Design improvements on rotary valve particle feeders used for obtaining suspended airflows

The back repulsion of low density particles, sticking of particles in feeder valve and interlocking and cohesive archs of particles in feeder hopper have been widely observed problems of a conventional rotary valve feeder used for feeding of granular particles into an airflow line. In this study, these problems of the rotary valve feeders were isolated by means of novel modifications to its conventional design. Results of the modifications showed that the modified feeder can be sensitively used to feed granular particles with mass feeding rates ranging between 5±0.15 and 85±0.85 g/s without encountering problems experienced with conventional rotary valves.     

Accurate and simple synthesis formulas for coplanar waveguides

Simple and accurate closed‐form formulas obtained by using a differential evolution algorithm are presented for the synthesis of coplanar waveguides (CPW). The results of the synthesis formulas proposed in this article are compared with those of the quasi‐static analysis, the synthesis formulas reported by the other researchers and also the experimental works available in the literature. The accuracy of the proposed synthesis formulas is found to be better than 0.75% for 9256 CPWs samples. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2008.     

A comprehensive survey: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and applications

Swarm intelligence (SI) is briefly defined as the collective behaviour of decentralized and self-organized swarms. The well known examples for these swarms are bird flocks, fish schools and the colony of social insects such as termites, ants and bees. In 1990s, especially two approaches based on ant colony and on fish schooling/bird flocking introduced have highly attracted the interest of researchers. Although the self-organization features are required by SI are strongly and clearly seen in honey bee colonies, unfortunately the researchers have recently started to be interested in the behaviour of these swarm systems to describe new intelligent approaches, especially from the beginning of 2000s. During a decade, several algorithms have been developed depending on different intelligent behaviours of honey bee swarms. Among those, artificial bee colony (ABC) is the one which has been most widely studied on and applied to solve the real world problems, so far. Day by day the number of researchers being interested in ABC algorithm increases rapidly. This work presents a comprehensive survey of the advances with ABC and its applications. It is hoped that this survey would be very beneficial for the researchers studying on SI, particularly ABC algorithm.     

Fabrication of chitosan/polyvinyl alcohol/amine modified carbon nanotube composite films for rapid chromate removal

Composite adsorbent films with amine and hydroxyl functionalities were synthesized from chitosan (CS), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and amine-modified carbon nanotubes (a-MWCNT) by solvent casting method. Weight proportions of CS to PVA and weight percent of a-MWCNT were optimized to achieve highest chromate removal capacity. Structural characteristics of the composites were investigated using scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and thermal gravimetric analysis. Accordingly, incorporation of a-MWCNT to CS/PVA structure resulted in the generation of nanochannels, which enhanced adsorption capacity. Moreover, the composite comprising 0.4% wt. a-MWCNT provided over 99% of Cr (VI) removal from 50 mg L⁻¹ Cr (VI) solution within five minutes of contact time. Redlich–Peterson and Radke–Prausnitz isotherm models provided the highest conformity to adsorption data. Maximum chromate sorption capacity of CS/PVA/a-MWCNT composite film was determined as 134.2 mg g⁻¹ being 172% higher than that of CS/PVA. Regeneration was best achieved in 1.0 M NaOH and the composite was shown to retain at least 70% of its original capacity after five consecutive adsorption–desorption cycles.     

Investigation of Ant System parameter interactions by using design of experiments for job-shop scheduling problems

In recent years, one of the most important and promising research fields has been metaheuristics to find optimal or near-optimal solutions for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Improving the quality of the solution or the solution time is basic research area on metaheuristics. Modifications of the existing ones or creation of hybrid approaches are the focus of these efforts. Another area of improving the solution quality of metaheuristics is finding the optimal combination of algorithm control parameters. This is usually done by design of experiments or one-at-a-time approach in genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and similar metaheuristics. We observe that, in studies which use Ant Colonies Optimization (ACO) as an optimization technique; the levels of control parameters are determined by some non-systematic initial experiments and the interactions of the parameters are not studied yet.In this study, the parameters of Ant System have been investigated on different sized and randomly generated job-shop scheduling problems by using design of experiments. The effects and interactions of the parameters have been interpreted with the outputs of the experiments. Referring to the statistical analysis it is observed that none of the interactions between the Ant System parameters has a significant effect on makespan value. A specific fractional experimental design is suggested instead of the full factorial design. Depending on the findings from the benchmark problems it will be a reliable approach to use the suggested design for saving time and effort in experiments without sacrificing the solution quality.     

A new QoS-aware TDMA/FDD MAC protocol with multi-beam directional antennas

With the ever-increasing demand for wireless real-time services and continuing emergence of new multimedia applications especially for mobile users, it is necessary for the network to support various levels of quality of service (QoS) while maximizing the utilization of scarce and expensive wireless channel resources. Considering this fact, a new TDMA/FDD MAC protocol integrating a novel QoS management algorithm and multi-beam Directional Antennas (DAs) to efficiently exploit wireless resources has been developed and presented in this paper. It supports all ATM CBR, VBR, ABR and UBR service classes by adopting a well-managed dynamic guarantee-based QoS scheduling algorithm. The work mainly aims at increasing the wireless system throughput as well as improving the call-blocking ratios and end-to-end delays for real-time applications. This seamless communication enables both handling real-time multimedia traffics in a fair manner and granting call requests on the basis of the connection types. The system has been developed, modeled and simulated using OPNET Modeler. The simulation results show that the QoS-aware TDMA/FDD MAC with multi-beam DAs has substantially increased the system throughput and that the call-blocking ratio has been reduced from 86% to 18%, when the proposed MAC with 8-Beam antennas is employed instead of the regular MAC.     

Strategic effort allocation in online innovation tournaments

Online innovation tournaments, such as those hosted by crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Kaggle), have been widely adopted by firms to evolve creative solutions to various problems. Solvers compete in these tournaments to earn rewards. In such competitive environments, it is imperative that solvers provide creative solutions with minimum effort. This article explores the factors that influence the solvers’ effort allocation decisions in a dynamic tournament setting. Specifically, comprehensive time variant data of teams that participated in crowdsourcing competitions on Kaggle were analyzed to gain insight into how solvers continually formulate strategies in light of performance feedback obtained through interim ranking. The results suggest that solvers strategically allocate their efforts throughout the contest to dynamically optimize their payoffs through balancing the probability of winning and the cost of expending effort. In particular, solvers tend to increase their efforts toward the end of tournaments or when they get closer to winning positions. Furthermore, our findings indicate that a last-minute surge in effort is more prevalent among high-skill solvers than in those with lower skill levels. In addition to providing insights that may help solvers develop strategies to improve their performance, the study has implications for the design of online crowdsourcing platforms, particularly in terms of incentivizing solvers to put forth their best effort.     

WSANFlow: An Interface Protocol Between SDN Controller and End Devices for SDN-Oriented WSAN

When dealing with a Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN) structure, one of the challenging problems is lack of flexibility in such network operations as establishment, management, and configuration. Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a promising technology for a simpler, more flexible, and less overworked network structure. Integration of SDN as a solution into the existing WSAN structures seems to be a strong candidate of deployment solutions for next generation WSAN systems. In order to get enhanced performance results for WSAN systems, we proposed an interface protocol, referred to as WSANFlow, which is responsible for all the communications between SDN controller (SDNC) and SDN-oriented end devices. The SDNC in this approach has the network intelligence and is capable of handling all the control and management operations related to the network. Thus, advanced communication operations can be managed and efficiently optimized efficiently by the SDN controller and then, subsequently, corresponding instructions can be delivered to end devices using the proposed WSANFlow protocol. In the study, we analyzed the proposed framework performance, in terms of power consumption ratio, throughput, and end to end delay metrics. Then, we compared the results with those of a ZigBee-based counterpart for different workloads such as; light, heavy and heavier load which modelizes a video stream of mild parameters. The results show that not only has the overall performance of the existing WSAN system been enhanced, but also control and management operations have been simplified by the proposed model.     

Magnetically controlled shape-memory effects of hybrid nanocomposites from oligo(ω-pentadecalactone) and covalently integrated magnetite nanoparticles

The covalent integration of inorganic nanoparticles in polymer matrices has gained significance for improving the structural properties of polymer-based materials. Here we report on the performance of poly(ω-pentadecalactone) networks with magnetite nanoparticles as netpoints in their magnetically-controlled shape-memory capability. Hybrid nanocomposites with magnetite nanoparticle content ranging from 5 to 11 wt% were prepared by reacting two types of oligo(ω-pentadecalactone) (OPDL) based precursors with terminal hydroxy groups, a three arm OPDL (³AOPDL, M_n = 6000 g mol⁻¹) and an OPDL (M_n = 3300 g mol⁻¹) coated magnetite nanoparticle (∅ = 10 nm), with a diisocyanate. Homogenous hybrid nanocomposites were obtained independent from the weight content of the OPDL decorated nanoparticles in the samples. At 100 °C (T > T_m-OPDL) the covalent integration of the nanoparticles increased the mechanical strength with increasing weight content whereby the elasticity remained almost constant. In magnetically-controlled one-way dual-shape experiments the shape fixity decreased from 95% to 90% but the shape recovery increased slightly from 95% to 97% when the nanoparticle content was increased. In magnetically-controlled reversible dual-shape experiments the nanoparticles had a restraining effect and the maximum shape-change of 65% for hybrid nanocomposites with 5 wt% magnetite nanoparticles was reduced to 36% when the particle content was increased to 11 wt%. These results show that the performance of hybrid nanocomposites can be tailored by nanoparticle content, however in terms of their applicability either mechanical strength or actuation capability should be focussed in the material selection.