Value engineering is a methodology used to analyze the function of the goods and services and to obtain the required functions of the user at the lowest total cost without reducing the necessary quality of performance. Many a time, Value Engineering (VE) is confused with cost cutting exercises in construction industry. The essential difference between conventional cost cutting and VE is that it involves reducing the cost by improving the functionality through lesser consumption of energy in terms of manpower, materials and machines. In the initial stages VE was used by production engineers for reducing the cost of manufacture. However, it was found that the benefit of VE is much greater if multidisciplinary teams of engineers were involved which would also influence the design team that is normally the case in construction

Value Engineering in Construction

Nickel chromium molybdenum alloys are well known for its creep properties along with high corrosion resistance which finds a very large application in Oil and Petro chemical industries. However due to its prohibitive cost a cheaper alternative of cladding Ni alloys on carbon steel base material is widely used. The Ni alloy may be applied by different methods such as roll bonding, explosive cladding or by weld overlaying. As the weld overlay process is simple and requires a small set up, this is being widely used to improve the corrosion properties of various equipments used in Oil and Petro chemical industries. While the process is simple and easier to apply, enough care need to be applied in controlling the weld chemistry. The most critical element to control is the Fe content in the weld overlay. It is observed that the corrosion properties are not affected when the Fe content is restricted to below 5%. Effort is made in this study to apply the weld overlay using Gas metal arc welding process using soild Inconel 625 wire. Various properties such as chemical composition, cracking tendencies, hardness across the weld overlay area etc were also studied in this work.

Welding Parameters for Inconel 625 Overlay on Carbon Steel using GMAW

Limestone and clay which are the major ingredients of the cement production are non-renewable resources. Therefore, it is essential to identify a sustainable material to replace cement. The by-product from the steel plant is subsequently granulated to desired fineness and is termed as Ground Granulated Blast furnace Slag (GGBS). Superplasticizers (SP) are used to improve the workability of concrete at low water-cement ratios and increase the compressive strength by reducing it. But, this workability is sometimes lost rapidly as time progresses after contact between the cement and water. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms that influence the cement-super plasticizer interaction for selecting an appropriate type of admixture at an optimum dosage. In this present research the compatibility study, between six combinations of cement using different percentages of GGBS with two different SPs were investigated. The optimum dosage was found using marsh cone test. The cement mortar flow test was conducted to find out the setting time and compressive strength of the mortar. It is found that the increase in addition of GGBS decreases the dosage of Superplasticizers to achieve the desired workability. The target mean strength of the M40 concrete was achieved with replacement of 50% GGBS using PCE based SP.

Influence of GGBS on Rheology of Cement Paste and Concrete with SNF and PCE based Superplasticizers

A new design methodology to reduce power consumption and minimization of area in FSM based system is fore fronted into FPGA using Finite State Machines (FSMs) mapping in this proposed work. This FSM is mapped into the On Chip Embedded Memory (OCEM) through clock gating technique. FSM encoding is stored using OCEM as it reduces the Flip-Flop (FF) and combinational function usage. Clock gating technique will reduce the power consumption additionally through blocking the clock while OCEMP is in idle state. The proposed design is tested and analyzed using ALTERA cyclone II FPGA for Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU), Advanced Encryption Standard core (AES), SRAM controller and Synchronous FIFO. OCEM based implementation of One- Hot encoding is performed and compared with conventional Flip-Flop based One-hot encoding and analyzed. The FSM implemented using proposed method consumes less power and fewer areas when compared with FF based FSM implementation or using binary encoding technique. The OCEM based implementation can be clocked to maximum clock frequency. Experimental results and analyses shows that OCEM based FSM consumes 4 to 26 % less power than FF based techniques.

Design of Power Aware on Chip Embedded Memory based FSM Encoding in FPGA

Objectives: In transportation field, a huge amount of data collected by IoT systems, remote sensing and other data collection tools brings new challenges, the size of this data becomes extremely big and more complex for traditional techniques of data mining. To deal with this challenge, Apache Spark stand as a powerful large scale distributed computing platform that can be used successfully for machine learning against very large databases. This work employed large-scale machine learning techniques especially Decision Tree with Apache Spark framework for big data analysis to build a model that can predict the factors lead to road accidents based on several input variables related to traffic accidents. Based on this, the predicting model first preprocesses the big accident data and analyze it to create data for a learning system. Empirical results show that the proposed model could provide new information that can assist the decision makers to analyze and improve road safety

Application of Big Data Analysis with Decision Tree for Road Accident

Importance of subtelomeric chromosome rearrangements associated with idiopathic mental retardation and with methylation of gene expression in neoplastic cells has been shown. In order to observe incidence of deletions or translocations involving subtelomere region in leukemias and lymphomas, 41 patients were observed precisely by chromosome metaphase fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) using subtelomere probes and so on, specially focus on the end of long arm of chromosome 11 or short arm of chromosome 17. The abnormalities of subtelomere region on chromosome 11 were frequently observed in 7 of 17 patients (41.6%) with 11q22-q25 abnormalities, which were 3 of 9 patients with add(11)(q23-q25) and 3 of 7 patients with del(11)(q22-25), and 16 of 24 patients (66.0%) with 17p13 abnormalities, which were 2 of 6 with translocation between 17 and other chromosome, 6 of 10 with add(17)(p13) and all of 8 with del(17)(p13). Lymphoid disease had slightly higher abnormalities of subtelomere region than myeloid disease in patients with 11q22-25 or 17p13 abnormalities. Chemo- or radiotherapy treated patients had also subtelomeric chromosomal rearrangements. These results indicate that leukemia and lymphomas have many abnormalities at subtelomere region and possible association of chromosome instability, relating to pathogenesis of these diseases especially after therapy. Furthermore, FISH and chromosome analyses were performed on long-term cultured HL-60 leukemic cell line after irradiation using three different sources, and the results confirmed the higher induction of chromosome instability involving subtelomere region after α-rays irradiation.

Hideki Asaoku

Papers

Higher involvement of subtelomere regions for chromosome rearrangements in leukemia and lymphoma and in irradiated leukemic cell line