Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Removal Of Hg(Ii) In Aqueous Solutions Through Physical And Chemical Adsorption Principles, Mengdan Xia, Zhixin Chen, Yao Li, Chuanhua Li, Nasir M. Ahmad, Waqas A. Cheema, Shenmin Zhu

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Adsorption has been the focus of research on the treatment of heavy metal mercury pollution since it is among the most toxic heavy metals in existence. The US EPA has set a mandatory discharge limit of 10 μg Hg L^-1 for wastewater and for drinking water a maximum accepted concentration of 1 μg Hg L^-1. Physical adsorption and chemical adsorption are the two major mechanisms of adsorption methods used for mercury removal in aqueous sources. The recent decades' research progress is reviewed to elaborate varieties of adsorption materials ranging from materials with large surface area for physical …

In Situ Characterisation Of Mns Precipitation In High Carbon Steel, Yasuhiro Tanaka, Farshid Pahlevani, Suk Chun Moon, Rian J. Dippenaar, Veena Sahajwalla

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Manganese sulphide (MnS) is one of the major non-metallic inclusions in steel with huge impact on steel property. In the case of high carbon steel, due to higher sulphur content and its brittleness, controlling MnS formation is one of the main issues. MnS has a complicated precipitation mechanism during solidification in liquid and solid steel and at the interface with oxide inclusions. Higher sulphur content, lower melting point and different oxide inclusions in high carbon steel will cause MnS precipitation at different stages. In this study, different stages of MnS precipitation from liquid and/or solid in high carbon steel and …

Time Series Analysis Of Online Public Opinions In Colleges And Universities And Its Sustainability, Wei He, Yuan Fang, Reza Malekian, Zhixiong Li

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

With the quick penetration of Internet applications, online media have become an important carrier of public opinions. The opinions and comments expressed by young college students-one of the most active netizen groups-on the Internet have turned out to be an essential part of the online public opinions in colleges and universities. However, the existing systems generally employ simple statistical methods to analyze the effect of online public opinions on the image and reputation development of colleges and universities without taking account of other factors, such as the hotness characteristics of online public opinions and semantic information. Therefore, on the basis …

A Deep Learning Model For Estimating Story Points, Morakot Choetkiertikul, Hoa K. Dam, Truyen Tran, Trang Pham, Aditya K. Ghose, Tim Menzies

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Although there has been substantial research in software analytics for effort estimation in traditional software projects, little work has been done for estimation in agile projects, especially estimating the effort required for completing user stories or issues. Story points are the most common unit of measure used for estimating the effort involved in completing a user story or resolving an issue. In this paper, we propose a prediction model for estimating story points based on a novel combination of two powerful deep learning architectures: long short-term memory and recurrent highway network. Our prediction system is end-to-end trainable from raw input …

Towards An Assessment Framework Of Reuse: A Knowledge Level Analysis Approach, Ghassan Beydoun, Achim Hoffmann, Rafael Valencia-Garcia, Jun Shen, Asifqumer Gill

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

The process of assessing the suitability of reuse of a software component is complex. Indeed, software systems are typically developed as an assembly of existing components. The complexity of the assessment process is due to lack of clarity on how to compare the cost of adaptation of an existing component versus the cost of developing it from scratch. Indeed, often pursuit of reuse can lead to excessive rework and adaptation, or developing suites of components that often get neglected. This paper is an important step towards modelling the complex reuse assessment process. To assess the success factors that can underpin …

Experiential Probabilistic Assessment Of Cloud Services, Mahdi Fahmidehgholami, Ghassan Beydoun, Graham C. Low

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Substantial difficulties in adopting cloud services are often encountered during upgrades of existing software systems. A reliable early stage analysis can facilitate an informed decision process of moving systems to cloud platforms. It can also mitigate risks against system quality goals. Towards this, we propose an interactive goal reasoning approach which is supported by a probabilistic layer for the precise analysis of cloud migration risks to improve the reliability of risk control. The approach is illustrated using a commercial scenario of integrating a digital document processing system to Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Metamorphic Relations For Enhancing System Understanding And Use, Zhi Q. Zhou, Liqun Sun, Tsong Yueh Chen, Dave Towey

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Modern information technology paradigms, such as online services and off-the-shelf products, often involve a wide variety of users with different or even conflicting objectives. Every software output may satisfy some users, but may also fail to satisfy others. Furthermore, users often do not know the internal working mechanisms of the systems. This situation is quite different from bespoke software, where developers and users usually know each other. This paper proposes an approach to help users to better understand the software that they use, and thereby more easily achieve their objectives - even when they do not fully understand how the …

Ea-Gans: Edge-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks For Cross-Modality Mr Image Synthesis, Biting Yu, Luping Zhou, Lei Wang, Yinghuan Shi, Jurgen Fripp, Pierrick Bourgeat

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is a widely used medical imaging protocol that can be configured to provide different contrasts between the tissues in human body. By setting different scanning parameters, each MR imaging modality reflects the unique visual characteristic of scanned body part, benefiting the subsequent analysis from multiple perspectives. To utilize the complementary information from multiple imaging modalities, cross-modality MR image synthesis has aroused increasing research interest recently. However, most existing methods only focus on minimizing pixel/voxel-wise intensity difference but ignore the textural details of image content structure, which affects the quality of synthesized images. In this paper, we …

Improving The Security Of The Drs Scheme With Uniformly Chosen Random Noise, Arnaud Sipasseuth, Thomas Plantard, Willy Susilo

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

At PKC 2008, Plantard et al. published a theoretical framework for a lattice-based signature scheme. Recently, after ten years, a new signature scheme dubbed as the Diagonal Reduction Signature (DRS) scheme was presented in the NIST PQC Standardization as a concrete instantiation of the initial work. Unfortunately, the initial submission was challenged by Yu and Ducas using the structure that is present on the secret key noise. In this paper, we are proposing a new method to generate random noise in the DRS scheme to elimite the aforementioned attack, and all subsequent potential variants.

Vitamin D Deficiency During Pregnancy And Its Associated Factors Among Third Trimester Malaysian Pregnant Women, Fui Chee Woon, Yit Siew Chin, Intan Hakimah Ismail, Marijka Batterham, Amir Latiff, Wan Ying Gan, Geeta Appannah, Siti Hussien, Muliana Edi, Meng Tan, Yoke Mun Chan

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Background Despite perennial sunshine, vitamin D deficiency is prevalent among Malaysians especially pregnant women. This study determines the vitamin D status and its associated factors among third trimester pregnant women attending government health clinics in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Methods Information on socio-demographic characteristics, obstetrical history, and sun exposure were obtained through face-to-face interviews. Vitamin D intake was assessed using a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration was measured and classified as deficient (< 30 nmol/L), insufficient (30-50 nmol/L), and sufficient ( ≥ 50 nmol/L).

Results Of the 535 pregnant women recruited, 42.6% were vitamin D deficient. They consumed an average of 8.7 ± 6.7 μg of …

Prospects For Protecting Business Microdata When Releasing Population Totals Via A Remote Server, James O. Chipperfield, John Newman, Gwenda Thompson, Yue Ma, Yan-Xia Lin

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Many statistical agencies face the challenge of maintaining the confidentiality of respondents while providing as much analytical value as possible from their data. Datasets relating to businesses present particular difficulties because they are likely to contain information about large enterprises that dominate industries and may be more easily identified. Agencies therefore tend to take a cautious approach to releasing business data (e.g., trusted access, remote access and synthetic data). The Australian Bureau of Statistics has developed a remote server, called TableBuilder, which has the capability to allow users to specify and request tables created from business microdata. The tables are …

Coffee-An Mpi-Parallelized Python Package For The Numerical Evolution Of Differential Equations, George Doulis, Jorg Frauendiener, Chris Stevens, Benjamin E. Whale

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

COFFEE (Conformal Field Equation Evolver) is a Python package primarily developed to numerically evolve systems of partial differential equations over time using the method of lines. It includes a variety of time integrators and finite differencing stencils with the summation-by-parts property, as well as pseudo-spectral functionality for angular derivatives of spin-weighted functions. Some additional capabilities include being MPI-parallelisable on a variety of different geometries, HDF data output and post processing scripts to visualize data, and an actions class that allows users to create code for analysis after each timestep.

Prediction Of Blast Furnace Hearth Condition: Part Ii - A Transient State Simulation Of Hearth Condition During Blast Furnace Shutdown, Xue Feng Dong, Paul Zulli, Mark Biasutti

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

The extent of hearth cooling is critically important in determining the feasible duration of an extended blast furnace maintenance shutdown. Based on a fixed domain method, a transient numerical model has been developed which considers the effect of solidification enthalpy of liquid iron in a coke-free bath, enabling the progress of hearth cooling to be monitored. The model was initially verified by comparing calculations with actual refractory temperatures during shutdowns of shorter duration (typically 1-2 days) at BlueScope's No. 5 Blast Furnace. It was then applied to estimate the hearth condition during an extended shutdown period (typically, 5-6 days). The …

Evaluation Of In-Depth Energy Modelling For The Design And Operation Of A Net-Positive Energy Solar Decathlon House, Brendan Banfield, Clayton Mcdowell, Duane A. Robinson, Ashish P. Agalgaonkar

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

The Solar Decathlon is an international competition that challenges collegiate teams from around the world to design and build functioning, sustainable, solar powered houses. The competition is split into ten sub-contests which vary from competition to competition. Contests are a combination of juried (judged by a panel experts) or measured (such as energy usage and thermal comfort) contests. This paper will focus on the measured contests, in particular; energy management, comfort conditions and house functioning. To ensure optimal house performance during the competition, extensive energy and thermal modelling is required to ensure the solar PV and on-site energy storage can …

An Electromagnetic Variable Inertance Device For Seat Suspension Vibration Control, Donghong Ning, Shuaishuai Sun, Haiping Du, Weihua Li, Nong Zhang, Minyi Zheng, Liang Luo

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

This paper designs and builds an electromagnetic variable inertance (VI) device for a heavy duty vehicle seat suspension to reduce the vibration transferred to driver bodies. The conventional semi-active vibration control mainly applies the variable damping (VD) and variable stiffness (VS) devices. The VI device is equivalent to an inerter with the capability to vary its inertance, which is a new semi-active system inspired by the VS device design. The VI device consists of a transmission device, a VD device and two flywheels. By varying the damping of the VD device, the equivalent inertance of the VI device is controllable …

Defect Detection For Patterned Fabric Images Based On Ghog And Low-Rank Decomposition, Chunlei Li, Guangshuai Gao, Zhoufeng Liu, Di Huang, Jiangtao Xi

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

In contrast to defect-free fabric images with macro-homogeneous textures and regular patterns, the fabric images with the defect are characterized by the defect regions that are salient and sparse among the redundant background. Therefore, as an effective tool for separating an image into a redundant part (the background) and sparse part (the defect), the low-rank decomposition model provides an ideal solution for patterned fabric defect detection. In this paper, a novel patterned method for fabric defect detection is proposed based on a novel texture descriptor and the low-rank decomposition model. First, an efficient second-order orientation-aware descriptor, denoted as GHOG, is …

Torque Response Characteristics Of A Controllable Electromagnetic Damper For Seat Suspension Vibration Control, Pengfei Liu, Xiangjun Xia, Nong Zhang, Donghong Ning, Minyi Zheng

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

In this paper, a novel resistance switching method is proposed to control an electromagnetic damper (EMD) system of a vehicle seat suspension, and torque response characteristics of the EMD system are investigated in detail. First, the relationship between electromagnetic torque and circuit resistance of the EMD system is established. The basic parameters of the EMD system are identified by least squares fitting, and the resistance distribution is optimized to meet the demand damping of seat suspension. Second, the electromagnetic torque response time and the continuously dynamic torque tracking performance of the EMD system are investigated experimentally. The time required for …

The Study Of The Directional Sensitivity Of Fiber Bragg Gratings For Acoustic Emission Measurements, Sagar Jinachandran, Abheek Basu, Hui Jun Li, Jiangtao Xi, Gangadhara B. Prusty, Ginu Rajan

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of engineering structures plays a crucial role in ensuring their safety and integrity. Acoustic emissions (AE) can be one of the several ways to monitor the structural health. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based AE measurement technique is emerging as a solution to assess cracks in structures remotely and has advantages of being less bulky and having low noise, high bandwidth and ease of implementation. This paper presents a study on the impact of AE signals on FBGs attached to a substrate, focusing on the directional sensitivity using different configurations. For ease of installation, the FBG sensors are …

Fault Diagnosis Of Reciprocating Compressor Using Component Estimating Empirical Mode Decomposition And De-Dimension Template With Double-Loop Correction Algorithm, Hongyi Wang, Feng Dong, Xinxiu Zhou, Hongyu Wang, Xinjun Zhu, Limei Song, Qinghua Guo

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

This paper presents an approach to implement multi-parameter (i.e., pressure, temperature, vibration, current, and liquid level) signals for fault diagnosis of the reciprocating compressor (RC). Due to the complexity of structure and motion of such compressor, the acquired signals involve transient impacts and noises. This causes the useful information to be corrupted and makes it difficult to diagnose the fault patterns accurately. A component estimating empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD) method is proposed to remove the random noise and improve data quality. Furthermore, a new template matching algorithm called de-dimension template with double-loop correction (DDT-DLC) is applied to diagnose the fault …

The Effect Of An Air Gap On A 2d Monolithic Silicon Detector For Relative Dosimetry, Kananan Utitsarn, Z A. Alrowaili, Nauljun Stansook, Giordano Biasi, Martin G. Carolan, Michael L. F Lerch, Anatoly B. Rosenfeld

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of an air gap on the Magic Plate (MP512) response and optimize this gap for relative dosimetry in photon and electron beams. Materials and methods: MP512 is a 2D monolithic silicon detector manufactured on a p-Type substrate. The array consists of 512 pixels with 0.5 x 0.5 mm2 size and 2 mm pitch with an overall dimension of 52 x 52 mm2. The signal ratio (SR) as a function of beam size and the percentage were measured with MP512 in 6 MV and 10 MV photon beams. The enhanced dynamic wedge (EDW) beam profile measurements …