Reliability analysis for the emergency power system of a pressurized water reactor facility during a loss of offsite power transient

The anticipated transient involving loss of offsite power has been identified as a major potential contributor of risk for a pressurized water reactor power generating facility. The capability of the emergency power system to supply adequate power to engineering safety systems is important for limiting the progression of the transient event and avoiding reactor core degradation;The evaluation of emergency power system reliability, using probabilistic risk assessment techniques with updated failure data, shows that the unavailability of this system is significantly higher than had been assessed earlier. The significant contributors to system unavailability are diesel generator operability problems, particularly when longer testing intervals are adopted, and human errors during the manual actuation of system-critical components. Proper human interaction in system operation is a unique contributor to total system availability and reliability

Portable Security System

This project puts the main concerns in designing a portable security system that is able to detect break in(s) through windows or doors in the house. The key point for the project is portability, which reflects the capability to carry or move the system around, so that the users will be able to safeguard their belongings and themselves wherever they are. This system would check for the condition of the sensor(s) continuously to ensure no intrusion. A mobile phone Sony Ericsson T630 is being used in this project. When the sensor is triggered off, the system will then display a text string "help" on PC. On the other side, PC will control the mobile phone Sony Ericsson T630 to send a text message to the pre-programmed phone number which can be the user's mobile or police help line, to inform him/her of the attempted burglary. AT command is used to send the text messages. This project will defmitely be beneficial to everyone. It is still further developed and enhanced for more feasible features. It is a handy solution to overcome burglary

Less is More: Micro-expression Recognition from Video using Apex Frame

Despite recent interest and advances in facial micro-expression research, there is still plenty room for improvement in terms of micro-expression recognition. Conventional feature extraction approaches for micro-expression video consider either the whole video sequence or a part of it, for representation. However, with the high-speed video capture of micro-expressions (100-200 fps), are all frames necessary to provide a sufficiently meaningful representation? Is the luxury of data a bane to accurate recognition? A novel proposition is presented in this paper, whereby we utilize only two images per video: the apex frame and the onset frame. The apex frame of a video contains the highest intensity of expression changes among all frames, while the onset is the perfect choice of a reference frame with neutral expression. A new feature extractor, Bi-Weighted Oriented Optical Flow (Bi-WOOF) is proposed to encode essential expressiveness of the apex frame. We evaluated the proposed method on five micro-expression databases: CAS(ME)$^2$, CASME II, SMIC-HS, SMIC-NIR and SMIC-VIS. Our experiments lend credence to our hypothesis, with our proposed technique achieving a state-of-the-art F1-score recognition performance of 61% and 62% in the high frame rate CASME II and SMIC-HS databases respectively.Comment: 14 pages double-column, author affiliations updated, acknowledgment of grant support adde

Enhancement of Cadmium and Zinc Flame Spectrometric Signals by Using APDTC-nButylamine-MIBK Extractants

Ammonium pyrrolidine-dithiocarbamate (APDTC) and methyl-isobutyl-ketone (MIBK) extractant were jound to be considerably improved by the addition of nbutylamine especially for the chemical analysis of Cd(II) and Zn(II) ions. Solvent extraction oj the bivalent metal ions is a function of pH and the concentration of APDTC and nbutylamine. Cd(II) and Zn(II) ions exhibit considerable flame spectrometric signal enhancement for pH ranges from 7 to 12 and 2 to 12 respectively when APDTC-nbutylamine-MIBK was used as the extractant in place oj APDTC-MIBK. The signal enhancement observed may be interpreted in terms of the formation of synergistic amine adduct and/or mixed solvent effect

Farmers’ Perceptions on the Adoption of Environment-Friendly Pepper Production Methods in Malaysia

This study investigates the farmers’ perceptions on the adoption of environment-friendly pepper production methods in Malaysia. This piece of information is deemed useful and important for the policy makers in Malaysia to devise appropriate policies to help Malaysian pepper farmers to have continuous market access in the gradually competitive international market arena. For this purpose, besides semi-structured interviews conducted on a random sample of 100 pepper farm households throughout Sarawak, structured questionnaires were also distributed to 31 literate pepper farmers randomly sampled in Sarawak between 1999 and 2007, to gather information regarding farmers’ perceptions on the adoption of environment-friendly pepper production methods in Malaysia. The results from the survey indicated that pepper farmers in Malaysia were generally less proactive and would take no initiative to produce environment-friendly pepper if there were no mandatory requirements from the government on these pepper farmers to curtail the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in their pepper cultivation ventures. There is an urgent need for Malaysian government to promulgate relevant policies to be integrated in the pepper production handbook or guidelines to make it mandatory for pepper farmers in Malaysia to minimize or even totally eliminate the use of chemical inputs in their pepper production processes

Solvent Extraction of Cd(II) using n-Butylamine-ClO:-MIBK and n-Butylamine-Oxine-MIBK

n-Butylamine-perchlorate-1WJBK and n-butylamine-oxine-MIBK extractants were found to be effective for the extraction of Cd(II) ions under strongly alkaline conditions (pH>10). This extraction is a function of the concentration of oxine, perchlorate, n-butylamine and pH. The flame AAS signal for Cd(II) was considerably enhanced by using the above extractants. The signal enhancement and the increase in % extraction of Cd(II) can be attributed to the formation of synergistic amine adducts

Non-isolated 30 kW class arcjet PCU

A 30 kW class arcjet Power Conditioning Unit, PCU, was built and tested during this Phase 2 SBIR contract. The PCU is an improved version of two previously developed PCU's. All of these units are 3-phase, 20 kHz buck regulators with current mode feed back to modulate the duty cycle to control the arcjet current at any selected operating point. The steady state control can assure arcjet stability despite the negative dynamic resistance of the arc discharge. The system also has a circuit to produce a high voltage start pulse to breakdown the gas and initiate the arc. The start pulse is formed by temporarily switching a short current path across the output terminals with a special solid state switching array. The switches then open rapidly, and the energy stored in the output inductors of the buck regulator produces a pulse of approximately 2500 V for approximately 500 nsec. The system was tested and modified until the transition to steady operation occurred after start up with a very small surge current overshoot. The system also can withstand a direct short circuit across the output without damage. The automatic feed back control simply reduces the duty cycle to hold the current at the set point. When the short is removed the full power output is immediately restored. This latest version arcjet PCU is conduction cooled to remove waste heat by conduction to the base plate. This unit is closer to flight a type of design than the previous functional bread boards. Waste heat is small because the PCU has a very high efficiency, 296 percent. The PCU was extensively tested with resistor loads to simulate operation with an arcjet. The unit was tested with ammonia arcjets at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Approximately 400 hours of testing were completed, with several starts. Many hours were also demonstrated with resistive loads. Some testing with hydrogen arcjets was also carried out at NASA LeRC. This system concept is now the design base for the ATTD program

Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?

Normative analysis of cognition-enhancing drugs frequently weighs the liberty interests of drug users against egalitarian commitments to a level playing field. Yet those who would refuse to engage in neuroenhancement may well find their liberty to do so limited in a society where such drugs are widespread. To the extent that unvarnished emotional responses are world-disclosive, neurocosmetic practices also threaten to provide a form of faulty data to their users. This essay examines underappreciated liberty-based and epistemic rationales for regulating cognition-enhancing drugs