Leakage analysis of gasketed flange joints under combined internap pressure and thermal loading

Leakage in Gasketed Flanged Joints (GFJs) have always been a great problem for the process industry. The sealing performance of a GFJ depends on its installation and applied loading conditions. This paper aims to finding the leak rate through ANSI class#150 flange joints using a compressed asbestos sheet (CAS) gasket under combined structural and thermal transient loading conditions using two different leak rate models and two different bolt-up levels. The first model is a Gasket Compressive Strain model in which strains are determined using finite element analysis. The other model is based on Porous Media Theory in which gasket is considered as porous media. Leakage rates are determined using both leak rate models and are compared against appropriate tightness classes and the effectiveness of each approach is presented

Minimal hepatic encephalopathy: Effect of H. pylori infection and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth treatment on clinical outcomes

The effect Helicobacter pylori (Hp) infection and small intestinal bacterial over growth (SIBO) in minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE) is not well understood. The aim of the study was to determine the effect of eradication of Hp infection and SIBO treatment on MHE in patients with cirrhosis. Patients with cirrhosis were enrolled and MHE was determined by psychometric tests and critical flicker frequency analysis. Hp infection and SIBO were assessed by urea breath and Hydrogen breath tests respectively in patients with cirrhosis and in healthy volunteers. Patients with Hp infection and SIBO were given appropriate treatment. At six weeks follow-up, presence of Hp infection, SIBO and MHE status was reassessed. Ninety patients with cirrhosis and equal number of healthy controls were included. 55 (61.1%) patients in the cirrhotic group were diagnosed to have underlying MHE. Among cirrhotic group, Hp infection was present in 28 with MHE (50.9%) vs. in 15 without MHE (42.8%) (p = 0.45). Similarly, SIBO was present in 17 (30.9%) vs. 11 (31.4%) (p = 0.95) in patients with and without MHE respectively. In comparison with healthy controls, patients with cirrhosis were more frequently harboring Hp and SIBO (47.7% vs. 17.7% (p \u3c 0.001) and 31.1% vs. 4.4% (p \u3c 0.001) respectively. On follow-up, all patients showed evidence of eradication of Hp and SIBO infection. Treatment of SIBO significantly improved the state of MHE in cirrhotics, however eradication of Hp infection did not improve MHE significantly. Additionally, patients with low Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score and belonging to Child class B had significantly better improvement in MHE. A large number of patients with cirrhosis had either active Hp infection or SIBO with or without MHE, compared to healthy controls. Treatment of SIBO significantly improved MHE in patients with cirrhosis, whereas eradication of Hp did not affect the outcome of MHE in these patients

AlGaInAs/InP Based Five & Three Quantum Wells Mode Locked Laser Diodes: A Comparative Study

Comparison of performance of semiconductor mode-locked laser diodes fabricated using AlGaInAs/InP material containing 5 and 3 quantum wells (QWs) inside the active region is reported. The simulations and experimental results show that lasers containing five QWs materials produce larger beam divergence and temporally broader optical pulses. For improvement in the mode-locking of lasers and reducing the far-field pattern, the number of QWs inside the active region was decreased from five to three and a far-field decreasing layer along with a thick spacer layer were introduced in the n-cladding region of epitaxial material. Before growing the material, simulations were carried out to optimise the design. The lower optical confinement factor and higher gain saturation energy of three QWs based mode-locked lasers provide higher average and peak output power, reduced and symmetric far-field pattern, better radio frequency (RF) spectra, shorter optical pulses, and stable optimal mode-locking for a wide range of gain current and saturable absorber reverse voltage

Sports Culture in South Asia: Effects of Modern Bowling Action Rules on Cricket, an Information Technology Perspective

Cricket, a famous game played and watched at its peak in Asia. The game is governed by International Cricket Council (ICC). It is a team sport of eleven players in each side with different roles, of which one is bowler. The bowlers have followed different styles of bowling sinces game has started, of which some declared illegal initially. In our study, we have focused on the cases of illegality reported form South Asian region in post 1990 period a new era of biomechanics based bowling laws started. We have also investigated the updated ICC process for bowlers review and remedy along with biomechanics based labs established worldwide. Finally, we have proposed a new information technology based bowling action evaluation solution, lower in cost and affordable at domestic level. Such study will help bowlers, their coaches and viewers to understand the biomechanics based bowling laws, standings of South Asian bowling after these laws and alternative solutions to rescue it

A Roadmap to Elevate Pakistan Sign Language among Regional Sign Languages

Several nations have worked hard to make their societies truly inclusive by developing gadgets, tools, services, and applications. A lot of work has been done for bringing the deaf community to the mainstream. Tools and applications exist for several sign languages including American Sign Language (ASL), Chinese Sign Language (CSL), Indian Sign Language (ISL) and Arabic Sign Language (ArSL). These tools help translating natural language text into respective sign language and vice versa. Similarly, standard corpora exist for all afore-mentioned sign languages and for many other languages. Unfortunately, no such noticeable development exists in the case of Pakistan Sign Language (PSL). This research aims to define a roadmap for the development of Pakistan Sign Language so as to bring it at par with other sign languages of the world.&nbsp

Toward an integrated disaster management approach: How artificial intelligence can boost disaster management

Technical and methodological enhancement of hazards and disaster research is identified as a critical question in disaster management. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as tracking and mapping, geospatial analysis, remote sensing techniques, robotics, drone technology, machine learning, telecom and network services, accident and hot spot analysis, smart city urban planning, transportation planning, and environmental impact analysis, are the technological components of societal change, having significant implications for research on the societal response to hazards and disasters. Social science researchers have used various technologies and methods to examine hazards and disasters through disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary lenses. They have employed both quantitative and qualitative data collection and data analysis strategies. This study provides an overview of the current applications of AI in disaster management during its four phases and how AI is vital to all disaster management phases, leading to a faster, more concise, equipped response. Integrating a geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) into disaster management enables higher planning, analysis, situational awareness, and recovery operations. GIS and RS are commonly recognized as key support tools for disaster management. Visualization capabilities, satellite images, and artificial intelligence analysis can assist governments in making quick decisions after natural disasters

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON AMONG LOCAL AND FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES WEBSITES USING SEO TOOLS

Websites are the main contributors of today’s businesses and assisting the users to surge business throughout the world by the search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are endlessly losing. In order to get greater business values and results website optimization is very indispensable. Websites that are not optimized their visitors and successively losing business. SEO is a process to increase a prominence of website on search engine and test whether user are contented or not with our content (Websites or Blogs). Most of the search engines (like Google Yahoo, Baidu and Ask.com) deliver instructions to the website owner/developers to craft their content according to their search engine philosophy. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize and compare overall website’s performance of the five Foreign and local universities. For this study, we used two different SEO tools named as Nibbler and SEOPTIMER. We evaluated websites with seventeen parameters of Nibbler and five of the SEOPTIMER. Some of the parameters are Social Interest, URL formats, Internal Links, Heading, Images, Page titles, Social media pages (Twitter, Facebook). This work will benefit us in achieving idea about the strength and weaknesses of these websites, and whose websites are enhanced and optimized. In this study we have enlightened essential SEO features for developing an academic websites for achieving better SERP ranking

Speak Pakistan: Challenges in Developing Pakistan Sign Language using Information Technology

Gesture based communication called Sign Language (SL) is the fundamental communication channel between hard of hearing individuals. Communication through signing is a visual motion dialect. Hard of hearing individuals use gesture based communication as their primary medium for correspondence. Different countries have their own sign language as the United States of America has American Sign Language (ASL), China has Chinese Sign Language (CSL), India has Indian Sign Language (ISL), and similarly Pakistan has Pakistan Sign Language (PSL). Most of the developed nations have addressed the issues of their hearing impaired people by launching projects involving Information Technology to reduce this gap between a deaf and a normal person. In central and south Asia, a considerable work has been conducted on ISL and CSL. However, Pakistan Sign Language is a linguistically under-investigated in the absence of any structured information about the language contents, grammar, and tools and services for communication. Hence, the major contributions of this research are to highlight the challenges to bridge this communication gap for Pakistani deaf community by using the existing literature, and to propose an Information Technology based architectural framework to identify major components to build applications which may help bridging the gap between the deaf and normal people of the country

A Strategy for the Promotion of Computer Programming Using Urdu Language in Pakistan

Software industry has proven to be a stepping stone towards changing the rank of a country in the comity of nations. In South Asian region, India has immensely excelled her economic growth by increasing its revenues with the help of software export. The development of software involves man power with technical support, where the premier focus in on computer programming. Therefore, producing a large number of skillful computer programmers in Pakistan would certainly help the cause of establishing software houses, which in turn, will attract the western world to outsource their software projects to Pakistan. Like India, this can certainly act like a game changer for Pakistan’s economy by earning a huge revenue. In this research we have presented a methodology to increase the interest of Pakistani people in computer programming by providing a bilingual computer program development environment in Urdu and English languages. This act may certainly open new dimensions of teaching computer programming, for instance, by introducing computer programming at school level. Furthermore, it may increase the interest of students and teachers to learn and teach computer programming while experiencing to program in their national language. Lastly, in technical terms, we have presented the visual design of such bilingual environment along with architectural modification in the preprocessor for C++ language to support both Urdu and English languages for writing computer program