Chemical and biological reactions of solidification of peat using ordinary portland cement (OPC) and coal ashes

Construction over peat area have often posed a challenge to geotechnical engineers. After decades of study on peat stabilisation techniques, there are still no absolute formulation or guideline that have been established to handle this issue. Some researchers have proposed solidification of peat but a few researchers have also discovered that solidified peat seemed to decrease its strength after a certain period of time. Therefore, understanding the chemical and biological reaction behind the peat solidification is vital to understand the limitation of this treatment technique. In this study, all three types of peat; fabric, hemic and sapric were mixed using Mixing 1 and Mixing 2 formulation which consisted of ordinary Portland cement, fly ash and bottom ash at various ratio. The mixtures of peat-binder-filler were subjected to the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) test, bacterial count test and chemical elemental analysis by using XRF, XRD, FTIR and EDS. Two pattern of strength over curing period were observed. Mixing 1 samples showed a steadily increase in strength over curing period until Day 56 while Mixing 2 showed a decrease in strength pattern at Day 28 and Day 56. Samples which increase in strength steadily have less bacterial count and enzymatic activity with increase quantity of crystallites. Samples with lower strength recorded increase in bacterial count and enzymatic activity with less crystallites. Analysis using XRD showed that pargasite (NaCa2[Mg4Al](Si6Al2)O22(OH)2) was formed in the higher strength samples while in the lower strength samples, pargasite was predicted to be converted into monosodium phosphate and Mg(OH)2 as bacterial consortium was re-activated. The Michaelis�Menten coefficient, Km of the bio-chemical reaction in solidified peat was calculated as 303.60. This showed that reaction which happened during solidification work was inefficient. The kinetics for crystallite formation with enzymatic effect is modelled as 135.42 (1/[S] + 0.44605) which means, when pargasite formed is lower, the amount of enzyme secretes is higher

Memetic Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Large-Scale Global Optimization

Memetic computation (MC) has emerged recently as a new paradigm of efficient algorithms for solving the hardest optimization problems. On the other hand, artificial bees colony (ABC) algorithms demonstrate good performances when solving continuous and combinatorial optimization problems. This study tries to use these technologies under the same roof. As a result, a memetic ABC (MABC) algorithm has been developed that is hybridized with two local search heuristics: the Nelder-Mead algorithm (NMA) and the random walk with direction exploitation (RWDE). The former is attended more towards exploration, while the latter more towards exploitation of the search space. The stochastic adaptation rule was employed in order to control the balancing between exploration and exploitation. This MABC algorithm was applied to a Special suite on Large Scale Continuous Global Optimization at the 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. The obtained results the MABC are comparable with the results of DECC-G, DECC-G*, and MLCC.Comment: CONFERENCE: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Brisbane, Australia, 201

Parameter identification of BIPT system using chaotic-enhanced fruit fly optimization algorithm

Bidirectional inductive power transfer (BIPT) system facilitates contactless power transfer between two sides and across an air-gap, through weak magnetic coupling. Typically, this system is nonlinear high order system which includes nonlinear switch components and resonant networks, developing of accurate model is a challenging task. In this paper, a novel technique for parameter identification of a BIPT system is presented by using chaotic-enhanced fruit fly optimization algorithm (CFOA). The fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA) is a new meta-heuristic technique based on the swarm behavior of the fruit fly. This paper proposes a novel CFOA, which employs chaotic sequence to enhance the global optimization capacity of original FOA. The parameter identification of the BIPT system is formalized as a multi-dimensional optimization problem, and an objective function is established minimizing the errors between the estimated and measured values. All the 11 parameters of this system (Lpi, LT, Lsi, Lso, CT, Cs, M, Rpi, RT, Rsi and Rso) can be identified simultaneously using measured input–output data. Simulations show that the proposed parameter identification technique is robust to measurements noise and variation of operation condition and thus it is suitable for practical application

Is swarm intelligence able to create mazes?

In this paper, the idea of applying Computational Intelligence in the process of creation board games, in particular mazes, is presented. For two different algorithms the proposed idea has been examined. The results of the experiments are shown and discussed to present advantages and disadvantages