Selection of optimal processing condition during abrasive wear of in-situ ZA-37/TiCp composites using MCDM technique

The present study attestation has been made towards microstructural characterization, and thereafter investigation on the optimum abrasive wear processing condition of newly developed insitu TiC reinforced ZA37 alloys. The MMC's have been processed by advanced vortex creating in-situ technique. Effects of significant influencing variables like abrasive grain size, percentage of reinforcement, applied load, and sliding velocity on abrasive wear characteristics via wear rates, coefficient of friction and interface temperature was investigated thoroughly. A newly developed, GRA based hybrid RSM approach has been implemented to investigate the optimum processing condition within the specified wear domain. The non-linear characteristics of response variables were demonstrated by developing a quadratic regression model which was the functions of independent process variables. ANOVA has been implemented to identify the percentage contribution of each process variables towards responses. The observation revealed that the abrasive grain size, percentage of reinforcement and applied load contributed significantly to the developed model and thereby on the wear characteristics. Improvements were noticed on the response characteristics attained by implementing both the GRSM and desirability approaches. Significant deviations were obtained on responses (15% on wear rates, 20% on COF and 4% on temperature) implementing two phases of optimal parametric combinations predicted by GRA based hybrid approach. Optical surface profile and corresponding micrograph represent the improved surface quality (R_a, 0.83 μm vs. R_a, 1.18 μm) and textures employing the GRSM based hybrid approach indicated settings of the process parameter.     

Finding a Pareto Optimal Solution for a Multi-Objective Problem of Managing Radio Resources in LTE-A Systems: A QoS Aware Algorithm

Wireless Personal Communications - Due to ever increasing users demands, fulfilling the needs of growing users is challenging with constrained resources for Long Term Evolution- Advanced (LTE-A)....     

Image recoloring using specular decomposition and in-painting

ABSTRACT

Image recoloring using wavelet transform, in-painting and dichromatic reflection model is proposed. Detailed wavelet bands are passed through a sharpening filter whereas the approximation band is passed through dichromatic reflection model to extract body and specular coefficients. In-painting and white illumination minimization using erosion and Gaussian blur further enhance the image quality. The proposed technique produces better results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in terms of edge preservation and minimization of noise, artefacts in contrast to state-of-art existing techniques.     

A multifocus image fusion using highlevel DWT components and guided filter

Multimedia Tools and Applications - It is often difficult and essential to distinguish between focused and de-focused structures in an image. To properly handle such structures, an image fusion...     

Biosorption of copper(II) on prunus amygdalus shell: Characterization,biosorbent size analysis,kinetic, equilibrium and mechanistic studies

Deletion of Cu(II) from synthetic solution was investigated using ground Prunus Amygdalus shell (GPAS). FTIR revealed the probable functional groups for the binding of Cu(II). XRD revealed amorphous nature of the GPAS. SEM analysis furnished microscopic details of GPAS. GPAS size analysis was done using seven ASTM screens and three mean diameters, namely mass mean, volume mean and volume surface mean diameters. Kinetic study consisted of pseudo-first and pseudo-second order kinetics. Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms were used to elucidate the isotherm study of uptake of Cu(II) onto GPAS. Trend of Scatchard was used to verify the applicability of the Freundlich model, while D-R model helped to determine the nature of biosorption. A detailed analysis for rate controlling step was made. Various mean diameters were used to estimate the diffusion coefficient for the biosorption of Cu(II) onto GPAS.     

Estimation and optimization based ill-posed inverse restoration using fuzzy logic

Intelligent systems ranging from neural network, evolutionary computations and swarm intelligence to fuzzy systems are extensively exploited by researchers to solve variety of problems. In this paper focus is on deblurring that is considered as an inverse problem. It becomes ill-posed when noise contaminates the blurry image. Hence the problem is very sensitive to small perturbation in data. Conventionally, smoothness constraints are considered as a remedy to cater the sensitivity of the problem. In this paper, fuzzy rule based regularization parameter estimation is proposed with quadratic functional smoothness constraint. For deblurring image in the presence of noise, a constrained least square error function is minimized by the steepest descent algorithm. Visual results and quantitative measurements show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed technique compared to the state of the art and recently proposed methods.     

Agile practices and performance: Examining the role of psychological empowerment

This study draws on the literature on psychological empowerment to conceptualize agile practices as a source of intrinsic motivation that enables the agile teams to deliver innovative outcomes. Then, drawing on the resource based view of innovative projects, the innovative behaviour of agile teams is cast as a project capability that affects project performance. To test this original conceptualization, data was collected to find support for the hypothesized relationships between agile practices, psychological empowerment, innovative behaviour and project performance. The statistical results showed that the agile practices of team autonomy and agile communication contributed to psychological empowerment that led to the innovative behaviour of agile teams. The innovative behaviour also affected project performance. The empirical validation of agile practices as a source of empowerment and motivation for agile teams is a new finding in the literature which has strong implications for both the theory and practice.