• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.31-40
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• 2008

The dynamic moduli of asphalt concrete are very important for the analysis and the design of asphalt pavement systems. The dynamic modulus master curve is usually represented by a sigmoidal function. The Ramberg-Osgood model was widely used for fitting of normalized modulus reduction curves with strain of soils in soil dynamic fields. The master curves were obtained by both sigmoidal functions and modified Ramberg-Osgood model for the same dynamic modulus data set, the fitting abilities of both methods were excellent. The coefficients in sigmoidal function are coupled. Therefore, it is not possible to separate the characteristics of the master curve with absolute value and shape. However, the each fitting coefficient in the Ramberg-Osgood model has a unique effect on the master curve, and the coefficients are not coupled with each other.

• Advances in materials Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.43-65
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• 2023

Free vibration analysis of power law and sigmoidal sandwich plates made up of functionally graded materials (FGMs) has been carried out using finite element based higher-order zigzag theory. The present model satisfies all-important conditions such as transverse shear stress-free conditions at the plate's top and bottom surface along with continuity condition for transverse stresses at the interface. A Nine-noded C0 finite element having eleven degrees of freedom per node is used during the study. The present model is free from the requirement of any penalty function or post-processing technique and hence is computationally efficient. The present model's effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing the present results with available results in the literature. Several new results have been proposed in the present work, which will serve as a benchmark for future works. It has been observed that the material variation law, power-law exponent, skew angle, and boundary condition of the plate widely determines the free vibration behavior of sandwich functionally graded (FG) plate.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.547-570
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• 2023

In the present work, a comparative study has been carried out between power, exponential, and sigmoidal sandwich FGM plates for free vibration conditions under hygro-thermal conditions. Rules of mixture is used to determine effective material properties across the thickness for power-law and sigmoid sandwich FGM plates. Exponential law is used to plot effective material properties for exponentially graded sandwich FGM plates. Temperature and moisture dependent material properties were used during the analysis. Free vibration analysis is carried out using recently proposed finite element based HOZT. Present formulation satisfies interlayer transverse stress continuity conditions at interfaces and transverse shear stress-free conditions at the plate's top and bottom surfaces. The present model is free from any penalty or post-processing requirements. Several new results are reported in the present work, especially for unsymmetric sandwich FGM plates and exponential and sigmoidal sandwich FGM plates.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.85-96
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• 2018

This study investigates the response of functionally graded (FG) gas pipe under unsteady internal pressure and temperature. The pipe is proposed to be manufactured from FGMs rather than custom carbon steel, to reduce the erosion, corrosion, pressure surge and temperature variation effects caused by conveying of gases. The distribution of material graduations are obeying power and sigmoidal functions varying with the pipe thickness. The sigmoidal distribution is proposed for the 1st time in analysis of FG pipe structure. A Two-dimensional (2D) plane strain problem is proposed to model the pipe cross-section. The Fourier law is applied to describe the heat flux and temperature variation through the pipe thickness. The time variation of internal pressure is described by using exponential-harmonic function. The proposed problem is solved numerically by a two-dimensional (2D) plane strain finite element ABAQUS software. Nine-node isoparametric element is selected. The proposed model is verified with published results. The effects of material graduation, material function, temperature and internal pressures on the response of FG gas pipe are investigated. The coupled temperature and displacement FEM solution is used to find a solution for the stress displacement and temperature fields simultaneously because the thermal and mechanical solutions affected greatly by each other. The obtained results present the applicability of alternative FGM materials rather than classical A106Gr.B steel. According to proposed model and numerical results, the FGM pipe is more effective in natural gas application, especially in eliminating the corrosion, erosion and reduction of stresses.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.755-757
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• 2015

Mouse models of chronic toxoplasmosis and atopic dermatitis (AD) were combined to clarify the effect of opportunistic Toxoplasma gondii infection on the development of AD. AD was induced as a chronic contact hypersensitivity (CHS) with repeated challenge of 2,4,6-trinitro-1-chlorobenzene (TNCB) on the dorsal skin of mice. TNCB induced skin thickness increases in both normal and toxoplasmic mice. The changing patterns were different from the sigmoidal which saturated at 20 days in normal mice to the convex saturated at 12 days in toxoplasmic mice with the crossing at 18 days. Compared to normal mice, toxoplasmic mice presented CHS more severely in earlier times and then moderately in later times. These data suggest that host immune modification by T. gondii infection enhances CHS in early times of atopic stimulation but soothes the reaction of CHS in later times in mouse model.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.285-291
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• 1998

Adsorption isotherms of water vapour for infant formula milk powders manufactured by P. M. and N company in Korea were measured at temperatures between 20, 30 and 40$^{\circ}C$ using COST-90 modified method. Results showed that the isotherms were sigmoidal in shape. The adsorption isotherms of milk powder were depending on the temperature and products. The BET-model were applied and analyzed to compare the experimental value. It was found that the BET-model is fitted with measuring data. Sample P showed the lowest monolayer value and sample N showed the highest. Isosteric heat obtained upon application of BET-model was calculated in this field of temperature using the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. It is suggested that the usage of the BET-model to estimate the heat of water sorption in infant formula milk powder should be in agreement with the results from COST-90 project.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.100 no.1
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• pp.62-69
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• 2011

Six commonly used non-linear growth functions were fitted to individual tree height-dbh data of eight major tree species measured by the $5^{th}$ National Forest Inventory in Chungcheong province. A total of 2,681 trees were collected from permanent sample plots across Chungcheong province. The available data for each species were randomly splitted into two sets: the majority (90%) was used to estimate model parameters and the remaining data (10%) were reserved to validate the models. The performance of the models was compared and evaluated by $R^2$, RMSE, mean difference (MD), absolute mean difference (AMD) and mean difference(MD) for diameter classes. The combined data (100%) were used for final model fitting. The results showed that these six sigmoidal models were able to capture the height-diameter relationships and fit the data equally well, but produced different asymptote estimates. Sigmoidal growth models such as Chapman-Richards, Weibull functions provided the most satisfactory height predictions. The effect of model performance on stem volume estimation was also investigated. Tree volumes of different species were computed by the Forest Resources Evaluation and Prediction Program using observed range of diameter and the predicted tree total height from the six models. For trees with diameter less than 30 cm, the six height-dbh models produced very similar results for all species, while more differentiation among the models was observed for large-sized trees.

• Horticultural Science & Technology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.768-776
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• 2010

This study was conducted to predict number and fresh weight of leaves, and total leaf area of a single-stemmed rose 'Vital' based on the accumulated thermal units, and to develop a model of shoot development for the prediction of the time when the flowering shoot reaches a phenological stage in a plant factory system. The base temperature ($T_b$), optimum temperature ($T_{opt}$), and maximum temperature ($T_{max}$) were estimated by regressing the rate of shoot development against the temperature gradient. The rate of shoot development ($R$, $d^{-1}$) for the phase from cutting to bud break (CT-BB) was best described by a linear model $R_b$ ($d^{-1}$) = -0.0089 + $0.0016{\cdot}temp$. The rate of shoot development for the phase from bud break to harvest (BB-HV) was fitted to the parabolic model $R_h$ ($d^{-1}$) = $-0.0001{\cdot}temp^2$ + $0.0054{\cdot}temp$ - 0.0484. The $T_b$, $T_{opt}$, and $T_{max}$ values were 5.56, 27.0, and $42.7^{\circ}C$, respectively. The $T_b$ value was used in the thermal unit computations for the shoot development. Number of leaves, leaf area (LA), and leaf fresh weight showed sigmoidal curves regardless of the cut time. The shoot development and leaf area model was described as a sigmoidal function using thermal units. Leaf area was described as LA = 578.7 $[1+(thermal units/956.1)^{-8.54}]^{-1}$. Estimated and observed shoot length and leaf fresh weight showed a reasonably good fit with 1.060 ($R^2=0.976^{***}$) and 1.043 ($R^2=0.955^{***}$), respectively. The average thermal units required from cutting to transplant and from transplant to harvest stages were $426{\pm}42^{\circ}C{\cdot}d$ and $783{\pm}24^{\circ}C{\cdot}d$, respectively.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1991 no.05
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• pp.82-85
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• 1991

Cell kinetics and the chemical mass action principle formulate the basis of immune system dynamics which may be synthesized mathematically as cascades of bilinear systems which are connected by nonlinear nondynamical terms. In this manner, a model for cell-mediated immune response (CMI) to tumor antigens and debris is developed. We also consider parametric control variables relevant to the latest experimental data, i.e., sigmoidal dose-response relationship and Michaelis-Menten dynamics. The preliminary results show that the parametric control variable is important in the destruction of tumors. As well as that, the exacerbation theory is a good method for tumor treatment. Finally, tumor control as an application of immunotherapy is analyzed from the basis established above.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.85-96
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• 2008

Automatic speech recognition has severe performance degradation under noisy environments. To cope with the noise problem, many methods have been proposed. Most of them focused on noise-robust features or model adaptation. However, researchers have overlooked utterance verification (UV) under noisy environments. In this paper we discuss UV problems based on the normalized confidence measure. First, we show that UV performance is also degraded in noisy environments with the experiments of an isolated word recognition. Then we observe how the degradation of UV performances is suffered. Based on the UV experiments we propose a modeling method of the statistics of phone confidences using sigmoid functions. For obtaining the parameters of the sigmoidal models, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is adopted. The proposed method improves 20% rejection performance. Our experimental results show that the PSO-NCM can apply noise speech recognition successfully.