A Novel Design Approach to X-Band Minkowski Reflectarray Antennas using the Full-Wave EM Simulation-based Complete Neural Model with a Hybrid GA-NM Algorithm

In this work, a novel multi-objective design optimization procedure is presented for the Minkowski Reflectarray RAs using a complete 3-D CST Microwave Studio MWS-based Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network MLP NN model including the substrate constant εr with a hybrid Genetic GA and Nelder-Mead NM algorithm. The MLP NN model provides an accurate and fast model and establishes the reflection phase of a unit Minkowski RA element as a continuous function within the input domain including the substrate 1 ≤ εr ≤ 6; 0.5mm ≤ h ≤ 3mm in the frequency between 8GHz ≤ f ≤ 12GHz. This design procedure enables a designer to obtain not only the most optimum Minkowski RA design all throughout the X- band, at the same time the optimum Minkowski RAs on the selected substrates. Moreover a design of a fully optimized X-band 15×15 Minkowski RA antenna is given as a worked example with together the tolerance analysis and its performance is also compared with those of the optimized RAs on the selected traditional substrates. Finally it may be concluded that the presented robust and systematic multi-objective design procedure is conveniently applied to the Microstrip Reflectarray RAs constructed from the advanced patches

AWARENESS LEVEL OF LEADER WOMEN FARMERS ABOUT ORGANIC LIVESTOCK

Intensive livestock animal production has been preferred in order to meet food requirements of increasing population since 1950’s. However, especially in baby foods, organic farming products are getting preferred because of any harmfull supplements in natural conditions. Organic farming is getting popular because of increasing demand for natural foods especially in baby foods and higher incomed peoples. At the same time, organic animal products are being preferred as a new trend. Lack of environmental pollutants, large scale of agricultural lands and the presence of native breed livestock animals provide the significant opportunities for the promotion of organic livestock in Turkey. However, Turkey has not met the demand for animal products produced as organic. Small scale livestock enterprise, low education level and inefficient producer organizations are lead to this results. In this study, awareness level of the leader women farmers who have higher education and leadership skills than the other women farmers on organic livestock animal production was determined

Methyldecalin hydrocracking over palladium/zeolite-X

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Hydrocracking of methyldecalin over Pd/REX has been studied with surface sensitive techniques in the critical temperature range 325-350 degrees C. Results from in situ characterization of adsorbed species, and post-reaction analysis of the catalyst surface by infrared and photoemission spectroscopies, were related to product distributions. The results are discussed in light of quantum chemical calculations of free and catalyst bound intermediates, following ring-opening reactions. Liquid and gaseous products were detected by infrared and WNis spectroscopies. Apparent activation energies of product formation hydrogen consumption, over a broader temperature range, were derived from previous autoclave experiments. An increase in temperature, 325-350 degrees C, results in a shift from preferred cracking products to aromatics, an enhanced level of light hydrocarbon off-gases, and a higher coverage of carbonaceous residues. The increased level of carbonaceous residues is accompanied by a lowered coverage of the reactant, at the surface. The altered product distribution can be characterized by apparent single activation energies, valid from 300 to 450 degrees C. Methane and aromatics show a similar rapid increase with temperature, hydrogen consumption a more timid increase, indicating a reaction limited by diffusion, and cycloalkane production a modest inverse temperature dependence. Fully hydrogenated ring-opening products represent valuable fuel components, but hydrogen deficiency can instead lead to chemisorbed precursors to coke. Our calculations show that cyclohexane, 1,2-diethyl, 3-methyl has a lower heat of formation than the corresponding surface intermediates, but a small enthalpy advantage can easily be countered by entropy effects at higher temperatures. This balance is critical to the formation of preferred products, instead of catalyst deactivation and aromatics. The theoretical results further show that surface intermediates, where the terminating hydrogen is replaced by a C-O bond, have distinct vibrations around 1150 cm(-1). (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Computational Pronunciation Analysis in Sung Utterances

Recent automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) approaches focus on building stronger acoustic models or in-domain language models, while the pronunciation aspect is seldom touched upon. This paper applies a novel computational analysis on the pronunciation variances in sung utterances and further proposes a new pronunciation model adapted for singing. The singing-adapted model is tested on multiple public datasets via word recognition experiments. It performs better than the standard speech dictionary in all settings reporting the best results on ALT in a capella recordings using n-gram language models. For reproducibility, we share the sentence-level annotations used in testing, providing a new benchmark evaluation set for ALT

Military Counterterrorism Measures, Civil–Military Relations, and Democracy: The Cases of Turkey and the United States

This study examines how military counter-terrorism (CT) measures affect the quality of democracy by altering civil-military relations (CMR) and focuses on civil-military relations as the main causal mechanism. We argue that the use of a military approach in counter-terrorism jeopardizes democracy at the societal level by increasing the belief that only the military is equipped to deal with the threat at hand. Therefore, erosions of civil liberties are tolerated in exchange for security. Second, we argue that military CT measures change the balance between the military and executive powers in procedural and liberal democracies. While the military’s executive power increases in procedural democracies, the civilian ruler’s control of the military power increases in liberal ones. Case studies of the U.S. and Turkey show that a military counter-terrorism approach affects CMR in these countries, which generate a similar tradeoff between security and the quality of democracy, albeit via different causal mechanisms. While that tradeoff is less severe in the U.S., Turkey is more vulnerable to erosion of democracy

The spectral shift function and Levinson's theorem for quantum star graphs

We consider the Schr\"odinger operator on a star shaped graph with $n$ edges joined at a single vertex. We derive an expression for the trace of the difference of the perturbed and unperturbed resolvent in terms of a Wronskian. This leads to representations for the perturbation determinant and the spectral shift function, and to an analog of Levinson's formula

Assembly line balancing by using axiomatic design principles: An application from cooler manufacturing industry

[EN] The philosophy of production without waste is the fundamental belief behind lean manufacturing that should be adopted by enterprises. One of the waste elimination methods is assembly line balancing for lean manufacturing, i.e. Yamazumi. The assembly line balancing is to assign tasks to the workstations by minimizing the number of workstations to the required values. There should be no workstation with the excessively high or low workload, and all workstations must ideally work with balanced workloads. Accordingly, in this study, the axiomatic design method is applied for assembly line balancing in order to achieve maximum output with the installed capacity. In order to achieve this aim, all improvement opportunities are defined and utilized as an output of the study. Computational results indicate that the proposed method is effective to reduce operators’ idle time by 12%, imbalance workload between workstations by 38%, and the total number of workers by 12%. 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Analysis of product design characteristics for remanufacturing using Fuzzy AHP and Axiomatic Design. Journal of Engineering Design, 28(5), 338-368. https://doi.org/10.1080/09544828.2017.1316014Cochran, D. S., Eversheim, W., Kubin, G., Sesterhenn, M. L. (2000). The application of axiomatic design and lean management principles in the scope of production system segmentation. International Journal of Production Research,38(6), 1377-1396. https://doi.org/10.1080/002075400188906Dolgui, A., Ihnatsenka, I. (2009). Branch and bound algorithm for a transfer line design problem: Stations with sequentially activated multi-spindle heads.European Journal of Operational Research, 197(3), 1119-1132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2008.03.028Durmusoglu, M. B., Satoglu, S. I. (2011). Axiomatic design of hybrid manufacturing systems in erratic demand conditions. International Journal of Production Research, 49(17), 5231-5261. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2010.510487Ertay, T., Satoğlu, S. I. (2012). System parameter selection with information axiom for the new product introduction to the hybrid manufacturing systems under dual-resource constraint. International Journal of Production Research, 50(7), 1825-1839. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2011.560205Ghosh, S., Gagnon, R. J. (1989). A comprehensive literature review and analysis of the design, balancing and scheduling of assembly systems. The International Journal of Production Research, 27(4), 637-670. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207548908942574Graves, S. C., Lamar, B. W. (1983). An integer programming procedure for assembly system design problems. Operations Research, 31(3), 522-545. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.31.3.522Gunasekera, J. S., Ali, A. F. (1995). A three-step approach to designing a metal-forming process. JOM, 47(6), 22-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03221198Guschinskaya, O., Dolgui, A., Guschinsky, N., Levin, G. (2008). A heuristic multi-start decomposition approach for optimal design of serial machining lines. European Journal of Operational Research, 189(3), 902-913. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2006.03.072Hager, T., Wafik, H., Faouzi, M. (2017). Manufacturing system design based on axiomatic design: Case of assembly line. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 10(1), 111-139. https://doi.org/10.3926/jiem.728Han, W. M., Zhao, J. L., Chen, Y. (2013). A Virtual Cellular Manufacturing System Design Model Based on Axiomatic Design Theory. In Applied Mechanics and Materials (Vol. 271, pp. 1478-1484). Trans Tech Publications. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.271-272.1478Holzner, P., Rauch, E., Spena, P. R., Matt, D. T. (2015). Systematic Design of SME Manufacturing and Assembly Systems Based on Axiomatic Design.Procedia CIRP, 34, 81-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2015.07.010Houshmand, M., Jamshidnezhad, B. (2002). Conceptual design of lean production systems through an axiomatic approach. In Proceedings of ICAD2002 Second International Conference on Axiomatic Design.Houshmand, M., Jamshidnezhad, B. (2004). A lean manufacturing roadmap for an automotive body assembly line within axiomatic design framework. International Journal of Engineering Transactions, 17(1), 51-72.Houshmand, M., Jamshidnezhad, B. (2006). An extended model of design process of lean production systems by means of process variables. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 22(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcim.2005.01.004Khandekar, A. V., Chakraborty, S. (2016). Application of fuzzy axiomatic design principles for selection of non-traditional machining processes. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 83(1-4), 529-543.Kulak, O., Durmusoglu, M. B., Tufekci, S. (2005). A complete cellular manufacturing system design methodology based on axiomatic design principles. 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Using simulated annealing to solve a multiobjective assembly line balancing problem with parallel workstations. International Journal of Production Research, 36(10), 2717-2741. https://doi.org/10.1080/002075498192454Nakao, M., Kobayashi, N., Hamada, K., Totsuka, T., Yamada, S. (2007). Decoupling executions in navigating manufacturing processes for shortening lead time and its implementation to an unmanned machine shop. CIRP Annals-Manufacturing Technology, 56(1), 171-174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cirp.2007.05.041Nordlund, M., Tate, D., Suh, N. P. (1996). Growth of axiomatic design through industrial practice. In 3rd CIRP Workshop on Design and the Implementation of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Tokyo, Japan (Vol. 6, pp. 77-84).Rauch, E., Spena, P. R., Matt, D. T. (2019). Axiomatic design guidelines for the design of flexible and agile manufacturing and assembly systems for SMEs. 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Forecasting natural gas consumption in Istanbul using neural networks and multivariate time series methods

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.The fast changes and developments in the world's economy have substantially increased energy consumption. Consequently, energy planning has become more critical and important. Forecasting is one of the main tools utilized in energy planning. Recently developed computational techniques such as genetic algorithms have led to easily produced and accurate forecasts. In this paper, a natural gas consumption forecasting methodology is developed and implemented with state-of-the-art techniques. We show that our forecasts are quite close to real consumption values. Accurate forecasting of natural gas consumption is extremely critical as the majority of purchasing agreements made are based on predictions. As a result, if the forecasts are not done correctly, either unused natural gas amounts must be paid or there will be shortages of natural gas in the planning periods

Preparation of PANI modified TiO2 and characterization under pre- and post- photocatalytic conditions

Polyaniline (PANI) is a promising conducting polymer for surface modification of TiO2 to overcome limitations of the use of visible light and attain increased photocatalytic efficiency for the removal of organic contaminants. In this study, a series of polyaniline modified TiO2 (PANI-TiO2) composites were prepared by using "in-situ" chemical oxidation polymerization method. The composites were systematically characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (equipped with an attenuated total reflection accessory, FTIR-ATR), Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffractometry (XRD), scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDAX), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), ultraviolet–visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV-DRS), photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL), nitrogen (N2) physisorption (Brunauer − Emmett − Teller surface area (SBET) and Barrett-Joyner-Halenda (BJH) pore size analysis), thermogravimetry-derivative thermogravimetry (TG-DTG) techniques. XRD patterns of PANI-TiO2 composites confirmed both the amorphous phase of PANI and the crystalline character of TiO2. TG/DTG analysis complemented the XRD profiles that the interactions between PANI and TiO2 resulted in a more stable PANI-TiO2 matrix. SEM images displayed the dominant morphology as dandelion-like shapes of PANI being more pronounced with increasing PANI ratios in PANI-TiO2 composites. UV-DRS profiles revealed that the band gap energies of the composites were lower than bare TiO2 expressing a shift to the visible light region. Both PL and UV-DRS analyses confirmed the band-gap reduction phenomenon of PANI modification of TiO2. The incorporation of PANI into TiO2 resulted in a reduction of the surface area of TiO2. The composites were subsequently subjected to photocatalytic activity assessment tests using humic acid (HA) as a model of refractory organic matter (RfOM) under simulated solar irradiation (Uyguner-Demirel et al. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30 85626-85638, 2023). The morphological and structural changes attained upon application of photocatalysis were also evaluated by FTIR-ATR, Raman spectroscopy, XRD, and SEM-EDAX methods in a comparable manner. The FTIR-ATR spectral features of PANI, RfOM and all composites displayed peaks with slight shifts under pre- and post- photocatalytic conditions as well as following dark surface interactions. Besides exhibiting noticeable photocatalytic performance, PANI-TiO2 composites were also proven to maintain stability under non-selective oxidation conditions in the presence of a complex organic matrix. The prepared PANI-TiO2 composites overcoming the limitations of UVA light active bare TiO2 photocatalysis could possibly find a beneficial use as potential catalysts in solar photocatalytic applications. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature