Watershed characteristics, land use and fabric: The application of remote sensing and geographical information systems

Integrated watershed assessment, especially relying on remote sensing (RS), is a newly established procedure in developing countries. It is proving to be a major component in river‐basin environmental management. The recurrence of environmental problems in the Akkar El Kabir River watershed, as well as the lack of proper data on sources and sinks of pollutants, and the extent of human interference, led to the current study. Advanced geoinformation tools, such as RS and geographical information systems (GIS), prove to be a valuable asset in securing data on the fabric of the Akkar watershed in relation to its natural setting and anthropic interference. This is particularly true in the current study as the river constitutes the boundary between Lebanon and Syria. Remote sensing captures the watershed characteristics and land use on both sides without constraints. The natural fabric includes geology, drainage, hydrogeology, forest and soil. The anthropic fabric includes settlements, utilities, roads, agriculture and land use. If it were not for geoinformation techniques, the task of securing such data would be difficult. Also, these techniques show the impact of malpractices from excessive human interference that result in degradation of land and water quality. Changes in the watershed, such as environmental deterioration, are observed as water pollution, soil erosion, forest decline and socioeconomic imbalance. Obviously, this is the outcome of malpractices in a multisectorial system. A major challenge for RS and GIS is to quantify, model and predict, if possible, the extent of these changes. Remote sensing inherently captures the impact of interaction between nature and human beings. Detection of change is a major indicator that RS can contribute to the evaluation of the state of the environment. The application of it on this watershed reveals that significant changes have occurred over the last 10–15 years, most of which are anthropic.     

Numerical implementation and analysis of a class of metal plasticity models coupled with ductile damage

This paper deals with a class of rate-independent metal plasticity models which exhibit non-linear isotropic hardening, non-linear kinematic hardening (Chaboche-Marquis model) and ductile damage (Lemaitre-Chaboche model). The backward Euler scheme is used to integrate the rate constitutive relations. The non-linear equations obtained are solved by the Newton method. The consistent tangent operator is obtained by exact linearization of the algorithm. Despite the complexity of the constitutive equations, closed-form expressions are derived, without any approximations. Analytical, numerical and experimental results are presented and discussed.     

Effect of different levels of an ascorbic acid and tea mixture on nonheme iron absorption from a typical Tunisian meal fed to healthy rats

The aim of our study was to evaluate the bioavailability of iron from a typical Tunisian meal 'couscous' provided to healthy rats with or without appropriate mixtures of tea plus ascorbic acid and to search for the optimal amount of ascorbic acid able to overcome the inhibitory effect of tea prepared under realistic Tunisian circumstances. Our findings show that a tea decoction (100 mg/ml) reduced nonheme iron absorption from couscous by 50% (16.5 vs. 33.1%; p < 0.01). In contrast, administration of 20 mg ascorbic acid increased nonheme iron absorption from couscous by more than 100% (66.8 vs. 33.1%; p < 0.001). Administration of ascorbic acid (20 mg) in a tea decoction (100 mg/ml) completely counteracted the inhibiting effect of tea and significantly improved the nonheme iron absorption from couscous (34 vs. 33% in the control group; NS). The same effect was shown when 10 mg ascorbic acid was added to the tea decoction; however, 5 mg ascorbic acid was not able to overcome the inhibitory effect of tea on nonheme iron absorption from couscous (33.1 vs. 19.4%; p < 0.01). Our findings demonstrate that a molar ratio of ascorbic acid and tea equal or superior to 0.25 or 0.50 is necessary to overcome the inhibitory effect in rats of tea prepared under Tunisian circumstances. In relation to human nutrition, for Tunisians who regularly drink tea, we suggest a much greater amount of ascorbic acid than that normally recommended for normal subjects.     

Improving the SVM gender classification accuracy using clustering and incremental learning

Gender recognition has been playing a very important role in various applications such as human–computer interaction, surveillance, and security. Nonlinear support vector machines (SVMs) were investigated for the identification of gender using the Face Recognition Technology (FERET) image face database. It was shown that SVM classifiers outperform the traditional pattern classifiers (linear, quadratic, Fisher linear discriminant, and nearest neighbour). In this context, this paper aims to improve the SVM classification accuracy in the gender classification system and propose new models for a better performance. We have evaluated different SVM learning algorithms; the SVM‐radial basis function with a 5% outlier fraction outperformed other SVM classifiers. We have examined the effectiveness of different feature selection methods. AdaBoost performs better than the other feature selection methods in selecting the most discriminating features. We have proposed two classification methods that focus on training subsets of images among the training images. Method 1 combines the outcome of different classifiers based on different image subsets, whereas method 2 is based on clustering the training data and building a classifier for each cluster. Experimental results showed that both methods have increased the classification accuracy.     

Improved Geometric Anisotropic Diffusion Filter for Radiography Image Enhancement

In radiography imaging, contrast, sharpness and noise there are three fundamental factors that determine the image quality. Removing noise while preserving and sharpening image contours is a complicated task particularly for images with low contrast like radiography. This paper proposes a new anisotropic diffusion method for radiography image enhancement. The proposed method is based on the integration of geometric parameters derived from the local pixel intensity distribution in a nonlinear diffusion formulation that can concurrently perform the smoothing and the sharpening operations. The main novelty of the proposed anisotropic diffusion model is the ability to combine in one process noise reduction, edge preserving and sharpening. Experimental results using both synthetic and real welding radiography images prove the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with other anisotropic diffusion methods.     

Consolidated method to predicting pressure drop and heat transfer coefficient for both subcooled and saturated flow boiling in micro-channel heat sinks

Published studies concerning transport phenomena in micro-channel heat sinks can be divided into those concerning saturated boiling versus those focused on subcooled boiling, with the vast majority related to the former. What has been lacking is a single generalized method to tackle both boiling regimes. The primary objective of the present paper is to construct a consolidated method to predicting transport behavior of micro-channel heat sinks incurring all possible heat transfer regimes. First, a new correlation is developed for subcooled flow boiling pressure drop that accounts for inlet subcooling, micro-channel aspect ratio, and length-to-diameter ratio. This correlation shows excellent predictive capability against subcooled HFE 7100 pressure drop data corresponding to four different micro-channel geometries. Next, a consolidated method is developed for pressure drop that is capable of tackling inlet single-phase liquid, subcooled boiling, saturated boiling, and single-phase vapor regimes as well as inlet contraction and outlet expansion. A similar consolidated method is developed to predict the heat transfer coefficient that is capable of tackling all possible combinations of heat transfer regimes. The new consolidated method is shown to be highly effective at reproducing both data and trends for HFE 7100, water and R134a.     

Coiled-tube heat exchanger for high-pressure metal hydride hydrogen storage systems – Part 2. Computational model

This second part of a two-part study presents a transient, three-dimensional numerical model for a high-pressure metal hydride (HPMH) hydrogen storage system that is cooled by a coiled-tube heat exchanger. The model uses the same geometry examined in the first part of the study and its predictions are compared to experimental results also discussed in the first part. The model involves solving coupled heat diffusion and hydriding reaction equations for Ti_1.1CrMn. These equations are solved to determine the spatial distribution of hydride temperature as a function of time over the entire duration of the hydriding reaction, which is shown to agree favorably with the experimental data. The model also serves as an effective means for tracking the detailed temporal variations of the heat exchanger’s key performance parameters for different hydride locations relative to the coolant tube. These variations can aid in determining optimum placement of the coolant tube relative the hydride powder. Like the experimental study, the model proves that coolant temperature has the greatest influence on the time needed to complete the hydriding reaction.     

A simple but sound approach for processing crystal growth kinetic data

The effects of common data smoothing techniques, on the estimating of the kinetic and thermodynamic parameters of the crystal growth process, were discussed in the light of birth and spread model. Adoption of the moving average, and filtration caused a noticeable misunderstanding of the real ruling growth mechanism, especially, during the early period of the crystal growth.In this work, a MATLAB routine was developed with standard, and reliable method to treat the prolonged concentration-time data sets, as obtained from continuous recording of refractometric °Brix readings of pure sucrose solutions in laboratory batch crystallization process. The method consists of finding the median of the residence time for every °Brix concentration, with and without interference of previous and post readings. In addition to 30% reduction in the evaluated interfacial free energies, up to 5-folds of increase in the estimates of the overall kinetic coefficients were reported using the common smoothing techniques instead of the proposed routine.     

Effectiveness of the earth tube heat exchanger system coupled to a space model in achieving thermal comfort in rural areas

The aim of this work is to investigate by modelling the possibility of reducing the operational energy of a typical house without negatively affecting its embodied energy. This is done through consideration of different building materials coupled with the use of an earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) for fresh air supply and cooling. For known indoor and outdoor conditions and for given building materials (thermal capacity and conductance), a ventilation controller determines the amount of flow rate needed to temperate the indoor air temperature to achieve thermal comfort. Different wall configurations are assumed for each of the living zone and the bedroom zone of the apartment. It is found that the use of an optimal wall configuration in each zone coupled with the EAHE results in 76.7% energy savings compared with the reference case with conventional cooling.