Design Errors: Inefficiency or Carelessness of Designer?

Design defects are experienced in many projects; the difference is only in the extent of occurrence. This technical note discusses a design error case in a building project in Nepal, where the designer made the wrong assumptions in roof treatment work for waterproofing as well as for heat insulation purposes. From the investigation of the problem, it was found that the waterproofing polymer was not applied directly over concrete slab top. Use of heavy concrete block as a heat insulation material also helped to increase the leakage problem. The problem evoked loss of prestige for project officials, the design consortium, and the contractor.     

Quality, Environmental, and Health and Safety Management Systems for Construction Engineering

The philosophy behind quality, environmental, and safety (QES) management systems is a concept that has been accepted by various contractors. Furthermore, a process has been developed insuring that the output produced conforms to customer satisfaction without violating any environmental, health, and safety rules and regulations. An effective QES program not only assures a quality product but also reduces costs, and enhances productivity. It is a top down process, i.e., top management together with line management and other employees develop the program and motivate all personnel to accept the process. Important functions to take under consideration are (1) explain and clarify the quality, environmental, and safety performance expected; (2) involve employees in decision-making and problem solving; (3) describe the consequences of poor quality and unsafe/unhealthy work conditions; (4) establish QES goals and provide feedback on performance; (5) provide a self-monitoring system; and (6) recognize and reinforce good performance and develop a reward system. This paper presents a discussion of the development of a portion of a QES management system which has been employed by a medium to large size construction company. In particular, Items 1–4, listed above, are described in detail.     

Lung nodules detection using semantic segmentation and classification with optimal features

Neural Computing and Applications - Lung cancer is a deadly disease if not diagnosed in its early stages. However, early detection of lung cancer is a challenging task due to the shape and size of...     

A balanced solution of a fuzzy soft set based decision making problem in medical science

The purpose of this paper is two folded. Firstly, the concept of mean potentiality approach (MPA) has been developed and an algorithm based on this new approach has been proposed to get a balanced solution of a fuzzy soft set based decision making problem. Secondly, a parameter reduction procedure based on relational algebra with the help of the balanced algorithm of mean potentiality approach has been used to reduce the choice parameter set in the parlance of fuzzy soft set theory and it is justified to the problems of diagnosis of a disease from the myriad of symptoms from medical science. Moreover the feasibility of this proposed method is demonstrated by comparing with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Naive Bayes classification method and Feng's method.     

An Intensive Study on Assorted Substrates Suitable for High JFOM AlGaN/GaN HEMT

Silicon - The performance comparison and the temperature profile of AlGaN/GaN HEMT on different substrates are investigated. It results the maximum drain-source current (IDS) of 1.08 A/mm, 1.04...     

A Numerical Investigation of Heat Suppression in HEMT for Power Electronics Application

Silicon - In this paper, AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) with stacked passivation (Diamond/SiN) is proposed and investigated. The implementation of stacked passivation in HEMT...     

Growth and formation mechanism of sea urchin-like ZnO nanostructures on Si

Sea urchin-like nanostructures of ZnO consisting of ZnO nanowires with blunt faceted ends were grown on Si (100) substrates by oxidation of metallic Zn at 600 °C. ZnO nanowires having a diameter of 30–60 nm and length of 2–4 Μm were in similar shape with uniform diameter along its entire length with well faceted blunt ends. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscope analysis showed that the as-grown nanostructures were highly crystalline with wurtzite hexagonal structure having lattice constants of a=b=3.25 å and c=5.21 å. Room temperature photoluminescence (PL) measurements showed a weak near band-edge emission at 380 nm, but a strong green emission at 500–530 nm. A model for vapor-solid (VS) growth mechanism of ZnO nanowires was presented, in which nucleation of ZnO is crucial for the growth of the nanostructures.     

Architectural Design,Improvement, and Challenges of Distributed Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Personal Communications - Software-defined networking (SDN) is widely perceived to simplify network management and monitoring. The introduction of the SDN model into wireless sensor...     

The Double Edge Sword Based Distributed Executor Service

Scalability is one of the most important quality attribute of software-intensive systems, because it maintains an effective performance parallel to the large fluctuating and sometimes unpredictable workload. In order to achieve scalability, thread pool system (TPS) (which is also known as executor service) has been used extensively as a middleware service in software-intensive systems. TPS optimization is a challenging problem that determines the optimal size of thread pool dynamically on runtime. In case of distributed-TPS (DTPS), another issue is the load balancing b/w available set of TPSs running at backend servers. Existing DTPSs are overloaded either due to an inappropriate TPS optimization strategy at backend servers or improper load balancing scheme that cannot quickly recover an overload. Consequently, the performance of software-intensive system is suffered. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new DTPS that follows the collaborative round robin load balancing that has the effect of a double-edge sword. On the one hand, it effectively performs the load balancing (in case of overload situation) among available TPSs by a fast overload recovery procedure that decelerates the load on the overloaded TPSs up to their capacities and shifts the remaining load towards other gracefully running TPSs. And on the other hand, its robust load deceleration technique which is applied to an overloaded TPS sets an appropriate upper bound of thread pool size, because the pool size in each TPS is kept equal to the request rate on it, hence dynamically optimizes TPS. We evaluated the results of the proposed system against state of the art DTPSs by a client-server based simulator and found that our system outperformed by sustaining smaller response times.     

Low-Dimensional Halide Perovskites and Their Advanced Optoelectronic Applications

Nano-Micro Letters - A NiFe2O4/expanded graphite (NiFe2O4/EG) nanocomposite was prepared via a simple and inexpensive synthesis method. Its lithium storage properties were studied with the goal of...