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Globe valves have good throttling ability, which permits its use in regulating flows. This paper aims to understand in detail the globe valve with different cage configurations and its impact on the flow characteristics that was carried out.

The computational study was carried out using FLUENT, a finite volume-based numerical code. Grid sensitivity tests were done and the results were validated experimentally. The effect of cage configuration on flow characteristics and valve coefficient was studied and optimised.

Valve coefficient was found to be dependent on cage configuration and reaches its maximum for the valve with triangular shaped aperture. Methodology to improve flow performance of a globe valve with highest valve coefficient is established.

Studies related with caged-type globe valves having different configurations are useful for improving their flow performance. In the present investigation, globe valves with different cage configurations and throttle positions are modeled to find out the valve coefficient, pressure and velocity contours inside and outside the cage and is validated with experimental results.

The purpose of this paper is to present the review of natural fibre composites as well as a specific type of fibre, i.e., sugar palm fibre and its composites.

The approach of this review paper is to present previous work on natural fibres and their composites. Then a review of several important aspects such as history, origin, botanic description, distribution, application and characterisation of sugar palm tree, and its fibre is presented. Finally a review of properties and characterisation of sugar palm composites is presented.

Findings of this review include the potential application of natural fibres and their composites for engineering application, the use of sugar palm and its fibres, as well as the suitability of sugar palm composites in engineering application after conducting review of their performance and characterisation.

The value of this review is to highlight the potential of natural fibres, natural fibre composites, sugar palm, sugar palm fibres and sugar palm composites as materials for engineering applications.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the development of environment friendly, low cost natural fibre composites by robust engineering approach. More specifically, the prime objective of the study is to optimise the composition of natural fibre reinforced polymer nanocomposites using a robust statistical approach.

In this research, the material is prepared using multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT), Cantala fibres and Epoxy Resin in accordance with the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) standards. Further, the composition is prepared and optimised using the mixture-design approach for the flexural strength of the material.

The results of the study indicate that MWCNT plays a vital role in increasing the flexural strength of the composite. Moreover, it is observed that interactions between second order and third order parameters in the composition are statistically significant. This leads to proposing a special cubic model for the novel composite material with residual analysis. Moreover, the methodology assists in optimising the mixture component values to maximise the flexural strength of the novel composite material.

This article attempts to include both MWCNT and Cantala fibres to develop a novel composite material. In addition, it employs the mixture-design technique to optimise the composition and predict the model of the study in a step-by-step manner, which will act as a guideline for academicians and practitioners to optimise the material composition with specific reference to natural fibre reinforced nanocomposites.

This paper aims to propose an approach by human and material resources combination to reduce hospitals crowding. Hospitals crowding is becoming a serious problem. Many research works present several methods and approaches to deal with this problem. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge – after a deep reading of literature – in all the proposed approaches, human and material resources are studied separately while they must be combined (to a given number of material resources an optimal number of human resources must be assigned and vice versa) to reflect reality and provide better results.

Hospital inpatient unit is chosen as framework. This unit crowding reduction is carried out by its capacity increasing. Indeed, inpatient unit modeling is performed to find the adequate combinations of human and material resources numbers insuring this unit stability and providing optimal service rates. At first, inpatient unit is modeled using queuing networks and considering only two resources (beds and nurses). Then, the obtained service rate formula is improved by including other resources and parameters using Baskett, Chandy, Muntz and Palecios (BCMP) queuing networks. This work is applied to “Princess Lalla Meryem” hospital inpatient unit.

Results are patients’ average number reduction by an average (in each block) of three patients, patients’ average waiting time reduction by an average of 9.98 h and non-admitted patients (to inpatient wards) access percentage of 39.26 per cent on average.

Previous works focus their studies on either human resources or material resources. Only a few works study both resources types, but separately. The context of those studies does not meet the real hospital context (where human resources are combined with material resources). Therefore, the provided results are not very reliable. In this paper, an approach by human and material resources combination is proposed to increase inpatient unit care capacity. Indeed, this approach consists of developing inpatient unit service rate formula in terms of human and material resources numbers.

This study examines the relationship between absorptive capacity, team culture, competitive intelligence awareness and entrepreneurial behavior with strategic flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage and further investigates the moderating influence of innovativeness on the relationship between strategic flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage in the hotel industry.

The current study applied a quantitative research method to collect data from five-star and luxury hotel management staff in Malaysia, using questionnaire surveys. A total of 550 questionnaires were distributed, and the researcher received 457 valid questionnaires. The hypotheses were tested using the SEM (structural equation modeling) analytical technique.

The salient findings of this research are (1) absorptive capacity, team culture and competitive intelligence awareness have a significant impact on strategic flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage, (2) entrepreneurial behavior has an insignificant effect on strategic flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage, (3) strategic flexibility has a significant impact on sustainable competitive advantage, (4) innovativeness actively moderates on the relationship between strategic flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage.

The study described here introduces a sustainable competitive advantage as a new and dynamic approach to explore how its outcomes or performance can be enhanced in the hotel industry. The outcomes of sustainable competitive advantage can help the long-term survival of hotels.

The present study suggests and explains the role of sustainable competitive advantage in the hotel industry and offers new insights into the competitive hotel industry's gaps and weaknesses.

The study aims to evaluate the financial distress position of selected sample banks in India. The top 10 banks with the highest levels of gross non-performing assets (NPA) under both public and private sector ownerships have been chosen for the study. Application of the Altman Z-score model has been used to compare both ownership banks’ financial distress for five years from 2017 to 2021. Based on the study’s findings, it was found that private sector banks demonstrated better financial stability than their public sector counterparts. Specifically, the average Z-score of the selected sample banks was higher than the safe zone threshold of 2.9 during the study period.

In today’s digital world, real-time health monitoring is becoming a most important challenge in the field of medical research. Body signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyogram and electroencephalogram (EEG) are produced in human body. This continuous monitoring generates huge count of data and thus an efficient method is required to shrink the size of the obtained large data. Compressed sensing (CS) is one of the techniques used to compress the data size. This technique is most used in certain applications, where the size of data is huge or the data acquisition process is too expensive to gather data from vast count of samples at Nyquist rate. This paper aims to propose Lion Mutated Crow search Algorithm (LM-CSA), to improve the performance of the LMCSA model.

A new CS algorithm is exploited in this paper, where the compression process undergoes three stages: designing of stable measurement matrix, signal compression and signal reconstruction. Here, the compression process falls under certain working principle, and is as follows: signal transformation, computation of Θ and normalization. As the main contribution, the theta value evaluation is proceeded by a new “Enhanced bi-orthogonal wavelet filter.” The enhancement is given under the scaling coefficients, where they are optimally tuned for processing the compression. However, the way of tuning seems to be the great crisis, and hence this work seeks the strategy of meta-heuristic algorithms. Moreover, a new hybrid algorithm is introduced that solves the above mentioned optimization inconsistency. The proposed algorithm is named as “Lion Mutated Crow search Algorithm (LM-CSA),” which is the hybridization of crow search algorithm (CSA) and lion algorithm (LA) to enhance the performance of the LM-CSA model.

Finally, the proposed LM-CSA model is compared over the traditional models in terms of certain error measures such as mean error percentage (MEP), symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE), mean absolute scaled error, mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error, L1-norm and L2-normand infinity-norm. For ECG analysis, under bior 3.1, LM-CSA is 56.6, 62.5 and 81.5% better than bi-orthogonal wavelet in terms of MEP, SMAPE and MAE, respectively. Under bior 3.7 for ECG analysis, LM-CSA is 0.15% better than genetic algorithm (GA), 0.10% superior to particle search optimization (PSO), 0.22% superior to firefly (FF), 0.22% superior to CSA and 0.14% superior to LA, respectively, in terms of L1-norm. Further, for EEG analysis, LM-CSA is 86.9 and 91.2% better than the traditional bi-orthogonal wavelet under bior 3.1. Under bior 3.3, LM-CSA is 91.7 and 73.12% better than the bi-orthogonal wavelet in terms of MAE and MEP, respectively. Under bior 3.5 for EEG, L1-norm of LM-CSA is 0.64% superior to GA, 0.43% superior to PSO, 0.62% superior to FF, 0.84% superior to CSA and 0.60% better than LA, respectively.

This paper presents a novel CS framework using LM-CSA algorithm for EEG and ECG signal compression. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work to use LM-CSA with enhanced bi-orthogonal wavelet filter for enhancing the CS capability as well reducing the errors.

This study examines how different stacking sequences of bamboo and flax fibers, treated with 5% aqueous sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and filled with 6wt% titanium oxide (TiO₂), affect the physical, mechanical and dry sliding wear resistance properties of a hybrid composite.

Composites with different fiber stacking arrangements were developed and tested per American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards to evaluate physical, mechanical and wear resistance properties, focusing on the impact of flax fiber mats at intermediate and outer layers.

The hybrid composite significantly outperformed composites reinforced solely with bamboo fibers, showing a 65.95% increase in tensile strength, a 53.29% boost in flexural strength and a 91.01% improvement in impact strength. The configuration with multiple layers of flax fiber mat at intermediate and outer levels also demonstrated superior wear resistance.

This study highlights the critical role of stacking order in optimizing the mechanical properties and wear resistance of hybrid composites. The findings provide valuable insights for the design and application of advanced composite materials, particularly in industries requiring high performance and durability.

Specific responses of thermoplastic components are required when they are subjected to impact conditions to minimize the damage in human body. Hardness property gives material, high resistance to various kinds of shape change when force is applied. In this study, mechanical properties such as impact strength and hardness of banana pseudo‐stem (BPS) unplastisized polyvinyl chloride (UPVC) composites were determined. It was found that fibre loading of BPS filler could enhance the properties of the impact strength and hardness of BPS/UPVC composites. The results on the addition of acrylic modifier to the composites have been discussed.

In the recent years, the industries show interest in natural and synthetic fibre-reinforced hybrid composites due to weight reduction and environmental reasons. The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the properties of the hybrid composites fabricated by using carbon, untreated and alkaline-treated hemp fibres.

The composites were tested for strengths under tensile, flexural, impact and shear loadings, and the water absorption characteristics were also observed. The finite element analysis (FEA) was carried out to analyse the elastic behaviour of the composites and predict the strength by using ANSYS 15.0.

From the experimental results, it is observed that the hybrid composites can withstand the maximum tensile strength of 61.4 MPa, flexural strength of 122.4 MPa, impact strength of 4.2 J/mm² and shear strength of 25.5 MPa. From the FEA results, it is found that the maximum stress during tensile, flexural and impact loading is 47.5, 2.1 and 1.03 MPa, respectively.

The results of the untreated and alkaline-treated hemp-carbon fibre composites were compared and found that the alkaline-treated composites perform better in terms of mechanical properties. Then, the ANSYS-predicted values were compared with the experimental results, and it was found that there is a high correlation occurs between the untreated and alkali-treated hemp-carbon fibre composites. The internal structure of the broken surfaces of the composite samples was analysed using a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis.