Mix Design For Oil-Palm-Boiler Clinker (OPBC) Concrete

An experimental investigation was conducted in mix design for lightweight concrete using Oil-Palm-Boiler Clinker (OPBC) as coarse aggregate. ACI mix design as used for normal weight concrete and mix design methods as used for lightweight concrete were employed to obtain the target compressive strength at 28-day and was found to be lower than the target strength for OPBC concrete. It was confirmed that the above established mix design methods couldn’t be used in this new OPBC concrete. Through trial mixes, the acceptable mix designs of this new concrete were obtained. The properties obtained from the acceptable mix designs were slumps of 40 to 100mm, demoulded densities of 1845 to 1980 kg/m3 and the 28-day compressive strengths of 27 to 35MPa.Keywords: Oil-Palm-Boiler Clinker (OPBC), Solid Waste, Mix Design, Lightweight Concrete, Compressive Strengt

Multi-Objective Stochastic Optimization for Preventive Maintenance Planning

PresentationMaintenance is an essential part of mechanical integrity programs and aims to prevent the occurrence of process safety incidents and costly unplanned shutdowns. Maintenance can increase the reliability of equipment in productive systems and effective preventive maintenance programs enable maintenance activities to be planned proactively. However, maintenance planning is subject to resource scarcity and is rendered nontrivial due to system complexity, reliability model nonlinearity, and parametric uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear programming is well suited to addressing these challenges and is adopted here to optimize the time intervals in which to perform maintenance on different pieces of equipment. Following presentation of an optimal maintenance planning framework, a model is formulated and optimized accounting for: the effect of imperfect repair using an effective age model, equipment failure behavior using a Weibull reliability model, endogenous uncertainty in reliability model parameters, and the simultaneous need to satisfy the competing objectives of cost minimization and reliability maximization using the ε-constraint method. The results of the research consist of optimal maintenance plans, plots of resultant equipment and system reliability over time, and a Pareto frontier of optimal solutions from which the decision maker can select. The approach adopted here is illustrated with a case study and can be extended to improving the overall availability, effectiveness, and resilience of a variety of productive systems

Investigation on The Factors Affecting Lifestyle of Professionals in The Construction Industries (Kerala and Tamil Nadu)

One of the vital assets of any industry is human resources. In general, the majority of works are carried out by humans in the construction industries. Study on the assessment of quality of civil engineering construction professionals’ lifestyle is very limited and hence the motto of this study is to understand the lifestyle of construction professionals and to assess the various factors affecting the lifestyle of them. To analyze the effects of societal behavior and to develop a model to study the impact of various factors in a construction professional’s lifestyle; a mixed approach had been adopted in this study. The instrument used in the study was a questionnaire survey conducted from 180 construction professionals working in different firms in Kerala and Tamil Nadu states of India and these were analyzed using structural equation modeling techniques. Factors affecting the construction professional’s lifestyle are: financial factors, organizational factors, quality, health and environmental factors, work-related factors, and social factors. Hence by foreseeing the factors and adopting favorable changes in a construction professional’s life, they may attain a better lifestyle. This study recommends the strategy to be considered for the improvements of lifestyle of the construction professional especially for “Civil Engineersâ€

Penerapan Teknologi Smart Building Pada Perancangan Smart Masjid

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, followed by a large number of mosques scattered invarious places and these mosques sometimes have a problem regarding the efficiency in managing theresources of a mosque. This paper is designed to introduce the concept of mosque design based on theprinciples of smart building with the literature study methods and analysis, and comparison to the values in thephilosophy of the Qur'an to determine the suitability of the application of smart building technology in thedesign of a mosque. With the support of some religious activities program, the expected result is "smartmosque", that would also suit with the site and user

How specific is the immune response to malaria in adults living in endemic areas?

It is documented that people living in malaria endemic areas acquire immunity against malaria afterrepeated infections. Studies involving passive transfer of IgG from immune adults to the nonimmunesubjects have shown that circulating antibodies play an important role, and that immuneadults possess protective antibodies, which susceptible malaria patients do not. Through a differentialimmunoscreen, we have identified several novel cDNA clones, which react exclusively andyet extensively with immune sera samples. Specific antisera raised against the immunoclones inhibitthe growth of parasites in culture. The clones studied so far turn out to be novel conserved Plasmodiumgenes. In order to study the response of sera of adults from malaria endemic areas of Indiaand Africa to these immunogens, we carried out ELISA assays using these immunopeptides, otherP. falciparum specific antigens, peptides, antigens from other infections such as mycobacterial infectionsand other proteins such as BSA. Children from the same areas and normal healthy urbanpeople showed very little activity to each of these categories. A large percentage of adults from endemicareas responded positively to all the malarial immunogens tested. However, the same personsalso showed high response to other antigens and proteins as well. The implications of theseresults are reported in this paper

Dust-acoustic rogue waves in an electron depleted plasma

A rigorous theoretical investigation is made to study the characteristics of dust-acoustic (DA) waves (DAWs) in an electron depleted unmagnetized opposite polarity dusty plasma system that contains super-thermal ($\kappa$-distributed) ions, mobile positively and negatively charged dust grains for the first time. The reductive perturbation method is employed to obtain the NLSE to explore the modulational instability (MI) conditions for DAWs as well as the formation and characteristics of gigantic rogue waves. The nonlinear and dispersion properties of the dusty plasma medium are the prime reasons behind the formation of rogue waves. The height and thickness of the DARWs associated with DAWs as well as the MI conditions of DAWs are numerically analyzed by changing different dusty plasma parameters, such as dust charges, dust and ion number densities, and ion-temperature, etc. The implications of the results for various space dusty plasma systems (viz., mesosphere, F-rings of Saturn, and cometary atmosphere, etc.) as well as laboratory dusty plasma produced by laser-matter interaction are briefly mentioned.Comment: 6 figures; 6 page

Integrating Kinetic Model of E. coli with Genome Scale Metabolic Fluxes Overcomes Its Open System Problem and Reveals Bistability in Central Metabolism

An understanding of the dynamics of the metabolic profile of a bacterial cell is sought from a dynamical systems analysis of kinetic models. This modelling formalism relies on a deterministic mathematical description of enzyme kinetics and their metabolite regulation. However, it is severely impeded by the lack of available kinetic information, limiting the size of the system that can be modelled. Furthermore, the subsystem of the metabolic network whose dynamics can be modelled is faced with three problems: how to parameterize the model with mostly incomplete steady state data, how to close what is now an inherently open system, and how to account for the impact on growth. In this study we address these challenges of kinetic modelling by capitalizing on multi-omics steady state data and a genome-scale metabolic network model. We use these to generate parameters that integrate knowledge embedded in the genome-scale metabolic network model, into the most comprehensive kinetic model of the central carbon metabolism of E. coli realized to date. As an application, we performed a dynamical systems analysis of the resulting enriched model. This revealed bistability of the central carbon metabolism and thus its potential to express two distinct metabolic states. Furthermore, since our model-informing technique ensures both stable states are constrained by the same thermodynamically feasible steady state growth rate, the ensuing bistability represents a temporal coexistence of the two states, and by extension, reveals the emergence of a phenotypically heterogeneous population