Room temperature ferromagnetism in Tb-doped ZnO dilute magnetic semiconducting nanoparticles

Pure and Tb-doped ZnO nanoparticles have been synthesized by chemical co-precipitation method. The transmission electron microscopy study reveals the spherical morphology of synthesized nanoparticles with average particle size 14–18 nm. The effect of Tb-doping on structural, optical and magnetic properties has been studied. X-ray diffraction shows that pure and Tb-ZnO nanoparticles exhibit wurtzite structure having hexagonal phase with primitive unit cell. It further reveals that there is no effect of Tb-doping on the X-ray diffraction pattern up to 2 % doping, however, higher doping concentration result in accumulation of Tb on ZnO surface. Photoluminescence spectra reveal that the doping Tb in ZnO changes crystallographic structure generating non-radiative oxygen vacancies. Three emission peaks located around 423, 485 and 515 nm has been observed. Pure ZnO nanoparticles show diamagnetic character, however, Tb-doped ZnO nanoparticles exhibit room temperature ferromagnetism. The correlation between defects generated upon Tb-doping to the observed ferromagnetism, in the synthesized nanoparticles, has been reported.     

Supply chain risk assessment during new product development: a group decision making approach using numeric and linguistic data

Companies strive to minimise supply chain related risks during new product development as any glitch while developing new products can lead to considerable delay in product launch with severe financial implications. However, many organisations face difficulty in properly assessing the vulnerabilities of their globally dispersed supply chains during the product development stage as no suitable procedure for that purpose seems to be readily available in the literature. The present research is an attempt to fulfil this requirement. A step-by-step approach for supply chain risk assessment during new product development, involving group decision making, is suggested. This approach can use both numeric and linguistic data and helps in determining vulnerability scores for various sub-systems and for each supplier of the most vulnerable sub-system. This is followed by failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) which helps prioritise failure modes of vulnerable suppliers and thus create specific control plans to mitigate supply related failures. Using this approach, organisations can devise control plans to alleviate the supplier related risks during new product development. Although, the methodology is illustrated through an application in aircraft manufacturing, it can also be used in other discrete and process manufacturing industries.     

Adaptive MAC Protocol for Solar Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture

The wireless sensor network is one of the promising technologies in the agriculture field. Its actual usage in real agriculture fields is limited by its dependence on the small batteries which cannot make the network survive for long. Various protocols are being designed at the network and MAC layer to increase the lifetime of the nodes, but up to a certain extent only. Hence the energy harvesting to power up the WSN nodes is a promising technology to fulfill this ever energy demand, but the protocols need to be redesigned for this scenario. Solar energy harvesting based MAC protocol which is adaptive to the changing weather conditions is designed in this paper for the smart agriculture applications. It is based on the multilayer and receiver-initiated process to improve network quality. It has shown the remarkable performance over the other energy harvesting based protocols in terms of ENO ratio, energy consumption and collision rate.

     

Analysis of Acquired Indoor LTE-A Data from an Actual HetNet Cellular Deployment

Wireless Personal Communications - Increasing the user downlink throughput is always a task of utmost importance for any cellular network service provider. However, most of the research is only...     

Influence of resonant Raman scattering in the elemental analysis using X-ray emission based techniques

A tabulation of characteristic X-ray energies across the periodic table are provided where those X-rays are expected to result in a significant fractional resonant Raman scattering (RRS) contribution to the X-ray attenuation from a particular shell/subshell of the same or another element. The tabulations can be considered as guideline so as to know what can be expected due to RRS in typical photon- and particle-induced X-ray emission spectrometry. The RRS contribution is not included in the available theoretical attenuation coefficients, which are generally used in estimation of the matrix corrections in routine quantitative elemental analysis based on various X-ray emission techniques. The radiative RRS peaks can also interfere with normal X-ray spectrum and influence the elemental analysis. The RRS cross-section depends upon the energy difference of the X-ray energy and the shell/subshell ionization threshold taken in the units of the shell/subshell energy width, density of available states near the Fermi level, and the band structure in case the element is in the solid form. Some aspects of the dependence of the RRS contribution on the chemical forms of the elements are also discussed.     

DRYING CHARACTERISTICS OF TAPIOKA

Experimcntal studies were carried out on a multipurposc industrial solar drycr having corrugated absorber with two glass covers. Drying charactcristics of Tapioka wcre obtained on the fixed bed portion of this dryer     

Structural and thermal characterization of macro-branched functional terpolymer containing 8-hydroxyquinoline moieties with enhancing biocidal properties

Novel polyfunctional acetyl and hydroxyl bearing functional terpolymer (HQFCA) derived from 8-hydroxyquinoline (HQ), 4-chloroacetophenone (CA) and formaldehyde (F) has been synthesized by complex condensation polymerization in the presence of an acid catalyst. The structure and morphology of terpolymer were elucidated by FTIR-ATR, one-dimensional NMR (¹H NMR, ¹³C NMR and DEPT-135 experiment), two-dimensional NMR (HSQC and TOCSY), pyrolysis GC–MS, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), nitrogen absorption, and optical microscopy (OM). Principal pyrolysis products generated from HQFCA units were 8-hydroxy-5,6-dimethylquinoline, 8-hydroxy-2-methylquinoline and 4-chloroacetophenone. This reactive terpolymer can be used as synthons for exchange membrane preparation and biomedical coating applications.     

DRYING OF PADDY IN A BED DRYER

The experimental results of a bed dryer (at Ludhiana) have been analyzed. The experimental results are well predicted by the small scale laboratory experiments on a spouted bed dryer.