Leaf springs in vehicles are used to absorb, store and release energy. During this cycle stresses induced in the springs must not exceed design stress, in order to avoid settling or premature failure. Number of experiments are done in order to determine the stresses, load rate and deflection, which involves lot of time and cost. Today, the technologies in leaf springs are changing gradually; therefore new tools are required to keep aligned with worldwide technological requirements. The work presented in this paper provides a CAE solution to static analysis of 65Si7 leaf springs used in light commercial vehicles (LCV’s). A practical model of leaf spring used in LCV has been taken into consideration for this study. It has been experimentally tested for deflection, stress and load rate on a full scale leaf spring testing machine. A static structural CAE analysis of leaf spring has been done under similar loading condition. The CAD model of the leaf spring has been prepared in solid works and analyzed using ANSYS. Using CAE tools, ideal type of contact and meshing elements have been proposed to achieve results closer to the experimental results. The analytical method for static analysis of the leaf springs has also been described. CAE results have been compared with experimental and analytical results for validation.

Injuries due to inhalation of hot gas are commonly encountered when dealing with fire and combustible material, which is harmful and threatens human life. In the literature, various studies have been conducted to investigate heat and mass transfer characteristics in the human respiratory tract (HRT). This study focuses on assessing the injury taking place in the upper human respiratory tract and identifying acute tissue damage, based on level of exposure. A three-dimensional heat transfer simulation is performed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software to study the temperature profile through the upper HRT consisting of the nasal cavity, oral cavity, trachea, and the first two generations of bronchi. The model developed is for the simultaneous oronasal breathing during the inspiration phase with a high volumetric flow rate of 90 liters/minute and the inspired air temperature of 100 degrees Celsius. The geometric model depicting the upper HRT is generated based on the data available and literature cited. The results of the simulation give the temperature distribution along the center and the surface tissue of the respiratory tract. This temperature distribution will help to assess the level of damage induced in the upper respiratory tract and appropriate treatment for the damage. A comparison of nasal breathing, oral breathing, and oronasal breathing is performed. Temperature distribution can be utilized in the design of the respirator systems where inlet temperature is regulated favoring the human body conditions.

The long term operation and planning of power plant depend upon an effective availability analysis and assessment of various systems in the plant concerned. The plant is expected to remain operational in a continual manner to achieve the desired production targets. Hence, the availability analysis of the boiler air circulation system plays an important role in this direction. For this purpose, the concerned system mathematical model based on Markov Birth-Death process has been developed. The system consists of four subsystems. The transition diagram represents reduced capacity, full working and failed state of the system. The differential equations associated with the transition diagram based on probabilistic approach have been solved recursively in order to develop the system steady state availability. Availability matrices represented measures the performance of the system concerned. In addition, different combinations of failures and repair rates provide various availability levels of the system. Maintenance decisions are taken based upon these values for improving availability of the power plant as well as the power supply. The result shows that the failure of the primary air fan affects the system availability at most, while failure of air heater affect it at least for different failures and repair rate combination of subsystems under study.

This research study focuses the existence of “weak form efficiency” in the Karachi stock exchange of Pakistan. Daily stock returns are used to check the “weak form efficiency’ in KSE covering a time period of 15 years ranges from July, 1997 to April, 2012. Kolmogrov-Smirnov (K-S) test, runs test, Unit root test Augumented Dickey Fuller test, Phillips Perron test are run to check the hypothesis. It is revealed that the KSE is not distributed normally and patterns are there in the prices so, the technical analyst can get the benefit in short run through predicting the future prices. This means that there exists some opportunity for the traders and investors to predict the upcoming stock prices of the securities, which are trading in the KSE and can earn high return and outperform the market. However, in long run scenario (in monthly data) the results are vice versa and Karachi stock exchange is a weak form efficient market.

For today’s high competitive market, when immensity purchasing of inventory becomes convenient or obligatory, to discover an alternative market in order to maximize the revenue earned is a tradition. In this paper, we considered an inventory model for seasonal products with Weibull rate of deterioration having two potential markets, say, primary and alternate. To handle the inventory up to the next season will result an increase in total cost. So it is a favorable task to transfer the remaining stock to the alternate market even at a slightly differ in selling price. Solution procedure, numerical examples and sensitivity analysis for different variables are presented to illustrate the model.

Transmission Network Expansion Planning (TNEP) is a basic part of power network planning that determines where, when and how many new transmission lines should be added to the network. So, the TNEP is an optimization problem in which the expansion purposes are optimized. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), Tabu Search (TS) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are methods used for solving the TNEP problem. Today, by using the hybridization models of AI tools, we can solve the TNEP problem for large-scale systems, which shows the effectiveness of utilizing such models. In this paper, a new approach to the hybridization model of Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) and Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) was used to solve the TNEP problem. Finally, by considering the uncertain role of the load based on a scenario technique, this proposed model was tested on the Garver’s 6-bus network.

Formulation and evaluation of strategy play important role in the strategy management. Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats (SWOT) is a famous approach to formulate strategy planning, which relies on external and internal factors. Identifying these factors precisely is very critical for any organization and manager. This study aims at providing a quantitative basis to analytically determine the ranking of the factors in SWOT analysis via Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach. This paper applies SWOT and Richard Rumelt & apos; s criteria to evaluate strategies in Evidential Reasoning approach. The ER approach has been developed to support MADA under uncertainty. It is based on Dempster’s rule for evidence combination and uses belief functions for dealing with probabilistic uncertainty and ignorance. This research is the first study in the ranking the factors of SWOT and Richard Rumelt approach. An illustrative example is also presented to show the efficiency of our model.

Capital structure plays an important role on market growth investigation. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between capital structure as dependent variable and seven independent variables including tax rate, firms & apos; growth rate, fixed assets, firms & apos; size, operating risk, profitability and industry type. The proposed study of this paper uses the financial information of 107 selected companies from 18 different industries listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period of 2004-2011 covering 40% of total number of companies listed in this stock exchange. We use ordinary least square technique to study the relationships. The results of the survey indicate that the there is a positive relationship between tax rate and firm & apos; s growth rate, and capital structure. The result of the survey also indicates there is a negative relationship between firm & apos; s profitability and capital structure. However, there is no evidence to believe that there was any relationship between fixed assets and capital structure. We have also concluded that there was a negative relationship between firm & apos; s profitability and capital structure but the results of our survey did not indicate that there was any difference between the mean of profitability in various sectors.

This research investigates the relationship between auditor’s opinion and stock return in the companies listed at Tehran stock exchange market. In this study, all required data are collected from aware shareholders and provide a sampling of 130 questionnaires, the data collected over the period 2010-2011 using test methods such as computer software, data analysis and statistical methods to answer research questions. According to research result through questionnaires and tests, there is a significant relationship between stock returns and the auditor & apos; s opinion, in fact, for aware shareholders of the company the auditor’s opinion has a special message. This message is based on the results of study hypothesis in comparison with previous research with regard to changes in the questionnaire and provides assumptions that are more detailed. The first finding is that unqualified audit report has a positive impact on stock returns of companies with a medium to low degree. Adverse audit report has a negative impact on stock returns of companies with medium to high degree. Disclaimer of audit report has a negative impact on stock returns of companies with medium to high degree. Finally, qualifying paragraphs, which modified the items of income statement items have more impact in comparison with qualifying paragraphs which modified the Balance Sheet items.

To meet the need for product variety, many companies are shifting from a mass-production mode to mass customization, which demands quick response to the needs of individual customers with high quality and low costs. The multifunctional nature of mechanical components necessitates that a designer redesign them each time when a component’s function changes. The functional Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD & T) specification, also called functional tolerancing, must be updated for each component. Currently, this is done by humans, and thus can be very time-consuming and error-prone. Functional tolerancing is one of the main obstacles to practical mechanical product family modeling. In this paper, a graph-based functional tolerancing scheme in 3D CAD is proposed. In the scheme, a product is generated by applying production rules to the graph of the base product, following customers’ or manufacturing engineers’ requirements. Functional tolerancing of each component of a product in the family is formulated as a non-linear constrained optimization (or cost minimization) process. Certain critical aspects of the scheme have been implemented in SolidWorks®, by using its Application Programming Interface (API) and C++. LEDA® and MATLAB® have been used to solve the graph and optimization problems.