Measures Designed to Assist SMEs

The central treasury is implementing six measures this year to help small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) meet the challenges they face, according to the Ministry of Finance.

Geotechnical investigations and remediation design for failure of tunnel portal section： a case study in northern Turkey

Mass movements are very common problems in the eastern Black Sea region of Turkey due to its climate conditions, geological, and geomorphological characteristics. High slope angle, weathering, dense rainfalls, and anthropogenic impacts are generally reported as the most important triggering factors in the region. Following the portal slope excavations in the entrance section of Cankurtaran tunnel, located in the region, where the highly weathered andesitic tuff crops out, a circular toe failure occurred. The main target of the present study is to investigate the causes and occurrence mechanism of this failure and to determine the feasible remedial measures against it using finite element method(FEM) in four stages. These stages are slope stability analyses for pre-and postexcavation cases, and remediation design assessments for slope and tunnel. The results of the FEM-SSR analyses indicated that the insufficient initial support design and weathering of the andesitic tuffs are the main factors that caused the portal failure. After installing a rock retaining wall with jet grout columns and reinforced slope benching applications, the factor of safety increased from 0.83 to 2.80. In addition toslope stability evaluation, the Rock Mass Rating(RMR), Rock Mass Quality(Q) and New Austrian Tunneling Method(NATM) systems were also utilized as empirical methods to characterize the tunnel ground and to determine the tunnel support design. The performance of the suggested empirical support design, induced stress distributions and deformations were analyzed by means of numerical modelling. Finally, it was concluded that the recommended stabilization technique was essential for the dynamic long-term stability and prevents the effects of failure. Additionally, the FEM method gives useful and reasonably reliable results in evaluating the stability of cut slopes and tunnels excavated both in continuous and discontinuous rock masses.

On the construction of balanced repeated measurements designs with good circular properties

Several fields,such as biological,medical,public health,agricultural sciences,etc.,require circular balanced repeated measurement designs with fewer unequal number of repeated measure-ments than the number of treatments.Also,the availability and high cost of experimental subjects in these fields prefer the design in fewer experimental units.However,balancing the carryover effects of the treatments in minimal experimental subjects is one of the problems in this case.In this paper,several new series of minimal circular nearly strongly balanced RMDs in periods of two and three different sizes are constructed.The proposed construction of designs has high efficiency and,therefore,can save the cost of experimentations due to a fewer exper-imental subjects.Most of the designs are very useful because of the unavailability of strongly balanced RMDs for these combinations of parameters.A list of sets of shifts for the construction of minimal circular nearly SBRMDs has also been mentioned in the Appendix.

A study on TCP performance of crowdsourced live streaming

The prevalence of smart phone and improvement of wireless net promote the usage of crowdsourced live streaming,where individual users act as live streaming sources to broadcast themselves online. Characterizing the performance and identifying its bottleneck in such systems can shed light on the system design and performance optimization. TCP performance of a commercial crowdsourced live streaming system is examined by analyzing packet-level traces collected at streaming servers. TCP stalls that heavily hurt the Qo E of user have been identified. In particular,the TCP stalls account for as much as 31. 6% of the flow completion time for upload flows and result in abandonment of upload on the corresponding channels. Stalls caused by timeout retransmissions are further dissected and timeout retransmission characteristics are revealed to be dependent on the video encoding methods. These findings provide new insights in crowdsourced live streaming systems and can guide designers to improve the TCP efficiency.

Structural Characterization of Thin Epitaxial GaN Films on Polymer Polyimides Substrates by Ion Beam Assisted Deposition

The Epitaxial GaN thin films have been fabricated by Ion Beam Assisted Deposition (IBAD) process using nitrogen ions with hyperthermal energies on the polyimides polymer substrates. By applying with the Reflection of High-Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Quantum Design Physical Properties Measurement System, the behaviour of hexagonal GaN thin films is investigated. The result showed that the high quality of the deposited GaN layers kept appearing for many parameters depending on the temperature greatly. The behaviour of high quality of epitaxial GaN coating on the polyimide polymer substrates is a promising material for optoelectronic devices and semiconductor devices application.

Dynamic design of green stormwater infrastructure

This paper compares ongoing research results on hydrologic performance to common design and crediting criteria, and recommends a change in direction from a static to a dynamic perspective to fully credit the performance of green infrastructure. Examples used in this article are primarily stormwater control measures built for research on the campus of Villanova University [1,2]. Evidence is presented demonstrating that the common practice of crediting water volume based on soil and surface storage underestimates the performance potential, and suggests that the profession move to a more dynamic approach that incorporates exfiltration and evapotranspiration. The framework for a dynamic approach is discussed, with a view to broaden our design focus by including climate, configuration and the soil surroundings. The substance of this work was presented as a keynote speech at the 2016 international Low Impact Development Conference in Beijing China [3].

Mixing of particles and powders:Where next?

Industrial mixers for powders and granular materials operate with no effective control of mixture quality and lack scientific design. The last twenty years have seen growth in understanding of mixing and mixers. However, research falls far short of what is needed for on-line characterisation of mixture quality. Secondly, although theoretical descriptions of a few mixer types have been reported, these fall far short of what is needed for equipment design. Two thrusts could revolutionise this situation. One is a scientific characterisation of mixer structure applicable to industrial scale as well as laboratory scale equipment; this is now within our grasp using digital imaging. The other is the development of ideas to overcome the restricted number of particles that can be used in the Distinct Element Method （DEM） for mixers. The goal should be to take the designer through a sequence of steps to the most appropriate mixer size, configuration and operating conditions for a given process duty.