need to shut down the system. In this paper, the fault detection and isolation (FDI) issue has been investigated including the fault of system actuators. Design of a fault detection system for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system has been done by the method of Unknown Input Observer (UIO). In this method, the system is divided into several sub-systems in a way that the effects of other inputs are entered into states equations as a disturbance. The design method of the observer is such that the disturbance effect is attenuated and only the fault related to a particular input is detected. Having detected and isolated a fault, controlling coefficients are iteratively updated and modified using an auto-tuning method and the closed loop system stability is ensured in the presence of the method. In addition, in order to reduce the oscillation resulting from exerting momentary changes in controlling coefficient, a modification method known as the Sigma modification has been used. Next, the method is implemented on the favorite model of three tanks and the results confirm capability of the designed fault detection system and quality of auto-tuning of the controller.

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The purpose and objectives of this work is to develop methods for formalization and creation of a systematic approach in solving problems of mobile units under uncertainty. Control problems in the application of classical control theory in conditions of uncertainty regarding the parameters of the object, the conditions of its functioning, disturbances arising from the influence of the external environment, as a rule, does not give good results. The solution of the problems in the materials of the article carried out as follows. The analysis of the uncertainty and the possibility of formalizing a moving object control tasks at the incompleteness of the initial data. As part of this article deals with the application of the theory of fuzzy sets and possibility theory, and situational decision-making models to formalize the parameters of the tasks of decision making under uncertainty.

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In this article, we study the influence of the heat transfer coefficient on the heat retention rate per unit length of a wall made of concrete attached to the tow-plaster. The study is done in frequency dynamic regime established conditions. For different values of the exciting pulse, we evaluate the thermal inertia of the wall. The wall has a length of 0.1m including 0.05m of concrete and 0.05m thermal insulating plaster-tow. The thermal conductivity of concrete is about 10 times greater than that of the tow-plaster material. The results show that the thermal behavior of the wall depends partly outdoor climatic constraints. The duration of the outdoor climatic stresses related to the excitation pulse is an important factor on the thermal inertia of the wall. The thermal inertia of the wall is also dependent on the heat exchange coefficient on the surface of the material, its thermophysical properties and initial temperature of the material.

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Micro-grid architecture is designed for small scale model in Brawijaya University area in order to change conventional AC-based electricity system previously. Low voltage direct current (LVDC) levels are proposed and charactized to obtain the optimal design of the DC grid system. Some parameters related to the electrical phenomenon of voltage, current and power which occur in distributed-generation, distribution grid, and load sites were also analyzed. Detailed model of photovoltaic (PV) and PMSG was implemented with operational analysis and simulated with study case modes to achieve the power and system efficiency. DC bus is conducted to accommodate the distribution power between PV generations; battery and super capacitor for energy sorage element, distributed-load and other grid utilization. Various condition and operation have been characterized toward stability performance of the voltage and current of 12-36 volts and 0-20 A DC, respectively. This architectural design can be utilized to develop an actual design and small scale implementation of the LVDC smart micro-grid system.

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Stratigraphic sequences and facies variability in the Lower Miocene to Pleistocene strata of the study area, northeast Malay Basin, Terengganu offshore, were investigated using the interpretation of 3-D high-resolution seismic data and profiles. Eight sequence boundaries (SB) were recognized in the studied formations due to the presence of variability of in the facies stacking pattern. The unconformity bounded early Lower Miocene to Recent succession in the northeast Malay Basin is subdivided into eight sequence boundaries or formations; the SB1, SB2, SB3, SB4, SB5, SB6, SB7 and SB8. These rock units were deposited in the variety of depositional environments including coastal fluvio-marine, inner neritic and holomarine environment. The stratigrahic sequences in the study area were determined by the difference of seismic reflection attribute including the amplitude strength, frequency and internal configuration. The sequences also characterized by the different of types of depositional environments.

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Availability of medium protocol rules make access to such networks that are shared to be accessed in an orderly manner. This allows all involved to share into a limited wireless bandwidth. Wireless channels have their own issues including carrier sensing, which depends on location, time among other issues. This article addresses the problems associated with scheduled access by delving deep and looking at such issues as energy consumption and MAC protocols output in wireless sensor networks. This article therefore analyzes MAC protocols specially developed for use in sensor networks. It is worth pointing out that MAC protocols are different from both scheduled and unscheduled protocols.

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Mobility environment leads to time varying frequency selective channel. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) be combined with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system to increases the system capacity on time varying channel. Time varying frequency selective MIMO channel estimation demands huge number of training signals since the system has huge number of channel coefficients. In practical, most of the channels are composed of a few dominant taps and large part of taps is zero or approximately zero. They are often called sparse multi-path channels. By exploiting the coherent sparsity of the multipath fading channels, Compressive Sensing (CS) based channel estimation method provides better estimation of sparse channel than the conventional estimation methods which are suitable for rich channels and also greatly decrease the pilot overhead burden. This paper evaluates the performance of CS based channel estimation methods for MIMO-OFDM systems over time varying frequency selective channel.

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Despite increasing data volumes much faster than compute power. This growth demands new strategies for processing and analyzing information. Organizations are determining that significant forecasting can be through sorting and analyze Big Data. Ever since a large amount of data is "amorphous", it should be structured in a manner which is appropriate for mining and succeeding analysis. Hadoop helps in structuring Big Data, and solves with solution for analytics purposes. Hadoop exploits a technique called Map Reduce to carry out this extensive analysis rapidly. In this paper, we provide an extensive survey of Map Reduce the popular open-source implementation Hadoop which can be obtained, while highlighting the various algorithms and computing selection by Map Reduce. We conclude the paper with a critical analysis of challenges that have not yet been fully met.

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The objective of this paper is to extract the review work related in the field of watermarking focusing exclusively on medical image watermarking. Medical imaging has impacted positively the health care system around the world by helping doctors perform visual diagnostics of the human body. Sharing this information digitally requires copyright protection which is offered using medical image watermarking researchers around the world. This review has two parts. First part embeds knowledge on medical image watermarking and second part extracts the performance of algorithms from the proposed literature to carry out watermarking of medical images. The performance of these methods is compared using normalized cross correlation coefficient and the algorithms were classified into non intelligence and intelligence based watermarking algorithms. This review concludes that intelligence and heuristic approaches for medical image watermarking give informative extracted cover medical images.

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This paper presents a new methodology for unit commitment (UC) using biogeography based optimization (BBO). The UC is an important optimization task in the daily operational planning of power system for determining the ON-OFF states of generating units that minimize the generation cost for a given time horizon. The BBO, inspired from the geographical distribution of biological species, searches for optimal solution through the migration and mutation operators. The proposed method divides the UC problem into several sub-problems, each representing an UC problem of an interval, and solves the each sub-problem using BBO. It suggests a repair mechanism for handling minimum-up/down and spinning reserve constraints. The simulation results on 10 unit test problem clearly indicate that the developed method is robust and computationally efficient.

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The problem of query optimization has been approached in several methods but suffers with the problem of accuracy. To overcome this issue and to improve the performance of our previous solution, we propose a multi level relational mapping algorithm in this paper. The method first identifies the relational objects and generates relational maps. From the relational maps the method identifies the objects and entity of query. Based on the above the method generates different rules to perform the query and computes the dependency measure for each part of the query. The use of relational map helps to identify the query dependency according to the object and to compute the dependency measure for each of the rule being produced. Finally a subset of dependency rule is produced as a result and the method improve the performance of rule generation and improves the performance of query optimization by scheduling the execution of query parts efficiently.

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In this paper, we study the behavior of the wind turbine at variable speed controlled by the control loops of ADRC (Active Disturbance Rejection Control) when a fault is affecting the grid frequency. Since the rotational speed is decoupled from the frequency by converters connecting the rotor and the grid, the inertial response of the system is substantially zero, and therefore does not naturally participate in the frequency setting. In this paper, we propose in this paper a control strategy that can, in case of frequency drop, release some of the kinetic energy stored in the turbine at the beginning of the fault and thus provide additional power to support the grid. The performance of this control strategy is also studied for the various values of the gain of the control loop of the inertial response of system. The dynamic model of this wind system based on a DFIG, the ADRC controllers and the control loop of inertial response of the system are simulated in Matlab-Simulink environment.

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We consider the boundary control problem for the nonlinear system describing steady flows of viscoelastic fluids of the Jeffreys kind in a bounded domain of (d=2 or 3). We study the existence of a weak solution minimizing a given cost functional. To prove the solvability of the control problem we construct a sequence of finite-dimensional approximating problems. For approximate solutions we obtain a priori estimates, which do not depend on the parameters of the approximation. This allows us to select a subsequence of approximate solutions that converges to some weak solution of the original problem. Using properties of the weak solutions and the cost functional, we obtain some sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal solutions.

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Lung cancer is the most common disease with greater morality rate. Computed Tomography (CT) images are used for early diagnosis of lung cancer with the help of CAD system. Selection of effective feature set and proper classifier for medical images where machine learning techniques are used is a challenging task. Texture analysis of computed tomography (CT) images is one of the important preliminary stages in the detection and classification for lung cancer. The image texture is characterized by Haralick texture with variety of statistical measures. The extracted texture feature values are used by a CAD to differentiate its type as benign or malignant. This paper aims to compare experimental results of 18 features extracted by using Gray Level Co occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and analyses the different classifiers that can be used for classification of nodule as benign or malignant. Measuring the statistical parameters of the nodule is crucial for determining the T stage of the nodule. This paper also analysis the statistical parameters and reported the contribution of minimal feature set for classification and staging. GLCM features are used for classification and Geometric features used are used for T staging. For these analysis 23 images dataset of different types of cancer is used.

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The power of human as a resource for project success is inevitable. In any firm every other resource surrounds the human resource thereby utilizing the resource for its full potential to deliver the right product at the right time. The main objective of this article is to investigate the relationship between communication and project success and to design novel techniques for formalizing person to person pairing based on interaction rates. A research model is constructed and a meta-heuristic Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approach is deployed which is inspired by the biological behaviour of ants for achieving the goal. The proposed model is tested over a small scale design based start-up firm as a pilot scale attempt and results infer higher stability and reliability of the model. The result of this method is compared with the classical assignment model wrapped by Hungarian Method (HM). The comparative analysis infers that ACO approach is a perfect blend and choice for sequential continuous communication while HM is a better choice for discrete communication. This also infers that the communication is a key attribute for project success and there exists a direct relationship between the two paradigms success and interaction.

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The success of mobile agents in e-learning environment has been well documented in literature. This research work attempts to propose an e-learning system architecture, which accommodates the tackling of certain pedagogical requirements of e-learners through the application of mobile agents. This research work also demonstrates that segregating different and restricted types of mobile agents will improve the computing performance of the system when compared with conventional client-server based e-learning systems. With strong footings on literature, this research proposes mobile agents that would serve the needs of the e-learners in providing appropriate learning objects in the form of pedagogically segregated e-contents called ‘objects’ that have already been stored as databases in the e-learning server. A collaborative agent in this e-learning server would invoke a separate/independent agent server located elsewhere, where from the mobile agents would originate. This research work presents experimental results obtained from simulation package for various trials (cases) of e-learner nodes and the three types of specific pedagogical requirements defined through the three types of instructional strategies namely ‘Factual’, ‘Procedural’ and ‘Solution’ which are handled by three independent mobile agents respectively. The segregated e-contents (objects) that are stored in the e-learning server would be searched for and delivered to the user nodes by these mobile agents. Four trial runs have been demonstrated and the documented values were computed based on Naïve Baye’s probability values. Naïve Baye’s theory has been applied so as to take the advantage of its conditional natures in terms of these three pedagogical components. The conditional probability ratios of these three are compared with the trend of reliability values of the required ratios of the three types of mobile agents. The novelty of the work is demonstrated through the suggestion of adaptation of these agents every time from previously obtained results. Important conclusions have been drawn from these experiments which will be of immense use to researchers and designers of e-learning systems as well as to mobile agent developers.

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In this paper, we focus on the development of a methodology for the performance of hospital supply chain via the three dimensions of cost, quality and safety. The first part of the article shows the interest of the hospital logistics in a hospital as well as the review of the literature on the assessment of performancer. The second part describes the implementation stages of our methodology. Nous finish our work by applying the decision support system in a hospital in Morocco.

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This paper dicussed comparison of three Digital Elevation Modelling (DEM) Interpolation methods, namely TIN, IDW, and KRIGING. The main objective of this research is to find which model can produce the best estimation for DEM construction when the same dataset is used for all of the methods. Two parameters are used to measure the accuracy of resulted DEM, which are the Mean Error and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The results from the DEM generation show that TIN consistently produce a higher Mean Error and RMSE compared to other methods, which indicate that this method has a relatively low accuracy when used to construct a DEM. On the other hand, IDW and KRIGING have a similar accuracy for constructing DEM. Therefore, another method of assessment such as visual assessment is recommended to evaluate which method is the most suitable to construct a DEM.

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This paper describes the design and implementation of dynamic and robust traffic management system based on fuzzy logic approach. Knowledge based system have been extensively adopted as approach for real time decision making system. As the conventional dynamic controllers were used sensors which are having certain limitations, so these limitations can be overcome by vision sensors i.e. camera. Also image and vision computing plays a important role in monitoring and measuring the traffic density on road. Problems were identified with the current traffic control system at the intersection on road and this necessitated the design and implementation of a new system to solve the congestion problems. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated with LabVIEW and MATLAB test bed. The results of extensive simulations using the proposed approach indicate that the system improves the average moving time and decrease the average waiting time than the controllers with conventional sensors.

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This paper discusses issues related to the modelling of forest fire extinguishing. The mathematical formulation of the interaction of a forest fire with a water barrier is presented. The evolution of fire and vegetation structure influence on the processes of evaporation is demonstrated. It was concluded that use of water barrier in the presence of a dense layer of low vegetation is ineffective in stopping fire spread.

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Mesoporous silica materials have emerged as promising platform as supporting materials for enzyme immobilization. However, a significant enhancement of cellulase enzyme activity entrapped inside silica pores remains a challenge. In this paper, we report cellulase enzymes immobilization on vinyl functionalized cubic mesoporous silica materials with different particle sizes and different vinyl concentration. Silica materials possess cubic mesostructured with two different sizes: micron size (around 8 µm) and nano size (around 300 nm) were made by using F127 surfactant at different acid concentrations. In addition, vinyl functionalization at different concentrations was also developed through co-condensation method. Vinyl functionalized nanoparticles showed significant improvements of enzyme activity, stability and reusability compared to the micron size particles. The increase of vinyl concentration with its hydrophobic characteristics within silica materials induced a high loading amount of cellulase enzymes. Vinyl functionalization created benign microenvironment for cellulase enzymes to perform its high activity. We found the benefit of using the vinyl functionalization and also the application of nanoparticles, compared to common large particle cubic mesoporous silica materials.

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A new approach about automated test generation presented. Original model gives new opportunities to generate well done educational tests. New software developed that gives ability to generate automatic tests just from books and educational manual. It can be made fast and without professional assistance.

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In hot and humid climates thermal discomfort is a major problem to the occupants of small residential houses especially when they are not equipped with air conditioners or provided with proper natural ventilation systems. Many research works indicate that, the energy consumption in residential sector amounts to a major portion in the total global energy consumption. In recent years, the issue of energy consumption modelling techniques in the building sector has been widely considered by architects and builders. Experimental studies in building energy usage and environmental analysis are very time consuming, expensive and require sophisticated sensors and instrumental techniques. Hence the building energy simulation is being increasingly used as an architectural design research tool, since it allows a detailed comfort and energy consumption evolutions. Powerful and affordable computing has made possible the detailed whole building energy simulations a reality. More number of software and web based tools are available for building energy computer simulation. Some widely used building simulation tools, technologies and their methodologies were reviewed and presented in this paper. Energy efficient buildings should maintain the best environment for human comfort, while minimizing the cost of energy. Many energy modelling approaches were emerging to cater for new design concepts towards energy efficient building and maintaining thermal comfort. Literature review on the concepts applied by many researchers, in different climates and in different places, for designing efficient and comfort residential buildings was done and presented in this paper.

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CPU caches are designed with fixed number of sets, associativity and line size. Some methods are proposed in the literature for certain combinations of variable cache sets, variable cache ways, variable cache lines. This paper gives a survey of significant results in this regard.

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Cloud computing is the process of using the network of remote hosted servers on the Internet. Cloud stores, manages and processes enormous amount of data without the use of local server or personal computers. The salient feature most share are on-demand scalability of highly available and reliable computing resources, secure access to metered services from anywhere and dislocation of data from inside of the organization to outside. While aspects of these features have been realized, still cloud computing remains a work in progress. Among them, one big challenge is about the security of data stored in cloud. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of cloud computing architecture and the security and privacy challenges involved. In specific, this paper deals with Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS) on the distributed cloud servers and also provides an effective solution to prevent those attacks by port lock mechanism using SFA algorithm (Server File Access algorithm).

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Concrete is the major building material largely used in building construction but it has many limitations with respect to its durability aspect. Cracks, the major reason for deterioration, occur due to various mechanisms like shrinkage, freeze and thaw action, mechanical tensile and compressive forces etc., lead to the failure of the structure. For enhancing the performance of concrete a new method of using bio mineralization in concrete is evolved. The calcite precipitating spore forming bacteria is introduced to concrete and when water comes in contact with the bacteria through the cracks it will react with it and produce calcium carbonate as a by product which heals the cracks. This type of concrete prepared with bacteria is called as Bacterial Concrete. A summary of the major research developments is outlined here.

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The operation of geothermal turbine plants is followed by a damage of working surfaces of metal and a formation of deposits in a ductal part. It leads to the destruction of power equipment’s elements, and also to the deceleration of turbines’ power and to the electric power generation at the geothermal power plant. A change of physical and chemical properties of the geothermal heat carrier by the means of the surface-active substances’ additives allows solving the problems mentioned above substantially. The developed criteria of a choice of the kind of surface-active substances provide the greatest efficiency of their application for the prevention of damages and formation of sediments in geothermal turbine plants. It is established on a criteria basis that the introduction of additives of a helamin to the geothermal heat carrier is a perspective way of the increase of geothermal turbine plants’ reliability and efficiency of operation.

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Over the world, the climate change is a major global concern. CO2 is the main cause of global warming, and at least 90% of CO2 emission results from the combustion of fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) for energy generation. Hence, clean energy included renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal) has been the focal point of most regulations of governments to aim at greenhouse gas reduction. The Mediterranean region encompassing Europe, North Africa and Middle East has enormous potential in solar energy. It has abundant solar radiation, cheap land and high electricity demand. So it could make this region the global hub for CSP generation. This paper explores the market potential of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The paper covers recent CSP trends and discusses in detail the CSP market development, forecasts and outlook of CSP deployment for electricity generation in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

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In the fast growing world understanding a situation is highly dynamic process. The decisions are to be made in an instantaneous fashion following different stages of risk and ambiguity. Project managers and leaders are forced to make such critical decisions that change the effect of the company. One such critical decision that involves rationalism and logical diagnosing is the process of choosing a feasible employee for a given project. The main objective of this research work is to propose strategies for optimally electing employees for an effective team formation and to understand the relationship between team’s success and given project’s success. The method adopted for achieving the central theme of the article is to develop a novel research model that wraps three dominant machine learning approaches to form a triangular hybridization for a better quality team formation. The three methods inspired are Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Decision Tree (DT), and a proposed method called Ensemble Decision Tree (EDT) which is a boosted decision tree using logit boost algorithm that are embedded into the proposed research model for achieving the desired goal. As a pilot scale attempt the model is validated by training and testing it over 474 freelancers from leading sites. The results infer that there exist a direct dependence of team and project success and the proposed EDT approach outperforms other two methods yielding an accuracy of about 87.34% in predicting the unknown sample as a valid or an invalid agent for the current project under consideration.

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Risk assessment is a process of categorizing and measurement of risk related outcomes from a specific incident and in a particular scenario. While risk itself is considered as the combination of likelihood and severity of the consequences of hazards. Typically, the qualitative approach of risk based inspection (RBI) is applied in oil and gas industries to measure the risk levels of hazards. But with this qualitative approach sometime the risk ranking ties among the different factors can lead to problem in selecting the most critical factor. To address the problem, this study aims to develop a fuzzy logic-base risk assessment model using a quantitative approach of RBI that will assist to mitigate the risk ties in risk ranking process of hazard. In this proposed model, fuzzy membership functions and ranges have been assigned for likelihood, severity of consequences and for total risk levels. A case study on ammonia hazard is presented to demonstrate the vitality of the proposed fuzzy risk assessment model with samples of four categories (people, environment, asset and reputation) from an oil and gas industry. The outcomes of this study indicate that the developed model has a strong potential application in oil and gas industry in assessing the severity levels of risk, and resolving risk ranking ties.

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LED (light emitting diode) converts over 80 percent of the input power into heat. This heat increases the junction temperature, which could result in reduced lifetime of the LED due to an excessive thermal load. This study aims to optimize the shape of a heatsink in order to develop a LED signal bulb that can replace the conventional halogen bulb equipped in vehicles. To this end, the thermal performance is predicted through a numerical analysis and verified with a prototype of the LED signal bulb for vehicles. A numerical analysis shows that Case 3 provides the most efficient thermal performance; it is also verified through experiments that the input power for the LED can be increased up to 6W without problems.

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The energy consumption of buildings depends not only on the envelope, orientation and the performance of its equipment but also depends on external environments that may be under the influence of Urban Heat Island, hence the need to assess the impact of this phenomenon on the energy consumption of buildings in Moroccan urban design, in this study three types of residential buildings (Economic Villa, Medium Class building and Economic building) are modeled and simulated by the TRNSYS V17 software in Fez climatic zone, Morocco, using two types of meteorological data, that provided by the suburban meteorological station and the urban data obtained by the Town Energy Balance model coupled with a turbulence closure model evaluated using experimental data for the city of Fez, then the impact of external building geometry expressed by the aspect ratio on cooling and heating demand is investigated for the three buildings types. The simulation results show that an average of 17.7 % of under sizing in annual energy demand is obtained due to urban heat island effects and the aspect ratio must be equal to 1.85, 2.14 and 1.93 for Economic Villa, Economic building and for Medium Class building respectively in order to insure minimal energy need.

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The electroencephalography is a method used for measuring the electrical impulses that are generated on the cerebral cortex by using electrodes located in different positions, but keeping a standard distribution. In this work, EEG signals related to speech process were acquired by the Emotiv Epoc®, this device is a low cost electroencephalogram that have 16 electrodes but only six were used (F7, F8, FC5, FC6, T7, T8). The aim of this research is to analyze if there are measurable and quantifiable differences among neutral EEG signals and vowels EEG signals from to imagine or to think any vowel by using DSP techniques, like Filters or Fourier Transform, along with statistical method that allow verify the truthfulness of previously mentioned difference. The aim of this research is to analyze if there are measurable and quantifiable differences among neutral EEG signals and EEG signals from the imagination or the thinking of any Spanish vowel by using DSP techniques, like Filters or Fourier Transform, along with statistical methods that allow verify the truthfulness of the previously mentioned difference. The analysis performed in this work makes evident the differences among the thinking of five Spanish vowels and the control signal, concluding that the recognizing of these is possible due to measurable features that are different from each other.

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The increasing demand for high speed electronic circuits leads the printed circuit board designers to face more electromagnetic coupling and radiation problems. The guard shield is one of the methods to minimize the electromagnetic coupling between adjacent microstriplines on a high speed printed circuit board. A novel U shaped guard shield is proposed to reduce far end crosstalk and near end crosstalk. This paper analyses the performance of various guard intervening schemes between two signal lines using FDTD method. The numerical results are verified by Ansoft HFSS simulation results. The U shaped guard traces reduces both near end crosstalk and far end crosstalk by approximately 45% than conventional guard traces.

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Signal detection is important in sonar and underwater digital communication. Optimum signal detection in underwater acoustic noise (UWAN) can be achieved with the knowledge of noise statistics. The assumption of Gaussian noise allows the use of linear correlation (LC) detectors. However, the non-Gaussian nature of UWAN results in the poor performance of such detectors. This study presents an empirical model of the characteristics of UWAN in the shallow waters of an acoustic underwater channel. Four detectors for the detection of known signals in UWAN are compared: locally optimal (LO) detector, sign correlation (SC) detector, LC detector, and the proposed Gaussian noise injection detector (GNID). The performance of the detectors is evaluated according to the detection probability (P_D) and receiver operating characteristic curves. Given a probability of false alarm ?(P?_FA) rate of 0.01 and P_D of 90 percent, the energy-to-noise ratios of the LO detector, SC detector, GIND, and LC detector are 8.854, 10.8, 10, and 12 dB, respectively. Among the four detectors, the LO detector achieves the best performance, whereas the LC detector shows the weakest performance in the presence of non-Gaussian noise.

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In this paper, a dynamic clustering algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks, the MADCA has been proposed. The proposed clustering methodology MADCA is hierarchical, dynamic and energy-efficient algorithm for mobile wireless sensor network. MADCA forms multiple clusters with each cluster having one cluster head and two deputy cluster heads. The sensor nodes start collecting the data only when the base station comes in range with the cluster head. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated through simulations and the results have been compared with the existing LEACH-M algorithm. MADCA shows drastic reduction in average communication energy when compared to LEACH-M. The network lifetime has been found to be greatly prolonged in MADCA. The node death has been found to be greatly reduced in the proposed algorithm. Thus the proposed clustering methodology has been found to be greatly useful when both the sensor nodes as well as the base station are mobile.

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The fracture toughness of dissimilar aluminum alloys butt-joined by Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is studied. The aluminum grades used in this project were 5083 and 6061. The feasibility of using conventional belt-driven milling machine to perform FSW was also investigated by adding a custom-made compact clamping jig and FSW tool bit to the machine set up, and by varying machine parameters such as tool rotational speed (?, rpm), tool traverse speed (v, mm/min), plunge depth (mm) and tool tilt angle. Premilinary FSW runs were done with the milling machine to modify it for the purpose of FSW. Two types of test were carried out which were tensile test and single edge notch tension (SENT) test. Both tests were performed on a Universal Testing Machine (UTM). By visual inspection, tunnel defect was seen in SENT specimens and in the dissimilar grade FSW joint for tensile testing specimen. The similar grade FSW joints performed less than their base material in terms of tensile strength. The critical stress intensity factor (SIF) for the welded specimens were found to be lower than critical SIF values known from literature for their respective materials.

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Carrots are healthy vegetables but this agricultural products have low value when they are sold as a raw commodity. To become value-added agricultural products, the value of raw carrots have to be increased through the addition of ingredients or processes that make them more attractive to the buyer. Increasing the added value of the carrots requires the development of food products that considering the voice of the customer. The aim of the research was to design food products based on carrots desired by the customer. The development of product design used Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method especially the product design phase. Candied carrot and carrot syrup were the products had been found in the previous research conducted to find the carrot based products most wanted by the customers. The research had developed the House of Quality matrix, whose technical requirements were used to develop product design matrix in this research. The product design of the two products were developed using QFD with two different developments, one for the product and one for the package. All of the critical parts resulted in this research, although each of them has different priorities, were important to develop the new products.

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Loop sizes are critical to the transfer efficiencies of inductive coupling implementations of wireless power transfer. This contribution is a numerical study of the impact of separation distances between coupled loops on the optimal size-ratios of square loops. Closed-form analytic expressions are developed as a basis for a parametric analysis of link performance parameters. The study leads to the development of a simple design equation to enable the direct determination of optimal relative sizing of coupled loops at required separation distances. The performance enhancement arising from the use of analytically-derived loop-size relationships is confirmed through full-wave electromagnetic simulations.

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The rapid growth of Android-based mobile devices technology in recent years has increased the proliferation of mobile devices throughout the community at large. The ability of Android mobile devices has become similar to its desktop environment; users can do more than just a phone call and short text messaging. These days, Android mobile devices are used for various applications such as web browsing, ubiquitous services, social networking, MMS and many more. However, the rapid growth of Android mobile devices technology has also triggered the malware author to start exploiting the vulnerabilities of the devices. Based on this reason, this paper explores mobile malware detection through an n-gram system call sequence which uses a sequence of system call invoked by the mobile application as the feature in classifying a benign and malicious mobile application. Several n-gram values are evaluated with Linear-SVM classifier to determine the best n system call sequence that produces the highest detection accuracy and highest True Positive Rate (TPR) with low False Positive Rate (FPR).

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This paper presents an inverted Koch fractal dual band dipole antenna with harmonic suppression capability. A double-sided Koch fractal dipole antenna incorporated with a tapered balun and operating at 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz was designed. Two rectangular defected ground structures were embedded on the triangular tapered balun to suppress undesired higher-order mode frequencies and enhance antenna performance. Results showed that the antenna functions at the desired frequencies (0.9 and 2.4 GHz) and eliminates higher-order harmonics (3.6 and 4.7 GHz). The antenna was simulated using the electromagnetic simulation software CST Microwave Studio. The simulated and experimental results were compared and good agreement was observed. The proposed antenna design presents a small size and low fabrication complexity.

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As the price of the copper increased due to high demand globally which used in various sectors, it become a major factor in boasting cable stealing activities particularly telecommunication cables since it is low risk, less hazard and easy to cut. The present invention relates to anti-theft monitoring apparatus for cables, especially for telephone lines, electrical cables and other communication lines, and more particularly, relates to the apparatus for detecting the cable theft by sensing the cables vibration. This system applies combination of vibration sensor, GSM and GPS module in order to form a complete solution for cable theft. The system able to detect the theft incident by recognising the vibration pattern made by cutting tools such as hacksaw, cutter and dagger. It also able to give information such as movement and location of the stolen cable.

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As the MOSFET’s size is expected to be shrunk every year, it is difficult to mitigate the short channel effect (SCE) issues arising in the device. The conventional MOSFET’s structure is no longer practical to apprehend these types of issues, especially for a device with a very small gate length (Lg). The SCE issues happen due to the reduction of the gate length (Lg), which causes the distance between the source and the drain region to become too close to each other. As a consequence, it causes the charge sharing effects between source and drain region that eventually leads to higher subthreshold swing (SS). A steep SS value around 55 to 65 mV/dec is desired in MOSFET device for faster switching operation. Therefore, a new architecture of Vertical Double Gate (DG) MOSFET device is proposed to circumvent these issues. Besides that, the process parameter variations in the device are also considered as one of the important factors that significantly affect the SS value. In this paper, an attempt to analyze the variability of multiple process parameters towards the SS value in 12nm gate length (Lg) vertical DG-MOSFET device has been made. At the end of the experiments, it was found that the most dominant process parameter that contributed a large effect on SS value was halo implantation tilt angle. The lowest possible value of SS was observed to be 62.52 mV/dec with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -35.83 dB.

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A novel compact proximity coupled microstrip antenna harmonic suppression with resonant at 2.45 GHz of rectenna application is presented in this paper using inexpensive FR4 substrate. An unbalanced slot has been fit on the radiating element to block the harmonic signals and achieve circularly polarized antenna. The evolution of the harmonic rejecting techniques began with a circular slot on the circular patch antenna followed by another circular slot positioned on the other side of radiating patch. Adequate suppressions of the second and third harmonics are obtained with minimum reflection coefficients up to greater than -3 dB respectively. The return loss of proposed design yields -29.16 dB at 2.45 GHz and offer high gain with 6.23 dB with bandwidth around 125 MHz. The proposed antenna also gives 24% size reduction compare with conventional circular patch. From the simulation result, the proposed antenna can be a good choice in the rectenna system for future wireless power transmission application.

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The integration of metamaterial superstrate with high-quality cavity 3-poles stacked filter with patch antenna is presented. The metamaterial inspired behavior is obtained using split ring resonators (SRR) printed on the dielectric substrate Rogers 5880 which is located 12 mm from the top of the filter/antenna. The effects of the metamaterial structure on the vertically stacked filter/antenna performances at X-band with resonant frequency 10.18 GHz are investigated. The gain of the filter/antenna system improved from 6.99 dB to 8.22 dB while the radiation pattern become more directive without distorting the filtering response.

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Ample of research has been carried out on the topic software metrics. Lots of metrics have been projected and validated in the field of software engineering especially for software development. However, metrics that related to software project management are still need to explore more especially from the industrial or practitioners. Identification of metrics for software project management may guide the project managers to manage and control the software projects. This is indirectly may reduce the software project failures in the industrial. This paper presents the processes and activities that used to identifying the performance criteria and the related metrics that can be used to monitor the performance of software projects. The aim of this paper is to identify the performance criteria and related metrics from the perspectives of practitioners. We carried out structured interview sessions among project managers from Malaysian Public Sector to accomplish this task. The results of this study are a set of performance criteria and metrics that can be a guideline to manage and control the software projects development towards to its success.

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A vehicular network topology is very dynamic compared to traditional mobile ad hoc network because of the movement and speed of the vehicles. Thus, a vehicular network is always partitioned due to this reason, especially if the vehicle density is low. In this situation where a direct end-to-end path between source and destination can be considered as non-existent, a regular ad hoc routing protocol with complete path discovery mechanism is not feasible since the routing path is usually disconnected due to the intermittent nature of network links. To overcome this problem, vehicles can be used as carriers to deliver messages using store-and-carry forwarding whenever forwarding option via wireless transmission is not available. It has been ascertained by the majority of researches in VANET that the carry and forward procedure can significantly affect an end-to-end delivery delay. This paper focuses on developing a proactive multi-copy routing protocol with carry and forward mechanism that is able to deliver packets from a source vehicle to a destination vehicle at a small delivery delay. The paper emphases on replicating data packets and distribute them to different relays. The proposed protocol creates enough diversity to reach the destination vehicle with a small end-to-end delivery delay while keeping low routing overhead by routing multiple copies independently. The simulation results in an urban grid model show that the proposed multi-copy forwarding protocol is able to deliver packets at small delivery delay compared to a single-copy forwarding algorithm without having to rely on real time traffic data or flooding mechanism.

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The existing algorithms of satellite measurements processing at estimation of mobile objects navigational parameters are employing either different modifications of the least-squares method or multifarious options of Kalman’s filter. The last method requires for compulsory knowledge of motion equations of each specific object. In this article we used another approach- application of methods of stochastic filtering for processing of satellite measurements. In the most general case of their use will allow to increase considerably the precision of navigational parameters determination owing to withdrawal from different simplifying allowances (linearization, additional information on object, on noises, etc.), used in existing algorithms of satellite navigation. For solving this task a number models were synthesised: invariant continuous model of an object navigational parameters variation, spatial model of trajectory, great circle model of trajectories in the Greenwich CS, loxodromic model of trajectories in the Greenwich CS, invariant model of object navigational parameters on the spatial trajectories. For illustration of efficiency of the offered approach it was carried out the modelling of filtering algorithm for combined equations "object-observer" by method of Runge -Kutte of the 4th order. An object motion was set on great circle curve and the law of object velocity module variation: V= 10 (1+sin 0.005t) m/sec. As a model of noise measuring the additive WGN with zero average of distribution and intensity was employed for: coded measuring - (10m) 2sec, the Doppler measuring - (0.25m/sec) 2sec. On termination of time interval of modelling operation the peak errors of components of coordinate vector are less then 4 m, which testifies to possibility of very effective practical use of the offered approach. The research results outlined in this paper were obtained with financial support from Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, as part of the execution of the project entitled “Establishment of high-tech production for the manufacture of complex reconfigurable systems of high-precision positioning of objects on the basis of satellite systems of navigation, local networks of laser and microwave beacons and technology MEMS”, pursuant to decree of the government of the Russian Federation No 218 issued on April 09, 2010. The researches were carried out in SFU.

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The delegation of the Egyptian National Seismic Network (ENSN) is to determine rapidly the location and size of all destructive earthquakes worldwide and to immediately disseminate this information to concerned national and international authorities, scientists, and the public. An earthquake monitoring system consists of many electronic devices, one of these vital devices is the digitizer which converts analogue to digital signal. The Digitizer consist of three main modules, the first module is front-end, the second module is the parallel to digital converter using an over sampling technique with decimation filter and finally the packetization module. The Egyptian National Seismic Network (ENSN) is a fully automated and network system dedicated to the digital learning and real-time processing of seismological data, as considerably as the speedy exchange of earthquake data. This paper will focus on designing the decimation filter. The current decimation filter consists of three stages. The total decimation factor is 300. Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter can reach more in effect performance with lower computational complexity and lower cumulative delay. The primary goal of this paper is optimizing the order of each stage using genetic algorithm. Finally both designs can be implemented on FPGA kit and a comparison between these two designs can be done. As a consequence, the computational complexity and the cumulative delay reduced to be 3052100 multiplications per second and 0.12 seconds respectively. The operating frequency of the modified decimation filter reached 8 MHz with power consumption of 211 mW on FPGA, VIRTEX7 xc7v585t-ffg1157.

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This paper is to address a 3-dimensional affordable phased array antenna for multibeam surveillance and tracking radar to support a Fire Control System. This 2m x 2m x 2m phased array antenna system is implemented at S-band and equipped with multi-beam forming capability for 3D electronic scanning without mechanical motors. A beamformer based on two stage Butler matrix for azimuth and elevation control is implemented and integrated to 16 x 16 cross dipole array antenna. Furthermore, to emulate the gun turret functions, we also prepared a mini launcher model for testing purposes to determine the effectiveness of the Fire Control System to acquire, track and lock the target.

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Single-band Star Geometric Pattern Artificial Magnetic Conductors (Star GP AMC) resonated at 2.45 GHz has been presented in this paper. The simulation has been done to the basic star AMC design and Star GP AMC design. In this study, the reflection phase bandwidth, angular stability and band gap appearance were analyzed. The results reveal that the Star GP AMC has miniaturized about 8% with 3.27% reflection phase bandwidth and have significant angular stability from 00 to 600 incidence angles. It was also found out that no band gap appeared on frequency range of the resonance frequency.

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This paper presents an investigation of the Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) performance on flexible substrates. Four types of flexible substrates are proposed which are Fast Film, Rogers RO3010, Taconic TLY-5, and Denim Jeans. Each type of substrates has different values of dielectric constant and thickness. The value of transmission and reflection of each substrate are evaluated in different FSS frequency response. The structure is integrated at FSS frequency response, 5.8GHz. The best value of transmission is about -43.15dB and the reflection is almost around -0.04dB which evaluated by the FSS structure using Fast Film as a substrate. However the structure operated in narrow bandwidth around 4.66% compared to Taconic TLY-5. This FSS design structure showed excellent performance when used for wireless local area network (WLAN).

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Microgrid is an aggregation of multiple distributed generators like renewable energy sources, conventional generators, and energy storage systems that provide electric power to consumers. It operates in two modes namely grid connected mode and islanded mode. The transition of microgrid from islanded mode to grid connected mode poses crucial grid synchronization issues. This is a key challenge to protection engineers. This paper proposes the implementation of 9 no’s 2/2.5 MVA low voltage (LV)- Diesel Generator (DG) sets synchronization in a real-time microgrid network using bus coupler logic to restrict the fault current vide programmable logic controller (PLC) during utility power failure based on load requirement.

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A Single Pole Double Throw (SPDT) switch design with transmission line stub resonator for application of WiMAX and LTE in 3.5 GHz band is proposed in this paper. The transmission line stub resonator is an open stub with quarter wave of the electrical length. A PIN diode was used in the resonator to reconfigure the resonator between bandstop and allpass responses. The implementation of the transmission line stub resonators in SPDT switch design was discussed together with the circuit operation. The result showed that the isolation of SPDT switch with transmission line stub resonator was higher than 30 dB in the 3.5 GHz band compared to the conventional design and it was verified with measurement results.

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A rough set is a mathematical tool to handle imprecise and imperfect information. It has been increasing in popularity recently in Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) and Machine Learning application. Rough set is one of the techniques used in KDD data mining. Data mining is an approach to extract useful information from a massive database for business purposes, for example, classifying customer churn. Churn is customer behaviour to terminate a service in favour of a competitor. Identifying customers who are likely to churn in the early stage will help firms to increase profitability since acquiring new customers is costly compared to retaining existing one. Limited research in investigating customer churn using machine learning techniques had led this research to discover the potential of rough set theory to enhance customer churn classification. This paper proposes a rough set predictive classification framework for customer churn in Telecommunication Companies. Experimental results show that the classification model is able to classify up to 83% to 98% accuracy for customer churn dataset. Overall, this indicates that the rough set theory is effective to classify customer churn compared to traditional statistical predictive approaches.

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This paper presents a comparison among the different classifiers such as Naïve Bayes (NB), decision tree (J48), Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Multi-Layer Perception (MLP), and Instance Based for K-Nearest neighbor (IBK) on water quality for datasets of Kinta River, Perak, Malaysia. Classification accuracy and confusion matrix were used in this research based on a 10-fold cross validation method. Then, a fusion at classification level between these classifiers was applied to get the highest accuracy and see which the most suitable multi-classifier approach for the datasets. The water quality datasets were taken from the East Coast Environmental Research Institute (ESERI) of University of Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA). The water quality classes were evaluated using 10 factor indices, namely DO Sat, DO Mgl, BOD Mgl, COD Mgl, TS Mgl, DO Index, AN Index, SS Index, Class, and Degree of Pollution. The results showed that the classification using fusion between IBK+MLP, IBK+SMO, and IBK+MLP+NB+SMO was superior to the other classifiers that achieved the higher accuracy with the same percentage of 93.98%. Thus, using multi-classifier approaches can achieve better accuracy than the single ones.

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Taguchi method is a statistical approach to optimize the design parameters and improve the performance at a low cost. In this paper, Taguchi method is used as an attempt to analyze and optimize the Microring Resonators (MRRs) design, a multiple application device in optical communication systems. The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer was selected as the medium of waveguide construction, with four control factors considered, namely width of rings and channels, radii of the microring, upper rib waveguide height and gap size. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) was adopted to analyze significant trends occurring on the Quality Factor (Q) and insertion loss (IL) performances under different sets of control factor combinations. Optimum parameter values were obtained and the confirmation experiments were also carried out. Upon optimization, the Q value improved to 1550 from 786 and IL decreased to 0.03 dB from 0.27 dB. It is verified via Taguchi analysis that not only the design constraints of the Microring Resonator can be identified, the performance of the design can be enhanced as well.

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In this paper, a novel planar microfluidic microwave sensor based on a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) for materials characterization is proposed. The design structure is simulated to analyse the effect of electric flux (electric fields distribution) on the several common liquids. The resonator sensor was integrated with quartz microcapillary which is functioning as sensing tube for characterizing solvents. The SIW resonator sensor is designed at 2 GHz and it demonstrates the changes of resonant frequency as well as the amount of electric flux based on different type of liquid samples. Finally, the operation of the sensor with presence of liquid samples such as water, ethanol, and methanol are performed and reported. This type of microwave sensor is useful for chemical, bio-medical and pharmaceutical applications which are related in materials characterization.

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Distributed energy resources (DER) integrated microgrid provides power with reliability and power quality. Suitable selective protection with speed is a key challenge in microgrid. In this paper, microprocessor based relays (MPBR) are employed in a real-time Information Technology (IT) campus microgrid system. The relay settings and coordination of the MPBR is varied as per varying load demand of 50%, 75% and 100% in the campus microgrid as and when occupied. This ensures that relay setting is done to the requirement and only the faulty circuit is isolated from the healthy portion of microgrid network for both phase and ground faults. To achieve this, suitable relay setting and coordination analysis is done vide ETAP (Electrical Transient Analyzer Program) to ensure that the relay curves in a circuit are not overlapping with each other.

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Conventional planar inductor has large area, low inductance, low quality factor which is not suitable for present RFIC’s technology. For RFIC applications we need low area, high inductance and high quality factor. This paper presents fractal inductor having high inductance of nearly 13% greater than conventional on-chip 3-D inductor with moderate quality factor values. This inductor occupies small on-chip size area of 10×10 µm2 on silicon suitable for RFIC’s applications. Fractal inductor performance is analysed by considering relative circuit model developed by conducting experiment in IE3D EM field solver. Due to its small size this inductor is operated at higher order frequency (10-100) GHz range that suits for RF applications. By applying the concept of fractal geometry, the length of conductor increases. Different geometries are available for fractal inductor design but, in this paper zigzag style of conductor run is considered with single iteration for one turn and two turns.

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Information-Centric Networking, which is also called Content-Centric Networking (CCN), is the vowing candidate for the Future Internet. ICN has many aspects, e.g., Naming, Routing, and Caching, etc. but in the past five years, caching gained a tremendous attraction by the research community. In ICN, caching is of two types, i.e., off-path caching and on-path caching. On-path caching is also known as in-network caching, where routers cache content items for some time before sending them to the desired destination(s). For ICN caching, many strategies have been proposed, for example, Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE), Leave Copy Down (LCD), Centrality-based caching, Most Popular Caching (MPC), and many more. The authors of MPC claim that it outperforms all existing strategies, however, it utilizes maximum memory during content caching. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for content caching, named Content Eviction Mechanism (CEM), and compare our results with LCE and MPC in OPNET Modeler 18.0. Our simulation results show that CEM predominantly outperforms LCE and MPC.

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Two years of rain rate and attenuation measurement in Malaysia is presented. The analysis shows that the attenuation follows the power law and linear law for rain rates below and above a certain cut-off rain rate respectively. A simple Two-Part model is proposed for consideration in the tropical regions.

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This paper is part of an ongoing work aiming to build an accurate Arabic sounds recognizer for teaching and learning purposes. Early phases of this work were dedicated to the development of a particular sound database from recitations of the Holy Quran to cover classical Arabic sounds; speech signals of this sound database were manually segmented and labelled on three levels: word, phoneme, and allophone. Next, two baseline recognizers were built to validate the speech segmentation on both phoneme and allophone levels and also to test the feasibility of the sounds' recognition intended target. This current phase considers the development of an elaborated recognizer, by considering the basic sounds and looking for their distinctive features (e.g. duration, energy, etc.) to determine which ones will be particularly helpful to identify the phonological variation of the basic sound. Here, we present the first results of the basic sounds recognition obtained so far.

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This paper presents an important overview on the RF switches for wide-band, broad-band and multi-band RF front-end of wireless communications. This paper is mainly focused on the discussion of the circuit configuration of RF switches that using Time Division Duplex (TDD) switching in wireless communications such as WiMAX, WiFi and LTE. The previous research works on the RF switches for wide-band, broad-band and multi-band RF front-end are discussed in term of technology used, circuit design, performance and its applications.

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Implantable medical device (IMD) is one of the latest developments in biomedical telemetry which allows the transmission of physiological signal at a distance either through wired or wireless communication. Commonly, this IMD is used at medical implant communication service (MICS) band. But, it have limited range of communication and suffers from low data rates which make low quality and precision of the patient record. So, this paper proposes an implantable planar antenna which operates at UWB frequency band. The total dimension of the antenna is 25 mm × 30 mm and by adding two strips at right top of antenna patch will increase the performance of the antenna. The results indicate when the antenna is embedded inside the human arm, the return loss is slightly shifted to the right. Presence of the conductive material in the human arm, the antenna gain is reduced to be negative due to the losses from the signal towards human arm tissue.

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This paper studies cryptography algorithms to be implemented into the SCADAKratos application of thermal vacuum chamber (TVC) system. SCADAKratos application is used to control and monitor the operations of the TVC which is a satellite test equipment that is located at the Malaysia Space Centre, Banting, Malaysia. The security features had been put aside during the development as it was claimed that there is no threat to the system since the system is operated internally. However, during service and troubleshooting by the manufacturer, the system will be accessed through public network. Besides that, the system also can be accessed remotely during operation for control and monitoring purpose. In addition, the testing data results also need to be transferred to the customer through the internet as it is easier and faster. The remote access through public network will cause the TVC system to face a risk to any threat and attack. Therefore, the implementation of cryptography algorithm into TVC system is needed in order to secure and protect the system from unauthorized access. This paper explains the architecture of SCADAKratos application of TVC system and how the cryptography algorithms could be implemented through this application. Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) and AES algorithm (AES) are chosen as the encryption technique which will be applied in the TVC system. Simulation result shows that this technique is feasible for the mentioned implementation.

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A psychoacoustic model is well established in an audio coding. A psychoacoustic quite threshold is a basic tool on audio coding. This paper investigates on a quantitative experimental impact on almost lossless image compression based on the concept of psychovisual threshold. This paper proposes a practical image coding on a standard resolution two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT). A psychovisual model is presented following the psychoacoustic quite threshold as a just noticeable difference instead of a quantization table. An experimental result on small and large rectangular images shall be presented. This framework can easily produce higher visual quality images at a competitive compression rate in comparison to an extended adaptive JPEG compression standard.

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In agriculture field, headland turning is one of the important aspects in controlling the unmanned vehicle to move from one row to another autonomously. Therefore, this paper presents the headland turning based on the pre-defined path using Bezier curve with optimum path and minimal navigation and orientation control schemes. Real-time experiments have been carried out in the laboratory environment with an experimental unmanned mobile robot. The deviation between the planned path and the real-time trajectory is recorded to analyze the efficiency of the proposed work. It is found that the average error is larger compared to other approach due to direct connection of the Bezier curve. Nevertheless, it is suitable to be implemented on a small-scaled unmanned vehicle in a narrow headland with a simple and optimum turning scheme.

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The desirable features of any voltage source used for electrical impedance tomography applications are: accurate shape of the sinusoidal waveform, constant amplitude of the signal and low output impedance throughout a wide frequency bandwidth. AD9850 synthesizes a pure, programmable sinusoidal waveform up to 5 MHz. The spectrum analyses provides the proof of a stable frequency agile voltage source around 14 dBm for electrical impedance tomography applications and beyond the beta dispersion range at 10 dB attenuation.

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In this paper, parametric analysis of miniature on-chip 3-D inductor is presented. The effect of conductor width, spacing between conductors and number of turns of inductor on Quality factor (Q-factor), inductance and Self-resonant frequency (SRF) are studied. Improvement in percentage increase of Q-factor is due to increase in conductor width. It can be found that ~72% of on-chip area reduction is observed when compared with conventional inductor design. Effective Q-factor and inductance are to be verified experimentally through dynamic variation of different parameters over the desired frequency range. The dimension of inductor considered for analysis is 100 µm ×100 µm, suitable for improved inductor design in high frequency RF circuits.

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Long Term Evolution (LTE) is well known as a cellular network that can support very high data rates in diverse traffic conditions. One way of achieving it is through packet scheduling which is the key scheme of Radio Resource Management (RRM) for LTE traffic processing that is functioning to allocate resources for both frequency and time dimensions. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a new scheduling scheme and its performance is compared with the Proportional Fair (PF) and Round Robin (RR) downlink schedulers for LTE by utilizing LTE Downlink System Level Simulator. The proposed new scheduling algorithm, namely the Modified-PF scheduler divides a single subframe into multiple time slots and allocates the resource block (RB) to the targeted User Equipment (UE) in all time slots for each subframe based on the instantaneous Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) feedback received from UEs. Simulation results show that the Modified-PF scheduler provides the best performance in terms of throughput and spectral efficiency with comparale fairness as compared to RR and PF schedulers. Although PF scheduler has the best fairness index, the Modified-PF scheduler provides a better compromise between the throughput/spectral efficiency and fairness. This shows that the newly proposed scheme improves the LTE output performances while at the same time maintains minimal required fairness among the UEs.

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This paper reports the design and experimental characterization of a dual-band rectifier for RF energy scavenging. The proposed circuit achieves comparable performances at 1.8 GHz and 2.45 GHz (GSM and ISM bands) for the wireless sensor network (WSN) system. The efficiency of RF-DC conversion can be improve by influence of the rectifying circuit. The analysis is conducted using ADS simulation version 2011, to determine the dc output voltage as well as the efficiency of the rectifier. The results show the rectifier efficiencies around 74.6% at 2.45 GHz and 78.06% at 1.8 GHz. DC output voltages is 6.7 V for simulation, while for measurement the output result is 5.2 V at input signal 20 dBm. The resulting rectifier has shown good effect of input power, load changes and matching circuit with single stub impedance matching, multi stage Wilkinson power combiner and voltage doubler to implement the dual band operation. This study is useful to provide understanding on the optimum technique to design dual-band rectifying circuit for RF energy scavenging. RF signal is used to powered the rectifier including the two frequencies of interest.

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In this paper, the performance analysis in terms of receiver sensitivity is presented by comparing three recent electrical based multiplexing techniques; Multi Slot Amplitude Coding (MSAC), Duty Cycle Division Multiplexing (DCDM) and 4-Pulse Amplitude Modulation (4-PAM). A 30 Gbit/s back-to-back configuration of the optical receiver model with optical pre-amplifier for these techniques have been investigated by considering an optical amplifier and receiver noise. The results show that MSAC technique achieves significantly better receiver sensitivity compared to DCDM and 4-PAM. As an alternative electrical multiplexing technique, we believe that MSAC has good potential to be adopted in future cost sensitive applications of optical communication system.

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This paper presents a design of Ultra Wideband Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) with Negative Feedback and multi-section matching network implementing on Microstrip design technique. The design started with selecting a transistor which is Super-low noise InGaAs HEMT MGF4937AM transistor that support ultra-wideband frequencies. In order to achieve ultra-wideband LNA, two different techniques which implementing negative feedback and multisection matching. The uses of negative feedback would degrade the gain while increasing the stability of the system. However, this problem can be overcome by introducing cascaded topology which can increase the gain while leaving the system stable. This LNA design is based on Rogers 4350B microstrip characteristic designed using Advanced Design System (ADS) software. The LNA provides an input return loss (S11) which less than -10 dB and the gain (S21) more than 15 dB and noise figure less than 4dB. UWB LNA can be used on several types of application such as wireless sensor and personal area networks, ground penetrating radars, and medical applications.

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Recently, wireless communication has been a crucial part of our daily life. Hence, this study focuses on RF energy harvesting where a small amount of the electrical power is generated to drive circuits in wireless communication electronics devices. This paper presents an optimum design of microstrip rectangular 2x2 patch array antenna with air gap and integrated with a double stage rectifying circuit which has the potential to be used for the RF energy harvesting system. A single and double stage rectifying circuit are designed and simulated. A prototype is then fabricated and measured to validate the simulation results. Simulation process mainly used EM simulator and measurement is carried out for various input power levels at frequency 2.45 GHz. An experimental measurement has been conducted by varying the load, R of the rectifying circuit. From the experimental measurement, it has been observed that the maximum DC voltage of 13.556 V and RF-DC efficiency of 78.57% are obtained from the energy harvesting system.

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This paper proposes the analytical comparison analysis of the mutual coupling for a large array antenna between a single-polarized and a dual-polarized type antenna with the existence of a spatial diversity. The large array antenna using multi dipole antennas with different configurations and antenna spacing are studied. The result shows that the improvement of the mutual coupling is at least 7 dB by using the dual-polarized star configuration with the slanted ± 450 dipole antennas and antenna spacing; D = ?/2. In addition, these different antenna configurations provide coupling result improvement that is comparable to the square lattice configuration with D = ? and this offers a significant size reduction for the large array antenna. Even though, the mutual coupling is the main interest in this study, other antenna parameters such as gain and beamwidth are included in this paper to provide a more comprehensive analysis.

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A smartphone has variety of uses and becomes one of the most important devices nowadays. This paper describes the design and operation of a door locking using smartphone through Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) technology. Programmed using Android, the smartphone can lock and unlock the door within WiFi range. Android application is designed using Eclipse and a Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC) is used as the main controller of the design. This design is able to work within maximum range of 40 meters and 150 meters. Smartphone activated door lock using WiFi has been designed, implemented and tested successfully.

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A double-pass amplification is demonstrated by using a newly doped fiber named as Zirconia based erbium doped fiber (Zr-EDF) and a broadband fiber mirror (BFM). The performances of the double pass Zr-EDFA are compared with single pass Zr-EDFA at high and low input signal powers, -10 and -30 dBm, respectively. The double pass amplification is observed to give a better performance compared to single pass amplification. This is due to the double propagation of the forwarded and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) signal into the gain medium and thus will increase the attainable gain in the entire C- and L band wavelength region. BFM is used as the signal reflector to ensure the reflected signal will propagate twice into the gain medium. It is observed that the double pass performance at lower input signal power of -30 dBm shows the better amplification compared to the high input signal power of -10 dBm. With the lower input signal power of -30 dBm, the maximum gain of 40.3 dB is obtained for double pass amplification at wavelength of 1560 nm. The gain enhancement between the maximum gain of double and single pass amplification is observed to be around 11.7 dB for this lower input signal power.

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Finger-vein biometric identification has gained attention recently due to its several advantages over fingerprint biometric traits. Finger-vein recognition is a method of biometric authentication that applies pattern recognition techniques based on the image of human finger-vein patterns. This paper is focused on developing a MATLAB-based finger-vein recognition system using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Graphical User Interface (GUI) as the user input. Two layers of CNN out of the proposed four-layer CNN have been used to retrain the network for new incoming subjects. The pre-processing steps for finger-vein images and CNN design have been conducted pm different platforms. Therefore, this paper discusses the method of linking both parts from different platforms using MEX-files in MATLAB. Evaluation is carried out using images of 50 subjects that are developed in-house. An accuracy of an average of 96% is obtained to recognize 1 to 10 new subjects within less than 10 seconds.

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Optical filter that utilizes silicon micro-ring resonator (MRR) has been proposed as a solution in order to provide high-bandwidth, low power consumption and small size. MRR is the promising basic element of future optical integrated circuits due to its various applications such as wavelength filter, modulator and sensor. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between ring radius, gap size and width of core variations to the MRR performance.

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Topology control is a technique implemented in wireless sensor networks to conserve energy and prolong the network lifetime while maintaining the network connectivity and coverage. The implementation of a topology control involves two phases, which are the topology construction, which builds a reduced topology, and topology maintenance, which restores, rotates or recreates the topology. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of topology control protocol based on several topology construction-topology maintenance combinations. Two energy-based topology maintenance algorithms are considered here, namely Energy Local Patching DSR and Hybrid Global Energy Topology Recreation Rotation. These topology maintenance algorithms are implemented on the underlying topology constructed by four selected topology construction algorithms known as the A3, Connected Dominating Set Rule K, KNEIGH Tree and Energy Efficient Connected Dominating Set. The experiments are conducted through a series of simulations for a 100-node network scenario by using a discrete event simulator known as Atarraya. The simulation results show that the combination of Energy Local Patching DSR and A3 consumes the least energy compared to other combinations by at least 36%. It can be concluded that CDS-based topology construction algorithms outperform KNEIGH Tree algorithm by an average factor of 6.5 in terms of the network lifetime. In addition, the Energy Local Patching DSR algorithm suits the CDS-based topology construction algorithms well, while Hybrid Global Energy Topology Recreation Rotation algorithm enhances the energy efficiency of the KNEIGH Tree algorithm.

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This paper is focusing on the development of a low cost finger-vein capturing device with Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a device that will capture the human finger-vein image and will be used for biometric security purposes such as authentication, verification and identification. A near-infrared light (NIR) will be emitted by a bank of NIR Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) which will penetrate the finger and are absorbed by the haemoglobin in the blood. The areas in which the NIR rays are absorbed (i.e. Veins) thus appear as dark regions in an image conveyed by a CCD camera located on the opposite side of the finger. The image captured is analyzed using Mean Square Error (MSE) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) to determine the suitable potentiometer level and to determine the best finger-vein image.

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Electromyography (EMG) can be used for many application, either in medical or industrial sectors. One of the famous application are prosthetic and exoskeleton devices. In order to use EMG signal efficiently, the signal must through signal processing method including preamplification, filtering, rectification and smoothing. After signal processing is done, the output of this signal will be used as input to control RH-2000 Robotic Hand. This paper explained a linear enveloped EMG circuit acquired from forearm muscle to control RH-2000 Robotic Hand. The data obtained from the experiment has been discussed and analyzed to determine a method to control prosthetic and exoskeleton devices can be achieved.

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The study demonstrates efficient wireless power transfer between two resonators. This paper compares self-resonator coils with LC resonator, which exhibits higher efficiency than typical self-resonator device. The effects of the following on power transmission efficiency and the resonant frequency are numerically investigated in revealing the effect of external capacitor. The numerical results show that a power transmission efficiency of nearly 76% can be achieved at 70 cm distance.

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Integrated instrumentation amplifiers (INA) are more expensive than discreet op-amps and cost could be a concern for multi-channel biosignal acquisition application. Instrumentation amplifiers can be developed with op-amps at a lower cost. However this approach, although cost effective, is rarely adopted. In this experiment, an EMG amplifier consisting of a preamplifier and filter stage was developed with discreet op-amps (JRC4558) and low tolerance components. Actual fabrication and testing with muscle contraction was performed, and the output was compared with a circuit built with an INA. In general, the low cost variant achieve a CMRR lower than a circuit developed with the INA, however, in practice their noise performance is comparable. The filter specification is also unaffected by the component tolerance.

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Hash Function is widely used in the protocol scheme. In this paper, the design of SHA-1 hash function by using Verilog HDL based on FPGA is studied to optimise both hardware resource and performance. It was successfully synthesised and implemented using Altera Quartus II Arria II GX: EP2AGX45DF29C4. In this paper, two types of design are proposed, namely SHA-1 and SHA-1unfolding. The maximum frequency of SHA-1 design is 274.2 MHz which is higher than SHA-1 unfolding that has the maximum frequency of only 174.73 MHz. However, this leads to a high throughput of the SHA1 unfolding design with 2236.54 Mbps. Besides, both designs provide a small area implementation on Arria II that requires only 423 and 548 Combinational ALUTs, 693 and 907 total register respectively.

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Using the internet, as a dynamic environment thanks to its distributed characteristic, for web service deployment has become a crucial issue in QoS-driven service composition. An accurate adaption should be undertaken to provide a reliable service composition which enables the composited services are being executed appropriately. That is, the critical aspect of service composition is the proper execution of combination of web services while the appropriate service adaption performed with respect to predetermined functional and non-functional characteristics. In this paper, we attempts to deliberate the optimization approaches to devise the appropriate scheme for QoS-based composite web service selection.

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Vision based systems have been used widely for various purposes that includes parking management, highways and industrial applications. In this paper smart parking system for disabled people has been developed based on vision technology. To accomplish this recognized image undergoes several pre-processing phases. Since the proposed system focuses disabled people therefore RFID tag detection feature has also been introduced for ticketless system that would store information of the parked vehicle and automatically deduct some balance on the base of duration. In the pre-processing phase several techniques have been applied such as Gaussian blur, Otsu binarization and Threshold INV. For the recognition of pattern K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm (K-NN) has been used for OKU sticker recognition. After the successful implementation of the system it has been tested out for evaluation and analysis under different lightning conditions and scenarios. Through collected data it can be concluded that the developed system performs efficiently in different lightning conditions by providing accurate results.

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The conventional modulation that is on- off keying (OOK) is suffered from the threshold detection level. This condition is worst with the presence atmospheric turbulence. The new modulation technique which based on dual carrier modulation enhance the performance FSO transmission with offering high power received and low scintillation index. The finding results show that under the strong turbulence condition the propagation distance can improve approximately 61% percent in comparison with conventional technique. Meanwhile for comparison wavelength the 1550 nm shows better performance than 850 nm where the improvement approximately 16% percent.

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Recently, some two-party Authenticated Key Agreement protocols over elliptic curve based algebraic groups, in the context of Identity-Based cryptography have been proposed. The main contribution of this category of protocols is to reduce the complexity of performing algebraic operations through eliminating the need to using Bilinear Pairings. In this paper, we proposed two novel Identity-Based Authenticated Key Agreement protocols over non-symmetric role participants without using Bilinear Pairings. The results show that our proposed schemes beside of supporting security requirements of Key Agreement protocols, require a subset of operations with low complexity in compare with related protocols in this scientific area.

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The new smart-phones with new operating system and portable sensors support the basis for context awareness systems and applications for handling user activity and user privacy. Nowadays, individuals need new services and real time information anywhere and anytime. Context awareness is an emerging service, which could be able to improve the user experiences in current situation. Context awareness can be considered as location, calendar, user activity and etc. The review of the literature proves that context awareness in mobile phone can be useful and studied as unavoidable service in next generation of smart-phone applications. In this paper, a short review about context awareness in mobile phone is studied, furthermore, we critically analyzed related works of context awareness in smart-phones. The review shows that the most important context in mobile phone is location, which is mostly obtained by using Global Positioning System (GPS) sensor in mobile phones but GPS can significantly increases battery consumption in mobile phones. In this regard, a framework as Improved Battery life in Context Awareness System (IBCS) is proposed to improve battery life and reduce cost of using GPS in context awareness applications based on smart-phones. The review argues the weakness and strength of these studies, and aims to (a) indicate the most important context in mobile phone, (b) reduce the battery consumption of GPS sensor in mobile phone.

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In this paper we show the results of a simulation of channel parameters using a Game Engine Ray based tool, developed by our group, which has been evolving during last few years. We show simulation results and compare it with a set of measurements for an indoor scenario, in the band of 5.4 GHz. We found a good match between the rays based tool and measurements for Delay Spread. Also, we show the use of an Open Source 3D modelling tool for the scenario building, showing the flexibility of the XML description language for this kind of scenarios.

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Malicious software or malware activity is increasingly threatened the network security as the malicious codes can be easily obtained and can be used as a weapon to gain illegal objectives. Hence, network traffic gathered from a control experiment are explored and features selection method is used to identify the features involved in formulating the malware attack pattern. This paper proposes generalize malware attack pattern in two perspectives which is attacker and victim using traditional worm. This research shall facilitate the authorities in detecting the malware intrusion activities in cyber space while protecting the Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII) in the country. These generalized malware attack pattern can be extended into research areas in alert correlation and computer forensic investigation.

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Attendance systems were developed before the mobile device has been introduced to the market. The traditional system and web-based system are accepted method to keep track the attendance of the staff. Some companies introduce a secure and expensive system such as RFID and Thumbprint technology. With the emergence of the GPS enabled device in smart phone, there is a need to introduce a smart phone as a medium to clock in and clock out for staff attendance, especially who work off-site. This paper will discuss the geo-fence technique and its implementation for mobile attendance android based application. The technique is suitable for analysing the location and boundaries of a GPS mobile enabled especially for staffs who are working away from the office or outstation. From the implementation conducted, the application functions well to keep track staff attendance records.

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This paper investigates one-minute rain rate in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia predicted based on Ito-Hosoya model. The model is categorized into meteorological based model as it receives as input local meteorological parameter. The best part about this model is it does not requires measured rain rate data to be converted into one-minute, instead it depends on long-term meteorological parameter values which widely available from various sources. In this paper, the local meteorological parameters are extracted from TRMM database which are average accumulation rainfall (from TMPA 3B43) and thunderstorm ratio (from TRMM PR 3A25 and TMI 3A12). The result shows that this model could be promising for use in Malaysia region as it produces better performance compared to the ITU-R model.

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The objectives of this study are to ascertain the factors that elevate the effectiveness of Lean Manufacturing (LM) application and examine the present-day versions of LM tools simulation. This investigation embarks on a re-evaluation of the existing procedures for the application of LM in the production sector. Three factors that determine the effectiveness of LM implementation in an organization were identified. Currently available LM tools simulations are perceived to be wanting in user-friendliness and saddled with inadequate communication between modeller and client regarding progression from the theoretical model to the process engineering stage. The outcomes derived from this study were arrived at through multi score that includes Elsevier, Springer, Google Scholar, Research Gate and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Enhancement of the recommended tools will pave the way for better decision-making among LM professionals in the manufacturing domain.

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This paper presents the design of dual-band low noise amplifier (LNA) for WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g/a/n wireless applications. A new technique using a cascaded LNA, notch filter and T network impedance matching is proposed. A fully integrated dual band LNA was designed using GaAs pHEMT transistors to increase and improve the gain and noise figure (NF) effectively. The LNA was matched concurrently at the two frequency bands by matching the input and output networks without switching techniques. The post layout simulation shows the power gain |S21| of 33.845 dB and 20.000 dB and NF of 0.946 dB and 0.493 dB for center frequency of 2.4 GHz and 5.75 GHz. The supply voltage for LNA is 2V.

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Several ICN cache deployment and management techniques have since been using the Web management techniques to manage information sharing and better cache-hit ratio. Leave Copy Down, Leave Copy Everywhere and Probabilistic cache managements have gained more attention. However, with Leave Copy Everywhere being the initial design specification in ICN proposal, several research issues of content manageability have posed a threat of particularly content and path redundancy. This paper presents an extensive simulation analysis of the popular cache management techniques by subjecting the concepts into different network topologies to investigate the prospect of extending and proposing a new form of cache management in ICN known as Cache-skip. Cache-skip use the consciousness of time of request, network size and Time Since Birth (TSB) and Time Since Inception (TSI) to carefully dedicate the positions of caching to benefits hit rates and less network stress as a form to efficiently utilize the bandwidth and enhance hits.

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Today, image-processing techniques are widely used in fields such as engineering and medical science. This paper focuses on medical imaging, particularly that of retinal images. Diabetic retinopathy has affected many people, and retinal imaging plays an important role in the diagnosis of abnormalities and diseases of the retina. Although many kinds of detection and treatment are available, research in this area is still not complete. In this work, a novel algorithm to effectively detect blood vessels has been proposed. For the segmentation of the fundus retina image, the region of interest (ROI) method and extraction of the vein using Kirsch's templates technique are resorted to. For the classification of disease, an artificial neural networks-based firefly clustering algorithm is used. Parameters like cotton wool spots area and the diameter of the vein are used for grouping the affected area. The system has achieved adequate results to support four stages of diabetic retinopathy diagnosis. Accurate detection is successfully determined, notwithstanding the normal or abnormal condition of the retina. MATLAB, a high-performance language for technical computing, is used to implement the concept.

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This paper aims to diagnose Pneumonia infection using image processing algorithms and artificial neural network. A group of infected and normal x-ray images are prepared using segmentation and feature extraction using many processes then using Self Organizing Map algorithm to classified them. Also, artificial neural network is used to build a database of different cases of pneumonia infected and normal x-ray images, training the network to detect the infected image; the used network was the Learning Vector Quantization network, which has a high performance in classification and determination processes. This system shows a good performance in processing, comparing, and detecting the infected images that reached 97.45%.

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The switched reluctance machine (SRM) is used for many application of electric drive system due to its simple construction and its robustness. Due to doubly salient structure of SRM; the torque pulsations are high when compared to other sinusoidal machines. The major drawback of using SRM drive is torque pulsations and increased components in the converter. In order to avoid these drawbacks a new bridgeless Single Ended Primary Inductor Converter (SEPIC) for closed loop control of SRM drive is proposed. The proposed converter reduces a conduction loss, input current ripple, torque ripples and also the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). The requirements of converter for switched reluctance motor drives and the proposed new converter are analyzed and discussed. In this paper a new converter topology for speed control of a switched reluctance motor is proposed and verified through MATLAB simulation.

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The computer plays vital role in all industries. The dependence on computers keeps on increasing every day. The digitization of information transfer between machine and men helps to make the paper-free society. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and its applications help us to make the digital world. In this paper, we review the various OCR approaches for recognizing the characters from different images. We reviewed the papers of OCR applied in recognizing texts in natural scenes, traffic signs and energy meter reading. We have initiated our presentation with handwritten text recognition using neural network to understand the process of OCR.

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Standard Concrete is developed by ternary blended system with partial replacement of cement by alccofine and fine fly ash. Efforts for improving the performance of concrete over the past few years suggest that cement replacement materials along with mineral and chemical admixtures can improve the strength and durability characteristics of concrete. Alccofine and Fly ash is pozzolanic materials that can be utilized to produce highly durable concrete composites. In the present experimental investigation an attempt is made to evaluate the compressive strength of standard concrete for 7 and 28 days curing period. In this study the Class F fly ash was used in various proportions 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and that of Alccofine by 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. A constant water binder ratio of 0.4 was adopted for all the trail mixes. The superplasticizer was also added based on the required degree of workability. The results summarizes that the standard concrete made with these trail mixes shows excellent fresh and hardened properties. The addition of Alccofine shows an early strength gaining property and is eco-friendly to nature and that of fly ash shows improvement in long term mechanical properties.

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In this research, a fixed-wing UAV based spatial information acquisition platform which can carry three cameras on board is developed and evaluated. A position and attitude determination of all collected photos is a prerequisite for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - based photogrammetry and computer vision applications to derive spatial data. In photogrammetric practices, an approximate position and attitude of each collected digital photos must be determined in advance to enable to start bundle adjustment procedures. There are numerous methods for solving this problem arises from both photogrammetric and computer vision communities. However, due to a high measurement cost of geodetic type of GPS observations, a minimal number of control points are used to solve a closed form of space resection problems. Two variant methods of a closed form solution using three control points only are evaluated. A method so called “a perspective similar triangle” arises from computer vision community and “a photo scaled variation” method are evaluated and compared. Both methods have a stable direct solution in presence of image noise; nonetheless this study reveals their robustness and stability of the solution with vertical, oblique, high oblique and convergent photos.

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Trimming down of the power supply voltage is absolutely necessary to reduce the dynamic power and refraining reliability problems in deep sub-micron regions. The power consumed in high performance microprocessors has risen to the levels that impose a primary limitation to increasing performance and functionality. If this trend in increasing power continues, the high performance microprocessors will tend to consume even more than thousands of watts. Dynamic switching power, the dominant component of the total power consumed in current CMOS technologies has been significantly reduced by reducing the supply voltage. Lowering the supply voltage degrades the circuit speed due to reduced transistor currents. The threshold voltages are scaled down to lessen the degradation in speed caused by supply voltage scaling, still maintaining the dynamic power consumption within the adequate levels. With reduced threshold voltages, the subthreshold leakage currents raise exponentially. Energy efficient circuits that are focused on lowering the leakage currents are greatly advantageous. Domino logic circuit techniques have been broadly applied in high performance microprocessors due to higher speed and area characteristics of domino CMOS circuits when compared to static CMOS circuits. However, deep sub micrometer (DSM) domino logic circuits utilizing low power supply and threshold voltages have shown reduction in noise margins. In this paper, a literature survey and investigation of various domino logic circuits have been carried out stating their features, advantages and disadvantages in a profound manner.

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The extended binary interaction parameters of vapor-liquid equilibrium for alcohols binary mixtures were obtained. A total of 23 systems that consisted of isobaric vapor-liquid equilibrium data at 101.325 kPa were selected. The extended binary interaction parameters were fitted simultaneously by correlating the selected vapor-liquid equilibrium data with the Wilson, Non-Random Two-Liquid (NRTL), and Universal Quasi-Chemical (UNIQUAC) activity coefficient models. The extended binary interaction parameters were described as the temperature-dependent binary interaction parameters to increase the capability of the parameters for the application in wide range of temperature. The obtained parameters were very useful to calculate vapor-liquid equilibrium for designing and optimizing the distillation column in the alcohol separation process.

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The weighted scheduling problem is practically obvious and need more investigation. In this research work is focused on the weighted scheduling problem with critical machine consideration of permutation flow type manufacturing environment. The objectives are makespan minimization as well as maximize the utilization of critical machine. The problem initially simplified and solved by heuristic method and validated. A special type of heuristic is suggested to solve such critical machine based weighted scheduling problems. The proposed heuristics were validated with multilevel problems. The proposed heuristic outperforms in reduction of ideal time, of critical machine as well as makespan.

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The liquefaction is an important phenomenon of mechanical instability of sandy soil leading to a catastrophic failure; this mechanism has been constantly revised to include new parameters that may control the mechanical instability under static or dynamic loadings. Such instability may be manifested by severe damage or large displacement. Civil engineer considers the important parameter of the shear strength for better design of structures founded on soil vulnerable. The accurate determination of the critical or residual shear strength has been a major challenge to geotechnical engineering. Therefore, it is essential to determine the main parameters that may significantly control the shear strength and to provide a broad understanding of soil behavior under undrained conditions. In this work, the main objective is to experimentally analyze the mechanical behavior under undrained conditions reconstituted loose and medium dense specimens of terrigenous silica sand with different almond content. This present paper is an attempt to describe experimentally the mechanical behavior of soils with low plastic silty sand and represent the variation of the critical shear strength based on different parameters, the density state as well as the equivalent void ratio. The last characteristic seems rightly the vulnerability of the material to instability.

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Provision of efficient transport system is crucial, particularly in fast growing cities such as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah city has witnessed a dramatic urban growth and land use changes over the last four decades. This has caused significant and critical changes in transport system and its quality. This paper attempts to assess the transport system quality in Jeddah. It measures the satisfaction level of Jeddah transport system users toward the current state of transport system in Jeddah city. Questionnaire was distributed to different age groups of Jeddah residents using different survey methods. Results show that all different age groups of Jeddah residents with different socio-economic attributes have a common dissatisfaction of current transport system quality in Jeddah. The results of this study assist transport planners in identifying the appropriate transport interventions policies and plans in order to provide sustainable and effective transport system in the city.

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The variable tooth thickness (VTT) hob is usually applied for longitudinal crowning work gear surface with twist free tooth flank. It is an important cutting tool for manufacturing the high precision helical gear. However, the manufacturing process fora VTT hob has not investigated yet. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a method for generating profile of VTT hob by using form grinding wheel on CNC grinding machine. A mathematical model for the tooth profile of VTT hob is established by setting the center distance between the grinding wheel and hob as a second order function of hob’s longitudinal feed movement. A numeral example is presented to illustrate and verify the merits of the proposed form grinding method.

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About 60% of Russia is located in isolated (autonomous) areas and mostly provided with electricity from diesel power plants running on imported fuel. According to the Russian Energy Agency (REA), the number of diesel power plants (DPP) operating in isolated areas is around 900, their power generation is about 2.54 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The cost of DPP producing energy is 0.25-2.0 Euro/kWh, which is significantly more expensive than in the areas with centralized power. Therefore, reducing the consumption of the imported DPP fuel is an important socio-economic problem. At the same time wind and solar energy potential have high rates in the areas with autonomous power supply, which can be effectively used by power complexes basing on renewable energy sources, ensuring a high proportion of replaced diesel fuel.

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Detection of arrhythmias by processing ECG has become vital. The QRS complex being a dominant feature of ECG places a key role in identifying Cardiac arrhythmias. The QRS complex being detected by 17 Hz band pass filter and shaped into a square pulse of 200ms width representing R peak by other circuitry is utilized in this work. Various arrhythmias are identified based on abnormalities in the time intervals between consecutive R peaks using Tompkins algorithm is presented. The algorithm is implemented in FPGA Spartan3.The algorithm is written in Verilog HDL and tested on Xilinx 13.1 ISE. The simulated test results have shown the detection accuracy around 99.3% and dynamic power consumed is 22mW.

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The wastewater of a chicken slaughterhouse in the form of rumen contents or gastric contents, excess blood, flesh, fat, and the rinsed water has become a source of environmental pollution. Characteristics of liquid waste generated from industrial activities slaughterhouse varies greatly, filled with relatively high organic matter content and fat solids concentration. The objective of the research is to determine the ability of the anaerobic bio-filter in minimizing total biological oxygen demand (BOD5), chemical oxygen demand (COD) in wastewater slaughterhouse. Samples were taken directly to the tub washing after chicken feathers were plucked. Application of the influent BOD concentration is in milligrams per liter (mg / L) with a value range of 420 mg / L; 400 mg / L; and 380 mg / L. Media used in this research is bio-ball to reduce pollutant loads in soluble BOD5, and COD in wastewater slaughterhouse with anaerobic biofilter dipped in up flow. It can be concluded that it is efficient to remove soluble BOD5, and COD. The least BOD concentrate influet is capable of removing the greatest amount of soluble BOD, and COD. At a concentration of 380mg BOD influent / L, the content of 98.08% dissolved BOD5 and content of 96.21% COD. is successfully removed.

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Diesel and spark-ignition piston engines are an ideal choice for long endurance, high altitude operations (10, 000m/33, 000ft) and extremely high altitude operations (20,000m-65,000ft). These systems are more complex than traditional applications that are normally limited to 5, 000-7, 000m (16, 000-23, 000ft). In fact, the air propulsion system (propeller or fan), the air intake, the fuel system, the turbo charging, the exhaust and the cooling system take part to the design optimization process. An integrated design is strictly necessary. Since prop-fan is currently under development, the design should start from the choice between propeller and fan. This choice will influence optimum cruise speed, critical altitude and aircraft design as a whole. The air induction system is extremely important to improve efficiency, endurance and critical altitude. At low altitude, a filtered induction system is used for takeoff. At high altitudes, the intake air is taken from high-pressure areas into an alternate, extremely optimized, path. This induction system recovers as much pressure as possible, air kinetic energy at cruise speed. In propeller systems, the intake is usually positioned in the lower part of the aircraft. On fan systems, a little amount of “high pressure” air is taken from the high-pressure area of the fan. The exhaust system is also critical with the choice between pressure recovery and thrust. Exhaust-pressure-recovery reduces backpressure and temperature at exhaust. However, the improvement in critical altitude is marginal. In more common, thrust driven exhaust systems, the exhaust energy is converted into speed and thrust. At the relatively high speed of high altitude cruise, also the cooling system adds a small amount of thrust through the Meredith’s effect. The piston engine power plant design is then extremely critical. Many different components should find the correct position for maximum performance. The power-plants of WWII water-cooled fighters and bombers are good examples, even if their design cruise altitude is below 10, 000m (33, 000ft). Modern turbofan and turbojet air intakes are also of help. However, the requirements of low weight, high reliability and long endurance HALE (High Altitude Long Endurance) UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) requires further work on this specific subject.

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In the present Digital Communication systems, it is highly possible that the data or message get corrupted during transmission and reception through a noisy channel medium which leads to the injection of random bits into the original message and corrupt the original message. For some applications, an option is to use Algorithmic-Based Fault Tolerance (ABFT) techniques that try to exploit the algorithmic properties to detect and correct errors. One example is Fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) that is used in spectral analysis in the communication for Time to Frequency transform in the receiver side. There are several protection schemes to detect and correct errors in FFTs. The Parseval or sum of square check is the most widely known. It is most common to find several blocks operating in parallel in the modern communication systems. Recently, a new technique called Fault tolerant parallel filters has been proposed. In this work same technique is first applied to protect Cordic based FFT and then the protection schemes that combine the use of Error Correction Codes and Parseval checks are proposed and the area reduction of 12% was observed. The Power, area and delay is analyzed in Cadence using 180 nm Technology for 8-pointprotected FFT with input 32 bit length. Simulation and Compilation report for FFT using ECC, SOS and ECC-SOS are obtained in Modelsim-Altera 6.4a and Quartus II 9.0.

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The advanced circuit engineering principle of construction of the low-sensitive CMOS selective amplifiers (SA) of HF and SHF ranges and interface ICs is developed. The suggested solutions provide the possibility of the cascade connection of several SAs without separating capacitors and additional circuits of matching of the static mode. The considered SAs are characterized by the potential possibility of the choice of resistances of the frequency setting circuit in a wide range of the rating values. The suggested architecture of SA in contrast with the well-known ones reduces the asymptotic attenuation of signals not only in the traditional sphere of high-frequency range but also in the sphere of low-frequency one (up to -70 dB) without additional separating capacitors. The results of the mathematical analysis and computer simulation of SA on the components of SiGe technological process SG25H1 are given.

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The Stiffness and Damping coefficients of squeeze film dynamic characteristics between porous curved circular plates lubricated with an electrically conducting non-Newtonian fluid in the presence of an external magnetic field are investigated in this paper. The expressions for MHNN porous squeeze film curved circular plate’s stiffness and dynamic coefficients are obtained. Comparing with the hydrodynamic Newtonian case, the dynamic stiffness and damping coefficients of squeeze film dynamic characteristics for porous curved circular plates are improved by the use of an electrically conducting non-Newtonian fluid in the presence of external magnetic fields.

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The design of a low power amplifier for recording EEG signals is presented. The low noise design techniques are used in this design to achieve low input referred noise that is near the theoretical limit of any amplifier using a differential pair as input stage. To record the neural spikes or local field potentials (LFP’s) the amplifier’s bandwidth can be adjusted. In order to reject common-mode and power supply noise differential input pair need to be included in the design. The amplifier achieved a gain of 53.7dB with a band width of 0.5Hz to1.1 kHz and input referred noise measured as 357 nVrms operated with a supply voltage of1.0V. The total power consumed is around 3.19µW. When configured to record neural signals the gain measured is 54.3 dB for a bandwidth of 100 Hz and the input referred noise is 1.04µ Vrms. The amplifier was implemented in 180nm technology and simulated using Cadence Virtuoso.

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In this paper the effect of connection of photovoltaic systems on electrical networks technically investigated. The importance of electrical energy generation from Photovoltaic Systems is expressed. The Development of Photovoltaic systems (PV) and expansion plans relating to the futuristic in worldwide is elaborated. The most important impacts of grid connected photovoltaic systems on electrical networks as well as the Penetration level of PV system is analyzed.

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The fracture toughness of dissimilar aluminum alloys butt-joined by Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is studied. The aluminum grades used in this project were 5083 and 6061. The feasibility of using conventional belt-driven milling machine to perform FSW was also investigated by adding a custom-made compact clamping jig and FSW tool bit to the machine set up, and by varying machine parameters such as tool rotational speed (?, rpm), tool traverse speed (v, mm/min), plunge depth (mm) and tool tilt angle. Premilinary FSW runs were done with the milling machine to modify it for the purpose of FSW. Two types of test were carried out which were tensile test and single edge notch tension (SENT) test. Both tests were performed on a Universal Testing Machine (UTM). By visual inspection, tunnel defect was seen in SENT specimens and in the dissimilar grade FSW joint for tensile testing specimen. The similar grade FSW joints performed less than their base material in terms of tensile strength. The critical stress intensity factor (SIF) for the welded specimens were found to be lower than critical SIF values known from literature for their respective materials.

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During cardiac surgery Cardiopulmonary Bypass (CPB) takes over the function of the Heart and Lungs. A Heart Lung Machine (HLM) support maintains the Oxygen content and the circulation of blood of the patient. The HLM system is managed by perfusionist manually to maintains the flow and pressure of the blood. The perfusionist often makes small adjustments in the system to maintain flow and pressure of Blood Gases. This maintenance process can be tedious and leads to human errors. By an introduction of an automatic controller in this system the variables can be perfectly controlled. In this work real time Blood Gas Analyzer (BGA) reports of various CPB surgery patients are collected and completely analyzed and for that oxygenation process values a Fuzzy Based Internal Model Controller Designed for a Perfusion System and tested in MATLAB Simulink for different CPB Surgery conditions. So this control strategy presented ensures the patient’s safety.

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As the charge is heterogeneous in a CI engine, combustion is not complete leading to the formation of unburnt HC and NOx , which also lowers its performance . HCCI is a new combustion concept involving the merits of both CI & SI engines. In the present work an attempt has been made to attain HCCI by incorporating an external fuel vaporizer. Performance tests have been conducted and the results show some good improvements.

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The research results outlined in this paper were obtained with financial support from Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, as part of the execution of the project entitled "Establishment of high-tech production for the manufacture of complex reconfigurable systems of high-precision positioning of objects on the basis of satellite systems of navigation, local networks of laser and microwave beacons and technology MEMS", pursuant to decree of the government of the Russian Federation ? 218 issued on April 09, 2010. The researches were carried out in SFU.

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