LiTaO3 assisted giant strain and thermally stable energy storage response for renewable energy storage applications

Piezoceramics with composition (1–z) [Bi_0.5(Na_0.84K_0.16)_0.5TiO₃]_0.96–0.04SrTiO₃–zLiTaO₃ (z = 0.00–0.030) were formulated by ordinary firing process following by rapid quenching treatment. Effect of LiTaO₃ on the structural, electrical and energy-storage properties were analyzed. For the composition with molar ratio 0.025, room temperature large-field piezoelectric coefficient (S_max/E_max = d₃₃*) of 885 pm/V at 3.6 kV/mm was recorded. Furthermore, for compositions z = 0.025 and 0.030, broad temperature stable dielectric constants and low losses from ~135 to 350 °C with a small variation of ± 15% was observed. Additionally, the energy density for z = 0.025 was ~0.60 J/cm³ in the broader temperature range of 75–125 °C, along with the energy-storage efficiency of greater than 70%. These observations suggest that the studied piezo-material compositions are promising for the ceramic actuators and capacitor applications.     

Semi-empirical approach for estimating broadband albedo of snow

Snow is a medium that exhibits highly anisotropic reflectance throughout the solar spectrum. The anisotropic nature of snow shows more variability in snow metamorphic processes for wavelengths beyond 1.0 μm than in the visible spectrum. This behavior poses challenges for the development of a model that can retrieve broadband albedo from reflectance measurements throughout the snow season. In this paper, a semi-empirical model is presented to estimate near infrared (0.8-2.5 μm) albedo of snow. This model estimates spectral albedo at a wavelength of 1.240 μm using only three variables: solar zenith angle, scattering angle and measured reflectance, which is used to retrieve near infrared albedo. To form a base for such a model, quantification of reflectance patterns and variability in varying snow condition, i.e. snow grain size, and sun-sensor geometry are prerequisite. In this study the DIScrete Ordinate Radiative Transfer (DISORT) model is used to simulate bi-directional reflectance. The performance of the developed model is evaluated by using DISORT simulated spectral albedo for various snow grain sizes and solar zenith angles, as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and in-situ measurements. The developed model is shown to be capable of estimating spectral albedo at 1.240 μm with acceptable accuracy. The mean error (ME), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) in the estimates are found to be 0.053, 0.055 and 0.064, respectively, for a wide range of sun-sensor geometries and snow grain sizes. The model shows better accuracy for spectral albedo estimates than for those computed using the Lambertian reflectance assumption for snow, reducing the error in the range and standard deviation by 75% and 65%, respectively. Applying the model to MODIS, the retrieved albedo is found to be in good quantitative agreement (r = 0.82) with in-situ measurements. These improvements in albedo estimation should allow more accurate use of remote sensing measurements in climate and hydrological models.     

In vivo dosimetry with diodes in a radiotherapy department in Pakistan

The International Commission of Radiological Units (ICRU) sets a tolerance of ±5 % on dose delivery, with more recent data limiting the overall tolerances to ±3 %. One of the best methods for accurate dose delivery and quality check is in vivo dosimetry, while radiotherapy is performed. The present study was carried out to test the applicability of diodes for performing in vivo entrance dose measurements in external photon beam radiotherapy for pelvic tumours and its implementation as quality assurance tool in radiotherapy. During November 2007 to December 2009, in 300 patients who received pelvic radiotherapy on a multileaf-collimator-assisted linear accelerator, the central axis dose was measured by in vivo dosimetry by p-Si diodes. Entrance dose measurements were taken by diodes and were compared with the prescribed dose. Totally 1000 calculations were performed. The mean and standard deviation between measured and prescribed dose was 1.26 ± 2.8 %. In 938 measurements (93.8 %), the deviation was <5 % (1.36 ± 2.9%); in 62 measurements (6.2 %) the mean deviation was >5 % (5.51 ± 2.3 %). Larger variations were seen in lateral and oblique fields more than anteroposterior fields. For larger deviations, patients and diode positional errors were found to be the common factors alone or in combination with other factors. After additional corrections, repeated measurements were achieved within tolerance levels. This study showed that diode-detector-based in vivo dosimetry was simple, cost-effective, provides quick results and can serve as a useful quality assurance tool in radiotherapy. The data acquired in the present study can be used for evaluating output calibration of therapy machine, precision of calculations, effectiveness of treatment plan and patient setup.     

Evaluating ARM HPC clusters for scientific workloads

The power consumption of modern high‐performance computing (HPC) systems that are built using power hungry commodity servers is one of the major hurdles for achieving Exascale computation. Several efforts have been made by the HPC community to encourage the use of low‐powered system‐on‐chip (SoC) embedded processors in large‐scale HPC systems. These initiatives have successfully demonstrated the use of ARM SoCs in HPC systems, but there is still a need to analyze the viability of these systems for HPC platforms before a case can be made for Exascale computation. The major shortcomings of current ARM‐HPC evaluations include a lack of detailed insights about performance levels on distributed multicore systems and performance levels for benchmarking in large‐scale applications running on HPC. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of results that covers major aspects of server and HPC benchmarking for ARM‐based SoCs. For the experiments, we built an unconventional cluster of ARM Cortex‐A9s that is referred to as Weiser and ran single‐node benchmarks (STREAM, Sysbench, and PARSEC) and multi‐node scientific benchmarks (High‐performance Linpack (HPL), NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Parallel Benchmark, and Gadget‐2) in order to provide a baseline for performance limitations of the system. Based on the experimental results, we claim that the performance of ARM SoCs depends heavily on the memory bandwidth, network latency, application class, workload type, and support for compiler optimizations. During server‐based benchmarking, we observed that when performing memory intensive benchmarks for database transactions, x86 performed 12% better for multithreaded query processing. However, ARM performed four times better for performance to power ratios for a single core and 2.6 times better on four cores. We noticed that emulated double precision floating point in Java resulted in three to four times slower performance as compared with the performance in C for CPU‐bound benchmarks. Even though Intel x86 performed slightly better in computation‐oriented applications, ARM showed better scalability in I/O bound applications for shared memory benchmarks. We incorporated the support for ARM in the MPJ‐Express runtime and performed comparative analysis of two widely used message passing libraries. We obtained similar results for network bandwidth, large‐scale application scaling, floating‐point performance, and energy‐efficiency for clusters in message passing evaluations (NBP and Gadget 2 with MPJ‐Express and MPICH). Our findings can be used to evaluate the energy efficiency of ARM‐based clusters for server workloads and scientific workloads and to provide a guideline for building energy‐efficient HPC clusters. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Swelling and aspirin release study: cross-linked pH-sensitive vinyl acetate-co-acrylic acid (VAC-co-AA) hydrogels

The objective of this work was to develop new pH-sensitive hydrogels to deliver gastric mucosal irritating drugs to the lower part of the gastrointestinal tract. For this purpose, cross-linked vinyl acetate-co-acrylic acid (VAC-co-AA) hydrogels were synthesized by using N, N, methylene bisacrylamide (MBAAm) as a cross-linking agent. Different ratios of 90:10, 70:30, 50:50, 30:70, and 10:90 of VAC-co-AA were synthesized. All of the compositions were cross-linked using 0.15, 0.30, 0.45, and 0.60 mol percent MBAAm. Swelling and aspirin release were studied for 8 hour period. The drug release data were fitted into various kinetic models like the zero-order, first-order, Higuchi, and Peppas. Hydrogels were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. In addition to the above, these hydrogels were loaded with 2%, 8% and 14% w/v aspirin solutions, keeping the monomeric composition and degree of cross-linking constant. In conclusion, it can be said that aspirin can be successfully incorporated into cross-linked VAC/AA hydrogels and its swelling and drug release can be modulated by changing the mole fraction of the acid component in the gels.