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Article
Publication date: 13 September 2021

Vijaya Prasad B., Arumairaj Paul Daniel, Anand N. and Siva Kumar Yadav

Concrete is a building material widely used for the infrastructural development. Cement is the binding material used for the development of concrete. It is the primary cause of CO2

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Abstract

Purpose

Concrete is a building material widely used for the infrastructural development. Cement is the binding material used for the development of concrete. It is the primary cause of CO2 emission globally. The purpose of this study is to develop sustainable concrete material to satisfy the present need of construction sector. Geopolymer concrete (GPC) is a sustainable concrete developed without the use of cement. Therefore, investigations are being conducted to replace the cement by 100% with high calcium fly ash (FA) as binding material.

Design/methodology/approach

High calcium FA is used as cementitious binder, sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and sodium silicates (Na2SiO3) are used as alkaline liquids for developing the GPC. Mix proportions with different NaOH molarities of 4, 6, 8 and 10 M are considered to attain the appropriate mix. The method of curing adopted is ambient and oven curing. Workability, compressive strength and microstructure characteristics of GPC are analysed and presented.

Findings

An increase of NaOH in the mix decreases the workability. Compressive strength of 29 MPa is obtained for Mix-I with 8 M under ambient curing. A polynomial relationship is obtained to predict the compressive strength of GPC. Scanning electron microscope analysis is used to confirm the geo-polymerisation process in the microstructure of concrete.

Originality/value

This research work focuses on finding some alternative cementitious material for concrete that can replace ordinary portland cement (OPC) to overcome the CO2 emission owing to the utilisation of cement in the construction industry. An attempt has been made to use the waste material (high calcium FA) from thermal power plant for the production of GPC. GPC concrete is the novel building material and alternative to conventional concrete. It is the ecofriendly product contributing towards the improvement of the circular economy in the construction industry. There are several factors that affect the property of GPC such as type of binder material, molarity of activator solution and curing condition. The novelty of this work lies in the approach of using locally available high calcium FA along with manufactured sand for the development of GPC. As this approach is rarely investigated, to prove the attainment of compressive strength of GPC with high calcium FA, an attempt has been made during the present investigation. Other influencing parameter which affects the strength gain has also been analysed in this paper.

Details

Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology , vol. 20 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1726-0531

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 2000

B.S. Dhillon and M.A. Aleem

This paper presents the results of a survey of Canadian robot users concerning robot reliability and safety. Data on 26 questions were analyzed and the resulting findings are…

699

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a survey of Canadian robot users concerning robot reliability and safety. Data on 26 questions were analyzed and the resulting findings are presented in the form of tables, histograms, pie charts, etc. Provides conclusions including the fact that approximately 75 per cent of companies are using robots for commercial purposes; most general types of robots used in industry are intelligent robots; frequently ineffective maintenance manuals are provided by the robot manufacturers; and robot‐related problems are generally less than 50 per year.

Details

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, vol. 6 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2511

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 October 2022

Thomas Danel, Zoubeir Lafhaj, Anand Puppala, Samer BuHamdan, Sophie Lienard and Philippe Richard

The crane plays an essential role in modern construction sites as it supports numerous operations and activities on-site. Additionally, the crane produces a big amount of data…

302

Abstract

Purpose

The crane plays an essential role in modern construction sites as it supports numerous operations and activities on-site. Additionally, the crane produces a big amount of data that, if analyzed, could significantly affect productivity, progress monitoring and decision-making in construction projects. This paper aims to show the usability of crane data in tracking the progress of activities on-site.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents a pattern-based recognition method to detect concrete pouring activities on any concrete-based construction sites. A case study is presented to assess the methodology with a real-life example.

Findings

The analysis of the data helped build a theoretical pattern for concrete pouring activities and detect the different phases and progress of these activities. Accordingly, the data become useable to track progress and identify problems in concrete pouring activities.

Research limitations/implications

The paper presents an example for construction practitioners and researcher about a practical and easy way to analyze the big data that comes from cranes and how it is used in tracking projects' progress. The current study focuses only on concrete pouring activities; future studies can include other types of activities and can utilize the data with other building methods to improve construction productivity.

Practical implications

The proposed approach is supposed to be simultaneously efficient in terms of concrete pouring detection as well as cost-effective. Construction practitioners could track concrete activities using an already-embedded monitoring device.

Originality/value

While several studies in the literature targeted the optimization of crane operations and of mitigating hazards through automation and sensing, the opportunity of using cranes as progress trackers is yet to be fully exploited.

Details

Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, vol. 31 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0969-9988

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 September 2002

B.S. Dhillon, A.R.M. Fashandi and K.L. Liu

This paper presents a review of published literature on robot reliability and safety. The literature is classified into three main categories: robot safety; robot reliability; and…

4481

Abstract

This paper presents a review of published literature on robot reliability and safety. The literature is classified into three main categories: robot safety; robot reliability; and miscellaneous. Robot safety is further categorized into six classifications: general; accidents; human‐factors; safety standards; safety methods; and safety systems/technologies. The period covered by the review is from 1973 to 2001.

Details

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, vol. 8 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2511

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 January 1987

Eighty‐five participants attended the 4th ISHM Display meeting at the Jaarbeurs Congress Centre in Utrecht on 16 October, 1986. The programme of the day started with the annual…

Abstract

Eighty‐five participants attended the 4th ISHM Display meeting at the Jaarbeurs Congress Centre in Utrecht on 16 October, 1986. The programme of the day started with the annual general membership meeting of the Benelux Chapter. The chairman, Mr T. Kwikkers, gave a short review of the state of affairs of ISHM‐Benelux and of the activities of the last year. He mentioned the temporary enlargement of the executive committee to give a new generation a chance to gain experience in the ISHM organisation and to take up some new activities. In order to raise publicity for ISHM and Hybrid Circuits a new brochure has been designed and a set of material for demonstration purposes was collected. With the material every member of the chapter can easily set up a presentation for schools or customers. This year ISHM‐Benelux has grown from 85 to 100 members and enjoys a healthy financial situation. Next year again emphasis will be put on public relations. Professor R. Govaerts signified that he was no longer available for a position in the executive committee. As Prof. Govaerts has been very active and stimulating for the ISHM‐Benelux Chapter from its foundation in 1976 up to now, the general membership meeting decided to appoint him as (the first) honorary member of this chapter. Except for Professor Govaerts, the sitting executive committee, consisting of 15 members, was re‐elected for another year. After the European conferences in Bournemouth and Hamburg the ISHM‐Benelux chapter is asked to organise the 1991 Conference. The executive committee is already looking out for candidates for a function in the organising committee, which must be formed in the coming year.

Details

Microelectronics International, vol. 4 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-5362

Article
Publication date: 8 June 2022

Chinnaraj Gnanavel and Kumarasamy Vanchinathan

These implementations not only generate excessive voltage levels to enhance the quality of power but also include a detailed investigating of the various modulation methods and…

Abstract

Purpose

These implementations not only generate excessive voltage levels to enhance the quality of power but also include a detailed investigating of the various modulation methods and control schemes for multilevel inverter (MLI) topologies. Reduced harmonic modulation technology is used to produce 11-level output voltage with the production of renewable energy applications. The simulation is done in the MATLAB/Simulink for 11-level symmetric MLI and is correlated with the conventional inverter design.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is focused on investigating the different types of asymmetric, symmetric and hybrid topologies and control methods used for the modular multilevel inverter (MMI) operation. Classical MLI configurations are affected by performance issues such as poor power quality, uneconomic structure and low efficiency.

Findings

The variations in both carrier and reference signals and their performance are analyzed for the proposed inverter topologies. The simulation result compares unipolar and bipolar pulse-width modulation (PWM) techniques with total harmonic distortion (THD) results. The solar-fed 11-level MMI is controlled using various modulation strategies, which are connected to marine emergency lighting loads. Various modulation techniques are used to control the solar-fed 11-level MMI, which is connected to marine emergency lighting loads. The entire hardware system is controlled by using SPARTAN 3A field programmable gate array (FPGA) board and the least harmonics are obtained by improving the power quality.

Originality/value

The simulation result compares unipolar and bipolar PWM techniques with THD results. Various modulation techniques are used to control the solar-fed 11-level MMI, which is connected to marine emergency lighting loads. The entire hardware system is controlled by a SPARTAN 3A field programmable gate array (FPGA) board, and the power quality is improved to achieve the lowest harmonics possible.

Details

Circuit World, vol. 49 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0305-6120

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 4 June 2024

Eda Başmısırlı, Aslı Gizem Çapar, Neşe Kaya, Hasan Durmuş, Mualla Aykut and Neriman İnanç

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of anxiety levels of adults on their nutritional status during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kayseri province, Turkey.

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of anxiety levels of adults on their nutritional status during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kayseri province, Turkey.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 898 adults consisting of 479 individuals with and 419 individuals without a positive diagnosis of COVID-19 were included in the study. The individuals’ socio-demographic characteristics, health status, nutritional habits, anthropometric measurement and Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) information were obtained online.

Findings

The mean FCV-19S score of the participants was 17.49 ± 6.02. FCV-19S score was higher in those who reduced their consumption of protein sources compared to those who did not change and those who increased (p < 0.001). It was determined that FCV-19S scores of participants who increased their consumption of fruit/vegetables, sweets and sugar were higher than those who did not change their consumption of such items (p = 0.007). The FCV-19S scores of individuals who did not change their onion/garlic and snack consumption were lower than those who decreased or increased the consumption of these nutrients (p = 0.001, p = 0.002).

Practical implications

Education programs can be organized especially targeting vulnerable populations, such as women, individuals with chronic diseases and those experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. These programs can be conducted by dietitians and psychologists in collaboration, focusing on promoting healthy eating habits and coping strategies during stressful times.

Originality/value

It was determined that those who changed their nutrition habits during the COVID-19 pandemic had higher fear levels than those who did not. Individuals with high fear paid more attention to healthy nutrition than individuals without fear.

Details

Nutrition & Food Science , vol. 54 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0034-6659

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 March 2021

P. Padmavathy, S. Pakkir Mohideen and Zameer Gulzar

The purpose of this paper is to initially perform Senti-WordNet (SWN)- and point wise mutual information (PMI)-based polarity computation and based polarity updation. When the SWN…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to initially perform Senti-WordNet (SWN)- and point wise mutual information (PMI)-based polarity computation and based polarity updation. When the SWN polarity and polarity mismatched, the vote flipping algorithm (VFA) is employed.

Design/methodology/approach

Recently, in domains like social media(SM), healthcare, hotel, car, product data, etc., research on sentiment analysis (SA) has massively increased. In addition, there is no approach for analyzing the positive or negative orientations of every single aspect in a document (a tweet, a review, as well as a piece of news, among others). For SA as well as polarity classification, several researchers have used SWN as a lexical resource. Nevertheless, these lexicons show lower-level performance for sentiment classification (SC) than domain-specific lexicons (DSL). Likewise, in some scenarios, the same term is utilized differently between domain and general knowledge lexicons. While concerning different domains, most words have one sentiment class in SWN, and in the annotated data set, their occurrence signifies a strong inclination with the other sentiment class. Hence, this paper chiefly concentrates on the drawbacks of adapting domain-dependent sentiment lexicon (DDSL) from a collection of labeled user reviews and domain-independent lexicon (DIL) for proposing a framework centered on the information theory that could predict the correct polarity of the words (positive, neutral and negative). The proposed work initially performs SWN- and PMI-based polarity computation and based polarity updation. When the SWN polarity and polarity mismatched, the vote flipping algorithm (VFA) is employed. Finally, the predicted polarity is inputted to the mtf-idf-based SVM-NN classifier for the SC of reviews. The outcomes are examined and contrasted to the other existing techniques to verify that the proposed work has predicted the class of the reviews more effectually for different datasets.

Findings

There is no approach for analyzing the positive or negative orientations of every single aspect in a document (a tweet, a review, as well as a piece of news, among others). For SA as well as polarity classification, several researchers have used SWN as a lexical resource. Nevertheless, these lexicons show lower-level performance for sentiment classification (SC) than domain-specific lexicons (DSL). Likewise, in some scenarios, the same term is utilized differently between domain and general knowledge lexicons. While concerning different domains, most words have one sentiment class in SWN, and in the annotated data set their occurrence signifies a strong inclination with the other sentiment class.

Originality/value

The proposed work initially performs SWN- and PMI-based polarity computation, and based polarity updation. When the SWN polarity and polarity mismatched, the vote flipping algorithm (VFA) is employed.

Article
Publication date: 5 October 2022

Sophiya Shiekh, Mohammad Shahid, Manas Sambare, Raza Abbas Haidri and Dileep Kumar Yadav

Cloud computing gives several on-demand infrastructural services by dynamically pooling heterogeneous resources to cater to users’ applications. The task scheduling needs to be…

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Abstract

Purpose

Cloud computing gives several on-demand infrastructural services by dynamically pooling heterogeneous resources to cater to users’ applications. The task scheduling needs to be done optimally to achieve proficient results in a cloud computing environment. While satisfying the user’s requirements in a cloud environment, scheduling has been proven an NP-hard problem. Therefore, it leaves scope to develop new allocation models for the problem. The aim of the study is to develop load balancing method to maximize the resource utilization in cloud environment.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the parallelized task allocation with load balancing (PTAL) hybrid heuristic is proposed for jobs coming from various users. These jobs are allocated on the resources one by one in a parallelized manner as they arrive in the cloud system. The novel algorithm works in three phases: parallelization, task allocation and task reallocation. The proposed model is designed for efficient task allocation, reallocation of resources and adequate load balancing to achieve better quality of service (QoS) results.

Findings

The acquired empirical results show that PTAL performs better than other scheduling strategies under various cases for different QoS parameters under study.

Originality/value

The outcome has been examined for the real data set to evaluate it with different state-of-the-art heuristics having comparable objective parameters.

Details

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, vol. 19 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-7371

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 March 2021

Azra Nazir, Roohie Naaz Mir and Shaima Qureshi

Natural languages have a fundamental quality of suppleness that makes it possible to present a single idea in plenty of different ways. This feature is often exploited in the…

Abstract

Purpose

Natural languages have a fundamental quality of suppleness that makes it possible to present a single idea in plenty of different ways. This feature is often exploited in the academic world, leading to the theft of work referred to as plagiarism. Many approaches have been put forward to detect such cases based on various text features and grammatical structures of languages. However, there is a huge scope of improvement for detecting intelligent plagiarism.

Design/methodology/approach

To realize this, the paper introduces a hybrid model to detect intelligent plagiarism by breaking the entire process into three stages: (1) clustering, (2) vector formulation in each cluster based on semantic roles, normalization and similarity index calculation and (3) Summary generation using encoder-decoder. An effective weighing scheme has been introduced to select terms used to build vectors based on K-means, which is calculated on the synonym set for the said term. If the value calculated in the last stage lies above a predefined threshold, only then the next semantic argument is analyzed. When the similarity score for two documents is beyond the threshold, a short summary for plagiarized documents is created.

Findings

Experimental results show that this method is able to detect connotation and concealment used in idea plagiarism besides detecting literal plagiarism.

Originality/value

The proposed model can help academics stay updated by providing summaries of relevant articles. It would eliminate the practice of plagiarism infesting the academic community at an unprecedented pace. The model will also accelerate the process of reviewing academic documents, aiding in the speedy publishing of research articles.

Details

International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, vol. 14 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-378X

Keywords

1 – 10 of 131