Analysis of cost effective pavement treatment and budget optimization for arterial roads in the city of Chattanooga

Many transportation agencies lack sufficient funds to maintain and repair roads, which results into increased pavement maintenance cost. Pavement Management System (PMS) has demonstrated to be an essential tool for proper management of infrastructure and proper utilization of available funds. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga utilized Micropaver software as PMS tool to conduct a pavement management analysis of principal arterials in the City of Chattanooga. The study used the City of Chattanooga pavement database to create the current and future pavement conditions. Maintenance and repair (M&R) planning analysis was also performed in order to determine the most cost-effective treatment and suggest the optimum utilization of funds for the city. An analysis of five budget scenarios was conducted for a five-year plan using the critical pavement condition index (PCI) method (ASTM D6433). Results show that the backlog elimination budget would be the best scenario because it increases the pavement condition and eliminates the backlog of major maintenance and repairs over the five-year period. The unlimited budget seems though ideal, it does not improve pavement condition. Maintaining current condition and limited budget scenarios would increase both the backlog and the total cost of maintenance and repairs over the analysis period.     

Investigation of the substrate effect for Zr doped ZnO thin film deposition by thermionic vacuum arc technique

ZnO is a fundamental wide band gap semiconductor. Especially, doped elements change the optical properties of the ZnO thin film, drastically. Doped ZnO semiconductor is a promising materials for the transparent conductive oxide layer. Especially, Zr doped ZnO is a potential material for the high performance TCO. In this paper, ZnO semiconductors were doped with Zr element and microstructural, surface and optical properties of the Zr doped ZnO thin films were investigated. Zr doped ZnO thin films were deposited thermionic vacuum arc (TVA) technique. TVA is a rapid and high vacuum deposition method. A glass, polyethylene terephthalate and Si wafer (111) were used as a substrate material. Zr doped ZnO thin films deposited by TVA technique and their substrate effect investigated. As a results, deposited thin films has a high transparency. The crystal orientation of the films are in polycrystal formation. Especially, substrate crystal orientation strongly change the crystal formation of the films. Substrate crystal structure can change the optical band gap, microstructural properties and deposited layer formation. According to the atomic force microscopy and field emission scanning electron microscopy measurements, all deposited layer shows homogeneous, compact and low roughness. The band values of the deposited thin film were approximately found as to be 3.1–3.4 eV. According to the results, Zr elements created more optical defect and shifted to the band gap value towards to blue region.     

A new approach for texture segmentation based on NBP method

Nowadays, image processing is an interesting research area due to the growth of the communication technologies. Matching problem, which consists of localizing one texture in an image, that contains several textures is one of the fundamental problem of image processing and pattern recognition. In this paper, a new feature extraction method and texture segmentation system are proposed. The proposed method (RINBP) is robust against rotation and improves the ability of extracting the local information. The segmentation architecture follows several steps. First, fixing a converging point α. After that, a Main analysis Window (MW) starting from α to the bottom left corner of the image is determined. Then, several possible windows are extracted and the feature extraction method is applied on each window. Finally, a similarity measure is calculated in order to decide if this window is pertinent or not. This process is stopped until the size of the MW reaches a minimum size. Each pertinent window increases the relevance of the desired texture in the output image. Finally, an image of relevance is obtained by considering the most relevant area. For the experiments, textured images generated from Brodatz album database are used. The experiments have shown the superiority of our method compared to other existing methods. The obtained results have illustrated the robustness and the efficiency of the proposed segmentation method based on the relevance of the analysis windows.     

Determination of the electronic parameters of nanostructure SnO2/p-Si diode

The current–voltage and capacitance–voltage characteristics of the nanostructure SnO₂/p-Si diode have been investigated. The optical band gap and microstructure properties of the SnO₂ film were analyzed by optical absorption method and scanning electron microscopy, respectively. The optical band of the film was found to be 3.58 eV with a direct optical transition. The scanning electron microcopy results show that the SnO₂ film has the nanostructure. The ideality factor, barrier height and series resistance values of the nanostructure SnO₂/p-Si diode were found to be 2.1, 0.87 eV and 36.35 kΩ, respectively. The barrier height obtained from C–V measurement is higher than obtained from I–V measurement and this discrepancy can be explained by introducing a spatial distribution of barrier heights due to barrier height inhomogeneities, which are available at the nanostructure SnO₂/p-Si interface. The interface state density of the diode was determined by conductance technique and was found to be 8.41 × 10¹⁰ eV⁻¹ cm⁻².It is evaluated that the nanostructure of the SnO₂ film has an important effect on the ideality factor, barrier height and interface state density parameters of SnO₂/p-Si diode.     

A new approach for texture segmentation based on the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Image processing is a very rich and important research area, which provides efficient solutions to many real and industrial problems. Texture analysis is one of...     

CONTRIBUTION TO HEAT TRANSFER IN AIR-LIFT AND BUBBLE COLUMN FERMENTORS WITH NEWTONIAN AND NON-NEWTONIAN SOLUTIONS

Heat transfer in five air-lift and bubble column bioreactors has been investigated. Water (Newtonian) and xanthan solutions (non-Newtonian) were used. The effects of superficial gas velocity, liquid-phase viscosity and riser-to-downcomer cross-section area ratio have been studied. In air-lift slightly higher heat transfer coefficients were observed than in bubble column reactors. The superficial gas velocity and the effective liquid-phase viscosity influence strongly the heat transfer performance in all systems studied. Following the surface renewal concept, general correlations for heat transfer in Newtonian and non-Newtonian fermentation broth were developed. They describe precisely heat transfer coefficients in a wide range of operating and geometrical conditions.