A reverse osmosis desalting plant operated by gas turbines

Power plants in Kuwait use gas turbines (GT) only for a few hours to produce power at peak load times. Peak loadoccurs in the summer due to the air-conditioning load. As an example, the average number of operating hours for six gas turbines in the Doha East power plant was 16 in the summer of 2001. There is little concern about efficiency of these GT since they work for a very short time during the year. However, a recent increase in desalted seawater demand suggests the use of these GT to operate reverse osmosis (RO) desalting systems all year around. The summer outside design temperature in Kuwait for air-conditioning calculations is 48°C dry bulb temperature (DBT), and 28°C wet bulb temperature (WBT); but the ambient temperature can easily reach 60°C. Gas turbine power output and efficiency are drastically reduced by the increase in temperature of intake air to the gas turbine's compressor, especially during harsh Kuwaiti summer conditions. Thus, it is essential to investigate cooling of air intake to the GT compressor. The performance of a typical GT unit and its ability to produce desalted waterby a RO desalting system at different ambient temperatures are presented. Calculation of needed capacities for the cooling of intake air to the GT compressor was performed for evaporative cooling, single and multiple mechanical vapor compression cycles, and combined indirect evaporation cooling with the refrigeration system. The improvements of power output and efficiency due to the cooling of air intake of the GT and the resulting increase in desalted water are also presented.     

Privacy-preserving biometric verification with outsourced correlation filter computation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In traditional biometric verification systems, personal computer stores biometric database and performs verification process. Because of limited storage,...     

Color object segmentation and tracking using flexible statistical model and level-set

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This study presents an unsupervised novel algorithm for color image segmentation, object detection and tracking based on unsupervised learning step followed with...     

A novel secure solution of using mixed reality in data transmission for bowel and jaw surgical telepresence: enhanced rivest cipher RC6 block cipher

Security threats are crucial challenges that deter Mixed reality (MR) communication in medical telepresence. This research aims to improve the security by reducing the chances of types of various attacks occurring during the real-time data transmission in surgical telepresence as well as reduce the time of the cryptographic algorithm and keep the quality of the media used. The proposed model consists of an enhanced RC6 algorithm in combination. Dynamic keys are generated from the RC6 algorithm mixed with RC4 to create dynamic S-box and permutation table, preventing various known attacks during the real-time data transmission. For every next session, a new key is created, avoiding possible reuse of the same key from the attacker. The results obtained from our proposed system are showing better performance compared to the state of art. The resistance to the tested attacks is measured throughout the entropy, Pick to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) is decreased for the encrypted image than the state of art, structural similarity index (SSIM) closer to zero. The execution time of the algorithm is decreased for an average of 20%. The proposed system is focusing on preventing the brute force attack occurred during the surgical telepresence data transmission. The paper proposes a framework that enhances the security related to data transmission during surgeries with acceptable performance.

     

Iris-based human identity recognition with machine learning methods and discrete fast Fourier transform

Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering - One of the most important modules of computer systems is the one that is responsible for user safety. It was proven that simple passwords and...     

Laser melting of Ti-15Al-20Nb alloy

Titanium aluminides have become promising materials for high-temperature applications, but the relatively poor oxidation resistance and elevated- temperature strength of these alloys limit their application to temperatures lower than 1000 °C. Niobium addition improves the properties of titanium aluminide. However, the mechanical, metallurgical, and corrosion properties of Ti- Al- Nb may be improved by treatment with a laser beam. Consequently, the present study examines the properties of Ti- 15Al- 20Nb alloy subjected to the Nd:YAG laser melting process. Hardness in the surface region increases to twice the base material hardness, and corrosion resistance improves considerably after laser treatment.     

The isoxazolidines: the effects of steric factor and hydrophobic chain length on the corrosion inhibition of mild steel in acidic medium

Several new isoxazolidines having varying degree of steric environment and hydrophobic chain length, prepared efficiently using single-step nitrone cycloaddition reactions, are tested for corrosion inhibition of mild steel in 1 M and 5 M HCl at 50-70 °C range by gravimetric and electrochemical methods. All compounds have shown very good corrosion inhibition efficiency (IE%) in acidic solution. Steric crowding around the nitrogen centres and hydrophobic chain lengths as well as increase in temperature (in the presence of the inhibitor in the higher concentration range 100-400 ppm) are found to increase the inhibition efficiency of the isoxazolidines. Thermodynamic parameters (ΔG°_ads, ΔH°_ads, ΔS°_ads) for the adsorption process and kinetic parameters for the metal dissolution (or hydrogen evolution) reaction in the presence of one of the isoxazolidines were determined. Experimental results agree with the Temkin adsorption isotherm. The inhibition of corrosion in 1 M HCl, influenced by both physi- and chemi-sorption, was found to be under mixed control, but predominantly under cathodic control.     

Swarm Intelligent Compressive Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

This article proposes a novel algorithm to improve the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. This algorithm employs swarm intelligence algorithms in conjunction with compressive sensing theory to build up the routing trees and to decrease the communication rate. The main contribution of this article is to extend swarm intelligence algorithms to build a routing tree in such a way that it can be utilized to maximize efficiency, thereby rectifying the delay problem of compressive sensing theory and improving the network lifetime. In addition, our approach offers accurate data recovery from small amounts of compressed data. Simulation results show that our approach can effectively extend the network lifetime of a large‐scale wireless sensor network.     

A Model for Incident Tickets Correlation in Network Management

In Information Technology Service Management (ITSM), network management teams typically use an Incident Ticket System (ITS) as a tool to track, troubleshoot, and coordinate the resolution of network incidents that occur during the daily operation of the network. A well organized ITS may positively impact on the efficiency of the incident management process. Nevertheless, in many cases the handling of tickets by the management team is not completely systematic and may be incoherent and inefficient. This way, irrelevant or redundant tickets for the same incident may be issued, thus creating a redundancy in the system that leads to inefficiencies. In this paper, we suggest a model aimed to correlate redundant tickets in order to reduce the information to a single ticket per incident. We validate the proposed correlation model by evaluating it with two datasets taken from a real ticketing system of a telecommunications network company. Using this model as a basis, we also develop and evaluate a methodology that assesses the efficiency of the management team during the process of tickets creation and management. Based on it, we also get some insights on the performance of the different management groups involved in the ticket creation process. These analyses can be leveraged for improving both the management groups functioning and the policies for the tickets’ creation.