Parameters Affecting Energy Consumption for Producing High Carbon Ferromanganese in a Closed Submerged Arc Furnace

The power consumption is considered to be the most important factor affecting the production cost of fer romanganese alloy. Different parameters affecting the energy consumption for industrial production of high carbon ferromanganese HCFeMn were investigated in a closed submerged arc furnace. The analysis of industrial data revealed that the most energy consumed factors were the direct reduction by solid carbon, Boudouard reaction, metal and slag formation, and decomposition of fluxing materials （limestone and dolomite）. To reduce the energy con- sumption and minimize the energy losses in the production process of HCFeMn, it was recommended to use Mn blend with minimum Mn to Fe ratio of 6 and lower SiO2 content or higher basicity. The added coke must be adjusted according to the material balance to prevent the over-coke and to minimize the highly endothermic ＂Boudouard reac tion＂. In addition, it was recommended to work at basic slags with the ratio of （CaO＋MgO） to Si（）2 equal to 1.0- 1.2 instead of much higher slag basicity. Furthermore, the mass losses had to be minimized through adjusting the handling and charging process and to take care of all metal produced.     

A Single-Channel Acoustic Echo Cancellation Scheme Using Gradient-Based Adaptive Filtering

In this paper, a single-channel acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) scheme is proposed using a gradient-based adaptive least mean squares (LMS) algorithm. Unlike the conventional dual-channel problem, by considering a delayed version of the echo-suppressed signal as a reference, a modified objective function is formulated and thereby an LMS update equation is derived. It is shown that the resulting update equation converges to the optimum Wiener–Hopf solution. Based on the commonly used assumption of negligibility of cross correlation between the reference and the current speech signals, a multi-step stopping criterion is introduced, which not only provides efficient control of the LMS update sequence but also ensures a faster convergence. The proposed control criterion is validated by considering all possible scenarios which arise due to the variation of speech properties at the reference and current samples of the adaptive filter. From extensive experimentation on several real-life echo-corrupted speech signals in different acoustic environments, it is found that the proposed algorithm can efficiently handle the problem of single-channel AEC and provide satisfactory performance in terms of both subjective and objective measures.     

Nanoscale Sensor Technologies for Disease Detection via Volatolomics

The detection of many diseases is missed because of delayed diagnoses or the low efficacy of some treatments. This emphasizes the urgent need for inexpensive and minimally invasive technologies that would allow efficient early detection, stratifying the population for personalized therapy, and improving the efficacy of rapid bed‐side assessment of treatment. An emerging approach that has a high potential to fulfill these needs is based on so‐called “volatolomics”, namely, chemical processes involving profiles of highly volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from body fluids, including breath, skin, urine and blood. This article presents a didactic review of some of the main advances related to the use of nanomaterial‐based solid‐state and flexible sensors, and related artificially intelligent sensing arrays for the detection and monitoring of disease with volatolomics. The article attempts to review the technological gaps and confounding factors related to VOC testing. Different ways to choose nanomaterial‐based sensors are discussed, while considering the profiles of targeted volatile markers and possible limitations of applying the sensing approach. Perspectives for taking volatolomics to a new level in the field of diagnostics are highlighted.     

Effect of Microalloying Additions on the Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Low Carbon Steel

Low carbon steels are characterized by good weldability,formability and fracture toughness properties.However,the low strength levels of these steel grades limit their wide applications.On the other hand,increasing the strength by increasing the carbon content and alloying elements deteriorates the other properties.In this study,the microalloying technique was used to examine the possibility of attaining low carbon steels with good combination of strength,ductility and impact properties.A low carbon steel microalloyed with single addition of vanadium and another one microalloyed with combined addition of vanadium and titanium were used in this investigation and their properties were compared with non-microalloyed low carbon steel having the same base composition.Furthermore,other two nonmicroalloyed and V-microalloyed steels with higher carbon,silicon and manganese contents were also investigated to reveal the effect of base composition.Tensile,hardness,room and zero temperature Charpy V-notch impact tests were conducted to evaluate the variations in the mechanical properties of low carbon hot forged steel containing vanadium and combinations of vanadium and titanium.In addition,the microstructures of the different investigated steels were observed using both optical microscope and scanning electron microscope.Furthermore,the hardness of the ferrite phase was also determined using micro-hardness technique.The results showed improvement of the mechanical properties of the investigated steels by both single V-and combined V + Ti-microadditions.Tensile,hardness and impact tests results indicated that good combinations of strength,ductility and impact properties can be achieved by V-microalloying addition.Steel with combination of V and Ti microaddition has much higher hardness,yield strength,ultimate tensile strength and impact energy at both room and zero temperatures compared with non-microalloyed and single Vmicroalloyed steels.Higher C,Si and Mn contents result in increasing the strength accompanied with decrea     

Numerical experiment-artificial intelligence approach to develop empirical equations for predicting leakage rates through GM/GCL composite liners

The aim of this study is to develop empirical equations to predict the liquid leakage rate through a composite liner comprising a geomembrane and a geosynthetic clay liner (GM/GCL) underlain by a free draining boundary and having a circular or a longitudinal defect in the geomembrane. For this purpose, an intensive numerical experimental program was conducted where different defect geometries and flow transport characteristics were studied to simulate most of the conditions likely to exist in practice in such type of composite liners. The results are presented in a dimensionless form to generalize the observed behaviour and to give more insight on the factors that control the leakage behaviour. Furthermore, the results are also used to develop empirical equations for predicting the rate of leakage. An artificial intelligent approach referred to as General Method of Data Handling (GMDH) was used for this purpose. The main advantage of the proposed leakage equations is their validity for different flow patterns as the effect of defects geometry and flow characteristics of the composite liner components are already embedded in the development of the equations. However, their validity is limited to the ranges of the dimensionless parameters that were used to develop them.     

Multiple-model adaptive control for interval plants

Multiple-Model Adaptive Control (MMAC) is usually considered suitable for Interval Plants. This paper proposes a multiple model adaptive controller for first order interval plant with large delays. The number of models to be used is investigated and the controller parameters tuning is studied. The proposed scheme is applied to a numerical example for illustration. Simulation results show the applicability of the method.     

Straightforward single-step generation of microswimmers by bipolar electrochemistry

Autonomous microswimmers are of enormous interest not only from an academic point of view, but also for future practical applications ranging from miniaturized motors to nanomedicine. A key step for the generation of such objects is their dissymmetric modification with a catalyst particle that activates the chemical conversion of a fuel molecule, leading ultimately to the propulsion of the object. So far it has been quite difficult to synthesize such dissymmetric objects and most approaches are based on using interfaces to break the symmetry. We demonstrate here that a very simple approach based on bipolar electrochemistry allows the bulk generation of carbon microtubes that are modified selectively at one end with a Pt cluster. The presence of this metal cluster allows the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide and the resulting oxygen bubbles trigger the propulsion of the object. The type of motion can be switched from linear to circular as a function of the exact position of the Pt cluster.     

Interference Cancellation with Space Diversity for Downlink MC-CDMA Systems

Modern wireless communications require an efficient spectrum usage and high channel capacity and throughput. Multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), Linear equalizers, multi-user detection and multicarrier code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) are possible solutions to achieve spectral efficiency, high channel capacity, eliminate multiple access interference (MAI), eliminate Inter symbol interference (ISI) and robustness against frequency selective fading. In this paper, we combine all these techniques and investigate BER performance. We propose a low complexity receiver structure for Single-input Multiple-output (SIMO) downlink MC-CDMA systems. It employs an interference cancellation scheme to suppress the interference caused by the multipath fading channel. Also, the proposed scheme is developed for MIMO MC-CDMA system. The performance analysis of Downlink MIMO MC-CDMA systems with V-BLAST over frequency selective fading channel is investigated under various number of transmit and receive antennas. The simulation results show proposed SIMO equalization with parallel interference cancellation scheme is effective in reducing the ISI and the MAI. It improves the performance significantly and the simulation results show that MIMO MC-CDMA with V-BLAST multi-user detection provides high data rate and the BER significant improvement.     

Performance evaluation of an authentication solution for IMS services access

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an access-independent, IP based, service control architecture. Users’ authentication to the IMS takes place through the AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement) protocol, while Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) is used to authenticate users before accessing the multimedia services over HTTP. In this paper, we focus on the performance analysis of an IMS Service Authentication solution that we proposed and that employs the Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) to personalize each user access. We carry out the implementation of this solution on top of an emulated IMS architecture and evaluate its performance through different clients’ access scenarios. Performance results indicate that increase in the number of clients does not influence the average processing time and the average consumed resources of the GBA entities during the authentication. We also notice that the Bootstrapping Server Function (BSF) presents a bottleneck during the service authentication which helps in giving some guidelines for the GBA entities deployment.