An artificial neural network model for the effects of chicken manure on ground water

In the areas where broiler industry is located, poultry manure from chicken farms could be a major source of ground water pollution, and this may have extensive effects particularly when the farms use nearby ground water as their fresh water supply. Therefore the prediction the extent of this pollution, either from rigorous mathematical diffusion modeling or from the perspective of experimental data evaluation bears importance. In this work, we have investigated modeling of the effects of chicken manure on ground water by artificial neural networks. An ANN model was developed to predict the total coliform in the ground water well in poultry farms. The back-propagation algorithm was employed for training and testing the network, and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was utilized for optimization. The MATLAB 7.0 environment with Neural Network Toolbox was used for coding. Given the associated input parameters such as the number of chickens, type of manure pool management and depth of well, the model estimates the possible amount of total coliform in the wells to a satisfactory degree. Therefore it is expected to be of help in future for estimating the ground water pollution resulting from chicken farms.     

Effects of surface roughness and the chemical structure of materials of construction on wall slip behavior of linear low density polyethylene in capillary flow

The presence of wall slip during the flow of polymeric melts has significant ramifications on the melts' processability. In this study, the effects of materials of construction and surface roughness on the wall slip behavior of a linear low density polyethylene were investigated, using capillary flow. Capillaries, constructed from copper, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass, were used. The inner surface roughness of the capillaries were characterized by the employment of a profilometer and scanning electron microscopy. The roughness profiles of copper capillaries were also altered by the employment of chemical etching. Using Mooney's analysis, the wall slip velocity values were determined to be in the range of 0.09 to 1.34 mm/s. The wall slip velocity values were the highest for stainless steel and were negligible for aluminum. The relative work of adhesion values of polyethylene were the smallest for stainless steel and copper and the highest for glass. Overall, the wall slip velocity values increased with decreasing surface roughness of the capillaries and with decreasing work of adhesion. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Harmony search based algorithm for the optimum design of grillage systems to LRFD-AISC

Harmony search based optimum design method is presented for the grillage systems. This numerical technique imitates the musical performance process that takes place when a musician searches for a better state of harmony. Jazz improvisation seeks to find musically pleasing harmony similar to the optimum design process which seeks to find the optimum solution. The design algorithm considers the serviceability and ultimate strength constraints which are implemented from Load and Resistance Factor Design—American Institute of Steel Construction (LRFD-AISC). It selects the appropriate W-sections for the transverse and longitudinal beams of the grillage system out of 272 discrete W-section designations given in LRFD-AISC. This selection is carried out such that the design limitations described in LRFD-AISC are satisfied and the weight of the system is the minimum. Many design examples are considered to demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm presented.     

Fractional wavelet transform for the quantitative spectral resolution of the composite signals of the active compounds in a two-component mixture

Fractional calculus is a powerful tool that has been applied successfully for the analysis of the complex systems. One interesting example of a complex mixture is given by the multicomponent pharmaceutical samples having constant matrix content. The main aim of this study is to develop a new approach based on the combined use of the fractional wavelet transform (FWT) and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) in order to quantify atorvastatin (ATO) and amlodipine (AML) in their mixtures without requiring a chemical pretreatment. In the first step, the absorption spectra of the compounds and their samples were processed by the FWT method. In the next step, the CWT approach was applied to the fractional wavelet spectra obtained in the above step. The aim of the application of FWT is data reduction corresponding to the spectra of compounds and their commercial samples. In the following step, the CWT was used for the quantitative resolution of the composite signals of the analyzed compounds. After method validation, the proposed signal processing methods based on the combined use of the FWT and the CWT were successfully applied to the resolution of the composite spectra for the quantitation of atorvastatin (ATO) and amlodipine (AML) in tablets.     

Single-step ahead prediction based on the principle of concatenation using grey predictors

In literature a number of different methods are proposed to improve the prediction accuracy of grey models. However, most of them are computationally expensive, and this may prohibit their extensive use. This paper describes a much simpler scheme, based on the principle of concatenation, in which unit step predictions are concatenated by replacing the missing outputs by their previously predicted values. Despite its extreme simplicity, it is shown that the predicted values thus derived results in a better performance than the methods proposed in the literature. Simulation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm when applied to nonlinear function predictions.     

Wavelet ridges for musical instrument classification

The time-varying frequency structure of musical signals have been analyzed using wavelets by either extracting the instantaneous frequency of signals or building features from the energies of sub-band coefficients. We propose to benefit from a combination of these two approaches and use the time-frequency domain energy localization curves, called as wavelet ridges, in order to build features for classification of musical instrument sounds. We evaluated the representative capability of our feature in different musical instrument classification problems using support vector machine classifiers. The comparison with the features based on parameterizing the wavelet sub-band energies confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed feature.     

Three‐dimensional high‐conductivity trees for volumetric cooling

Here, we show how the cooling performance of a volumetrically heated solid can be increased by embedding high‐conductivity tree‐shaped designs in it. The volume fraction occupied by the high‐conductivity material is fixed. Embedding the high‐conductivity material as trees in the solid decreases the maximum temperature more than three times compared with distributing the high‐conductivity material uniformly throughout the solid. The maximum temperature decreases as the number of the bifurcation levels and the volume fraction of the highly conductive material increase. The thermal resistance of the cube is the lowest when the diameter ratio of the mother and daughter branches at each pairing junction is 2. Changing from T‐shaped to Y‐shaped designs and from two‐dimensional to three‐dimensional designs decrease the maximum and the volume averaged temperatures. The peak temperature is the lowest in three‐dimensional and Y‐shaped designs. This paper shows that the peak temperature of the heated solid can be decreased by only varying the shape of the high‐conductivity tree embedded in it. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.