Prospective techniques of effective daylight harvesting in commercial buildings by employing window glazing, dynamic shading devices and dimming control—a literature review

Over a few decades, daylighting has been perceived to possess good potential for energy conservation. In this perspective, there have been significant advances in research methodologies and technologies for optimizing energy consumption through daylight harvesting in commercial buildings. In light of this, a thorough understanding of the application of available technology is very important for daylighting practices for building energy management. The objective of this paper is to examine the status of published research on three key building parameters: window glazing area, dynamic shading devices, and daylighting controls playing a rule on energy conservation. This article may serve as a coherent literature survey that would provide better understanding of the subjacent issues and possibly rejuvenate research interest in this immensely potential field of energy engineering.     

The Influence of Ti Doping at the Mn Site on Magnetoresistance and Thermopower Properties of Sm0.6Sr0.4MnO3

Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism - The influence of non-magnetic Ti doping at the Mn site on magnetoresistance and thermopower properties of Sm0.6Sr0.4MnO3 (Sm0.6Sr0.4Mn1-xTixO3,...     

Two-Server 3D ElGamal Diffie-Hellman Password Authenticated and Key Exchange Protocol Using Geometrical Properties

Mobile Networks and Applications - In the contemporary world, Internet based services undoubtedly plays a vital role in supporting business processes. Yet, these services suffer from poor...     

Uranium extraction from partially neutralised and diluted phosphoric acid using a synergistic organophosphorous solvent mixture

A process is described for the separation of uranium from partially neutralised and diluted phosphoric acid (PNDA) which is generated in fertiliser plants when phosphoric acid is used to scrub ammoniacal vapours from the neutralisation reactors. The separation process is based on solvent extraction using a synergistic mixture of di-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid (DEHPA) with tri-n-alkyl phosphine oxide (TAPO). The effects of process parameters including concentration of DEHPA and TAPO, temperature and degree of neutralisation of acid have been investigated. Laboratory scale and pilot plant scale tests have been carried out. The extraction reaction is found to be exothermic with enthalpy effect of 30 kJ/mol. Tests on stripping of extracted uranium and recovery of uranium have been carried out and results are reported. Analysis of data indicates significant differences in the mechanism of uranium extraction from PNDA and the mechanism reported in literature for extraction of uranium from weak phosphoric acid using a similar solvent mixture.     

Chitin and chitosan in selected biomedical applications

Chitin (CT), the well-known natural biopolymer and chitosan (CS) (bio-based or “artificial polymer”) are non-toxic, biodegradable and biocompatible in nature. The advantages of these biomaterials are such that, they can be easily processed into different forms such as membranes, sponges, gels, scaffolds, microparticles, nanoparticles and nanofibers for a variety of biomedical applications such as drug delivery, gene therapy, tissue engineering and wound healing. Present review focuses on the diverse applications of CT and CS membranes and scaffolds for drug delivery, tissue engineering and targeted regenerative medicine. The chitinous scaffolds of marine sponges’ origin are discussed here for the first time. These CT based scaffolds obtained from Porifera possess remarkable and unique properties such as hydration, interconnected channels and diverse structural architecture. This review will provide a brief overview of CT and CS membranes and scaffolds toward different kinds of delivery applications such as anticancer drug delivery, osteogenic drug delivery, and growth factor delivery, because of their inimitable release behavior, degradation profile, mucoadhesive nature, etc. The review also provides an overview of the key features of CT and CS membranes and scaffolds such as their biodegradability, cytocompatibility and mechanical properties toward applications in tissue engineering and wound healing.     

Malware detection by pruning of parallel ensembles using harmony search

Detection of malware using data mining techniques has been explored extensively. Techniques used for detecting malware based on structural features rely on being able to identify anomalies in the structure of executable files. The structural attributes of an executable that can be extracted include byte ngrams, Portable Executable (PE) features, API call sequences and Strings. After a thorough analysis we have extracted various features from executable files and applied it on an ensemble of classifiers to efficiently detect malware. Ensemble methods combine several individual pattern classifiers in order to achieve better classification. The challenge is to choose the minimal number of classifiers that achieve the best performance. An ensemble that contains too many members might incur large storage requirements and even reduce the classification performance. Hence the goal of ensemble pruning is to identify a subset of ensemble members that performs at least as good as the original ensemble and discard any other members.     

Secure public administration using wireless blockchain technology with efficient routing policy

Current research works are majorly focused on the security importance and prevention measures in wireless sensor network (WSN). The survey of existing papers states that there are no efficient protocols for achieving secure and reliable peer authentication that ensures trust and confidentiality of the end-users, as public administration worldwide invokes many maximized resources demanding transparency with security. Nowadays, a number of nations have started implementing smart city ideas; new technology should be used to safeguard various public administration services against corruption, intruders rendering an active part, and public transparency. By integrating blockchain (BC) technology with wireless-based public administration process (WBPAP), the challenge of gaining trust, and eliminating corruption can be attained. Auto-metric graph neural network (AGNN) approach is proposed for eliminating data tampering and malicious attack in the peer network. Trust, confidentiality, and integrity can be achieved using the proposed BC-AGNN-WBPAP-WSN approach. The simulation of this model is activated in MATLAB, and its performance is examined using some performance metrics. Finally, the attained outcomes prove that the proposed method is the first wireless-based public blockchain experimental method for public administration analyzed with theoretical methods.     

Efficient dynamic resource provisioning based on credibility in cloud computing

Wireless Networks - Cloud Computing is a growing technology in which resources are provided as a service. The efficiency in providing the resources as a service depends on various factors. One of...     

Development of solvent extraction process for erbium purification

A solvent extraction process based on organophosphorus extractant EHEHPA has been developed to raise the purity of erbium from ~20 to >85% in the product solution. The challenging task of upgrading erbium value in a host of chemically similar heavy rare earths present in a concentrate (% composition: Dy₂O₃: 58.72, Er₂O₃: 21.45, Ho₂O_3: 13.33, Tm₂O₃: 0.67, Yb₂O₃: 4.74 and Y₂O₃: 1.09) was accomplished by careful selection of process parameters such as aqueous feed acidity, EHEHPA concentration, total rare earths concentration in feed solution, phase ratio, scrubbing agent, and so forth. Under optimised conditions, a multi-stage counter-current and scrubbing test runs raised the purity of erbium to >85% with >95% recovery in the product strip solution. Amongst the various scrubbing agent, 0.025M Er₂O₃ at 1.2M HCl was found to be superior.     

Synthesis and Characterization of Polyaspartimides Containing Anisyl Moiety

New class of aromatic bismaleimides containing anisyl group were synthesized from bis(4-amino 3,5-dimethyl phenyl) anisyl methane and maleic anhydride via bismaleamic acid as an intermediate followed by cyclodehydration to bismaleimides. The structure was confirmed by FTIR, ¹H-NMR and elemental analysis. Further, a series of polyaspartimides were synthesized by addition reaction of bismaleimide (BMDA) with various diamines. The polymers were characterized by IR and elemental analysis. The polymers exhibit good solubility in organic solvents such as NMP, DMF and DMSO. They exhibit good thermal stability. T _g of polyaspartimides are in the range of 125–278°C and T _10% weight loss are in the range of 398–476°C.