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The purpose of this paper is to improve the performance of control loop suffering from control valve stiction. Control valve stiction is considered as of one of the main causes of oscillation in process variables, which require performing costly unplanned maintenance and process shutdown. An adaptive solution to handle valve stiction while maintaining safety and quality until next planned maintenance is highly desirable to save considerable cost and effort.

This paper implements a new stiction compensation method built using adaptive inverse model techniques and intelligent control theories. Finite impulse response (FIR) model, which is known to be robust, as a compensator for stiction. The parameters of FIR model are tuned in an adaptive way using differential evolution (DE) technique. The performance of proposed method is compared with other two compensation techniques.

The new method showed excellent performance of the DE–FIR compensator compared to other dynamic inversion methods in terms of minimizing process variability, energy saving and valve stem aggressiveness.

The compensation ability for all compensators reduces with the increase of stiction severity, thus the over shoot case always shows the worst result. In future works, other optimization techniques will be explored to find the appropriate technique that can extend the FIR model size with smallest computation time that can improve the performance of the compensator in over shoot case. In addition, the estimation of the valve residual life based on the level of stiction and effort required by the controller should be considered.

The presented approach represents an original contribution to the literature. It performs stiction compensation without a need for a prior knowledge on the process or the valve models and guarantees a smooth control of the stem movement with a low control effort. The proposed approach differs from previous adaptive methods as it uses stable FIR models and DE to find the appropriate parameters of the inverse model and handle nonlinear behavior of stiction.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of Board of Directors Effectiveness (BODE) on the performance of Malaysian Takaful companies licensed by the Central Bank of Malaysia. In addition, the study investigates the moderating effect of Shariah Committee Quality (SCQ) on the relationship between BODE and companies’ performance.

This study uses a sample of 11 Malaysian Takaful companies during the period of 2010-2017. While BDE and SCQ are measured using indices, performance is proxied using ROA and ROE. A panel fixed effect regression analysis is used to test the impact of the BDE on the financial performance of Malaysian Takaful companies and the moderator role of SCQ.

The main finding of this study shows a positive association between BDE and performance. More specifically, boards with a high presence of independent, Muslim and female directors positively contribute to the performance of Malaysian Takaful companies. Another interesting finding is related to the positive moderating effect of SCQ on the relationship between BDE and performance. This result indicates that a high level of SCQ combined with a high level of board effectiveness improve performance.

The finding is of great importance to stakeholders and policymakers to improve their board effectiveness and the quality of the Shariah committee to reduce agency costs and to improve the performance of Malaysian Takaful companies.

This study adds to the prior literature by investigating for the first time the relationship between BDE and performance and the interaction effect of SCQ on the performance of Malaysian Takaful companies.

The onset of Darcy–Benard convection in a fluid-saturated porous layer within channeled walls can be through either the convectively amplified perturbations or absolutely unstable modes. The convective type route to formation of cellular forms has received much more interest in the literature than the absolute mode. This paper aims to explore the absolute instability mechanism on triggering the Benard convection in the presence of a uniform magnetic field acting perpendicular to the channel walls.

Pursuing a completely theoretical linear stability approach, the locus of wavenumbers and critical Rayleigh numbers with respect to varying Peclet numbers leading to zero complex group velocity, and hence the absolute instability onset, is formulated in closed form. The formulae also incorporate the influence of fluid movement through the porous layer.

Wanenumbers are found to be increasing in magnitude under the effect of the magnetic field. Although the magnetic field expectedly behaves in favor of stabilizing the convection through both convective and absolute instabilities by pushing the threshold value of Rayleigh number to higher values, a peculiarity exists in such a manner that the stabilizing effect of magnetic field can no longer compete against the absolute instability mechanism within the magnetized field after some critical location possessing negative part of the wavenumber.

The significant outcome is attributed to the exchange of instabilities as far as the absolute instability mechanism is concerned. Magnetic field is always stabilizing and no such trend is observed regarding the convective type instability.

Unsteady natural convection of water-based nanofluid within a right-angle trapezoidal cavity under the influence of a uniform inclined magnetic field using the mathematical nanofluid model proposed by Buongiorno is presented. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The left vertical and right inclined walls of the enclosure are kept at constant but different temperatures whereas the top and bottom horizontal walls are adiabatic. All boundaries are assumed to be impermeable to the base fluid and to nanoparticles. In order to study the behavior of the nanofluid, a non-homogeneous Buongiorno’s mathematical model is taken into account. The physical problems are represented mathematically by a set of partial differential equations along with the corresponding boundary conditions. By using an implicit finite difference scheme the dimensionless governing equations are numerically solved.

The governing parameters are the Rayleigh, Hartmann and Lewis numbers along with the inclination angle of the magnetic field relative to the gravity vector, the aspect ratio and the dimensionless time. The effects of these parameters on the average Nusselt number along the hot wall, as well as on the developments of streamlines, isotherms and isoconcentrations are analyzed. The results show that key parameters have substantial effects on the flow, heat and mass transfer characteristics.

The present results are new and original for the heat transfer and fluid flow in a right-angle trapezoidal cavity under the influence of a uniform inclined magnetic field using the mathematical nanofluid model proposed by Buongiorno. The results would benefit scientists and engineers to become familiar with the flow behavior of such nanofluids, and the way to predict the properties of this flow for possibility of using nanofluids in advanced nuclear systems, in industrial sectors including transportation, power generation, chemical sectors, ventilation, air-conditioning, etc.