13474 research outputs found
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A novel lightweight cement composite incorporating micro-sized silica aerogel / Syed Nasir Shah
No full textLightweight cement composite (LCC) has gained more interest and is increasingly
explored by researchers due to its many advantageous properties. Silica aerogel (SA), a
synthetic ultralightweight material with a nano-porous structure and remarkable
insulation properties, makes it a potential option to be incorporated in LCC. LCC
incorporating SA (SA-LCC) would be an ideal insulating building material and could
promote energy efficiency in buildings since the building sector consumes about 30-40%
of global energy consumption. However, there are some challenges when it comes to
incorporating SA into LCC. One of the difficulties is mixing SA with cement composite
due to its ultra-lightweight and hydrophobic nature. Thus, this research aims to develop
a chemical treatment for SA to ease its mixing and assess the influence of micro-sized SA
on the properties of LCC. Therefore, a detailed study was conducted on both untreated
and treated SA-LCC. The study was divided into 3 phases; where phase 1 focuses on
developing chemical treatment for SA, characterizing untreated and treated SA, and
evaluating the effect of different content of untreated/treated SA (20-80% of sand
replacement) on the basic properties of LCC. The results of phase 1 revealed that the
treated SA became temporarily hydrophilic and eased the mixing. In addition, the
chemical treatment did not affect the pore structure, particle size distribution, chemical
bonds, and crystallographic structure of SA. A significant reduction in the oven-dry
density (up to 50%) and compressive strength (up to 80%) of SA-LCC was observed,
while the porosity was increased (up to 260%). Phase 2 emphasizes the insulating
properties, dimensional stability, durability performance, and microstructure
characteristics of SA-LCC. Despite the increase in water absorption (140/290%) and
decrease in water resistance (11/19%), the increase in porosity of LCC due to
incorporation of untreated/treated SA improved the insulating properties. The noise reduction coefficient (NRC) improved up to 15%, whereas the thermal conductivity was
improved up to 80%. Despite the beneficial insulating properties, the limitations of the
SA-LCC include the higher shrinkage (10 times) and lower resistance to elevated
temperatures, in addition to increased water absorption. Nevertheless, in overall, LCC
with a low oven-dry density of about 1190 kg/m3 and adequate compressive strength (6.38
MPa) can be produced by incorporating treated SA, which has a low thermal conductivity
(0.220 W/m.K) and good NRC (0.261). Therefore, in phase 3, in view of the observed
limitations of the SA-LCC, a scaled lightweight sandwich wall panel (SWP) was
introduced, which utilized calcium silicate board (CSB) as the skin. This is intended for
wall application to suit the benefits of the SA-LCC. The practical application of treated
SA-LCC as core for SWP shows that non-load bearing SWP can be produced with treated
SA-LCC and 6 mm CSB as the skin with unit weight, compressive, and flexural strength
of 1570 kg/m3, 2.4 MPa, and 4.7 MPa, respectively. The SWP also has good impact load
resistance (70 J) and direct flame resistance. Furthermore, the SWP has satisfactory
insulating properties with NRC and thermal conductivity of 0.259 and 0.561 W/m.K,
respectively
The nexus among top management, environmental and financial performance: A comparative study of China, Germany and Japan / Wu Qichun
No full textThe traditional business model is not adequately equipped to address sustainable development issues as the former focused purely on profits where performance is evaluated using financial indicators, such as sales, costs, and profits. Society is increasingly discouraged from sacrificing the environment for economic progress as excessive pollution is steadily making the world uninhabitable. Ever since the landmark Paris Accord in 2015, governments, corporations, and other interested bodies have been working together to seek sustainable development paths. The extant literature presents mixed findings (positive and negative between environmental and financial performance), thereby requiring fresh studies to produce reliable and consistent results. Several governments have already introduced regulations to reduce carbon emissions and even establish emissions trading mechanisms. Consequently, environmental and social strategies have become the new tools of business warfare in this context. Corporate board members and management are likely to play an increased policy-making role in the new business competition model. Hence, this study aims at examining the relationship between top management team (TMT), and corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). To investigate the nexus among top management, environmental and financial performance, this study followed stakeholder theory and upper echelons theory and applies a positivist approach to understand the environmental and financial factors that critically impact on corporate performance and involve 621 public firms from 2010 to 2018 from Germany, Japan and China. Financial performance was estimated using return on asset (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin's Q, while the environmental indicators were emissions per sale, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure, and CSR strategy. The TMT characteristics are measured by Gender diversity, i.e., ratio of a female director and the female executive director, and independent director, and Environmental Committee. Major findings by the study are firms in Germany more likely to hire female directors and independent directors compared with firms in Japan and China. Most companies from Japan (81%) and Germany (68%) have set environmental committees, but only 29.2% of China's firms have an environmental committee. CEP is performed well in firms in Germany and Japan compared with firms in China. The TMT characteristics are beneficial for the CEP (ESG and strategy). The female and independent board director is beneficial for carbon reduction in China but weak and harmful in Germany and Japan. It is not helpful of the Environmental committee on the emissions reduction of firms. The long-term analysis results showed that emissions per sale positively impacts CFP in China's corporate performance, but it is the opposite and exhibits a negative relationship in Germany and Japan. ESG information disclosure positively impacted CFP in all three country samples, while CSR strategy negatively impacted CFP in all three country samples. The emissions per sale positively impacted ROA in the high emissions industries but negatively impacted ROA in low emissions industries. The TMT characteristics negatively impacted CFP in China, but positively impacted CFP in Japan and Germany. The econometric results showed the possible occurrence of different causality in different countries and in different industries pointing to a need for the use of more detailed differentiation of causality variables between countries and industries in future studies. The source of the sample will affect the results suggesting the possible variations between a middle-income country such as China, and high-income countries like Germany and Japan. This study discloses the financial benefits of the company's environmental protection, which will gradually appear in subsequent years, but do not become reflected in the current year's financial statements
Interaction between visual and verbal modes in the subtitling of the anime movie Your Name / Xu Zhiyi
No full textThe purpose of this Audio Visual Translation (AVT) study is to investigate the interactions between the visual and verbal modes, and how the visual mode supports the verbal mode to produce the representational meanings conveyed in the Mandarin translation of the Japanese anime movie, ‘Your Name’. Chen’s (2019) theoretical framework is adopted to guide the investigation on the relationship between three dimensions that is, the Representamen (i.e., verbal mode), Object (i.e., visual mode), and Interpretant (i.e., subtitling). The rationale for the adoption of Chen’s framework is that it allows the study to go beyond technical constraints and cultural gaps which have been commonly discussed in past studies. The study probes into Japanese-Mandarin AVT as there has been less attention paid to East Asian languages.
The findings of this study which are based on 89 samples reveal that the verbal mode is supported by the visual mode to fill cultural gaps, maintain narrative flow, avoid redundancy, overcome technical constraints and linguistic differences in subtitling. The interactions between the visual and verbal modes in the movie are found to have undergone explication (15 %), replacement (38 %), generalisation (1 %), addition (43 %), and deletion (7 %), and up to two interactions are observable in one sample. Moreover, Mandarin subtitles in the movie contained either less or more information in comparison with Japanese verbal messages while the essential meaning remained intact. However, there were also instances where the essential meaning in Japanese was sometimes affected in the Mandarin subtitles with the narrative flow being disrupted.
The study has highlighted some of the subtitling strategies used when translating from Japanese to Mandarin and the interaction between visual and verbal modes, as well as how the interaction influences subtitling. As this study was only conducted at the representational meaning level, the analytical unit in the visual mode focused only on the shot. It is hoped that studies in the future will view the interaction between the visual and verbal modes on subtitling at the scene and sequence levels
Predicting mortality of Malaysian patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) subtypes using machine learning and deep learning approaches / Muhammad Firdaus Aziz
No full textThe conventional risk score for predicting short- and long-term mortality following Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) is typically not population-specific and does not accommodate for Asian patients. The purpose of this study is to use machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms to predict and identify variables linked to short and long-term mortality in Asian STEMI and NSTEMI/UA patients and to compare these results to a conventional risk score. Model development for STEMI: in-hospital (6299 patients), 30-days (3130 patients), and 1-year (2939 patients) and NSTEMI/UA: in-hospital (4771 patients), 30-days (2402 patients), and 1-year (2304 patients) datasets was done using the National Cardiovascular Disease Database (NCVD) Malaysia registry of a multi-ethnic, heterogeneous Asian ACS population. 50 variables were considered for STEMI and 39 for NSTEMI/UA. ML algorithms were used to examine significant variables utilising feature selection methods. The ML feature selection approach was then used to develop ML and DL models using all and selected variables, which were then compared to the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) score. For STEMI patients, the best ML model, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with sequential backward elimination (SBE) selected variables, produced AUC values of 0.88 for in-hospital, 0.90 for 30 days, and 0.84 for 1 year, while the best model for NSTEMI/UA patients produced AUC values of 0.85 for in-hospital, 0.87 for 30 days, and 0.80 for 1-year mortality prediction. The same variables were then used to create the best DL model for STEMI (AUC 0.96 in-hospital, 0.93 for 30 days, and 0.90 for 1-year mortality prediction) and NSTEMI/UA (AUC 0.97 in-hospital, 0.91 for 30 days, and 0.88 for 1-year mortality prediction). TIMI risk score reported lower performance for STEMI (In-hospital: AUC=0.81, 30 days: AUC=0.80 and 1-year: AUC=0.76) and NSTEMI/UA patients (In-hospital: AUC=0.42, 30 days: AUC=0.49 and 1- year: AUC=0.42) as compared to ML and DL algorithms. Age, heart rate, Killip class, fasting blood glucose, and diuretics were found to be the common variables across the three time points in the STEMI dataset, whereas age, heart rate, Killip class, and intake of Low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) were found to be the common variables in the NSTEMI/UA dataset. When compared to the TIMI risk score, both ML and DL were better at classifying ACS patients in a multi-ethnic population. ML enables the identification of distinct variables in Asian populations to improve mortality prediction. In the future, continuous testing and validation will enable improved risk classification, possibly modifying management and results
An investigation of Higg Index evaluation towards the sustainable development of apparel industry in Bangladesh / Chong Chen Seng
No full textIn the past 2 decades, the green supply chain concept or sustainable development in the textile or fashion industry become more important as the brands and people are aware the discarded of the clothes that never worn, and it is contributing the factor of depletion of natural resources and greenhouses gases effect. According to Bank (2019); (Nation, 2019), textile industry has become second most polluted industry come after oil and gas industry around 8% to 10% of the global warming greenhouse effects emissions and including the carbon dioxide and wastewater globally, thus it could cause the ecological impact to environment and human. This issue draws an attention to different stakeholders such as the government agency come out waste prevention activities to promote the sustainable textile and also has proposed the textile industry shall set a consensus standard among manufacturer, supplier to improve the durability of products , and recyclability of the textile products which does not impact on the environment surrounding. Environmentalist practitioners were focused on the education awareness to adopt the sustainable concept & strategies in textile supply chain management. The Higg Index FEM is a set sustainability evaluation tool which is a tool that standardizes and assess the facilities environmental performance by measuring the environment management system, energy usage and GHG emissions, water use , wastewater, air emissions, waste management handling and lastly is chemical management system in the organization to reduce environment impact of supply chain and meet the environmental requirement of industry.
This research project focuses on the Higg Index Facility Environment Module (FEM) created by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) to investigate the sustainable development within the textile industry and where the organization utilizes appropriate sustainability management tools like Higg Index FEM 3.0. Moreover, this study aims to investigate and determine most environment impact to the textile between company self-assessment scoring and the assessor scoring. Finally, the self-assessment and external assessment will be compared in terms of their significance and the accuracy with which evaluations are scored. In particular, a comparison study using the secondary data from the Higg Index self-assessment & external assessment data results will be conducted using SPSS Statistics 25 data analysis.
In conclusion, the results of the Higg Index Module were gathered from the organization's assessment and an external assessor; the SPSS statistics results were presented and demonstrated that the score total verified from the external assessor result for the Higg Index's seven components has a significant impact on the Higg Index FEM Scoring, where the skewness and kurtosis normality with ( P value more than 0.05). Additionally, the main applicability scores of 0.680 for water and 0.607 for wastewater from the external assessor contribute significantly to the Higg Index FEM Module scoring. Self-assessment scores from the organisation were evaluated to be approximately 33% of the total score or 19.06499 points higher than those from the external assessor
Wear mapping mechanism mapping for diesel-diluted biolubricant / Mohamad Firdaus Saharudin
No full textAs a result of concerns about fossil fuel depletion and climate change, tough
legislation requiring automobiles to utilize renewable fuels, mainly bioethanol, have been
enacted. In fact, the friction caused by the piston ring and the cylinder wall, which is the
biggest source of friction in an engine, is caused by a lot of fuel getting into the lubricant
from unburned fuel, which has a lot of heat of vaporization to make it easier for fuel to get
into the crankcase. Recently, bio-based lubricant has been mixed with gasoline at ever
higher concentrations, and the amount of fuel that builds up in the crankcase is significant.
It is important to investigate the tribology of wear mechanism mapping for diesel-diluted
bio-lubricant. This research shows how biolubricant and special machines can be used to
investigate how things wear. Many goals were met in this study, which looked at how fuel
dilution in bio-lubricant affected performance, physicochemical and oil ageing, as well as
how it affected the lubricant itself. The fourball tester tribotester machine can be used to
look at friction and wear in bio-lubricant oils. Because of its excellent lubricity and
resistance to oxidation, the trimethylolpropane trioleate (TMPTO) ester was chosen as the
bio-based base stock in this study. The esterification of oleic acid with TMP alcohol yielded
TMPTO. From this study, the last goal is to make a wear map of the steel ball. The fourball
tester method was used in the research, which is a standard way to figure out how lubricant
diesel fuel is used. For each fuel sample, microscopic views of the test ball wear scars, as
well as the areas that have been considered when measuring the diameters of the scars, were
shown. When make a wear map, compare two samples that are in different conditions, like
temperature and rotation speed. This wear map is the main goal of this project
Finite element modelling of wire-arc-additive-manufacturing process (WAAM) / Shihao Sun
No full textThere are many advantages to using Wire-Arc-Additive-Manufacturing technology, including lower costs, shorter construction cycles, and freedom from workpiece size constraints. This paper chooses to use a numerical simulation technique to study the additive manufacturing of stainless steel 316 material based on ANSYS WORKBENCH.
In this study, the Gaussian heat source and Goldak double ellipsoid heat source models are analyzed in detail. Using 3D finite element meshing technology, the workpiece is meshed, and the mesh self-adaptive technology is used to automatically refine and generate meshes for the weld metal, which creates conditions for shortening the numerical simulation time of the welding process. The results show that the higher the welding power and initial temperature, the higher the temperature of the temperature field, the higher the welding speed, the lower the average temperature. The higher the welding power and speed, the higher the tension; the lower the stress, the higher the starting temperature. At the end of the study, the group 6 has been selected as the optimized group (300 w, 0.4 mm/s, 300 °C)
Heat transfer to two phase flow and fouling mitigation by synthetic fibre additives / Thineskumar Ramalingam
No full textOne of the most notable logical premiums is the investigation of the conduct of fibre suspension streams, since adding a little amount of fibre to the water modifies the stream's behavior. Textile industries are one of the most important businesses that use fibre suspensions, which has led to a rise in the use of synthetic fibres as an alternative source. As a result, investigating the heat transfer and fouling resistance patterns of synthetic fibre suspension in annular flow appears to be critical. A total of six concentrations with six different velocities ranging from 0.0025 wt. percent up to 0.1 wt. percent and from 0.1 m/s to 0.35 m/s were used in this study for a specific synthetic fibre, the Nylon 6,6 fibre, in which a total of six concentrations with six different velocities ranging from 0.0025 wt. percent up to 0.1 wt. percent and from 0.1 m/s to 0. The varied concentrations and velocities were then evaluated under three distinct constant heat flux boundary conditions, with specimen surface temperatures of 50°C, 60°C, and 70°C, respectively. Heat transfer was found to be enhanced. For carbonate fouling in de-ionized water (DI Water), an experimental study was conducted using a combination of sodium bicarbonate and calcium chloride. Using a constructed monitoring system, the impacts of various factors on the calcium carbonate scale development process were explored experimentally. The rates of calcium carbonate deposition in suspension with and without Nylon 6,6 additions (only DI Water) were compared. Analytical microscopy was used to evaluate the shape of the deposit layer on the surface
Coherent crowd analysis with visual attributes / Nurul Japar
No full textAs human crowds become a norm due to the increasing global population, crowd analysis becomes essential to facilitate crowd surveillance. Towards improving surveillance tasks, extensive computer vision studies focus on analyzing coherent behavior in human crowds. Therefore, contextual information from visual attributes is essential in learning semantic relations among individuals. However, extracting discriminative visual attributes remains challenging due to challenges such as inter-object occlusions within crowd scenes. Hence, this thesis proposes solutions in analyzing coherent behavior in crowd scenes with visual attributes. This thesis first demonstrates the solution of exploiting contextual information to extract visual attributes within crowd scenes. Specifically, this thesis proposes a visual attributes extraction module to extract head-level visual attributes based on individual detection and head pose classification. Explicitly, it focuses on individuals’ head features to localize individuals and classify their head poses to distinguish individuals in crowds independently. Contrariwise to existing studies that focus on point-head annotations in {푥, 푦} coordinates, this module extracts visual attributes with spatial location, area of the bounding box, and head pose classification in {푥, 푦, 푤, ℎ} bounding boxes. Second, this thesis presents a coherent group detection framework to detect collective behavior in crowds by utilizing the visual attributes extraction module. Coherent groups represent individuals that are connected by collective behavior within crowd scenes. Unlike existing studies that focus on temporal information, the proposed framework detects the collective behavior by computing attributes similarity on individuals’ heads visual attributes. Via a clustering approach, the connected individuals are aggregated into local clusters for coherent group detection. These clusters represent mid-level representations of crowd understanding that illustrate group behavior. Third, this thesis extends the coherent group detection framework towards scene understanding. Specifically, a collectiveness analysis framework is designed to quantify and detect collectiveness from individual-level to scene level. The incremental learning in this framework notably analyzes semantic relations among individuals and infers topological relationship propagation via a manifold learning algorithm. Contrary to existing approaches, this approach computes crowd estimation for collectiveness quantification. It also computes the similarity and merges local clusters into global clusters for collectiveness detection. Inclusive experiments on various crowd scenes, i.e., Shanghai Tech RGB-D (ST RGB-D) Dataset, Collective Motion Database and CUHK Dataset, are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approaches. This thesis also presents several potential applications to facilitate crowd surveillance. As a result, the contributions of this thesis constitute more effective solutions for visual attributes extraction, coherent group detect and collectiveness analysis. Research findings from this thesis can assist as reference sources for the research community to support future work of crowd analysis
Biophysical and in silico characterization of the interaction of anticancer drugs with human serum albumin / Salanee Kandandapani
No full textTyrphostin 9 (Tyr 9), pazopanib (PZP) and regorafenib (REG) are potent platelet-derived
growth factor receptor (PDGFR) inhibitors, and induce apoptosis in various cancer cell
types such as chronic myeloid leukemia, soft tissue sarcoma, renal cancer, colorectal
cancer and gastrointestinal stromal tumors. The binding of these drugs to the major
transport protein in human circulation, human serum albumin (HSA) was investigated
using fluorescence and UV-vis absorption spectroscopic techniques as well as molecular
docking methods. Fluorescence quenching titration results showed progressive decline in
the protein fluorescence with increasing drug concentrations. A decreasing trend of the
Stern-Volmer constant, Ksv with increasing temperature characterized the drug-induced
quenching as static quenching, thus pointed towards the formation of
Tyr 9/PZP/REG–HSA complexes. This was further confirmed by the hyperchromic effect
seen in the UV-vis absorption spectra of HSA upon addition of these drugs. The
binding constant (Ka) values of these drug–HSA systems were found to lie within the
range 1.29–3.56 × 105 M-1 at 298 K, which suggested moderate binding affinity between
these ligands and HSA. The drug–HSA complexes were found to be stabilized by
hydrophobic interactions, van der Walls forces and hydrogen bonds, based on the
thermodynamic data [(ΔS° = + 13.90 J mol–1 K–1 and ΔH° = – 26.60 kJ mol–1for Tyr 9–
HSA system); (ΔS° = + 98.37 J mol–1 K–1 and ΔH° = – 60.31 kJ mol–1for PZP–HSA
system); (ΔS° = + 17.17 J mol–1 K–1 and ΔH° = – 23.00 kJ mol–1for REG–HSA system)].
These results were further supported by the molecular docking analyses. Interaction of
Tyr 9, PZP and REG with HSA also produced microenvironmental perturbations around
protein fluorophores (Tyr and Trp), as evident from the 3-D fluorescence spectral results but increased protein’s conformational stability against thermal denaturation.
Competitive drug displacement results along with molecular docking analyses suggested
Sudlow’s Site I of HSA as the preferred Tyr 9, PZP and REG binding site