The increasing interest in small-scale renewable-energy plants for distributed power generation has led to a demand for suitable software tools to study and develop control systems able to manage advanced integrated systems. Biomass, as a renewable energy resource, needs to be processed if it is to be exploited in small CHP units and pyrolysis is one of the options available for transforming so...

Slope stability is one of the most complex and essential issues for civil and geotechnical engineers, mainly due to life and high economical losses resulting from these failures. In this paper, a new approach is presented for estimating the Safety Factor (SF) for circular failure slope using hybrid support vector regression (SVR) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The ACO is combined with the S...

In this paper, a modified learning algorithm for the multilayer neural network with the multi-valued neurons (MLMVN) is presented. The MLMVN, which is a member of complex-valued neural networks family, has already demonstrated a number of important advantages over other techniques. A modified learning algorithm for this network is based on the introduction of an acceleration step, performing by...

The Upper Cretaceous facies of Enugu Area are part of the sequence in the Anambra Basin of Southeastern Nigeria. These include the Enugu Shale, Mamu Formation, Ajali Sandstone and Nsukka Formation. The deformation structures within the Upper Cretaceous in Enugu area were dominant to sandstones of the Marnu Formation. The white silty fine sandstone, muddy fine sandstone and heteroliths of this f...

The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf’s law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath’s law has begun to be involved. Menzerath’s law manifests in language, music and genomes as a tendency of the mean size of the parts to decrease as the number of parts increases in many situations. This statistical...

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The present study describes the effect of concept maps on learners’ achievement and interest for classroom teaching of the second law of thermodynamics to engineering students. Learners are encouraged to develop their individual concept maps of the second law of thermodynamics. The scores of the learners’ concept maps are compared with the score of the expert map developed by the teacher. After...

In wireless sensor network most of the devices operate on batteries. These devices or nodes have limited amount of initial energy that are consumed at different rates, depending on the power level and intended receiver. In sleep scheduling algorithms most of the nodes are put to sleep to conserve energy and increase network life time . There are to main approaches to sleep scheduling i) random ...

This study focuses on the shape optimization of concrete gravity dams considering dam– water–foundation interaction and nonlinear effects subject to earthquake. The concrete gravity dam is considered as a two–dimensional structure involving the geometry and material nonlinearity effects. For the description of the nonlinear behavior of concrete material under earthquake loads, the Drucker–Prage...