Estimation of power generation potential of nonwoody biomass species

In view of high energy potentials in non-woody biomass species and an increasing interest in their utilization for power generation, an attempt has been made in this study to assess the proximate analysis and energy content of different components of Sida rhombifolia, Xanthium strumarium, Anisomeles lamiaceae and Eupatorium coelestinum biomass species (both non-woody), and their impact on power generation and land requirement for energy plantations. The net energy content in Sida is the highest. Xanthium biomass species appears to have slightly higher calorific values in its components than those of Anisomeles and Eupatorium. The pattern of variation of calorific value in the components like stump, branch, leaf and bark is not identical for all the presently studied biomass species. In all these studied biomass species, the calorific values of leaves, in general, are after stump and branch. The data for proximate and ultimate analysis of the components of these species are very close to each other and hence it is very difficult to draw a concrete conclusion. However, it appears from the present work that Eupatorium and Xanthium biomass species have the highest fixed carbon and lowest volatile matter contents in their stumps than the stumps of the others. As for ash fusion temperature The Sida biomass species has the highest values of IDT, ST, HT and FT (7860- 1490˚C) for its ash, followed by Anisomeles (740-1441˚C). Xanthium and Eupatorium have lower values for IDT, ST, HT and FT (670- 1244˚C) for their ashes. The results have shown that approximately 4, 7, 6 and 2 hectares of land are required to generate 20,000 kWh/day electricity from Sida rhombifolia, Eupatorium coelestinum, Xanthium strumarium and Anisomeles lamiaceae biomass species. Coal samples, obtained from six different local mines, were also examined for their qualities and the results were compared with those of studied biomass materials. This comparison reveals much higher power output with negligible emission of suspended particulate matters (SPM) from biomass materials

A low power selective median filter design

A selective median filter which consumes less power has been designed and different logics for majority bit evaluation has been applied and simulated in VHDL .It is rightly called as selective because an edge pixel detector [2] has been used to select those pixels which are to be processed through median filter. As for median value calculation; sorting of 3 x 3 window’s pixel values has been done using majority bit circuit [4].Different majority bit calculation method has been implemented and the result sorting circuit has been analyzed for power analysis. In this work a general median filter which uses binary sorting method known as Majority Voting Circuit (MVC) has been designed using VHDL and optimized using SYNOPSIS which has used 0.13μm CMOS technology .The digital design of sorting circuit saves approximately 60% of power comprising of cell leakage and dynamic power comparing to a mixed signal design of Floating gate based Majority bit median filter [4]. Before operating median filter on each pixel double derivative filter [2] has been applied to check whether it is an edge pixel or not. Overall this is a digital design of a mixed filter which preserves edges and removes noises as well.Low power techniques at logic level and algorithmic level have been embedded into this work. In our work we have also designed a small microprocessor using VHDL code. Later a memory (for the purpose of image storing) based Control Unit for single median value evaluation has been designed and simulated in XILINX. Here for sorting circuit a common logic based circuit (component) has been put forward. The power, latency or delay, area of whole design has been compared and tested with other designs