City Compactness: Assessing the Influence of the Growth of Residential Land Use

In the urban sprawl paradigm, residential land use exhibits a more significant growth than other categories. Consequently, large proportions of the natural environment are converted to residential areas, particularly in tropical countries. Compact urban development is one of the most sustainable urban forms with environmental perspectives, such as rural development containment and natural environment preservation. However, no proper investigation of the relationship and influence of residential growth and city compactness is available. This study evaluated and forecasted the residential development of Kajang City in Malaysia based on compact development. First, the relationship between residential land use change and city compactness was evaluated. Second, residential growth was projected by utilizing the land transformation model (LTM) and the statistical-based weight of evidence (WoE) using various spatial parameters. Both models were evaluated with respect to observed land use and compactness maps. Results indicated that most of the newly developed residential areas were in zones where the degrees of compactness increase during certain periods. In addition, LTM performed better and provided a more accurate modeling of residential growth than the WoE. However, WoE provided clearer and more informative results than LTM in terms of functional relationships between dependent and independent variables related to city compactness.     

A framework to investigate the effectiveness of interconnection of power distribution systems subjected to hurricanes

Billions of dollars lost to natural disasters such as hurricanes are associated with infrastructure damage and power interruptions. Most utilities have radially operated systems and the existing supporting infrastructure may not provide possibilities to restore power from other substations that are not within the disaster areas. This would lower reliability during hazards especially for customers that are downstream of affected parts of the system. A potential strategy to remedy such situations entails extending feeders from different substations in the vicinity and connecting them with affected feeder lines from other substations. This paper presents a framework to study the effectiveness of constructing additional lines with switching devices to connect feeders from different substations to improve system performance. The framework incorporates a hurricane hazard model, a topologically based system performance measure, and cost analysis. A notional power distribution system of parts of Florida is used to demonstrate the proposed framework. The results show that improvement in system performance achieved by constructing new lines depends largely on hurricane path, number of new lines constructed as well as the length of the new lines. Longer lines have a high probability of failure which leads to only marginal improvement in system performance and high construction cost.     

Radiological characterization of building materials used in Malaysia and assessment of external and internal doses

In this study, the activity concentrations of ~(226)Ra,~(232)Th,~(222)Rn, and ~(40)K, emanation fractions(P),equilibrium equivalent concentration(EEC), and mass exhalation rates(E_m) of radon released from building materials used in Malaysia were studied using gamma-ray spectrometer with HPGe detector. Radiological parameters[activity concentration index(ACI), indoor air-absorbed dose rate(D_(in)), annual effective dose(AED_(in)) from external and internal(E_(Rn)), soft tissues(H_(ST)) and lung(H_L), and effective dose equivalent(H_(eff))] were estimated to evaluate radiological hazards due to the use of these building materials: sand, cement, gravel, bricks, tiles, fly ash, white cement, and ceramic raw materials. The measured P, EEC,and E_m vary from 10 to 30%, 0.9 to 22 Bq m~(-3), and 33 to 674 mBq h~(-1) kg~(-1), respectively, while the calculated ACI and AED_(in) vary from 0.1 ± 0.01 to 2.1 ± 0.1 and 0.1 ± 0.01 to 2.4 ± 0.6 mSv y~(-1), respectively. On the other hand, the internal annual effective dose ranges from 0.1 to 1.4 mSv y~(-1). The estimated radiological risk parameters were below the recommended maximum values, and radiological hazards associated with building materials under investigation are therefore negligible.     

Robust enhancement and centroid-based concealment of fingerprint biometric data into audio signals

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Numerous issues are raised through the enhancement, transmission and storage of biometric data due to its high sensitivity and extremely crucial purpose....     

Potential of Hybrid Data-Intelligence Algorithms for Multi-Station Modelling of Rainfall

Water Resources Management - One of the most challenging tasks in rainfall prediction is designing a reliable computational methodology owing the random and stochastic characteristics of...     

Electrospun ZnFe2O4/Al: ZnFe2O4 nanofibers for degradation of RhB via visible light photocatalysis and photo-Fenton processes

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Pure zinc ferrite, ZnFe2O4 and aluminum-doped zinc ferrite, Al: ZnFe2O4 (0.5% Al) nanofibers were prepared by the combination of...     

Metal complexes as potential ligands: The deprotonation of aminephenolate metal complexes

The cationic nickel, copper and zinc complexes of tris-(2-hydroxybenzyl)-aminoethylamine (H6TrenSal) have been deprotonated using potassium hydroxide. The nickel complex can be sequentially deprotonated to form a series of compounds namely, [(H6TrenSal)Ni]⁺, [(H6TrenSal)Ni] and “[(H6TrenSal)Ni]K”. The latter is isolated as a mixture of species namely [{(H6TrenSal)Ni}K(EtOH)]₂, [{(H6TrenSal)Ni}K(EtOH)₂-μ-OH₂]₂ and [{(H6TrenSal)Ni}K(EtOH)₂-μ-EtOH]₂, which co-crystallise in a roughly 50:27.5:22.5 ratio. In contrast the deprotonation of [(H6TrenSal)M]⁺ (M = Cu, Zn) results in the formation of tetrameric complexes [({(H6TrenSal)Ni}K(OH₂)₂)₄(μ₄-OH₂)].     

A predictive model based on an optimized ANN combined with ICA for predicting the stability of slopes

Engineering with Computers - In this study, we optimized artificial neural network (ANN) with imperialist competition algorithm (ICA) for the problem of slope stability design charts. To prepare...     

Effect of Brood Pheromone on Survival and Nutrient Intake of African Honey Bees (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Apis mellifera scutellata</Emphasis>) under Controlled Conditions

The influence of pheromones on insect physiology and behavior has been thoroughly reported for numerous aspects, such as attraction, gland development, aggregation, mate and kin recognition. Brood pheromone (BP) is released by honey bee larvae to indicate their protein requirements to the colony. Although BP is known to modulate pollen and protein consumption, which in turn can affect physiological and morphological parameters, such as hypopharyngeal gland (HPG) development and ovarian activation, few studies have focused on the effect of BP on nutritional balance. In this study, we exposed newly emerged worker bees for 14 d and found that BP exposure increased protein intake during the first few days, with a peak in consumption at day four following exposure. BP exposure decreased survival of caged honey bees, but did not affect either the size of the HPG acini or ovarian activation stage. The uncoupling of the BP releaser effect, facilitated by working under controlled conditions, and the presence of larvae as stimulating cues are discussed.     

Evaluation of rubbercrete based on ultrasonic pulse velocity and rebound hammer tests

Several research works have been carried out to study the fresh and hardened properties of concrete containing crumb rubber (rubbercrete) as a replacement of fine aggregate. The outcomes of these studies have highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of rubbercrete compared with conventional concrete mixtures. In view of the fact that rubbercrete is being used in the construction industry for a variety of purposes, evaluations of the rubbercrete mixtures using non-destructive tests such as rebound hammer (RH) and ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) to establish valid relationships is worthwhile. Fifteen mixtures with different w/c ratios (ratios of weight of water to weight of cement) and crumb rubber content percentages were prepared, cast and tested using RH and UPV at different curing ages. Models were proposed and statistically validated to predict the relationship between compressive strength with UPV and rebound number (RN) for rubbercrete mixtures at 3, 7 and 28 days.