A basis for the design of a multiattribute heuristic for single resource project scheduling

Two important characteristics of a project network are the network's topology and the amount of resources available. Most published project scheduling procedures take one or both of these two characteristics into account. Project scheduling procedures that are robust over variations of network characteristics are desirable. The degree of robustness is generally gauged by one or more measures of performance.

The objective of this paper is to compare a set of priority rules that are useful for a single resource project scheduling problem. The set of networks suggested by Patterson (1973) is used along with the set of performance measures proposed by Khattab and Choobineh 1991. The result of this comparison allows one to design a multiattribute heuristic for a single resource project scheduling problem.     

Calculation of fuel burnup and radionuclide inventory in the Syrian miniature neutron source reactor using the GETERA code

Calculations of the fuel burnup and radionuclide inventory in the Syrian miniature neutron source reactor (MNSR) after 10 years (the reactor core expected life) of the reactor operation time are presented in this paper using the GETERA code. The code is used to calculate the fuel group constants and the infinite multiplication factor versus the reactor operating time for 10, 20, and 30 kW operating power levels. The amounts of uranium burntup and plutonium produced in the reactor core, the concentrations and radionuclides of the most important fission products and actinide radionuclides accumulated in the reactor core, and the total radioactivity of the reactor core were calculated using the GETERA code as well. It is found that the GETERA code is better than the WIMSD4 code for the fuel burnup calculation in the MNSR reactor since it is newer, has a bigger library of isotopes, and is more accurate.     

Spontaneous ignition behavior of cotton fabric having different amounts of polyester

Measurements were made on a series of cotton/polyester blends having different compositions. The results showed that the time to ignition increased as the polyester contents of the fabric were increased. An explanation of this observation is given. Both the orientation of the fabric and the temperature of the furnace environment affect the time-to-ignition values. The time to ignition was found to be longer for the fabric loaded in horizontal position than that loaded in vertical position. This difference was attributed to the effect of the forced convection induced inside the furnace. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Synthesis and characterization of cellulose nanowhisker-reinforced-poly(ε-caprolactone) scaffold for tissue-engineering applications

Poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) is a bioresorbable and biocompatible polymer with assorted medical applications. However, remarkable hydrophobicity and nonosteoconductivity have stood as a barrier to limit its applications. The present study aims to modify the bulk characteristics of PCL to develop a polymeric scaffold with adequate structural and mechanical properties to support regenerated tissues. For this purpose, functionalized bacterial cellulose nanowhiskers (BCNW-g-βCD-PCL₂₀₀₀) are synthesized. Reinforcing PCL matrix with 4 wt % of the nanowhiskers resulted in a bionanocomposite with promoted bulk properties. Compared to neat PCL, the obtained bionanocomposite shows improvements of 115 and 51% in tensile strength and Young's modulus, respectively; 20% increase in hydrophilicity; 7% increase in degradation rate; and 6% decrease in crystallinity. Gas foaming/combined particulate leaching technique is used to develop highly porous structures of 86–95% porosity with interconnected macropores of mean pore diameters of 250–420 μm. Porous scaffolds showed compression modulus values of 5.3–9.1 MPa and would have promising applications in regenerative medicine. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2020 , 137, 48481.     

Four energy group neutron flux distributions in the Syrian Miniature Neutron Source Reactor using the WIMSD4 and CITATION codes

A 3-D (R, θ, Z) neutronic model for the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor (MNSR) was developed earlier to conduct the reactor neutronic analysis. The group constants for all the reactor components were generated using the WIMSD4 code. The reactor excess reactivity and the four group neutron flux distributions were calculated using the CITATION code. This model is used in this paper to calculate the pointwise four energy group neutron flux distributions in the MNSR versus the radius, angle and reactor axial directions. Good agreement is noticed between the measured and the calculated thermal neutron flux in the inner and the outer irradiation sites with relative differences less than 7% and 5%, respectively.     

Assessment of fuel conversion from HEU to LEU in the Syrian MNSR reactor using the MCNP code

Assessment of fuel conversion from high enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel in the Syrian MNSR reactor was conducted in this paper. Three 3-D neutronic models for the Syrian MNSR reactor using the MCNP-4C code were developed to assess the possibility of fuel conversion from 89.87% HEU fuel (UAl₄–Al) to 19.75% LEU fuel (UO₂). The first model showed that 347 fuel rods with HEU fuel were required to obtain a reactor core with 5.17 mk unadjusted excess reactivity. The second model showed that only 200 LEU fuel rods distributed in the reactor core like the David star figure were required to obtain a reactor core with 4.85 mk unadjusted excess reactivity. The control rod worth using the LEU fuel was enhanced. Finally, the third model showed that distribution of 200 LEU fuel rods isotropically in the 10 circles of the reactor core failed to convert the fuel since the calculated core unadjusted excess reactivity for this model was 10.45 mk. This value was far beyond the reactor operation limits and highly exceeded the current MNSR core unadjusted excess reactivity (5.17 mk).     

Nutritional quality of legume seeds as affected by some physical treatments, Part 1: Protein quality evaluation

The effect of water soaking, boiling, roasting, microwave cooking, autoclaving, fermentation and micronization on the nutritional quality of cowpea, pea and kidney bean was investigated. Pea seeds showed the highest crude fat, crude fiber and the lowest moisture contents while kidney bean had the lowest crude fat and the highest crude protein and ash contents. Glu and Asp were the main amino acids in all legumes while Cys and Met contents were the lowest. The protein efficiency ratio (PER), protein chemical score (CS) and the essential amino acid index (EAAI) of raw seeds ranged from 2.15 to 2.95, 39.07 to 68.30, and 55.49 to 62.84, respectively. Soaking, boiling, microwave cooking and autoclaving increased the total essential amino acids in all samples. Furthermore, raw and treated samples showed higher Lys content than the reference protein. Autoclaving was the most effective in improving protein quality followed by micronization, microwave cooking and fermentation. In addition, in vitro protein digestibility was improved after soaking, boiling, microwave cooking, autoclaving and fermentation but was reduced after roasting and micronization.     

On the coexistence of a primary user with an energy harvesting secondary user: a case of cognitive cooperation

In this paper, we consider a cognitive scenario where an energy harvesting secondary user shares the spectrum with a primary user. The secondary source helps the primary source in delivering its undelivered packets during periods of silence of the primary source. The primary source has a queue for storing its data packets, whereas the secondary source has two data queues: a queue for storing its own packets and the other for storing the fraction of the undelivered primary packets accepted for relaying. The secondary source is assumed to be a battery‐based node, which harvests energy packets from the environment. In addition to its data queues, the secondary user has an energy queue to store the harvested energy packets. The secondary energy packets are used for primary packets decoding and data packets transmission. More specifically, if the secondary energy queue is empty, the secondary source can neither help the primary source nor transmit a packet from the data queues. The energy queue is modeled as a discrete‐time queue with Markov arrival and service processes. Because of the interaction of the queues, we provide inner and outer bounds on the stability region of the proposed system. We investigate the impact of the energy arrival rate on the stability region. Numerical results show the significant gain of cooperation.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Hybrid Regularization-Based Multi-Frame Super-Resolution Using Bayesian Framework

The prime purpose for the image reconstruction of a multi-frame super-resolution is to reconstruct a higher-resolution image through incorporating the knowledge obtained from a series of relevant low-resolution images, which is useful in numerous fields. Nevertheless, super-resolution image reconstruction methods are usually damaged by undesirable restorative artifacts, which include blurring distortion, noises, and stair-casing effects. Consequently, it is always challenging to achieve balancing between image smoothness and preservation of the edges inside the image. In this research work, we seek to increase the effectiveness of multi-frame super-resolution image reconstruction by increasing the visual information and improving the automated machine perception, which improves human analysis and interpretation processes. Accordingly, we propose a new approach to the image reconstruction of multi-frame super-resolution, so that it is created through the use of the regularization framework. In the proposed approach, the bilateral edge preserving and bilateral total variation regularizations are employed to approximate a high-resolution image generated from a sequence of corresponding images with low-resolution to protect significant features of an image, including sharp image edges and texture details while preventing artifacts. The experimental results of the synthesized image demonstrate that the new proposed approach has improved efficacy both visually and numerically more than other approaches.     

The case for SIMO random access in multi-antenna multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, we demonstrate that multiple concurrent asynchronous and uncoordinated Single-Input Multiple-Output (SIMO) transmissions can successfully take place even though the respective receivers do not explicitly null out interfering signals. Hence, we propose simple modifications to the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) to enable multiple non-spatially-isolated SIMO sender-receiver pairs to share the medium. Namely, we propose to increase the physical carrier sense threshold, disable virtual carrier sensing, and enable message-in-message packet detection. We use experiments to show that while increasing the peak transmission rate, spatial multiplexing schemes such as those employed by the IEEE 802.11n are highly non-robust to asynchronous and uncoordinated interferers. In contrast, we show that the proposed multi-flow SIMO MAC scheme alleviates the severe unfairness resulting from uncoordinated transmissions in 802.11 multi-hop networks. We analytically compute the optimal carrier sense threshold based on different network performance objectives for a given node density and number of receive antennas.