906 resultados para pass-ups
Resumo:
Principal Topic Counties in Northern Europe, such as Sweden, Finland and Denmark, have comparatively low per capita rates of entrepreneurship as measured by independent new venture start-up rates – as for example measured by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) rate. However, the latest 2011 GEM data reveals that these same countries have comparatively very high Employee Entrepreneurship Activity (EEA) rates – that is a high rate per capita of employees involved in new product development or new enterprise activities. This observation has prompted us to investigate the role of national culture in driving independent versus employee entrepreneurial activities. Prior research has established that national (and regional) culture plays an important role in forming an “entrepreneurial culture” that encourages (or discourages) independent business start-ups and TEA (e.g. Davidsson, 1995; Beugelsdijk, 2007). However, the relationship of culture and EEA has not received research attention. Moreover, empirical relationships between elements of national culture and independent entrepreneurship have revealed some surprising results. For example, Wildeman et al. (1999) report an unexpected higher share of individual business ownership in countries that have higher uncertainty avoidance, higher power distance and lower individualism according to Hofstede’s dimensions of culture. They speculate that dissatisfaction can be a source of entrepreneurship: in countries with a high power distance, a high uncertainty avoidance and low individualism, there may be relatively more business owners since enterprising individuals cannot satisfy their needs within existing organizations. Yet it remains a rather open question whether entrepreneurial behaviour in existing organisations provides a satisfactory explanation for these empirical findings. Methods We will conduct a cross sectional study of the influence of national culture according to the five / six dimensions of Hofstede (1980; 2001) on both TEA and EEA for the 54 countries that participated in GEM 2011. Since it is well established that the opportunities for entrepreneurship vary substantially with a country’s level of economic development, we intend to conduct separate analyses for the three categories of development – innovation driven economies, efficient driven economies and factor driven economies. We also intend to restrict our assessment of TEA to opportunity driven entrepreneurship, as necessity driven entrepreneurship has a different relationship to the “entrepreneurial culture” that is the focus of our study. We will control for a range of factors such as GDP growth, ease of doing business index and unemployment. Results and Implications Descriptive analyses of the GEM TEA and EEA data reveal clusters of countries that appear to be have similar national culture. We are yet to conduct regression analyses.
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Debate about the relationships between business planning and performance has been active for decades (Bhidé, 2000; Mintzberg, 1994). While results have been inconclusive, this topic still strongly divides the research community (Brinckmann et al., 2010; Chwolka & Raith, 2011; Delmar & Shane, 2004; Frese, 2009; Gruber, 2007; Honig & Karlsson, 2004). Previous research explored the relationships between innovation and the venture creation process (Amason et al., 2006, Dewar & Dutton, 1986; Jennings et al., 2009). However, the relationships between business planning and innovation have mostly been invoked indirectly in the strategy and entrepreneurship literatures through the notion of uncertainty surrounding the development of innovation. Some posited that planning may be irrelevant due to the iterative process, the numerous changes innovation development entails and the need to be flexible (Brews & Hunt, 1999). Others suggested that planning may facilitate the achievement of goals and overcoming of obstacles (Locke and Latham, 2000), guide the venture in its allocation of resources (Delmar and Shane, 2003) and help to foster the communication about the innovation being developed (Liao & Welsh, 2008). However, the nature and extents of the relationships between business planning, innovation and performance are still largely unknown. Moreover, if the reasons why ventures should engage (Frese, 2009) –or not- (Honig, 2004) in business planning have been investigated quite extensively (Brinckmann et al., 2010), the specific value of business planning for nascent firms developing innovation is still unclear. The objective of this paper is to shed some light on these important aspects by investigating the two following questions on a large sample of random nascent firms: 1) how is business planning use over time by new ventures developing different types and degrees of innovation? 2) how do business planning and innovation impact the performance of the nascent firms? Methods & Key propositions This PSED-type study draws its data from the first three waves of the CAUSEE project where 30,105 Australian households were randomly contacted by phone using a methodology to capture emerging firms (Davidsson, Steffens, Gordon, Reynolds, 2008). This screening led to the identification of 594 nascent ventures (i.e., firms that were not operating yet at the time of the identification) that were willing to participate in the study. Comprehensive phone interviews were conducted with these 594 ventures. Likewise, two comprehensive follow-ups were organised 12 months and 24 months later where 80% of the eligible cases of the previous wave completed the interview. The questionnaire contains specific sections investigating business plans such as: presence or absence, degree of formality and updates of the plan. Four types of innovation are measured along three degrees of intensity to produce a comprehensive continuous measure ranging from 0 to 12 (Dahlqvist & Wiklund, 2011). Other sections informing on the gestation activities, industry and different types of experiences will be used as controls to measure the relationships and the impacts of business planning and innovation on the performance of nascent firms overtime. Results from two rounds of pre-testing informed the design of the instrument included in the main survey. The three waves of data are used to first test and compare the use of planning amongst nascent firms by their degrees of innovation and then to examine their impact on performance overtime through regression analyses. Results and Implications Three waves of data collection have been completed. Preliminary results show that on average, innovative firms are more likely to have a business plans than their low innovative counterpart. They are also most likely to update their plan suggesting a more continuous use of the plan over time than previously thought. Further analyses regarding the relationships between business planning, innovation and performance are undergoing. This paper is expected to contribute to the literature on business planning and innovation by measuring quantitatively their impact on nascent firms activities and performance at different stages of their development. In addition, this study will shed a new light on the business planning-performance relationship by disentangling plans, types of nascent firms regarding their innovation degres and their performance over time. Finally, we expect to increase the understanding of the venture creation process by analysing those questions on nascent firms from a large longitudinal sample of randomly selected ventures. We acknowledge the results from this study will be preliminary and will have to be interpreted with caution as the business planning-performance is not a straightforward relationship (Brinckmann et al., 2010). Meanwhile, we believe that this study is important to the field of entrepreneurship as it provides some much needed insights on the processes used by nascent firms during their creation and early operating stages.
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Speaker diarization is the process of annotating an input audio with information that attributes temporal regions of the audio signal to their respective sources, which may include both speech and non-speech events. For speech regions, the diarization system also specifies the locations of speaker boundaries and assign relative speaker labels to each homogeneous segment of speech. In short, speaker diarization systems effectively answer the question of ‘who spoke when’. There are several important applications for speaker diarization technology, such as facilitating speaker indexing systems to allow users to directly access the relevant segments of interest within a given audio, and assisting with other downstream processes such as summarizing and parsing. When combined with automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, the metadata extracted from a speaker diarization system can provide complementary information for ASR transcripts including the location of speaker turns and relative speaker segment labels, making the transcripts more readable. Speaker diarization output can also be used to localize the instances of specific speakers to pool data for model adaptation, which in turn boosts transcription accuracies. Speaker diarization therefore plays an important role as a preliminary step in automatic transcription of audio data. The aim of this work is to improve the usefulness and practicality of speaker diarization technology, through the reduction of diarization error rates. In particular, this research is focused on the segmentation and clustering stages within a diarization system. Although particular emphasis is placed on the broadcast news audio domain and systems developed throughout this work are also trained and tested on broadcast news data, the techniques proposed in this dissertation are also applicable to other domains including telephone conversations and meetings audio. Three main research themes were pursued: heuristic rules for speaker segmentation, modelling uncertainty in speaker model estimates, and modelling uncertainty in eigenvoice speaker modelling. The use of heuristic approaches for the speaker segmentation task was first investigated, with emphasis placed on minimizing missed boundary detections. A set of heuristic rules was proposed, to govern the detection and heuristic selection of candidate speaker segment boundaries. A second pass, using the same heuristic algorithm with a smaller window, was also proposed with the aim of improving detection of boundaries around short speaker segments. Compared to single threshold based methods, the proposed heuristic approach was shown to provide improved segmentation performance, leading to a reduction in the overall diarization error rate. Methods to model the uncertainty in speaker model estimates were developed, to address the difficulties associated with making segmentation and clustering decisions with limited data in the speaker segments. The Bayes factor, derived specifically for multivariate Gaussian speaker modelling, was introduced to account for the uncertainty of the speaker model estimates. The use of the Bayes factor also enabled the incorporation of prior information regarding the audio to aid segmentation and clustering decisions. The idea of modelling uncertainty in speaker model estimates was also extended to the eigenvoice speaker modelling framework for the speaker clustering task. Building on the application of Bayesian approaches to the speaker diarization problem, the proposed approach takes into account the uncertainty associated with the explicit estimation of the speaker factors. The proposed decision criteria, based on Bayesian theory, was shown to generally outperform their non- Bayesian counterparts.
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Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) station is the interface between passenger and service. The station is crucial to line operation as it is typically the only location where buses can pass each other. Congestion may occur here when buses maneuvering into and out of the platform lane interfere with bus flow, or when a queue of buses forms upstream of the platform lane blocking the passing lane. However, some systems include operation where express buses pass the critical station, resulting in a proportion of non stopping buses. It is important to understand the operation of the critical busway station under this type of operation, as it affects busway line capacity. This study uses micro simulation to treat the BRT station operation and to analyze the relationship between station Limit state bus capacity (B_ls), Total Bus Capacity (B_ttl). First, the simulation model is developed for Limit state scenario and then a mathematical model is defined, calibrated for a specified range of controlled scenarios of mean and coefficient of variation of dwell time. Thereafter, the proposed B_ls model is extended to consider non stopping buses and B_ttlmodel is defined. The proposed models provides better understanding to the BRT line capacity and is useful for transit authorities for designing better BRT operation.
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Penalties and sanctions to deter risky/illegal behaviours are important components of traffic law enforcement. Sanctions can be applied to the vehicle (e.g., impoundment), the person (e.g., remedial programs or jail), or the licence (e.g., disqualification). For licence sanctions, some offences attract automatic suspension while others attract demerit points which can indirectly lead to licence loss. In China, a licence is suspended when a driver accrues twelve demerit points within one year. When this occurs, the person must undertake a one-week retraining course at their own expense and successfully pass an examination to become relicensed. Little is known about the effectiveness of this program. A pilot study was conducted in Zhejiang Province to examine basic information about participants of a retraining course. The aim was to gather baseline data for future comparison. Participants were recruited at a driver retraining centre in a large city in Zhejiang Province. In total, 239 suspended drivers completed an anonymous questionnaire which included demographic information, driving history, and crash involvement. Overall, 87% were male with an overall mean age of 35.02 years (SD=8.77; range 21-60 years). A large proportion (83.3%) of participants owned a vehicle. Commuting to work was reported by 64% as their main reason for driving, while 16.3% reported driving for work. Only 6.4% reported holding a licence for 1 year or less (M=8.14 years, SD=6.5, range 1-31 years) and people reported driving an average of 18.06 hours/week (SD=14.4, range 1-86 hours). This represents a relatively experienced group, especially given the increase in new drivers in China. The number of infringements reportedly received in the previous year ranged from 2 to 18 (M=4.6, SD=3.18); one third of participants reported having received 5 or more infringements. Approximately one third also reported having received infringements in the previous year but not paid them. Various strategies for avoiding penalties were reported. The most commonly reported traffic violations were: drink driving (DUI; 0.02-0.08 mg/100ml) with 61.5% reporting 1 such violation; and speeding (47.7% reported 1-10 violations). Only 2.2% of participants reported the more serious drunk driving violation (DWI; above 0.08mg/100ml). Other violations included disobeying traffic rules, using inappropriate licence, and licence plate destroyed/not displayed. Two-thirds of participants reported no crash involvement in the previous year while 14.2% reported involvement in 2-5 crashes. The relationship between infringements and crashes was limited, however there was a small, positive significant correlation between crashes and speeding infringements (r=.2, p=.004). Overall, these results indicate the need for improved compliance with the law among this sample of traffic offenders. For example, lower level drink driving (DUI) and speeding were the most commonly reported violations with some drivers having committed a large number in the previous year. It is encouraging that the more serious offence of drunk driving (DWI) was rarely reported. The effectiveness of this driver retraining program and the demerit point penalty system in China is currently unclear. Future research including driver follow up via longitudinal study is recommended to determine program effectiveness to enhance road safety in China.
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Extending recent research on the importance of specific resources and skills for the internationalization of start-ups, this article tests a negative binomial model on a sample of 520 recently created high technology firms from the UK and Germany. The results show that previous international experience of entrepreneurs facilitates the rapid penetration of foreign markets, especially when the company features a clear and deliberate strategic intent of internationalization from the outset. This research provides one of the first empirical studies linking the influence of entrepreneurial teams to a high probability of success in the internationalization of high-technology ventures.
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Authenticated Encryption (AE) is the cryptographic process of providing simultaneous confidentiality and integrity protection to messages. This approach is more efficient than applying a two-step process of providing confidentiality for a message by encrypting the message, and in a separate pass providing integrity protection by generating a Message Authentication Code (MAC). AE using symmetric ciphers can be provided by either stream ciphers with built in authentication mechanisms or block ciphers using appropriate modes of operation. However, stream ciphers have the potential for higher performance and smaller footprint in hardware and/or software than block ciphers. This property makes stream ciphers suitable for resource constrained environments, where storage and computational power are limited. There have been several recent stream cipher proposals that claim to provide AE. These ciphers can be analysed using existing techniques that consider confidentiality or integrity separately; however currently there is no existing framework for the analysis of AE stream ciphers that analyses these two properties simultaneously. This thesis introduces a novel framework for the analysis of AE using stream cipher algorithms. This thesis analyzes the mechanisms for providing confidentiality and for providing integrity in AE algorithms using stream ciphers. There is a greater emphasis on the analysis of the integrity mechanisms, as there is little in the public literature on this, in the context of authenticated encryption. The thesis has four main contributions as follows. The first contribution is the design of a framework that can be used to classify AE stream ciphers based on three characteristics. The first classification applies Bellare and Namprempre's work on the the order in which encryption and authentication processes take place. The second classification is based on the method used for accumulating the input message (either directly or indirectly) into the into the internal states of the cipher to generate a MAC. The third classification is based on whether the sequence that is used to provide encryption and authentication is generated using a single key and initial vector, or two keys and two initial vectors. The second contribution is the application of an existing algebraic method to analyse the confidentiality algorithms of two AE stream ciphers; namely SSS and ZUC. The algebraic method is based on considering the nonlinear filter (NLF) of these ciphers as a combiner with memory. This method enables us to construct equations for the NLF that relate the (inputs, outputs and memory of the combiner) to the output keystream. We show that both of these ciphers are secure from this type of algebraic attack. We conclude that using a keydependent SBox in the NLF twice, and using two different SBoxes in the NLF of ZUC, prevents this type of algebraic attack. The third contribution is a new general matrix based model for MAC generation where the input message is injected directly into the internal state. This model describes the accumulation process when the input message is injected directly into the internal state of a nonlinear filter generator. We show that three recently proposed AE stream ciphers can be considered as instances of this model; namely SSS, NLSv2 and SOBER-128. Our model is more general than a previous investigations into direct injection. Possible forgery attacks against this model are investigated. It is shown that using a nonlinear filter in the accumulation process of the input message when either the input message or the initial states of the register is unknown prevents forgery attacks based on collisions. The last contribution is a new general matrix based model for MAC generation where the input message is injected indirectly into the internal state. This model uses the input message as a controller to accumulate a keystream sequence into an accumulation register. We show that three current AE stream ciphers can be considered as instances of this model; namely ZUC, Grain-128a and Sfinks. We establish the conditions under which the model is susceptible to forgery and side-channel attacks.
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A novel in-cylinder pressure method for determining ignition delay has been proposed and demonstrated. This method proposes a new Bayesian statistical model to resolve the start of combustion, defined as being the point at which the band-pass in-cylinder pressure deviates from background noise and the combustion resonance begins. Further, it is demonstrated that this method is still accurate in situations where there is noise present. The start of combustion can be resolved for each cycle without the need for ad hoc methods such as cycle averaging. Therefore, this method allows for analysis of consecutive cycles and inter-cycle variability studies. Ignition delay obtained by this method and by the net rate of heat release have been shown to give good agreement. However, the use of combustion resonance to determine the start of combustion is preferable over the net rate of heat release method because it does not rely on knowledge of heat losses and will still function accurately in the presence of noise. Results for a six-cylinder turbo-charged common-rail diesel engine run with neat diesel fuel at full, three quarters and half load have been presented. Under these conditions the ignition delay was shown to increase as the load was decreased with a significant increase in ignition delay at half load, when compared with three quarter and full loads.
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In Queensland, there is little research that speaks to the historical experiences of schooling. Aboriginal education remains a part of the silenced history of Aboriginal people. This thesis presents stories of schooling from Aboriginal people across three generations of adult storytellers. Elders, grandparents, and young parents involved in an early childhood urban playgroup were included. Stories from the children attending the playgroup were also welcomed. The research methodology involved narrative storywork. This is culturally appropriate because Aboriginal stories connect the past with the present. The conceptual framework for the research draws on decolonising theory. Typically, reports of Aboriginal schooling and outcomes position Aboriginal families and children within a deficit discourse. The issues and challenges faced by urban Murri families who have young children or children in school are largely unknown. This research allowed Aboriginal families to participate in an engaged dialogue about their childhood and offered opportunities to tell their stories of education. Key research questions were: What was the reality of school for different generations of Indigenous people? What beliefs and values are held about mainstream education for Indigenous children? What ideas are communicated about school across generations? Narratives from five elders, five grandparents, and five (urban) mothers of young Indigenous children are presented. The elders offer testimony on their recollected experiences of schooling in a mission, a Yumba school (fringe-dwellers’ camp), and country schools. Their stories also speak to the need to pass as non-indigenous and act as “white”. The next generation of storytellers are the grandparents and they speak to their lives as “stolen children”. The final story tellers are the Murri parents. They speak to the current and recent past of education, as well as their family experiences as they parent young children who are about to enter school or who are in the early years of school.
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From the early-to-mid 2000s, the Australian horror film production sector has achieved growth and prosperity of a kind not seen since its heyday of the 1980s. Australian horror films can be traced back to the early 1970s, when they experienced a measure of commercial success. However, throughout the twenty-first-century Australian horror gained levels of international recognition that have surpassed the cult status enjoyed by some of the films in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, Australia has emerged as a significant producer of breakout, cult, and solid B-grade horror films, which have circulated in markets worldwide. Australian horror’s recent successes have been driven by one of its distinguishing features: its international dimensions. As this chapter argues, the Australian horror film production sector is an export-oriented industry that relies heavily on international partnerships and presales (the sale of distribution rights prior to a film’s completion), and on its relationships with overseas distributors. Yet, these traits vary from film to film as the sector is comprised of several distinct domains of production activity, from guerrilla films destined for niche video markets like specialist cult video stores and online mail-order websites to high(er)-end pictures made for theatrical markets. Furthermore, the content and style of Australian horror movies has often been tailored for export. While some horror filmmakers have sought to play up the Australianness of their product, others have attempted to pass off their films as faux-American or as placeless films effaced of national reference points.
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Numerous Abaqus [1] finite element analyses have been carried out using various plasticity models to investigate the effect of friction force on the rail head in relation to both the development of the accumulated plastic strain (PEEQ) and the changes in the depth of PEEQ distribution in the wheel-rail contact. The normal force distribution on the rail head was assumed to be Hertzian. The tangential force was implemented as a fraction of the normal force in the subroutine. Each analysis was carried out for a single pass and the effect of various friction coefficient values has been observed.
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Poor health and injury represent major obstacles to the future economic security of Australia. The national economic cost of work-related injury is estimated at $57.5 billion p/a. Since exposure to high physical demands is a major risk factor for musculoskeletal injury, monitoring and managing such physical activity levels in workers is a potentially important injury prevention strategy. Current injury monitoring practices are inadequate for the provision of clinically valuable information about the tissue specific responses to physical exertion. Injury of various soft tissue structures can manifest over time through accumulation of micro-trauma. Such micro-trauma has a propensity to increase the risk of acute injuries to soft-tissue structures such as muscle or tendon. As such, the capacity to monitor biomarkers that result from the disruption of these tissues offers a means of assisting the pre-emptive management of subclinical injury prior to acute failure or for evaluation of recovery processes. Here we have adopted an in-vivo exercise induced muscle damage model allowing the application of laboratory controlled conditions to assist in uncovering biochemical indicators associated with soft-tissue trauma and recovery. Importantly, urine was utilised as the diagnostic medium since it is non-invasive to collect, more acceptable to workers and less costly to employers. Moreover, it is our hypothesis that exercise induced tissue degradation products enter the circulation and are subsequently filtered by the kidney and pass through to the urine. To test this hypothesis a range of metabolomic and proteomic discovery-phase techniques were used, along with targeted approaches. Several small molecules relating to tissue damage were identified along with a series of skeletal muscle-specific protein fragments resulting from exercise induced soft-tissue damage. Each of the potential biomolecular markers appeared to be temporally present within urine. Moreover, the regulation of abundance seemed to be associated with functional recovery following the injury. This discovery may have important clinical applications for monitoring of a variety of inflammatory myopathies as well as novel applications in monitoring of the musculoskeletal health status of workers, professional athletes and/or military personnel to reduce the onset of potentially debilitating musculoskeletal injuries within these professions.
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This paper examines the innovativeness of nascent and young entrepreneurial firms in Australia. Findings of interest in this paper include: • The vast majority of new ventures offer some degree of innovation in some aspect of their business, be it the product, the process, their market selection or their marketing approach. • With close to 75 per cent claiming they do more than taking mere imitations to the market, novelty in the product/service is the type of innovation most commonly offered by start-up firms. • The innovativeness of start-ups varies by industry. Construction start-ups stand out as particularly low in innovation across all indicators, while Manufacturing stands out the most in the positive direction. • Team start-ups other than spouse teams have higher novelty, as do ventures started by founders with prior start-up experience. • There is no association between the founders’ level of education and the novelty of the ventures they (try to) create.
Resumo:
Geographical market expansion is included in various definitions of entrepreneurship as it entails the opening up of new markets (for example, Davidsson 2003). Expansion into new international markets and launch of new products in international markets are also consistent with definitions of entrepreneurship which center on the pursuit of opportunities {e.g.\Stevenson, 1983 #922;Gartner, 1993 #931}. Accordingly, the decision by managers of small, internationally active businesses to continue to internationalize can be viewed as an entrepreneurial act. In spite of the fact that both start-ups and existing firms can behave entrepreneurially by expanding into new international markets, the attention of entrepreneurship researchers interested in international activities has largely focused on international new ventures (INVs); that is, business organizations that internationalize from inception (Oviatt, and McDougall 1994; Oviatt, and McDougall 1997). Consequently, pursuit of international opportunities by established small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lacks theoretical understanding and empirical investigation through an entrepreneurship lens. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge at the entrepreneurship-internationalization interface by testing whether Stevenson’s opportunity-based conceptualization of entrepreneurial management (Stevenson 1983; Stevenson and Gumpert 1985; Stevenson and Jarillo 1990) can explain the attainment of continued entrepreneurial outcomes by SMEs operating in foreign markets. We choose Stevenson’s conceptualization as it gauges firm-level characteristics that are theorized to facilitate the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities, which arguably is at the heart of SMEs’ continued venturing into international markets.
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Double-pass counter flow v-grove collector is considered one of the most efficient solar air-collectors. In this design of the collector, the inlet air initially flows at the top part of the collector and changes direction once it reaches the end of the collector and flows below the collector to the outlet. A mathematical model is developed for this type of collector and simulation is carried out using MATLAB programme. The simulation results were verified with three distinguished research results and it was found that the simulation has the ability to predict the performance of the air collector accurately as proven by the comparison of experimental data with simulation. The difference between the predicted and experimental results is, at maximum, approximately 7% which is within the acceptable limit considering some uncertainties in the input parameter values to allow comparison. A parametric study was performed and it was found that solar radiation, inlet air temperature, flow rate and length has a significant effect on the efficiency of the air collector. Additionally, the results are compared with single flow V-groove collector.