<p>Photovoltaic (PV) systems are becoming increasingly popular; however, arc faults on the direct current (DC) side are becoming more widespread as a result of the effects of aging as well as the trend toward higher DC voltage levels, posing severe risk to human safety and system stability. The parallel arc faults present higher level of current as compared with the series arc faults, making it more difficult to spot the series arc. In this paper and for the aim of condition monitoring, the features of a DC series arc fault are analyzed by analysing the arc features, performing model’s simulation in PSCAD, and carrying out experimental studies. Various arc models are simulated and investigated; for low current arcs, the heur

Although its wide utilization in microbial cultures, the one factor-at-a-time method, failed to find the true optimum, this is due to the interaction between optimized parameters which is not taken into account. Therefore, in order to find the true optimum conditions, it is necessary to repeat the one factor-at-a-time method in many sequential experimental runs, which is extremely time-consuming and expensive for many variables. This work is an attempt to enhance bioactive yellow pigment production by Streptomyces thinghirensis based on a statistical design. The yellow pigment demonstrated inhibitory effects against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus and was characterized by UV-vis spectroscopy which showed lambda maximum of

conventional FCM algorithm does not fully utilize the spatial information in the image. In this research, we use a FCM algorithm that incorporates spatial information into the membership function for clustering. The spatial function is the summation of the membership functions in the neighborhood of each pixel under consideration. The advantages of the method are that it is less
sensitive to noise than other techniques, and it yields regions more homogeneous than those of other methods. This technique is a powerful method for noisy image segmentation. 

Nystatin is the drug of choice for treatment of cutaneous fungal infections with main disadvantage that is the need for multiple applications to achieve complete eradication which may reduce patient compliance. Microparticles offer a solution for such issue as they are one of sustained release preparations that achieve slow release of drug over an extended period of time. The objectives of this study were to fabricate nystatin-loaded chitosan microparticles with the ultimate goal of prolonging drug release and to analyze the influence of polymer concentration on various properties of microparticles. Microparticles were prepared by chemical cross-linking method using glutaraldehyde as cross-linking agent. Five formulas, namely N1C1, N1C2,

A load-shedding controller suitable for small to medium size loads is designed and implemented based on preprogrammed priorities and power consumption for individual loads. The main controller decides if a particular load can be switched ON or not according to the amount of available power generation, load consumption and loads priorities. When themaximum allowed power consumption is reached and the user want to deliver power to additional load, the controller will decide if this particular load should be denied receiving power if its priority is low. Otherwise, it can be granted to receive power if its priority is high and in this case lower priority loads are automatically switched OFF in order not to overload the power generation. The

Autonomous systems are these systems which power themselves from the available ambient energies in addition to their duties. In the next few years, autonomous systems will pervade society and they will find their ways into different applications related to health, security, comfort and entertainment. Piezoelectric harvesters are possible energy converters which can be used to convert the available ambient vibration energy into electrical energy. In this contribution, an energy harvesting cantilever array with magnetic tuning including three piezoelectric bimorphs is investigated theoretically and experimentally. Other than harvester designs proposed before, this array is easy to manufacture and insensitive to manufacturi

There are still areas around the world suffer from severe shortage of freshwater supplies. Desalination technologies are not widely used due to their high energy usage, cost, and environmental damaging effects. In this study, a mathematical model of single-bed adsorption desalination system using silica gel-water as working pair is developed and validated via earlier experiments. A very good match between the model predictions and the experimental results is recorded. The objective is to reveal the factors affecting the productivity of fresh water and cooling effect in the solar adsorption system. The proposed model is setup for solving within the commercially-available software (Engineering Equation Solver). It is implemented to so