As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord

Background Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is widely used in the cancer therapy field. This type of plasma is very close to room temperature. This paper illustrates the effects of CAP on breast cancer tissues both in vivo and in vitro. Methods The mouse mammary adenocarcinoma cell line AN3 was used for the in vivo study, and the MCF7, AMJ13, AMN3, and HBL cell lines were used for the in vitro study. A floating electrode-dielectric barrier discharge (FE-DBD) system was used. The cold plasma produced by the device was tested against breast cancer cells. Results The induced cytotoxicity percentages were 61.7%, 68% and 58.07% for the MCF7, AMN3, and AMJ13 cell lines, respectively, whereas the normal breast tissue HBL cell line exhibited very li

Smear zone is usually formed around the prefabricated vertical drains (PVD’s) due to mandrel driving. The geotechnical properties of the soil in this zone exhibit significant changes that affect the performance of the PVD’s. The most relevant property in this respect is the coefficient of permeability. So far, no serious attention is paid to investigate the effects of shearing under large shear strains on the geotechnical properties of the soft soil in Fao region. In this study, an extensive laboratory testing program was conducted to assess the characteristics of the smear zone with an emphasis on the permeability coefficient of Fao soft soil. The results show that the permeability of the smear zone is about 70% of

To accommodate utilities in buildings, different sizes of openings are provided in the web of reinforced concrete deep beams, which cause reductions in the beam strength and stiffness. This paper aims to investigate experimentally and numerically the effectiveness of using carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips, as a strengthening technique, to externally strengthen reinforced concrete continuous deep beams (RCCDBs) with large openings. The experimental work included testing three RCCDBs under five-point bending. A reference specimen was prepared without openings to explore the reductions in strength and stiffness after providing large openings. Openings were created symmetrically at the center of spans of the other specimens

Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) is a well known device for effectively regulating the active power flow in a power system. In this paper, the SSSC linearized power flow equations are incorporated into Newton-Raphson algorithm in a MATLAB written program to investigate the control of active poweer flow and the transient stability of a five bus and a thirty bus IEEE test systems, during abnormal conduction (three phase fault near buses). A comparison of the results obtained for the base case without SSSC and with it to investigate the effectiveness of the device on both of the active power flow and the transient stability.

Database is characterized as an arrangement of data that is sorted out and disseminated in a way that allows the client to get to the data being put away in a simple and more helpful way. However, in the era of big-data the traditional methods of data analytics may not be able to manage and process the large amount of data. In order to develop an efficient way of handling big-data, this work studies the use of Map-Reduce technique to handle big-data distributed on the cloud. This approach was evaluated using Hadoop server and applied on EEG Big-data as a case study. The proposed approach showed clear enhancement for managing and processing the EEG Big-data with average of 50% reduction on response time. The obtained results provide EEG r

Thermal management has become a major issue in the latest high performance computing machines because high CPU temperatures result in inefficient performance and decreased hardware life span. In this work, the cooling performance of a finned metal foam heat sink (FMFHS) was examined. The pore density values of tested copper metal foam (CMF) samples with different values of PPI 5, 10 and 20, with a constant porosity of 90%. For reference, these samples were measured by a conventional Aluminum plate-fin heat sink (CHS). The work was performed under experimental conditions in which air directed over the heat sink surface at air velocities (2.5, 3.0 and 3.5 m/s). The environmental temperature was fixed at 27 °C. Findings

An adaptive nonlinear neural controller to reduce the nonlinear flutter in 2-D wing is proposed in the paper. The nonlinearities in the system come from the quasi steady aerodynamic model and torsional spring in pitch direction. Time domain simulations are used to examine the dynamic aero elastic instabilities of the system (e.g. the onset of flutter and limit cycle oscillation, LCO). The structure of the controller consists of two models :the modified Elman neural network (MENN) and the feed forward multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The MENN model is trained with off-line and on-line stages to guarantee that the outputs of the model accurately represent the plunge and pitch motion of the wing and this neural model acts as the identifier. Th