Abstract: The impact response of homogeneous and film/substrate systems subjected to low velocity impact is studied by the coded finite element program. To model and simulate impact response, a effective finite element approach based on the Sun's higher-order beam finite element, Kurapati’s generalized power law and Dharani's film model is proposed. The verification of the numerical model is conducted by using energy balance model and wave propagation model, and the present finite element results show a good agreement with two open literature results. Film of layered system may eventually be protected from impact damage and layered system is more impact resistant than homogeneous system, whereas we can see that the variation of film thickness of layered system does not affect so much on impact responses. In addition, the maximum stress by this impact analysis of thin soft film over hard substrate is observed at the interface of film and substrate unlike occurring right underneath of the indentor in static analysis, that is, the interface between two layers by low velocity impact is subject to more failure risk than the other layer.

Abstract: Brazil imports more than 90% of potassium fertilizer needs for food production in order to meet an annual consumption of about 200 million dollars. This demand tends to increase 3% per year, only to be maintained at current agricultural production. It is therefore imperative for the nation to develop strategies to reduce import dependence. One possibility for implementation in agricultural productivity can be harnessing of alternative sources of potassium, for example, rocks containing K2O in the composition. In this context, various microbial species have highlighted the role of biossolubilization capacity of chemical elements from these rocks, releasing them as chemical forms assimilable by plants. In this study, two separate cultures from sunflower rhizosphere, identified as Paenibacillus sp and sp Bhurkholderia were evaluated for the ability to release K, Si, and Mg a partir de rock powder (verdete 9,5% K2O) in Aleksandrov's medium. Paenibacillus sp. was the most effective to solubilize K (circa 32 mg.L-1), while the solubilizing performance of Bhurkholderia sp was worse than the abiotic control (uninloculated sterile medium). Changes in particle size distribution of rock powder (20-28#; 28-35#; <35#) greatly affected the solubilization of Si and Mg in biotic assays, but potassium solubilization did not statistically differ for both biological treatments and control. Was not identified change in the crystalline rock structure by XRD analysis in any of the grain size conditions. In EPS, only produced by Burkholderia sp were found amounts of Si, K and Mg twice larger than those released into the aqueous phase. The results indicate that the strategy adopted for the isolation of high mineral efficient solubilizing bacteria was satisfactory, which may be an alternative in the future to biofertilizer production.

Abstract: In the current work the theory of third-harmonic generation will be developed for the case of metamaterials while the constant-intensity approximation has been used for the phase change of interacting waves. Different parameters are taken into consideration with us for investigation of the intensity of third-harmonics for metamaterials. The effect of self-action, at the presence of phase change, for light waves in metamaterials has been investigated by authors. We compare this effect with an analogous effect in usual homogeneous cubic media. We will prove that the phase velocity of the pump wave could be changed by changing pump intensity, length of nonlinear medium and phase mismatch between interacting waves. The possibility of phase change for fundamental radiation in metamaterials, which has the order of magnitudes higher than homogenous cubic media, will be feasible. PACS: 81.05.-t, 42.70.-a, 42.65.Ky

Abstract: A major objective in the web winding system control design is to obtain a precise thickness, with the best possible regularity when a sudden constraints occurs. This system knows several constraints such as the thermal effects caused by the frictions, and the mechanical effects provoked by metal elongation, that generates dysfunctions due to the influence of the process conditions. In this paper, the backstepping method is applied in order to design a nonlinear controller with the goal of resolving a thickness problems, to obtain the best possible regularity, where only the tracking error is necessary. The control variables are velocities and tractions forces along the web winding system. The proposed control law and Lyapunov function guarantee asymptotic stability from all initial values. Simulation studies are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results obtained illustrate the efficiency of the proposed control with no overshoot, and the rising time is improved with good disturbances rejections comparing with the classical control law.

Abstract: A great number of composite materials consist of fibre metal laminates based on light aluminium have been manufactured and tested. Glass laminate aluminium reinforced epoxy (GLARE) is the common types of these composites. (GLARE) is a fibre metal laminate (FML) composed of several very thin layers of metal (usually aluminium) interspersed with layers of glass-fibre "pre-preg", bonded together with a matrix such as epoxy. A special surface treatment is made for aluminium sheet plate to increase the debonding strength among the various layers of this composite material. (GLARE) material is manufactured with five stacking sequence using different woven glass fibre layers (1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 layers, respectively). Fracture toughness of such material is of great intense. Therefore, both longitudinal and deboning fracture toughness are measured using double edge notch and double cantilever beam specimen, respectively for each stacking sequence. The longitudinal fracture toughness values are measured as; (228.54, 244.86, 272.632, and 603 MPa√(m) )according to the layers number, whereas debonding strength is found as nearly (2 jol/mm2) for each specimen. Results of both laminate types indicate that the increasing in the volume fraction of composite; (Vc), in the FML results in a significant increase in its tensile strength and consequently in its longitudinal fracture toughness, while little difference in debonding fracture toughness has been reported.

Abstract: Soil moisture determination is critical as the parameter affects the physical and characteristics of soil in civil, geological and agricultural industry. However, effective non-destructive model for accurate soil moisture determination is challenging to be discovered. In this article, the concept and development of soil moisture determination via ground penetrating radar (GPR) principle is explained. The system is designed to be used with standard horn antenna with a sweep frequency of 1.7 – 2.6GHz along with vector network analyzer (VNA). The proposed system can determine soil moisture of three types of soil samples such as sand, loamy, and clay with high degree of accuracy. In this work, microwave surface reflection method is applied to analyze the effect of soil moisture with its electrical properties using GPR principle. The result of the research is promising with high percentage of agreement with Topp theoretical value. The highest values are 61% 42% 54% for sand, clay and loamy, respectively. For system validation, a new soil type is used for measurement, and the result has an accuracy of 93%. By using the proposed developed models, soil moisture estimation can be determined with minimal data input through a novelty GPR principle.

Abstract: With the emergence of cloud computing [1], we are now witnessing an advancement of online learning platforms toward Cloud Learning Environments (CLE) [6] i.e. the use of Cloud Computing for the remote training. One aspect of these Cloud Learning Environments is that, the actual pedagogical contents are most important and tend to consider the entire Web as a space for content. Actually, the CLE are often combinations of open systems on the Internet. Web today migrates toward the semantic web, and some resources on the Web have a semantic or ontology [7] for a better description. The problem in these CLE is that they don’t have an adequate ontology, simple and easy to use for the description of all educational resources on Internet. A good description of these educational resources has the advantage to: allow more detailed annotation of resources, facilitate information retrieval, allowing rapid assessment of the relevance of the content of an educational document, facilitate the organization and management of collections of resources and certify some content in intellectual authority. We carried out a semantic normalization work [10] in which an ontology has been produced for the description of learning content. We exported this ontology to the Web and illustrated an example of using in a CLE to properly tag the content for easy use by the course actors: authors and students. Then, an approach to documents semantic search in the Web was presented, based on previous produced ontology which has been made available on Internet. Thus, it is easy to reconstruct the contents in CLE. Therefore the composition of content will no longer be limited to a LMS platform [8], but will be extended to CLE environments considering the space of content to compose the whole Web.

Abstract: This paper is focused on evaluation of barrier-free accessibility of the significant regional transfer junction in Ostrava made up of the Ostrava-Svinov railway station and upper and lower stops of the urban mass transportation. The outcome is focused on solving the problems of movement and orientation of blind and visually impaired people.

Abstract: This paper proposes a feed forward backpropagation neural network (NN) based remaining useful life (RUL) prediction approach. Estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) is an important tool to reduce maintenance cost of equipment. The accurate RUL prediction based on the current and previous health condition of the equipment is essential to make a timely maintenance decision for failure avoidance. In this paper, an artificial neural network (ANN) based method is developed for achieving more accurate remaining useful life prediction of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The ANN model takes the multiple measurement values at the current and history inspection points as the inputs, and the output is the remaining life hours of the equipment. The ANN RUL prediction uses FeedForward Backpropagation Neural Network (FFBPNN) with Levenberg Marquardt of training algorithm. The effects of changing the number of neurons in the input layer, the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the rate of learning, and the momentum constant are investigated. We employed variable importance analysis in identify critical feature variables to be given as input for an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the lifetime of tungsten filament. The objective of this research paper is to propose a predictive model to be able to evaluate the health state of tungsten filament and to estimate the RUL of the component.

Abstract: Marble industry is one of the most labor intensive industry. In Pakistan even material handling in marble industries is done by labors. Pakistan is blessed with large reserves of high quality marbles which can have a significant impact on its Gross Domestic Product. Unsafe working environment affects the worker’s morale and reduces the productivity and quality to an alarming level. Protection of labor increases their physical integrity and ultimately reduces the social costs associated with safety. A systematic approach needs to be evolved to identify potential hazards with in a working environment. This research paper utilizes Analytical Hierarchy Process to identify the significant hazards within a marble processing environment.

Abstract: A gyroscope is essential equipment in all air vehicles. These vehicles sometime work in very challenging conditions like high temperature, noise and radiation. A vortex rate sensor as a fluidics gyroscope has been proposed to work in such conditions. This gyroscope has no moving parts with minimum manufacturing and maintenance cost. A modified vortex rate sensor has been design and manufactured of wood to study theoretically and experimentally the static performance of it. To carry out the experimental work; a rig has been designed and build. The experimental work was performed with four different air flow rate (50, 75, 100 and 125 L/min). The results show that there is a linear relation between the differential pressures taken of the sensor with its angular velocity and there is a good agreement between the theoretical and the experimental result.

Abstract: The current study is an exploratory research aimed at identifying the factors that influence successful development of data warehousing (DW). Analysis of reviewed related studies together with the information gained from interviewing data warehousing experts constitute the basic foundation for the current study’s theoretical framework. Five hundred and eighty data warehouse users in 34 companies were surveyed to obtain their perceptions of the extent that each of 132 items had actually contributed to their firms’ DW success at different phases of development. The researchers have followed rigorous multivariate statistical analysis procedure to construct an overall model of DW success. The model has proven that all its independent variables have significant influence on the DW overall success and that system appropriation factors have significant impact on this success throughout the different phases of DW development.

Abstract: This paper proposes a hybrid AC-DC smart micro grid that will electrify rural area by using renewable energy sources. In this proposed hybrid grid system, both AC and DC micro grids are connected through bidirectional converters. In a micro grid system, different loads and distributed generators are connected. In AC side, AC sources and loads are connected. And in DC side DC sources and loads are connected. For stabilize the system under various generation, load and fault condition as well as ensure power sharing among ac, dc and utility grid, different algorithms are proposed. This proposed hybrid grid has been designed and simulated using Simulink in MATLAB. Simulation results show the system remains stable under uncertain change in load, generation and ability to get over from three phase fault operation.