Volume 13, Issue 3 (July & August 2022 (Articles in English & French) 2022)
Abstract
The present study is a methodological synthesis aiming to evaluate the adherence of Iranian L2 papers to the study quality standards. Ten Iranian journals were selected based on the latest ranking of Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology (MSRT), and all experimental papers (N = 367) published from their beginnings were explored for study quality with regards to sampling, design, statistical tests, reporting practices and data sharing, and visual presentation. In the evaluation of the papers, the protocols proposed by Gass and Plonsky (2011) and Pagout and Plonsky (2017) were moderated and some recent issues proposed by APA’s (2018) Journal Article Reporting Standards and some scholars (e.g., Hu & Plonsky, 2019; Khany & Tazik, 2019; Larson-Hall, 2017) were added. The results showed that while there were issues, like acceptable sample size, use of pre-testing, reporting descriptive and inferential statistics, and ensuring the reliability of instruments, that were acceptably adhered to quality standards, problematic areas existed in all five facets of quality, and the majority of them stayed constant or changed slightly over time. The shortcomings caused by such lack of adherence are discussed to identify the challenges in the way of improving the papers’ quality. Although the results are obtained from a specific context, the implications may be generalizable to other contexts where English is taught and researched as a foreign language.
Volume 24, Issue 12 (December 2024)
Abstract
In thermal barrier coatings (TBC), surface cracks, debonding, and thickness degradation may occur during the manufacturing process or life cycle, leading to poor performance and ultimately a dangerous system failure. The main goal of non-destructive testing of thermal barrier coatings is to detect these defects and determine the health of the coating. Various non-destructive inspection methods have been proposed to evaluate thermal barrier coatings, and due to the numerous advantages of thermography, including high speed, low cost, safety, no need for direct contact, automation capability, and inspection of a large area of the part, this method has received special attention from researchers. This study will present a method for manufacturing samples with different diameters of artificial separation defects. The following is the equipment's arrangement and the sample's thermography process. It was concluded that blackening the surface of the sample by increasing the amount of thermal energy absorption increased the ability to identify separation defects and increased the signal-to-noise ratio by 257%. Finally, by implementing different filters on the recorded raw thermal images, it has been shown that in both cases the best filter in terms of SNR is the median filter and then the Gaussian filter. The background removal filter also had no noticeable effect on increasing the signal-to-noise ratio and acted as a complement to the median and Gaussian filters by reducing the fixed error
