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The advantages of nanocomposites containing single silicate layers uniformly dispersed in a polymer matrix were first demonstrated by researchers at Toyota in Japan, who developed nylon-6 nanocomposites and published in 1993. Polymer-nanoclay nanocomposites have attracted the attention of many researchers thereafter due to their outstanding mechanical and barrier properties. This concept is first...
The paper presents the results of a detailed two dimensional model investigation of a rubble mound breakwater armoured with Hollow Block (HOBO) concrete armour units, with respect to the hydraulic performance. The results of the model investigations are analysed to obtain graphical and numerical relationships between the energy dissipation, wave reflection, energy transmission, wave steepness, wave...
Metal processing industry in Sri Lanka began around 3000BC. Ancient chronicles like Mahavansaya, Thupavansa and Pujavaliya proved the Sri Lanka's history of metal industry. Archaeometallurgical surveys of Sri Lanka have revealed a non-conventional wind-driven iron smelting furnace for the first time in the world. Some of them dated back to third century BC. Replications of iron smelting process have...
Biomass is recently gaining popularity in industry as a promising source of renewable energy. Thermal conversion of biomass is recently gaining increased attention of researchers as a way of improving the efficiency of raw biomass fuel due to higher advantages it gives as compared to direct biomass combustion. These conversion methods are well studied using mathematical models and computer simulations...
There is growing global interest on bio-methane as a vehicular fuel and Europe Union (EU) has stated that this as a best well-to-wheel fuel. Commercialization of bio-methane under atmospheric conditions is limited due to its requirement of higher storage capacity. Compressed bio-methane systems have been currently commercialized in Europe in order to increase its low energy density however the process...
Nonblack particulate fillers most used with thermoplastic and rubber are calcium carbonate, silica, talc and alumina hydrates. The main characteristics, which control the effectiveness and the dispersion of filler in the polymer, are structure, surface area and chemical activity of filler. The mechanical behavior of rubber-thermoplastic blends depends greatly on interactions and compatibility that...
Fiber optic communication technology is an essential component in any Electrical Engineering curriculum. Unfortunately the expensive fiber optic communication equipment is a major drawback in teaching fiber optics theories and principles especially in the 3rd world countries. This paper presents a development of a low cost Fiber optic power meter and a bandwidth analyzer to be used in laboratories...
Since heavy metal pollution is a significant aspect to aquatic ecosystems, the objective of this research work was to investigate adsorption characteristics of chitosan as an alternative adsorbent material. In this study, chitosan, synthesized from locally available shrimp type “penaeus monodon” was used to observe adsorption characteristics of cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb) heavy metals from aqueous...
In this paper, two stabilizing nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) designs, namely, final-state equality constraint stabilizing design and final-state inequality constraint stabilizing design have been applied to achieve two wheeled mobile robot's control objectives, i.e. point stabilization and trajectory tracking. In both controllers, final-state constraints are imposed, on the online optimization...
The coronary cine-angiogram (CCA) is an invasive medical image modality which is used to determine the luminal obstructions or stenosis in the Coronary Arteries (CA). CCA based quantitative assessment of vascular morphology is a demanding area in medical diagnosis and segmentation of blood vessels in CCAs is one of the mandatory step in this endeavor. The accurate segmentation of CAs in Angiogram...
Web user profiling targets grouping users in to clusters with similar interests. Web sites are attracted by many visitors and gaining insight to the patterns of access leaves lot of information. Web server access log files record every single request processed by web site visitors. Applying web usage mining techniques allow to identify interesting patterns. In this paper we have improved the similarity...
Availability of records on environmental factors like noise, temperature, and precipitation is important in making critical decisions concerning public safety and wellbeing. Traditional methods involving dedicated human personnel and equipment in capturing these data have been reliable, but extremely costly and time consuming. We propose a data collecting and visualizing framework based on crowdsourcing...
We developed a new email client which runs on the browser and is not dependent on a particular server, based on the Unhosted web application architecture. The client can connect to any standard mail server directly from the browser, using IMAP and SMTP protocols so that the user is not limited to the webmail clients provided by various email service providers. As our client runs in a browser, it is...
Start-up marks are considered as one of the major defect in woven fabric, it occurs when the loom is restarted after loom stoppage due to various reasons. This defect is more prominent in high speed weaving looms especially with elastic warp yarns and is caused to deteriorate the fabric quality. This research paper deals with the mathematical analysis of the startup mark generation in elastic tape...
Appliance specific load monitoring is very useful in energy management solutions that are becoming a challenging task with growing energy demand. It facilitates appliance recognition and load monitoring such that optimum resource utilization can be achieved by correct appliance scheduling. In this paper we present a study of non-intrusive load recognition using steady state appliance signatures for...
The two-dimensional (2-D) discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is widely used in digital signal processing (DSP) and computing applications. Fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) are widely used as low-complexity algorithms for the computation of the DFT as it reduces the required computation operations from O(N2) to O(N log2N). The multiplicative complexity is used as a benchmark in comparing different algorithms...
The main objective of this research is to find out the economic impact of adopting green practices to the supply chains of manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka and the competitiveness gained through it. Greening the supply chain is looked at from three perspectives in this research namely, greening the inbound function, greening the production function and greening the outbound function where the...
The massive volume of video and image data, compels them to be stored in a distributed file system. To process the data stored in the distributed file system, Google proposed a programming model named MapReduce. Existing methods of processing images held in such a distributed file system, requires whole image or a substantial portion of the image to be streamed every time a filter is applied. In this...
Manufacturing industry is a rapid developing area and requires new technologies and concepts to increase the profit margin through high production rate and high quality. To have a sufficient and higher production rate there should be competent fixturing systems, because fixtures perform major tasks such as locating, holding and supporting components during manufacturing processes. Due to the large...
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