A reverse anaerobic/anoxic/aerobic (A2O) process is recognized as a developed biological nutrient removal process for wastewater treatment. A few researchers recently integrated a microbial fuel cell (MFC) into an A2O process to generate electricity during wastewater treatment. However, no published studies show the outcome of combining the MFC with the reverse A2O process. The performance of a reverse A2O-MFC during the treatment of raw duck pond water was investigated in this study. For suitable electrode placement, nine patterns of anode and cathode location (CH01-CH09) were also investigated. As a result, 60-79%, 14-52%, 57-82%, and 50-82% of phosphates, nitrates, total ammonia nitrogen, and COD were removed, respectively. Lineweaver-Burk plots could be used to estimate the system's phosphate removal rates. The highest electrical energy was observed at CH05 (162.5 Wh) in the first period of the treatment operation and at CH02 (710.3 Wh) in the second period. The electrode placement patterns of CH05, where the anode and cathode were installed in an anaerobic tank and an oxic tank, and CH02, where the anode and cathode were installed in an anoxic tank and an anaerobic tank, were recommended for the reverse A2O-MFC with a 35-cm electrode distance.

This paper presents the influence of surface energy effects on the deflection of circular nanoplate with two-parameter elastic substrate. The governing equation for axisymmetric bending of the nanoplate, based on the Gurtin-Murdoch surface elasticity theory, resting on a Winkler-Pasternak elastic foundation is derived from a variational approach based on the concept of minimum total potential energy. The analytical general solution to the governing equation is then obtained in terms of the modified Bessel functions. Finally, closed-form solutions for deflections, bending moment and transverse shear in the nanoplate subjected to normally distributed loading are presented explicitly for the boundary conditions of simple, clamped, and free edges. A set of numerical solutions are selected to demonstrate the influence of surface material parameters and the substrate moduli on the deflection and bending moment profiles of a silicon nanoplate on Winkler-Pasternak foundation. It is found that the nanoplate clearly shows size-dependent behaviors, and becomes stiffer with the existence of surface stresses.

Food image classification is a challenging problem, the solution of which can be of great benefit to many real-world applications such as nutrition and allergy estimation. Most of the previous studies proposed to use variations of convolutional neural networks to tackle the problem. However, due to the limited number of annotated food image datasets, there is still some room for improvement, especially in terms of accuracy and speed. Generally speaking, neural networks trained to solve image classification problems on a small dataset benefit from utilizing the weights of the networks that have been pre-trained on a large image classification dataset such as ImageNet. In this paper, we compare the trade-offs between training networks from scratch, deploying pre-trained networks as feature extractors, and fine-tuning the networks for Thai food image classification. By utilizing Transfer Learning with EfficientNetV1, we were able to achieve higher accuracy for Thai Food Image Classification on the largest publicly available Thai food image dataset, THFOOD-50. In particular, our proposed method improves upon the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art method from 84.06% to 91.49% while maintaining the speed for the prediction at 103 ms and 1205 ms for GPU and CPU, respectively.

Direct computations of acoustic noise of flow over an inclined plate are performed at two Mach numbers by solving the compressible Navier-Stokes equations without invoking any form of modelling.The flat plate has a sharp leading edge and sharp trailing edge and is inclined at incidence of 20 • .The simulations are performed at a chord-based Reynolds number of 1000, and the freestream Mach numbers of 0.4 and 0.6.The numerical results reveal the effect of the Mach number on both of the hydrodynamic near-field and the acoustic far-field.Increasing the Mach number results in an increase in the shedding frequency and a decrease in the acoustic wavelength.The directivity plots show that additional lobes are present on the plate suction side at higher Mach number.

In this paper, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art research studies to present the potential of small cells to address the high capacity demands of in-building users in mobile networks.In doing so, we discuss relevant theoretical backgrounds and carry out performance evaluations of key enabling technologies along with three major directions toward improving the network capacity, including spectrum accessibility, Spectral Efficiency (SE) improvement, and network densification.For the spectrum accessibility, numerous types of Small Cell Base Station (SBS) architectures of a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) are evaluated.For the SE improvement, cognitive radio techniques are evaluated for the Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) among multiple MNOs in a country.For the network densification, the spectrum reuse is evaluated at both intra-and inter-building levels for a given Co-Channel Interference (CCI) constraint.It is shown that multi-band multitransceiver enabled small cells operating in the high-frequency millimeter-wave licensed or unlicensed spectrum to realize DSS techniques by exploiting SBS architectures for the spectrum accessibility, a hybrid interweave-underlay spectrum access in Cognitive Radio Networks for the spectral efficiency improvement, and both vertical and horizontal spectrum reuse in small cells deployed densely within buildings for the network densification can address high capacity demand in indoor mobile networks.

The paper presents an investigation of riverbank stability at the estuary area of Muaro Kualo Segment, Muara Bangkahulu River in Bengkulu, Indonesia. This area had experienced slope failures along the riverbank during the Bengkulu flood in 2019. This study is initiated by conducting a geotechnical survey to observe site condition. During the survey, slope geometry measurement and soil sampling are performed. The laboratory tests are performed to collect physical and engineering soils properties. The rainfall intensity during period of 2011-2020 is also collected to observe normal and critical river water level. The finite element method is employed to analyse the slope stability analysis under the normal and critical river water level conditions. The results showed that the slope failure is generally initiated at the slope toe. Because of the river water level, factor of safety of slope along the estuary is less than the minimum criteria for the stable slope. It indicates that slope failure is very possible to occur. Implementation of sheet pile is conducted to reduce the slope failure potential. The results showed that the use of sheet pile is relevant to improve slope stability in the study area.

Turning locally available industrial by-products such as fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBFS) into cement-free materials has been recently received much attention from researchers. Following this trend, the present study produces alkaliactivated mortars (AAFS) using a mixture of FA and GGBFS as a precursor activated by an alkaline solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate. Five AAFS mixtures were prepared for the evaluation of engineering properties, drying shrinkage, and microstructural observation using various FA/GGBFS ratios of 30/70, 40/60, 50/50, 60/40, and 70/30. The experimental results show that the proportions of FA and GGBFS significantly affected the performance of the AAFS in both fresh and hardened stages. Higher GGBFS content resulted in a reduction in flowability and higher fresh unit weight. The GGBFS-rich AAFS developed its mechanical strength faster than the FA-rich AAFS and the strength gain of the GGBFS-rich AAFS was significantly higher than that of the cement-based mortar at only 1-day old, confirming the applicability of AAFS as a structural material and its potential to replace cement in the no-cement mortar production. The AAFS sample incorporating 60% of GGBFS and 40% of FA exhibited the highest strength, lowest water absorption, and less drying shrinkage with a relatively dense microstructure among the AAFS samples.

In safety-related nuclear structures, steel-plate composite (SC) walls are often used in combination with reinforced concrete (RC) walls or foundations. Appropriate connections are required to transfer force demands from the SC walls to the RC components without the connection failure that is often associated with brittle failure mode. This paper presents a design procedure developed for mechanical connections between SC and RC walls. This procedure implements the full-strength connection design approach in ANSI/AISC N690-18, Specification for Safety-Related Steel Structures for Nuclear Facilities, which requires connections to be stronger than the weaker of the connected walls. This paper also presents the results from experimental and analytical investigations conducted to verify the structural performance of the full-strength SC-to-RC connection. The focus of this paper (Part 1) is on the evaluation of the performance, strength, and ductility of SC wall–to–RC wall mechanical connections subjected to out-of-plane flexure. The results include global force-displacement responses, observations on concrete crack propagation, as well as applied force-strain responses of the connection region. The experimentally observed and analytically predicted results verify the conservatism of the proposed design procedure.