Bio-diesel as an alternative fuel for diesel engines—A review

The present review aims to study the prospects and opportunities of introducing vegetable oils and their derivatives as fuel in diesel engines. In our country the ratio of diesel to gasoline fuel is 7:1, depicting a highly skewed situation. Thus, it is necessary to replace fossil diesel fuel by alternative fuels. Vegetable oils present a very promising scenario of functioning as alternative fuels to fossil diesel fuel. The properties of these oils can be compared favorably with the characteristics required for internal combustion engine fuels. Fuel-related properties are reviewed and compared with those of conventional diesel fuel. Peak pressure development, heat release rate analysis, and vibration analysis of the engine are discussed in relation with the use of bio-diesel and conventional diesel fuel. Optimization of alkali-catalyzed transesterification of Pungamia pinnata oil for the production of bio-diesel is discussed. Use of bio-diesel in a conventional diesel engine results in substantial reduction in unburned hydrocarbon (UBHC), carbon monoxide (CO), particulate matters (PM) emission and oxide of nitrogen. The suitability of injection timing for diesel engine operation with vegetable oils and its blends, environmental considerations are discussed. Teardown analysis of bio-diesel B20-operated vehicle are also discussed.     

An efficient color and texture based iris image retrieval technique

This paper proposes a hierarchical approach to retrieve an iris image efficiently from for a large iris database. This approach is a combination of both iris color and texture. Iris color is used for indexing and texture is used for retrieval of iris images from the indexed iris database. An index which is determined from the iris color is used to filter out the images that are not similar to the query image in color. Further, iris texture features of those filtered images, are used to determine the images which are similar to the query image. The iris color information helps to design an efficient indexing scheme based on color indices. The color indices are computed by averaging the intensity values of all red and blue color pixels. Kd-tree is used for real-time indexing based on color indices. The iris texture features are obtained through Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm. These features are used to get the query’s corresponding image at the top best match. The performance of the proposed indexing scheme is compared with two well known iris indexing schemes ( [Mehrotra et al., 2010] and [Puhan and Sudha, 2008]) on UPOL (Dobeš, Machala, Tichavský, & Posp?´šil, 2004) and UBIRIS (Proencca & Alexandre, 2005) iris databases. It is observed that combination of iris color and texture improves the performance of iris recognition system.     

Recognition in the near infrared spectrum for face,gender and facial expressions

Visible face recognition systems are subjected to failure when recognizing the faces in unconstrained scenarios. So, recognizing faces under variable and low illumination conditions are more important since most of the security breaches happen during night time. Near Infrared (NIR) spectrum enables to acquire high quality images, even without any external source of light and hence it is a good method for solving the problem of illumination. Further, the soft biometric trait, gender classification and non verbal communication, facial expression recognition has also been addressed in the NIR spectrum. In this paper, a method has been proposed to recognize the face along with gender classification and facial expression recognition in NIR spectrum. The proposed method is based on transfer learning and it consists of three core components, i) training with small scale NIR images ii) matching NIR-NIR images (homogeneous) and iii) classification. Training on NIR images produce features using transfer learning which has been pre-trained on large scale VIS face images. Next, matching is performed between NIR-NIR spectrum of both training and testing faces. Then it is classified using three, separate SVM classifiers, one for face recognition, the second one for gender classification and the third one for facial expression recognition. It has been observed that the method gives state-of-the-art accuracy on the publicly available, challenging, benchmark datasets CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0, Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS, PolyU, CBSR, IIT Kh and HITSZ for face recognition. Further, for gender classification the Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS, PolyU,and IIT Kh has been analyzed and for facial expression the Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS dataset has been analyzed.

     

A technique to match highly similar 3D objects with an application to biomedical security

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Biometric technologies such as the face, fingerprint, and iris recognition have important utility in biomedical and healthcare applications. The use of...     

Production and analysis of bio-diesel from non-edible oils—A review

Bio-diesel has become more attractive recently because of its environmental benefits and it is derived from renewable resources, bio degradable and non-toxic in nature. Several bio-diesel production methods have been developed, among which transesterification using alkali catalyst gives high level of conversion of triglycerides to their corresponding methyl ester in short reaction time. The process of transesterification is affected by the reaction condition, molar ratio of alcohol to oil, type of alcohol, type and amount of catalysts, reaction time and temperature, purity of reactants free fatty acids and water content of oils or fats. In this work, an attempt has been made on review of bio-diesel production, methods of analyzing, bio-diesel standard, resources available, process developed performance in internal combustion engines, teardown analysis of bio-diesel B20 operated vehicle, recommendation for development of bio-fuels, environmental considerations, economic aspects and advantages. The technical tools and process for monitoring the transesterification reaction like TLC, GC, HPLC, GPC, ¹H NMR and NIR have also been summarized in this paper.     

A Scalable Block Chain Framework for User Identity Management in a Decentralized Network

Wireless Personal Communications - This paper presents two protocols in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network, namely base station (BS), based power splitting protocol (PSR) and BS based...     

Growth and characterization of 2-(meta-methoxyphenyl) thiazolidine

2-(meta-methoxyphenyl) thiazolidine (hereafter called 2mmpT) has medicinal importance, as the five-membered thiazolidine ring happens to be the active part of penicillin. This material has been synthesized and crystallized. The crystals are needle-shaped and of dimensions 0.3 × 0.5 × 1.5mm³ using X-ray diffraction technique, oscillation and Weissenberg patterns of the sample are taken. It is shown that the crystal is monoclinic and the unit cell parameters are found to be a = 1.007(5) nm, b=0.545(3) nm, c=1.720(8) nm and =71.3(3)°. The space group is P2₁/c.From IR absorption spectrum of the sample, the characteristic peak pertaining to NH at 3250cm^–1 has been identified. The proton magnetic resonance (PMR) spectrum of the sample unambiguously supports the proposed structure of the compound. It has been confirmed that thiazolidine complex in the present case is a cyclic and not a linear one. The implications are discussed.