Low grade crude palm oil (LGCPO) presents as an attractive option as feedstock for biodiesel production due to its low cost and non-competition with food resources. Typically, LGCPO contains high contents of free fatty acids (FFA), rendering it impossible in direct trans-esterification processes due to the saponification reaction. Esterification is the typical pre-treatment process to reduce the FFA content and to produce fatty acid methyl ester (FAME). The pre-treatment of LGCPO using two different acid catalysts, such as titanium oxysulphate sulphuric acid complex hydrate (TiOSH) and 5-sulfosalicylic acid dihydrate (5-SOCAH) was investigated for the first time in this study. The optimum conditions for the homogenous catalyst (5-SOCAH) wer

The communication networks (mobile phone networks, social media platforms) produce digital traces from their usages. This type of information help to understand and analyze the human mobility in very accurate way. By these analyzes over cities, it can give powerful data on daily citizen activities, urban planners have in that way, relevant indications for decision making on design and development. As well as, the Call detail Records (CDRs) provides valuable spatiotemporal data at the level of citywide or even nationwide. The CDRs could be analyzed to extract the life patterns and individuals mobility in an observed urban area and during ephemeral events. Whereas, their analysis gives conceptual views about human density and mobility pattern

Specialized hardware implementations of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can offer faster execution than general-purpose microprocessors by taking advantage of reusable modules, parallel processes and specialized computational components. Modern high-density Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer the required flexibility and fast design-to-implementation time with the possibility of exploiting highly parallel computations like those required by ANNs in hardware. The bounded width of the data in FPGA ANNs will add an additional error to the result of the output. This paper derives the equations of the additional error value that generate from bounded width of the data and proposed a method to reduce the effect of the error to give

Compaction curves are widely used in civil engineering especially for road constructions, embankments, etc. Obtaining the precise amount of Optimum Moisture Content (OMC) that gives the Maximum Dry Unit weight g_dmax. is very important, where the desired soil strength can be achieved in addition to economic aspects.

In this paper, three peak functions were used to obtain the OMC and g_dmax. through curve fitting for the values obtained from Standard Proctor Test. Another surface fitting was also used to model the Ohio’s compaction curves that represent the very large variation of compacted soil types.

The results showed very good correlation between the values obtained from some publ

The speech recognition system has been widely used by many researchers using different
methods to fulfill a fast and accurate system. Speech signal recognition is a typical
classification problem, which generally includes two main parts: feature extraction and
classification. In this paper, a new approach to achieve speech recognition task is proposed by
using transformation techniques for feature extraction methods; namely, slantlet transform
(SLT), discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) type Daubechies Db1 and Db4. Furthermore, a
modified artificial neural network (ANN) with dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm is
developed to train a speech recognition system to be used for classification and recognition
purposes. T

The continuous increase in population has led to the development of underground structures like tunnels to be of great importance due to several reasons. One of these reasons is that tunnels do not affect the living activities on the surface, nor they interfere with the existing traffic network. More importantly, they have a less environmental impact than conventional highways and railways. This paper focuses on using numerical analysis of circular tunnels in terms of their behavior during construction and the deformations that may occur due to overburden and seismic loads imposed on them. In this study, the input data are taken from an existing Cairo metro case study; results were found for the lateral and vertical displacements, the Peak