In this work, a novel design for the NiO/TiO2 heterojunction solar cells is presented. Highly-pure nanopowders prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique were used to form the heterojunctions. The electrical characteristics of the proposed design were compared to those of a conventional thin film heterojunction design prepared by the same technique. A higher efficiency of 300% was achieved by the proposed design. This attempt can be considered as the first to fabricate solar cells from highly-pure nanopowders of two different semiconductors.

The emphasis of Master Production Scheduling (MPS) or tactic planning is on time and spatial disintegration of the cumulative planning targets and forecasts, along with the provision and forecast of the required resources. This procedure eventually becomes considerably difficult and slow as the number of resources, products and periods considered increases. A number of studies have been carried out to understand these impediments and formulate algorithms to optimise the production planning problem, or more specifically the master production scheduling (MPS) problem. These algorithms include an Evolutionary Algorithm called Genetic Algorithm, a Swarm Intelligence methodology called Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), Bat Algorithm (BAT), T

The paper is concerned with, the behavior of the hydrostatic thrust bearings lubricated with liquid-solid lubricants using Einstein viscosity formula, and taking into account the centrifugal force resulting from high speed.  Also studied is the effect of the bearing dimensions on the pressure, flow rate, load capacity, shear stress, power consumption and stiffness.

The theoretical results show an increase in load capacity by (8.3%) in the presence of solid graphite particles with concentration of (16%) by weight as compared with pure oil, with increasing shear stress.  .

In general the performance of hydrostatic thrust bearings improve for load carrying capacity, volume flow rate,

    Identification of complex communities in biological networks is a critical and ongoing challenge since lots of network-related problems correspond to the subgraph isomorphism problem known in the literature as NP-hard. Several optimization algorithms have been dedicated and applied to solve this problem. The main challenge regarding the application of optimization algorithms, specifically to handle large-scale complex networks, is their relatively long execution time. Thus, this paper proposes a parallel extension of the PSO algorithm to detect communities in complex biological networks. The main contribution of this study is summarized in three- fold; Firstly, a modified PSO algorithm with a local search operator is proposed

Digital image manipulation has become increasingly prevalent due to the widespread availability of sophisticated image editing tools. In copy-move forgery, a portion of an image is copied and pasted into another area within the same image. The proposed methodology begins with extracting the image's Local Binary Pattern (LBP) algorithm features. Two main statistical functions, Stander Deviation (STD) and Angler Second Moment (ASM), are computed for each LBP feature, capturing additional statistical information about the local textures. Next, a multi-level LBP feature selection is applied to select the most relevant features. This process involves performing LBP computation at multiple scales or levels, capturing textures at different

The performance quality and searching speed of Block Matching (BM) algorithm are affected by shapes and sizes of the search patterns used in the algorithm. In this paper, Kite Cross Hexagonal Search (KCHS) is proposed. This algorithm uses different search patterns (kite, cross, and hexagonal) to search for the best Motion Vector (MV). In first step, KCHS uses cross search pattern. In second step, it uses one of kite search patterns (up, down, left, or right depending on the first step). In subsequent steps, it uses large/small Hexagonal Search (HS) patterns. This new algorithm is compared with several known fast block matching algorithms. Comparisons are based on search points and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). According to resul

The distribution of the expanded exponentiated power function EEPF with four parameters, was presented by the exponentiated expanded method using the expanded distribution of the power function, This method is characterized by obtaining a new distribution belonging to the exponential family, as we obtained the survival rate and failure rate function for this distribution, Some mathematical properties were found, then we used the developed least squares method to estimate the parameters using the genetic algorithm, and a Monte Carlo simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of estimations of possibility using the Genetic algorithm GA.

Data centric techniques, like data aggregation via modified algorithm based on fuzzy clustering algorithm with voronoi diagram which is called modified Voronoi Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm (VFCA) is presented in this paper. In the modified algorithm, the sensed area divided into number of voronoi cells by applying voronoi diagram, these cells are clustered by a fuzzy C-means method (FCM) to reduce the transmission distance. Then an appropriate cluster head (CH) for each cluster is elected. Three parameters are used for this election process, the energy, distance between CH and its neighbor sensors and packet loss values. Furthermore, data aggregation is employed in each CH to reduce the amount of data transmission which le

String matching is seen as one of the essential problems in computer science. A variety of computer applications provide the string matching service for their end users. The remarkable boost in the number of data that is created and kept by modern computational devices influences researchers to obtain even more powerful methods for coping with this problem. In this research, the Quick Search string matching algorithm are adopted to be implemented under the multi-core environment using OpenMP directive which can be employed to reduce the overall execution time of the program. English text, Proteins and DNA data types are utilized to examine the effect of parallelization and implementation of Quick Search string matching algorithm on multi-co