Assessment of total columnar ozone climatological trends over the Indian sub-continent

In the present study, long term satellite and Dobson spectrophotometer Total Column Ozone (TCO) data have been used to study the interannual variability and also to assess climatological trends in TCO over different geographical locations of Indian sub-continent. TCO data were analyzed for the period 1957 to 2015 over New Delhi (28.63° N, 77.18° E), Varanasi (25.30° N, 83.02° E), Pune (18.53° N, 73.84° E) and Kodaikanal (10.0° N, 77.47° E). An extensive validation was performed for Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) retrieved TCO data independently with Dobson Spectrophotometer TCO measurements over New Delhi, Varanasi, Pune and Kodaikanal. The results of this exercise showed good correlation coefficient (r) of 0.87 (0.88), 0.84 (0.82), 0.91 (0.80) and 0.84 (Data not available) respectively. Climatological mean TCO over New Delhi, Varanasi, Pune and Kodaikanal are 275.02 ± 6.44 DU, 269.03 ± 7.34 DU, 260.78 ± 5.07 DU and 258.71 ± 6.36 DU respectively for the period 1957 to 2015. An increasing trend over New Delhi (0.20 DU year^–1), Pune (0.18 DU year^–1), Kodaikanal (0.14 DU year^–1) and decreasing trend over Varanasi (0.01 DU year^–1) were observed. High significance of TCO trend was found at New Delhi (p-value < 0.0001), Pune (p-value = 0.002) and Kodaikanal (p-value = 0.003) with negligible trend over Varanasi with p-value of 0.84. The TCO variations at different geographical locations associated with upper atmospheric meteorological parameters such as lower Stratospheric Temperature (ST) at 65 hPa and Tropopause Height (TH) were also addressed. Annual lower stratospheric temperature shows positive relationship with TCO and Stratospheric ozone over the study sites. Further, decadal variability in TCO with respect to solar activity at New Delhi was also analyzed.     

A new ground-based FTIR spectrometer reference site at Shadnagar (India) and preliminary columnar retrievals of CH4 and N2O

A Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer has been operational since March 2014, at National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Shadnagar, which is a suburban site of central India. Direct solar radiation spectra recorded by the FTIR during clear sky days at a high spectral resolution of 0.01 cm^?1 were analysed using the line-by-line radiative transfer algorithm (LBLRTA) to retrieve the initial results of column-averaged concentrations of methane (X_CH4) and nitrous oxide (X_N2O) in the atmosphere. Error residuals between the measured and estimated atmospheric transmissions are in the range of 0.40–0.80% for CH₄ and 0.20–0.50% for N₂O, respectively. The maximum (minimum) X_CH4 and X_N2O were, respectively, 1.88 ± 0.04 ppm (1.67 ± 0.02 ppm) and 316.15 ± 5.85 ppb (278.92 ± 4.02 ppb). Columnar concentrations of CH₄ and N₂O retrieved from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) were compared against retrieved X_CH4 and X_N2O using the ground FTIR. The observed differences between the two data sets lie between ?0.06 ppm and +0.10 ppm for CH₄ and between +32 ppb and ?10 ppb for N₂O.     

Temporal Thermal Behavior and Damage Simulations of FRP Deck

The finite-element method (FEM) has been employed to study the structural behavior of the fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bridge deck. The numerical results were verified with the field-test results provided by New York State Department of Transportation. Fully coupled thermal-stress analyses were conducted using the FEM to predict the failure mechanisms and the “fire resistance limit” of the superstructure under extreme thermal loading conditions. Furthermore, damage simulations of the FRP deck as a result of snow and ice plowing process were performed to investigate any possibility of bridge failure after damage occurs. Thermal simulations showed that FRP bridge decks are highly sensitive to the effect of elevated temperatures. The FRP deck approached the fire resistance limit at early stages of the fire incident under all cases of fire scenarios. The damage simulations due to the snow plowing showed minimal possibility of bridge failure to take place under the worst-case damage scenario when the top 5 mm of the FRP deck surface was removed. The results of both phases of simulations provide an insight into the safety and the reliability of the FRP systems after the stipulated damage scenarios were considered. Moreover, this paper provides discussions concerning the recommended immediate actions necessary to repair the damaged region of FRP deck panels and possible use of the bridge after the damage incident.     

Load Testing of an FRP Bridge Deck on a Truss Bridge

New York State has constructed a fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) bridge deck as an experimental project. The goal of the project was to improve the load rating of a 50-yr old truss bridge located in Wellsburg, New York. The FRP deck weighs approximately 80-percent less than the deteriorated concrete bridge deck it replaced. Reducing the dead load increased the allowable live load capacity of the bridge without significant repair work to the existing superstructure, thus lengthening its service life. Load testing was conducted after installation of the FRP deck to study the conservativeness of the design, ascertain the assumptions made on composite action between the deck and the superstructure, and examine the effectiveness of joints in load transfer. This report describes the testing and discusses the results. The results indicate that the design was conservative. The design assumed no composite action between the deck and the superstructure, and the experimental data confirms that assumption. The study also shows that the joints are only partially-effective in load transfer between panels. Peak strains under the test loads were only a very small fraction of the ultimate strength of the FRP deck.     

Heuristic shape optimization of gas ducting in process and power plants

Sudden changes in the flow direction are quite common but are inevitable in the lay-out in gas ducting in process and power plants. While it is well known that such changes lead to high pressure drops and flow separation, the scope for optimization is limited by constraints such as on-site fabrication and lay-out limitations. In the present paper, we present an efficient, computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based shape optimization method which results in lesser pressure drop and more streamlined flow while adhering to site-specific constraints in terms of the extent of changes that can be made. The method is based on velocity defect in the plane of the bend: if, at a particular streamwise location, the average velocity in one half of cross section is above (or below) the cross sectional average velocity by, say, 10% or more, then the width of the duct locally is increased (or decreased), if it is possible to do so within the lay-out restrictions. An iterative application of this criterion using a commercial CFD code is shown to lead to better design of the bend. The optimized solution is validated with experimental results.     

Hydrogen production by alcoholysis of sodium borohydride

Alcoholysis of sodium borohydride offers advantages due to reduction in number of steps for recycling of sodium borohydride, elimination of freezing problems that are associated with the use of water, fast generation of hydrogen, etc. Methanol was used to liberate hydrogen from sodium borohydride. The influence of the amount of solvent, substrate concentration, temperature and catalyst on the kinetics of alcoholysis reaction in non‐stabilized sodium borohydride has been examined in the present study. The reaction was found to be first order with respect to substrate concentration and zero order with respect to solvent concentration. Effect of soluble metal salts, metal powder and metal boride as catalysts on hydrogen generation rate has also been investigated. It was found that NiCl₂, Ni₂B and RuCl₃ were effective catalysts and hydrogen generation proceeds with high efficiency in the presence of these catalysts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimizing the Cray Graph Engine for performant analytics on cluster,SuperDome Flex,Shasta systems and cloud deployment

We present updates to the Cray Graph Engine, a high performance in-memory semantic graph database, which enable performant execution across multiple architectures as well as deployment in a container to support cloud and as-a-service graph analytics. This paper discusses the changes required to port and optimize CGE to target multiple architectures, including Cray Shasta systems, large shared-memory machines such as SuperDome Flex (SDF), and cluster environments such as Apollo systems. The porting effort focused primarily on removing dependences on XPMEM and Cray PGAS and replacing these with a simplified PGAS library based upon POSIX shared memory and one-sided MPI, while preserving the existing Coarray-C++ CGE code base. We also discuss the containerization of CGE using Singularity and the techniques required to enable container performance matching native execution. We present early benchmarking results for running CGE on the SDF, Infiniband clusters and Slingshot interconnect-based Shasta systems.     

Functional demarcation of pitch

A satisfactory solution is yet to be found for the problem of estimating the pitch of speech signals. It is difficult even to evolve objective criteria to evaluate existing algorithms. This is usually done on the basis of complexity of the algorithm, speed of computation, ease of implementation, etc. Even the verification of the results of one particular technique is difficult. This paper presents three functional demarcations of pitch estimation methods (based on the linear model of speech production, analysis of the short-time spectrum and examination of the time domain signal, respectively) as used for speech processing. It is shown that evaluation and comparison of different algorithms becomes consistent and easy within each demarcation. Also, methods falling within each demarcation are shown to be suited for a particular area of speech processing.