Densification of 8Y‐Tetragonal‐Stabilized Zirconia Optoceramics with Improved Optical Properties by Y Segregation

8% Yttria‐stabilized zironcia (8YSZ) transparent ceramics have a wide technological applications. Segregation of the Y around the grain boundaries is favored by slow heating rate. The optimized sintering parameters helped in obtaining transparent ceramics of 8YSZ with a high percentage of cubic phase in addition to the presence of tetragonal phase. HRTEM was used to verify the grain growth suppression and to observe the presence of the cubic phase. The presence of cubic phase has suppressed the grain growth, which increased the transparency in the visible and infrared region without the addition of dopants or by utilizing high pressure.     

Time trends in the intrafamily distribution of dietary energy in rural India

The intrafamily distribution of dietary energy in 5,458 households from seven states in India was assessed from 24-hour dietary recall data collected by the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau during 1996-97. The energy consumption, expressed as percentage of recommended dietary intake (%RDI), of preschool children, schoolchildren, and adolescents was compared with that of adult men and women in the same households. Time trends in the intrafamily distribution of dietary energy were assessed by comparing the data with those collected in 1975-80 using the same procedures in the same villages. About one-third of the preschool children had an inadequate intake of energy, even when their adult counterparts had an adequate intake, whereas only about 7% of the preschoolers and their parents were consuming inadequate amounts of energy. The extent of energy inadequacy was much less in adolescents and school-age children than in preschool children. This was true even when the adults in the same households had an adequate energy intake. In 1996-97, there was a significant increase in the proportion of households with preschool children consuming inadequate energy, although both adult men and women were consuming energy-adequate diets as compared with the dietary data collected in the same villages in 1975-80. The results indicate the need to provide effective nutrition education for parents regarding the nutritional needs of their children.     

Enhanced Active Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks

Wireless networks play a very important role in today’s modern world, convincingly surpassing the wired infrastructure in terms of popularity. Hence, it is important to ensure that services which access wired networks should also be accessible using a wireless network without any performance degradation. One of the most common variants in wireless communications is the Wireless Mesh Network (WMNs). WMNs exploit multi-hop wireless communications between wireless access points. Hence, the effective bandwidth decreases as the number of hops increases in a WMN, thus increasing latency and resulting in reduced performance. This may be due to spatial contention, multipath fading, interference or inefficient queuing mechanisms etc. Here we take queuing mechanisms into consideration and study the QMMN algorithm (Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks) which tends to improve throughput, fairness and reduce global synchronization problems. Based on our study, we implement a modified version of the QMMN algorithm, otherwise called the Enhanced QMMN (EQMMN) algorithm. EQMMN can be considered an effective algorithm which solves the problem of fairness between flows (either responsive or unresponsive) and eventually improves TCP throughput at wireless access points. Our experimental results prove that EQMMN algorithms have better performance characteristics such as throughput (TCP) and fairness index compared to QMMN algorithms.     

Prediction of Humidification Power in Textile-Spinning Mills Using Functional and Neural Networks

The power required for the supply, pumping, and exhaust system of the humidification plant of a spinning department of a textile mill depends on many factors. The most important factors are power of motor driving machinery, lighting and heating load, number of people inside, temperature gradient, and relative humidity. The usual procedure is to train the back-propagation neural network (BPN) with the available data and, once it is trained, BPN will be used for inferring. Some other investigators have used different neural network architectures. In this article, we give a general methodology to build and work with functional network (FN), an alternative to neural network paradigm. In this architecture neural functions, instead of weights, are learned. In addition to data, domain knowledge can also be incorporated. It is shown by means of an example that this functional network architecture is successfully applied to predict power required for the humidification plants.     

Vertically oriented Ti-Fe-O nanotube array films: toward a useful material architecture for solar spectrum water photoelectrolysis

In an effort to obtain a material architecture suitable for high-efficiency visible spectrum water photoelectrolysis, herein we report on the fabrication and visible spectrum (380-650 nm) photoelectrochemical properties of self-aligned, vertically oriented Ti-Fe-O nanotube array films. Ti-Fe metal films of variable composition, iron content ranging from 69% to 3.5%, co-sputtered onto FTO-coated glass are anodized in an ethylene glycol + NH4F electrolyte. The resulting amorphous samples are annealed in oxygen at 500 degrees C, resulting in nanotubes composed of a mixed Ti-Fe-O oxide. Some of the iron goes into the titanium lattice substituting titanium ions, and the rest either forms alpha-Fe2O3 crystallites or remains in the amorphous state. Depending upon the Fe content, the band gap of the resulting films ranges from about 380 to 570 nm. The Ti-Fe oxide nanotube array films are utilized in solar spectrum water photoelectrolysis, demonstrating 2 mA/cm2 under AM 1.5 illumination with a sustained, time-energy normalized hydrogen evolution rate by water splitting of 7.1 mL/W.hr in a 1 M KOH solution with a platinum counter electrode under an applied bias of 0.7 V. The surface morphology, structure, elemental analysis, optical, and photoelectrochemical properties of the Ti-Fe oxide nanotube array films are considered.     

Evaluation and testing of analytical methods for cyanide species in municipal and industrial contaminated waters

Total cyanide analysis by distillation is used most commonly to assess cyanide content of water samples. This manual method is robust but slow and provides no information about cyanide speciation, a significant limitation in that cyanide species have substantially different toxicity characteristics. Seven alternative methods for the analysis of cyanide species or groups of species were evaluated in reagent water and five different contaminated water matrices, including five species-specific methods--weak acid dissociable (WAD) cyanide, free cyanide by microdiffusion, available cyanide, automated WAD cyanide by thin film distillation, metal cyanides by ion chromatography--and two automated techniques for total cyanide--total cyanide bythin film distillation and total cyanide by low-power UV digestion. The species-specific cyanide analytical techniques achieved low, ppb-level detection limits and exhibited satisfactory accuracy and precision for most contaminated waters. Analysis of low concentrations of cyanide species in raw wastewater was problematical for the available cyanide and ion chromatography methods, which experienced significant interference problems and/or low recoveries. There was recovery of significant diffusible cyanide in microdiffusion tests with nickel-cyanide-spiked samples, reflecting dissociation of this weak metal-cyanide complex during the test and demonstrating that the test can recover some fraction of WAD cyanide in addition to free cyanide. The automated total cyanide methods, which involve UV digestion, achieved low detection limits for most waters but exhibited low recoveries for some waters.     

Low Latency,Area and Optimal Power Hybrid Lightweight Cryptography Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is proved as technologically competent connecting many devices via the internet. Now in networks transmitting a large quantity of data in a secure manner is of vital concern as communication is on the increase. Hence an efficient cryptographic methodology is essential to transmit securely. However, conventional encryption algorithms are having high computational complexity, more power consumption and high memory occupation. In this paper, low latency, area and optimal power Hybrid Lightweight Cryptography Authentication Scheme which is utilizing the 8-bit manipulation principle (HLCAS) is proposed and implemented. For such a method verification is done and validated for speech signal utilizing MATLAB. The correlation and histogram attributes have been computed to validate the security level. The complexity of the hardware is validated utilizing devices of FPGA of Spartan3E XC3S500E. From the implementation result, it has been found that the proposed HLCAS method has 5.4 ns latency, 0.9 K bytes RAM and consumes 202 mW power. From the comparison with a few reported methods it has been observed that the proposed HLCAS method outperform other methods.

     

Environmental degradation in major ports of India

The levels of SPM, SO₂ and NO_X in all major ports of India were estimated as a part of studies on the impact of dusty cargo handling activity in major ports on their air and water environments. Most of the dusty cargoes, which were being handled by the major ports, are collected and leached with distilled water for qualitative and quantitative estimation of water leachable parameters. The analysis was carried out using A AS, ICP‐MS and a spectrophotometer apart from classical methods. The levels of air pollutants in each port were discussed in the light of activities in and around the port area. The results of this study revealed that apart from activities in and around the port areas, the mode of handling of dusty cargo in any port plays a vital role on its air and water environments. This study emphasises the need to set the standards for the emissions of air pollutants during the handling of dusty cargo in major ports.     

The synthesis and photophysical studies of quinoxaline and pyridopyrazine derivatives

A simple and facile method for the synthesis of 2,3-bis[(E)-2-aryl vinyl]-quinoxaline and 2,3-bis[(E)-2-aryl vinyl]-pyrido(2,3-b)pyrazine is described. Condensation of cinnamils with 1,2-diaminobenzene and 2,3-diaminopyridine in water using conventional heating and microwave irradiation afforded high yields (71–92%) of 2,3-bis[(E)-2-aryl vinyl]-quinoxalines and 2,3-bis[(E)-2-arylvinyl]-pyrido(2,3-b)pyrazines. The photophysical properties of the resultant quinoxaline and pyrazine derivatives were studied; the pyridopyrazine derivatives were found to exhibit halochromism.     

Application specific thresholding scheme for handover reduction in 5G Ultra Dense Networks

Telecommunication Systems - Traditional multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) algorithms are used in the handover of user equipment (UE) in an Ultra Dense Network (UDN). UDN refers to the increased...