A Y-channel design for improving zeta potential and surface conductivity measurements using the current monitoring method

This study presents a new Y-channel design for measuring the zeta potential and surface conductance of a solid-liquid pairing using the current monitoring technique. The new design improves the throughput and reliability of the testing apparatus since the displacement between two solutions can be repeated many times without interfering with the experiments. It also increases the accuracy of the measurement by producing sharper start and end transitions for the current–time plot of the solution displacement process. In this design, efforts have been made to minimize the effects of electrolysis, Joule heating and undesired pressure driven flow on the measurements. An improvement on the current–time slope analysis is also presented. The Y-channel design was validated by comparing zeta potential measurements to published results. The zeta potential of several biological buffers relevant to the microfluidic community in plasma treated PDMS/PDMS and PDMS/Glass microchannels are presented. Preliminary studies of surface conductivity measurements using the Y-channel design were also conducted and are briefly discussed.     

An ant colony optimization approach to multi-objective optimal design of symmetric hybrid laminates for maximum fundamental frequency and minimum cost

An ant colony optimization algorithm for optimum design of symmetric hybrid laminates is described. The objective is simultaneous maximization of fundamental frequency and minimization of cost. Number of surface and core layers made of high-stiffness and low-stiffness materials, respectively, and fiber orientations are the design variables. Optimal stacking sequences are given for hybrid graphite/epoxy-glass/epoxy laminated plates with different aspect ratios and number of plies. The results obtained by ant colony optimization are compared to results obtained by a genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. The effectiveness of the hybridization concept for reducing the weight and keeping the fundamental frequency at a reasonable level is demonstrated. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed ant colony algorithm outperforms the two other heuristics.     

Rapid and efficient hand gestures recognizer based on classes discriminator wavelet networks

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The vision based on hand gesture recognition is one of the key challenges in behavior understanding and computer vision. It offers to machines the possibility of...     

A thorough investigation for development of hydrogen projects from wind energy: A case study

Increasing energy demand has led to a substantial growth in the use of wind energy across the world, which can be attributed to the low initial and running costs and rapid and easy deployment of this technology. The development of hydrogen from wind energy is an excellent way to store the excess wind power produced, as the produced hydrogen can be used not only as clean fuel but also as input for various industries. Considering the good wind potentials of Yazd province, the variety of industries that are active in this area, and the central location of this province in Iran, which gives it ample access to major transport routes and other industrial hubs, hydrogen production from wind power in this province could benefit not only this region but the entire country. Given these considerations, we conducted a technical, economic, and environmental assessment of the potential for wind power generation and hydrogen production in Yazd province. Overall, the assessments showed that the best locations for harvesting wind energy in this province are Bahabad and Halvan stations. For these two stations, it is recommended to use EWT DW 52-900 turbine to take advantage of its higher nominal capacity to achieve higher electricity and hydrogen output and emission reduction. For Abarkoh and Kerit stations, which have a low wind energy potential, it is recommended to use small turbines such as Eovent EVA120 H-Darrieus. Also, economic and technical assessments showed that it is not economically justified to harvest wind energy in Ardakan station. The results of ranking the stations with the Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) techniques showed that Bahabad station was introduced as the best place to produce hydrogen from wind energy.     

Optimum section selection procedure for horizontal axis tidal stream turbines

Stochastic behavior of renewable energy sources forces designers to optimize the energy converters for the purpose of capturing the maximum amount of available energy. The performance of horizontal axis wind and tidal turbines mainly depends on the geometrical properties such as chord and twist distributions and also the types of sections which are utilized along the blade. The purpose of presented paper is introducing a procedure which can be utilized in order to select the optimum sections for horizontal axis tidal turbines for the purpose of increasing the turbine performance. The presented procedure also can be applied for horizontal axis wind turbines. For the purpose of evaluating the performance of the proposed method, two design types (chord and twist distributions) of tidal turbines are selected as case studies. Power coefficient is considered as objective function, and three types of hydrofoils namely NACA63-8xx, NACA44xx, and RISO-A1-xx are selected as candidate solutions. A blade element momentum theory model is used for calculating the power coefficient. The discrete ant colony optimization algorithm is selected as optimization tool. The results indicate that the utilization of the proposed method will considerably decrease the required process time for obtaining the optimum sections across the blade span, and also it is shown that using different types of sections across the blade span can increase the power coefficient of the turbine. The importance of the proposed method will be significant when various types of hydrofoils and airfoils can be considered as candidate sections across the blade span.

     

Evaluation of the Generating Capacity Adequacy of the Saudi Arabian Central Operating Area

The goal of the study presented in this article was to evaluate the adequacy of the generation capacity of the Central Operating Area in Saudi Arabia. The generating capacity adequacy was evaluated to examine the ability of the generating capacity of the system to meet the total system demand. Over the last five decades, several probabilistic methods have been developed as a means of conducting such an evaluation. Three probabilistic simulation techniques were used for the evaluation of the designated system for this study: analytical, sequential, and non-sequential Monte Carlo. A variety of reliability indices, such as loss of load expectation and loss of energy expectation, were obtained.     

A robust digital audio watermarking scheme based on DWT and Schur decomposition

The vulnerability of digital audio signals for different types of risks requires an imperceptible and robust digital audio watermarking scheme. In this research, we propose creating one such imperceptible and robust hybrid watermarking scheme based on a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and Schur decomposition hybrid method. The proposed scheme embeds the foreground bits of the watermarking image into the least significant bit of the diagonal coefficients of the triangular matrix S generated from Schur decomposition. Schur decomposition is applied on the second sub-band HL₂ generated from applying a second-level 2D-Haar DWT on the first channel of the original audio signal. We analyze the proposed digital audio watermarking scheme’s performance in terms of signal to noise ratio (SNR), objective difference grades (ODG), and subjective difference grades (SDG) that resulting 81.43, 4.78 and 0.184, respectively. The resulting of payload capacity, NC, and BER are as high as 319.29 bps, 0.9911, and 0.0135, respectively. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme is inaudible and robust against common types of attacks such as Gaussian noise, re-quantization, re-sampling, low-pass filter, high-pass filter, echo, MP3 compression, and cropping. In comparison with state-of-the-art audio watermarking schemes, the proposed scheme’s performance is superior in term of imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload size.

     

Interlaminar stresses in thick rectangular laminated plates with arbitrary laminations and boundary conditions under transverse loads

In the present study, interlaminar stresses resulting from bending of thick rectangular laminated plates with arbitrary laminations and boundary conditions are analyzed analytically based on a three-dimensional multi-term extended Kantorovich method (3DMTEKM). Using the principle of minimum total potential energy, three systems of coupled ordinary differential equations with non-homogeneous boundary conditions are obtained. Then an iterative procedure is established to achieve analytical solution. The results obtained from this theory are compared with those of analytical solutions existing in the literature. It is found that the present results have excellent agreements with those obtained by layerwise theory. The results show that the multi-term EKM converges within only three terms of trial functions and the single-term EKM is not able to estimate the local interlaminar stresses near the boundaries of laminates. Finally, the power of the present approach in obtaining the interlaminar stresses in thick rectangular laminated plates with general types of boundary conditions and lay-ups is examined.     

Analysis of interlaminar stresses in general cross-ply laminates with distributed piezoelectric actuators

This paper represents an analytical solution to determine the interlaminar stresses of general cross-ply laminates with piezoelectric layers as actuators under transverse mechanical loads. The three-dimensional constitutive equations of piezoelectricity are considered and the governing equations are derived within the framework of second-order shear-deformation plate theory as a set of partial differential equations. These equations are solved for two kinds of boundary conditions and the unknown assumed functions of displacement field are found. Numerical results show that this approach can generally predict the behavior of interlaminar stresses. Also, they clearly indicate the singular behavior of interlaminar normal and shear stresses in the boundary region near the edges of the laminate.     

Adaptive distribution‐based handover scheme for cellular communication networks

In this paper, we propose a new Generalized Distribution‐Based Handover (DBHO) to deal with the inefficient utilization of spectral resources due to the non‐uniform cell loads. The DBHO scheme is different from the existing adaptive schemes since it uses a new criterion to initiate handover when moving from/to a congested cell. Two risk factors are used to dynamically change handover boundaries according to the distribution of traffic loads. This controls the handover initiation process such that a user in a congested cell that is moving to a free cell is allowed to initiate a handover to a new cell earlier, as long as the signal received from the target cell is higher than a certain threshold. While delaying the handover initiation process for a user moving in the opposite direction, as long as the signal received from the serving cell is not lower than a certain threshold. Our results show a substantial reduction in the handover and call dropouts rates. Our scheme is complementary to the existing adaptive schemes proposed in the literature. The proposed scheme also gives cellular system designers a new tool to optimize the overall network performance by initiating handovers based on the traffic intensities. Frequent handovers increase the load on switching networks, which consequently degrades the Quality of Service (QoS). Existing handover schemes usually use parameters such as the received signal strength for initiating a handover with some additional measurements to reduce unnecessary handovers and call dropouts. These schemes perform well when cell loads are somewhat evenly distributed, but fail to account for nonuniform traffic, as is often the case in microcells. Hence, it is desirable to design efficient handover schemes to avoid unnecessary handovers, reduce call dropouts and yet dynamically adapt to the variation of traffic among cells. In this paper, we present a new adaptive handover scheme that dynamically changes the handover boundaries to balance cell loads and to effectively reduce the average number of handovers. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.