Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to presents a methodology to assist in the performance improvement of the process. The purpose is to assist operation processes to control and reduce cost of operations.

Methodology/approach–The paper is based on literature studies, research and experience which can be applied by an organisation in order to identify the potential benefits.

Findings–This paper provides a methodology used in this paper suggested that there will be a significant opportunity to improve the performance of the majority of the existing assets. Through benchmarking, gaps are identified and an outline of a procedure to quantify existing gaps was provided. All the tools provided by the methodology of benchmarking within the process focus on quantifying a financial gap; this sets out the priorities and justifies the case for continuous improvement. The improvement in the time of the process will lead to an increase in the value of the production, thus creating financial savings.

Originality/value–This is the first attempt framework, measures and industry world class targets, to benchmark best manufacturing practices in a company at the oil sector in North Africa. The paper provides some useful insights and can help companies to implement best practices and benchmarking to improve their practices.

Handover latency is the primary cause of packet loss resulting in performance degradation of standard Mobile IPv6. Mobile IPv6 with fast Handover enables a Mobile Node (MN) to quickly detect at the IP layer that it has moved to a new subnet by receiving link-related information from the link-layer; furthermore it gathers anticipative information about the new Access Point (AP) and the associated subnet prefix when the MN is still connected to the previous Corresponding Node (CN).

This paper proposes an enhancement to Fast Mobile IPv6 handover (FMIPv6), based on link layer information, we also present performance evaluations in terms of the packet loss and handover latency using evaluation models.

Activation energy for static recrystallization estimated in this work of 281kJ/mol is in excellent agreement with previously reported data (both experimental and mdeled) and indicates that difusion of Nb in austenite is most probably the rate controlling process

The influence of vanadium and nitrogen on microstructure and mechanical properties of medium-carbon

steels has been studied by means of metallography and mechanical testing. Vanadium addition to the low

nitrogen steel suppresses the formation of ferrite–pearlite following the low reheating temperatures and microstructure

consists of bainitic sheaves. Increasing nitrogen at the same vanadium level promotes the acicular

ferrite formation. For high reheating temperatures, dominantly acicular ferrite structure in both the low

nitrogen and the high nitrogen vanadium steels is obtained. The results suggest that vanadium in solid solution

promotes the formation of bainite. The effect of nitrogen is related to the precipitation of VN particles in

austenite with high potency for intragranular nucleation of acicular ferrite and to the precipitation of V(C, N)

particles in ferrite with high potency for precipitation strengthening. Addition of both vanadium and nitrogen

considerably increases the strength level, while CVN20 impact energy increases on changing the microstructure

from bainitic ferrite to the fine ferrite–pearlite and acicular ferrite.

The title complex was isolated as red solid material from the reaction of Co(SCN)2 with 4(Salicylaldimine) antipyrine in ethanol. The molecular structure has been determined by elemental analysis, FT IR, UV-Vis and X-ray diffraction. The crystallographic data are: monoclinic

P21/n, a = 9.8335(3) A, b = 18.8593(6) A, c = 11.2921(4) A, = 90', =  = 90', V = 2041.46(12) ų and Z 2, R =0.045. The dicobalt (Il) complex is centrosymmetric dimer in which the Co(ll) ions are six coordinate being bonded to three coordinating donor sites from the corresponding tridentate Schiff base ligand and the fourth one is relatively bonded by phenolic oxygen, the fifth and sixth donor sites comes from isothiocyanate and methanol.

The rapid growth of advanced robots has given researchers unprecedented opportunities to explore and discover new fields of research where robots can be used to assist humans in their daily life. There are many applications that use robots and automation in different aspects of life such as industry, medical, domestic machines and etc. In this paper, the work has been devoted for the use of robotics and robots in cleaning process. The window cleaning robot is one of the robots that have emerged in recent decay. This robot can be used in homes, offices and large buildings. The main target is to design a robot that can clean glass windows efficiently and rapidly even in dangerous and hazardous places. The robot will be controlled using the Programmable Logic Controller PLC. The motion will generated by three servo motors.

The influence of vanadium and nitrogen on microstructure and mechanical properties of

medium-carbon steels has been studied by means of metallography and mechanical testing.

Vanadium addition to the low nitrogen steel suppresses the formation of ferrite-pearlite following

the low reheating temperatures and microstructure consists of bainitic sheaves. Increasing nitrogen

at the same vanadium level promotes the acicular ferrite formation. For high reheating temperatures,

dominantly acicular ferrite structure in both the low nitrogen and the high nitrogen vanadium steels

is obtained. The results suggest that vanadium in solid solution promotes the formation of bainite,

whereas the effect of nitrogen is related to the precipitation of VN particles in austenite with high

potency for intragranular nucleation of acicular ferrite and to the precipitation of V(C,N) particles in

ferrite with high potency for precipitation strengthening. Addition of both vanadium and nitrogen

considerably increases the strength level, while CVN20 impact energy increases on changing the

microstructure from bainitic ferrite to the fine ferrite-pearlite and acicular ferrite.

The induction motor is the most common driver in industry and has been previously proposed as a means of inferring the condition of an entire equipment train, predominantly through the measurement and processing of power supply parameters. This has obvious advantages in terms of being non-intrusive or remote, less costly to apply and improved safety. This paper describes the use of the induction motor current to identify and quantify a number of common faults seeded on a two-stage reciprocating compressor. An analysis of the compressor working cycle leads to current signal the components that are sensitive to the common faults seeded to compressor system, and second- and third-order signal processing tools are used to analyse the current signals. It is shown that the developed diagnostic features: the bispectral peak value from the amplitude modulation bispectrum and the kurtosis from the current gives rise to reliable fault classification results. The low feature values can differentiate the belt looseness from other fault cases and valve leakage and inter-cooler leakage can be separated easily using two linear classifiers. This work provides a novel approach to the analysis stator current data for the diagnosis of motor drive faults

Differences in activation between spores from strains of Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis with and without the toxin-encoding plasmid pBtoxis are demonstrated. Following alkaline activation, the strain bearing pBtoxis shows a significantly greater germination rate. Expression of just three genes constituting a previously identified, putative ger operon from this plasmid is sufficient to produce the same phenotype and characterizes this operon as a genetic determinant of alkaline activation.

Adaptive control systems have been studied for many years. There are many types of adaptive control algorithms, one of which is the reference model technique. In this paper, the work has been devoted for the use of model reference adaptive control system (MRAC). The MRAC algorithm with parameters adaptation was developed and applied for control of the DC motor drive. The algorithm is based on the gradient technique with parameter adaptation. The controller can significantly improve system behavior and force the system to follow the reference model and minimize the error between the model and plant output.