An Intercommunication Home Energy Management System with Appliance Recognition in Home Network

In present days there are wide varieties of household electric appliances along with different power consumption habits of consumers, making identifying electric appliances without presetting difficulty. This paper introduces smart appliance management system to recognize electric appliances in home networks, which uses sensing devices that measure current to calculate the power consumption of the appliances. The system will set the characteristics and categories of each electric appliance, and then uses the classifications of the electronic energy features in order to recognize different appliances. The system searches the cluster data while eliminating noise for recognition functionality and error detection mechanism or the electric appliances using the current clustering algorithm. Afterwards the recognition are used to build a control list of appliances on the platform to provide appliance intercommunication. Simultaneously, the household appliance automatic control services are integrated by the system to control appliances based on userspower consumption plans to realize a bidirectional monitoring services. In actual experiments, the proposed system achieves a recognition rate or 95% as well as successfully controls general household electric appliances in home network.     

Cross-layer TCP with bitmap error recovery scheme in wireless ad hoc networks

Current TCP is not able to distinguish corruption losses from packet loss events. Hence, high transmission errors and varying inherent latency within a wireless network would cause seriously adverse effects to TCP performance. To improve TCP in IEEE 802.11 multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks, this study proposes an error recovery mechanism based on coordination of TCP and IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. The simulation results confirm that the proposed error recovery approach could provide a more efficient solution for frequent transmission losses, and enable TCP to distinguish between congestion errors and transmission errors, and thus, to respond with proper remedial actions.     

Comparative assessment upon dye removal capability of indigenous bacterial strains from Lanyang Plain in northeast Taiwan

This study provides a first attempt from a geological and ecological perspective to look forward isolations of indigenous strains with the decolorization capability from the most biodiverse region in Taiwan for dye-laden wastewater treatment. Serial selections were conducted by a specific use of the fungicide nystatin and model azo dye C.I. reactive red 141 (RR141) during isolation. Several bacterial strains with the excellent capability of azo dye decolorization were predominantly isolated from river water and mud samples of Lanyang River Basin. Phase-curve profiles indicated that azo dye decolorization was found to be non-growth associated for both mixed cultures and isolated pure strains. The color removal efficiency of the mixed culture was nearly 10-fold to that of Pseudomonas luteola at ca. 600mgL(-1) RR141, indicating a promising feasibility of isolated cultures to be applicable for practical treatments. The decolorization performance of unacclimated and acclimated pure cultures was at most 20% and 70-80% to that of the mixed cultures, respectively. It might suggest that combined interactions among decolorizers were crucial for the optimal color removal. According to the results of physiological and 16S rRNA gene sequence examinations, the isolated strains should belong to Aeromonas species (very likely A. hydrophila).     

Energy flow analysis in pulp and paper industry

This work analyzed the energy flow of the pulp and paper industry in Taiwan. The potential technology options that were examined focus on how to capture some of the energy currently lost in the processes and then identifying the areas with energy-saving potential that could also have large impacts across a variety of industries. In addition, the energy-saving potential of these options was evaluated. The energy-saving potential of the pulp and paper industry would be around 6939.9 KLOE/M. The greatest energy-saving potential lies with improving energy distribution and equipment efficiency, which would together potentially comprise 86.8% of total energy conservation. This analysis can serve as a benchmark for current pulp and paper making operations, and as a base case for stimulating changes toward more efficient energy utilization in the pulp and paper industry.     

Synthesis and characterization of well-dispersed multi-walled carbon nanotube/low-bandgap poly(3,4-alkoxythiophene) nanocomposites

In this study, we prepared nanocomposites of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and low-energy-bandgap conjugated polymers incorporating 3,4-alkoxythiophene monomers. Poly(3,4-dihexyloxythiophene) (PDHOT) and poly(3,4-dimethoxythiophene-co-3,4-dihexyloxythiophene) [P(DMOT-co-DHOT)] have relatively low-energy-bandgaps (ca. 1.38 and 1.34 eV, respectively), determined from the onsets of absorbances in their UV–Vis spectra, because of the electron-donating effects of their alkoxy groups. MWCNTs have poor solubility in common organic solvents; after surface modification with alkyl side chains using the Tour reaction, however, the p-hexylaniline modified MWCNT derivative (MWCNT-HA) was readily dispersed in CHCl₃ and could be mixed with the low bandgap polymers. Scanning electron microscopy images revealed that MWCNT-HA was dispersed well in each polythiophene derivative; only a few MWCNT-HA bundles could be observed at a high MWCNT-HA content (≧20 wt.%). The electrical conductivities of the MWCNTs/PDHOT composites were dependent on their MWCNT content, reaching 16 S/cm at 30 wt.% MWCNT-HA. We suspect that the two hexyloxy chains of PDHOT enhanced its solubility and allowed it to wrap around the surfaces of the MWCNTs more readily.     

Dichloromethane treatment by mesoporous metal catalysts

Dichloromethane (DCM) is one of the most commonly used solvents in industry. DCM easily accumulates and breaks down slowly; it is recognized as being carcinogenic. This research uses the sol-gel method to synthesize Mesoporous Mobil Catalytic Material Number 41 (MCM-41), Fe-MCM-41 and Pt-MCM-41 catalysts, and discusses the effectiveness of using these self-made catalysts to treat DCM. The qualities of each catalyst are identified using XRPD, BET, and SEM–EDS characteristic analyses. These results are then analyzed using the reaction kinetics theory. Results show that removal efficiency increases with the increase in temperature and concentration, and decreases with the increase in reaction chamber flow rates. Adsorption of DCM using mesoporous metal catalysts conforms to the Langmuir isotherm adsorption model. It was found that the best correlation results were observed for a Pt-MCM-41 catalyst.     

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) studies on Cd0.5Fe0.5Se nanocrystalline thin films deposited by a spray pyrolysis technique

Recently, nanostructured thin films have attracted the attention of researchers from several disciplines, due to their outstanding electronic and optical properties and potential applications in various optoelectronic devices. The ternary Cd_0.5Fe_0.5Se nanocrystalline thin films were deposited by a spray pyrolysis method onto glass, aluminium, copper and stainless steel substrates. The structural and morphological properties were studied by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy analysis. The XRD study revealed that, Cd_0.5Fe_0.5Se films are nanocrystalline in nature with hexagonal lattice. The optical absorption study showed that, the semiconductor Cd_0.5Fe_0.5Se thin film deposited on glass exhibits direct band gap energy of the order of 1.95 eV. The PEC study revealed that, Cd_0.5Fe_0.5Se thin films deposited on aluminium substrate exhibited maximum fill factor (FF) and efficiency (η) as compared to the films deposited on stainless steel and copper substrates.     

A sparsity-ranking edge-preservation filter for removal of high-density impulse noises

In this study, a novel sparsity-ranking edge-preservation filter (SREPF) is proposed for removal of high-density impulse noise in images. Using the sparse matrix representation, the first stage of SREPF is not only to identify the noisy candidates but also to decide the processing order of them via a rank of noise-pixel sparsity in the working window. Then the second stage of SREPF utilizes a modified double Laplacian convolution to confirm the truly noisy pixels and yield a directional mean to recover them. This new approach has achieved more remarkable success rate of the edge detection than other edge-preservation methods especially in high noise ratio over 0.5. As a result, SREPF has significant improvements in terms of edge preservation and noise suppression exhibited by the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity index metric (SSIM). Simulation results show that this method is capable of producing better performance compared to several representative filters.     

Hybrid robust support vector machines for regression with outliers

In this study, a hybrid robust support vector machine for regression is proposed to deal with training data sets with outliers. The proposed approach consists of two stages of strategies. The first stage is for data preprocessing and a support vector machine for regression is used to filter out outliers in the training data set. Since the outliers in the training data set are removed, the concept of robust statistic is not needed for reducing the outliers’ effects in the later stage. Then, the training data set except for outliers, called as the reduced training data set, is directly used in training the non-robust least squares support vector machines for regression (LS-SVMR) or the non-robust support vector regression networks (SVRNs) in the second stage. Consequently, the learning mechanism of the proposed approach is much easier than that of the robust support vector regression networks (RSVRNs) approach and of the weighted LS-SVMR approach. Based on the simulation results, the performance of the proposed approach with non-robust LS-SVMR is superior to the weighted LS-SVMR approach when the outliers exist. Moreover, the performance of the proposed approach with non-robust SVRNs is also superior to the RSVRNs approach.     

The influence of municipal solid waste incinerator fly ash slag blended in cement pastes

This study investigates the effect of mixing Type I, Type II, and Belite cements with municipal solid waste incinerator (MSWI) fly ash slag-blended cement (FASBC). The experimental results showed that a 10-40% slag replacement of by caused an increase in the initial and the final setting time. The toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) results show that the heavy metal content met the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) regulatory limits. From the results, it can be seen that the effect of the replacement of 10-40% of the cement by slag caused an increase in the initial and final setting time. Compressive strength results indicate that the slag-blended cement (SBC) pastes had slower compressive strength development in the early stages, but this strength obviously increased at later ages. Variations in the Portland cements can affect early strength development but have no significant effect on the degree of hydration at later ages. MSWI slag gives a relatively slower increase in early strength but may show a greater degree of reaction at later ages.