The potential of electricity imports to meet future electricity requirements in India

As resources of electricity generation in India are not sufficient, this paper analyses the potential of electricity import from neighboring countries to meet the future electricity requirements of India. Based on the data of electricity generation, consumption, and future generation potential, we work out projected electricity generation/ demand of India and its neighboring countries by 2050 to identify the possibility of India’s cross-border electricity trading with its neighboring countries, more particularly the electricity import potential.     

Overview of emerging nonvolatile memory technologies

Nonvolatile memory technologies in Si-based electronics date back to the 1990s. Ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) was one of the most promising devices replacing the conventional Flash memory facing physical scaling limitations at those times. A variant of charge storage memory referred to as Flash memory is widely used in consumer electronic products such as cell phones and music players while NAND Flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are increasingly displacing hard disk drives as the primary storage device in laptops, desktops, and even data centers. The integration limit of Flash memories is approaching, and many new types of memory to replace conventional Flash memories have been proposed. Emerging memory technologies promise new memories to store more data at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cell phones and portable music players. They are being investigated and lead to the future as potential alternatives to existing memories in future computing systems. Emerging nonvolatile memory technologies such as magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM), ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), phase-change memory (PCM), and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) combine the speed of static random-access memory (SRAM), the density of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the nonvolatility of Flash memory and so become very attractive as another possibility for future memory hierarchies. Many other new classes of emerging memory technologies such as transparent and plastic, three-dimensional (3-D), and quantum dot memory technologies have also gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Subsequently, not an exaggeration to say that computer memory could soon earn the ultimate commercial validation for commercial scale-up and production the cheap plastic knockoff. Therefore, this review is devoted to the rapidly developing new class of memory technologies and scaling of scientific procedures based on an investigation of recent progress in advanced Flash memory devices.     

Detoxification of a carcinogenic paint preservative by Blumea malcolmii Hook cell cultures

Phytoremediation is considered as an effective viable alternative to remediate the contaminated sites, industrially hazardous chemicals and other toxic pollutants. This bioremediation option offers a safe, cheap and eco friendly alternative to existing physical and chemical remediation technologies as well as other biological sources. The wall paint preservatives consist of several harmful and carcinogenic compounds causing serious environmental concerns. In the present study, an actively growing Blumea malcolmii Hook cell suspensions were established successfully on MS+CM (20%) +2,4-D (5 mg l(-1))+Gln (100 mg l(-1))+sucrose (3%) and were used to detoxify a paint preservative Troysan S 89 (a mixture of carbendazim, diuron and ochthilinone). FTIR and UV spectral analytical studies revealed the phytotransformation of Troysan S 89 by Blumea cell suspension cultures. The non-toxic nature of the products formed after phytotransformation was confirmed by phytotoxicity, cytogenotoxicity while non-carcinogenic nature by Ames tests. The novelty of the present study is effective communal degradation of a mixture of three toxicants in Troysan S 89 by cell suspension cultures of Blumea. This work suggested that Blumea cell suspensions might be able to contribute to the wider and safer application of phytoremediation.     

Local pixel statistics based impulse detection and hybrid color filtering for restoration of digital color images

This paper presents a two stage filtering system to remove random valued impulse noise from color images based on local statistics of the filtering window under consideration. In the first stage, to detect the noisy pixel, the locally adaptive threshold is derived from the pixels of the filtering window. In the second stage, the restoration of the noisy pixel is done on the basis of brightness and chromaticity information obtained from the neighbouring pixels in the filtering window. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme yields much superior performance in comparison with other color image filtering methods.     

Iron, folate, and vitamin B12 stores among pregnant women in a rural area of Haryana State, India

BACKGROUND: Iron, folate, and vitamin B12 deficiencies have adverse effects on pregnancy outcome. In India, data on the concomitant prevalence of these deficiencies among pregnant women are meager. OBJECTIVE: We conducted a community-based study to assess the prevalence of deficiencies of iron, folate, and vitamin B12 among pregnant women in a rural block of Haryana State. METHODS: The study was approved by the ethics committee of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. A total of 283 pregnant women were enrolled in the study. After oral informed consent had been obtained from the women, blood was drawn from the antecubital vein for estimation of the levels of serum ferritin by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (levels < 12 ng/ mL were considered as indicative of poor iron stores); serum folate was determined by radioimmunoassay (levels <3 ng/mL were considered as indicative of poor folate stores); and serum vitamin B12 was estimated by the microbiologic method (levels < 200 pg/mL were considered as indicative of poor vitamin B12 stores). RESULTS: The results indicated that 67.7%, 26.3%, and 74.1% of the women had poor iron, folate, and vitamin B12 stores, respectively. Concomitant deficiencies of iron, folate, and vitamin B12 occurred in 16.2% of the women. We found that 59.9% of the women were consuming less than 75% of the recommended daily caloric allowance (2175 kcal), indicating an overall poor food intake. This could be one of the predominant reasons for poor iron, folate, and vitamin B12 stores among the women. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that apart from iron and folate, vitamin B12 deficiencies may play an important role in causing anemia.     

Estimation of average life for negative exponential distribution

This paper deals with the problem of average life estimation when the life times follow negative exponential distribution. A minimum mean square error estimator belonging to the class of linear combination of complete sufficient statistics has been obtained. The estimator thus obtained requires knowledge of coefficient of variation. The effect of using a guessed value of coefficient of variation on the estimator has also been studied.     

Microhardness of laser ablated alumina coating on Ti-6Al-4V

Alumina coated on Titanium alloys find wide tribological applications due to the improvement in hardness of substrate. This paper presents the effect of deposition of alumina by pulsed laser ablation on Vickers hardness of Ti-6Al-4V substrate. Nd: YAG laser of wavelength 1064nm is used with sintered alumina disc as target for ablation. The variation of Vickers microhardness with load in Ti-6Al-4V shows indentation size effect. Proportional Specimen Resistance (P.S.R) model is applied to separate load -independent hardness from the load -dependent hardness. Composite hardness of Alumina coated Ti-6Al-4V is measured for different laser processing conditions. The film hardness has been separated from the composite hardness of the film-substrate system by the use of an approach based on the law of area of mixtures model taking into an account of ISE, due to proportional specimen resistance of the material to indentation. Film hardness of different films produced by varying the target — substrate distance is presented. As the film thickness increases its hardness decreases as compared to bulk hardness. These studies will be useful in the selection of appropriate coating thickness and substrate hardness to achieve a required composite hardness in the design and production of wear-resistant parts of engineering devices.     

A cost-benefit analysis of a third camera for stereo correspondence

This paper looks at the twin issues of the gain in accuracy of stereo correspondence and the accompanying increase in computational cost due to the use of a third camera for stereo analysis. Trinocular stereo algorithms differ from binocular algorithms essentially in the epipolar constraint used in the local matching stage. The current literature does not provide any insight into the relative merits of binocular and trinocular stereo matching with the matching accuracy being verified aginst the ground truth. Experiments for evaluating the relative performance of binocular and trinocular stereo algorithms were conducted. The stereo images used for the performance evaluation were generated by applying a Lambertian reflectance model to real Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) available from the U.S. Geological Survey. The matching accuracy of the stereo algorithms was evaluated by comparing the observed stereo disparity against the ground truth derived from the DEMs. It was observed that trinocular local matching reduced the percentage of mismatches having large disparity errors by more than half when compared to binocular matching. On the other hand, trinocular stereopsis increased the computational cost of local matching over binocular by only about one-fourth. We also present a quantization-error analysis of the depth reconstruction process for the nonparallel stereo-imaging geometry used in our experiments.