Stability and thermophysical properties of fly ash nanofluid for heat transfer applications

Improving the performance of heat transfer fluids is altogether significant. The best approach for improving the thermal conductivity is the addition of nanoparticles to the base fluid. In the present study, specific heat, dynamic viscosity, and thermal conductivity of water-based Indian coal fly ash stable nanofluid for 0.1% to 0.5% volume concentration in the temperature range of 30 to 60°C has been investigated. To evaluate an average particle diameter of 11.5 nm, the fly ash nanoparticles were characterized with scanning electron microscopy and dynamic light scattering. Using zeta potential, the stability of nanofluid in the presence of surfactant Triton X-100 was tested. Thermal conductivity and viscosity of fly ash nanofluid increased, while specific heat decreased as volume concentration increased. The effect of temperature on the fly ash nanofluid was directly proportional to its thermal conductivity and specific heat and inversely proportional to viscosity.     

A 150 MHz 0.6 μm BiCMOS superscalar microprocessor

An implementation of the Pentium microprocessor architecture in 0.6 μm BiCMOS technology is described. Power dissipation is reduced and performance is enhanced over the previous generation. Processor features, implementation technology, and circuit techniques are discussed. An internal clock rate of 150 MHz is achieved at 3.7 V and -55°C     

GPU accelerated novel particle filtering method

In this paper, a graphics processor unit (GPU) accelerated particle filtering algorithm is presented with an introduction to a novel resampling technique. The aim remains in the mitigation of particle impoverishment as well as computational burden, problems which are commonly associated with classical (systematic) resampled particle filtering. The proposed algorithm employs a priori-space dependent distribution in addition to the likelihood, and hence is christened as dual distribution dependent (D3) resampling method. Simulation results exhibit lesser values for root mean square error (RMSE) in comparison to that for systematic resampling. D3 resampling is shown to improve particle diversity after each iteration, thereby affecting the overall quality of estimation. However, computational burden is significantly increased owing to few excessive computations within the newly formulated resampling framework. With a view to obtaining parallel speedup we introduce a CUDA version of the proposed method for necessary acceleration by GPU. The GPU programming model is detailed in the context of this paper. Implementation issues are discussed along with illustration of empirical computational efficiency, as obtained by executing the CUDA code on Quadro 2000 GPU. The GPU enabled code has a speedup of 3 and 4 over the sequential executions of systematic and D3 resampling methods respectively. Performance both in terms of RMSE and running time have been elaborated with respect to different selections for threads per block towards effective implementations. It is in this context that, we further introduce a cost to performance metric (CPM) for assessing the algorithmic efficiency of the estimator, involving both quality of estimation and running time as comparative factors, transformed into a unified parameter for assessment. CPM values for estimators obtained from all such different choices for threads per block have been determined and a final value for the chosen parameter is resolved for generation of a holistic effective estimator.     

Effect of thiophosphoryl compounds as accelerators and coupling agents on the vulcanization of NR‐XNBR blend

The effect of a number of thiophosphoryl compounds [viz., bis(isobutyl) thiophosphoryl di‐, tri‐, and tetrasulfides and bis(dicyclohexyl) thiophopsphoryl di‐, tri‐, and tetrasulfides] on natural rubber (NR)‐carboxylated nitrile rubber (XNBR) blend was studied. All these thiophosphoryl compounds are capable of forming interrubber links leading to covulcanized blends which exhibit a fair degree of synergism with respect to physical properties, the maximum being obtained at the 25% NR and 75% XNBR blend composition. This is an obvious claim that the blend under investigation is technologically compatible, having some degree of interrubber interaction which is enhanced in case of two‐stage vulcanization. The existence of interrubber interaction is judged by the swelling experiment. The blend morphology assessed by SEM micrographs corroborates the foregoing observations and accounts for the significant improvement in physical properties of the blend vulcanizates, particularly in two‐stage vulcanization. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 86: 3286‐3299, 2002     

Developing a Dynamic Cluster Quantization based Lossless Audio Compression (DCQLAC)

In this paper, an approach has been made to produce a compressed audio without losing any information. The proposed scheme is fabricated with the help of dynamic cluster quantization followed by Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) and Huffman coding. The encoding algorithm has been designed in two phases, i.e., dynamic cluster selection (of sampled audio) followed by dynamic bit selection for determining quantization level of individual cluster. Quantization level of each cluster is selected dynamically based on mean square quantization error (MSQE). Bit stream is further compressed by applying Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) and Huffman code respectively. Experimental results are supported with current state-of-the-art in audio quality analysis (like statistical parameters (compression ratio, space savings, SNR, PSNR) along with other parameters (encoding time, decoding time, Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and entropy) and compared with other existing techniques.

     

Topography of the flank wear surface

In many applications, topography represents the main external features of a surface. This paper describes the topography of the flank wear surface and also presents the relationship between the maximum flank wear and the topography parameters (roughness parameters) of the flank wear surface during the turning operation. A modern CNC lathe machine (Okuma LH35-N) was used for the machine turning operation. Three-dimensional surface roughness parameters of the flank wear surface were measured by a surface texture instrument (from Talysurf series) using surface topography software (Talymap). Based on the resulting experimental data, it is found that as the flank wear increases, the roughness parameters (sR_a, sR_q, and sR_t) on the flank surface increase significantly. The greater the roughness value of the flank wear surface, the higher the friction of the tool on the workpiece and the greater the heat generation that will occur, thus ultimately causing tool failure. On the other hand, positive skewness (sR_sk) indicates the presence of a small number of spikes on the flank surface of the cutting tool, which could quickly wear off during the machining process.     

Text-dependent speaker verification using classical LBG,adaptive LBG and FCM vector quantization

An important task of speaker verification is to generate speaker specific models and match an input speaker’s utterance with these models. This paper focuses on comparing the performance of text dependent speaker verification system using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients feature and different Vector Quantization (VQ) based speaker modelling techniques to generate the speaker specific models. Speaker-specific information is mainly represented by spectral features and using these features we have developed the model which serves as an important entity for determining the claimed identity of the speaker. In the modelling part, we used Linde, Buzo, Gray (LBG) VQ, proposed adaptive LBG VQ and Fuzzy C Means (FCM) VQ for generating speaker specific model. The experimental results that are performed on microphonic database shows that accuracy significantly depends on the size of the codebook in all VQ techniques, and on FCM VQ accuracy also depend on the value of learning parameter of the objective function. Experiment results shows that how the accuracy of speaker verification system is depend on different representations of the codebook, different size of codebook in VQ modelling techniques and learning parameter in FCM VQ.     

Taming the killer in the kitchen: mitigating household air pollution from solid-fuel cookstoves through building design

In this study, we attempt to mitigate household air pollution (HAP) through improved kitchen design. Field surveys were conducted in ten kitchens of rural western India, which were then modelled and simulated for dynamic indoor airflow network analysis. The simulated results were statistically clustered using principal component analysis and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, to construct a cumulative built environment parameter called ‘Built Factor’ for each kitchen, and subsequently a derivative matrix was developed. Categorization of better performing kitchens from this derivative matrix enabled in deriving the built parameter thresholds for a ‘better’ kitchen design. This derived kitchen showed 60 % reduction in PM2.5 peak concentration during cooking hours. The evaluation described here is essentially a “proof of concept”, that effective building design can be an alternative way to reduce HAP without the introduction of chimneys, improved cookstoves or shifting to cleaner fuel.     

Lattice Boltzmann method simulation of electroosmotic stirring in a microscale cavity

The suitable surface modification of microfluidic channels can enable a neutral electrolyte solution to develop an electric double layer (EDL). The ions contained within the EDL can be moved by applying an external electric field, inducing electroosmotic flows (EOFs) that results in associated stirring. This provides a solution for the rapid mixing required for many microfluidic applications. We have investigated EOFs generated by applying a steady electric field across a square cavity that has homogenous electric potentials along its walls. The flowfield is simulated using the lattice Boltzmann method. The extent of mixing is characterized for different electrode configurations and electric field strengths. We find that rapid mixing can be achieved by using this simple configuration which increases with increasing electric field strength. The mixing time for water-soluble organic molecules can be decreased by four orders of magnitude by suitable choice of wall zeta potential and electric field. We dedicate this paper to the memory of our colleagues Professors Kevin Granata and Liviu Librescu who fell tragically on April 16, 2007 while answering their call to serve higher education. They continue to inspire us. AM gratefully acknowledges support from Jadavpur University under the World Bank funded Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme of the Government of India and the hospitality of the Virginia Tech ESM Department where he conducted a portion of this work.