PROBABLISTIC ASSESSMENT OF ROOF UPLIFT CAPACITIES IN LOW-RISE RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION

Post hurricane damage investigations of light frame wood residential structures reveal that roof envelope failure induces considerable damage to the structure and its contents. Roof - to - wall (RTW) connection failures though not as common as roof sheathing failure also cause significant structural and material damage. Considerable changes have been made in the ASCE structural loads standard and International Building code (IBC) after hurricane Andrew in order to prevent RTW connection and sheathing failures. That includes not only a substantial increase in the design wind load in the past two decades but also a strict enforcement of tighter nailing schedules and stronger RTW connections (metal straps and hurricane ties). However a significant number of older buildings constructed with toenailed RTW connections exist and their safety and reliability needs to be investigated. Hence there is an apparent need to statistically understand the behavior of toenailed RTWconnections in existing buildings. Fragility analysis of roofs of older buildings will provide an insight on the prevailing level of safety and help to identify the shortcomings and the associated ramifications. Experimental statistics and analytical models of the toenail behavior and sheathing fasteners will help to formulate accurate roof fragility estimations. Estimation of the effect of wind load spatial correlation on the fragility estimation and the sensitivity of fragility curves to various modeling assumptions will further enhance the credibility of roof system fragility analysis methodologies. Since hurricane ties have replaced toenailed RTW connections in modern residential construction and are used as a retrofit measure to complement existing toenail connection capacities, understanding their behavior under high loads is essential. Experimental tests on hurricane ties subjected to uplift and combined (uplift and lateral) loads will not only provide an insight on the advantage of their usage in hurricane prone areas but also help in identifying the available design space when subjected to multi-axial loads. This information is crucial while developing statistical and analytical models for hurricane ties. This research study evaluated the in-situ capacity of roof-to-wall connections and sheathing to rafter fasteners in light-framed wood construction. The outcome of this study was an analytical model designed to approximate the uplift behavior of toenail connections and to facilitate modeling of roof systems. In addition, the study experimentally examined three very common hurricane ties under uni-axial, bi-axial and tri-axial loads. After testing over 350 connections and performing detailed analyses, the currently used design equation for combined loads was found to be inefficient (least usable design space) and overly conservative. A new design space taking a 25% reduction on all allowable loads for hurricane ties when subjected to multi-axis load is proposed. A finite element model of a light frame gable roof system was created using the developed analytical model of the RTW toenail connections and sheathing fasteners. Assessment of the overall impact of RTW and sheathing connector behavior on the wind-uplift fragility curves for the roof system was achieved using a Latin-hypercube based simulation strategy. It was found that the treatment of post ultimate connection behavior had a significant influence on the fragility assessment of the roof system. However assigning variable and uniform stiffness for roof-to-wall connectors and sheathing fasteners had little to no effect on the distribution pattern of wind uplift load among connectors. Additionally, the effects of gable end supports, sheathing thickness, nailing schedule and wind pressure spatial correlation on the fragility estimation were explored. The results indicated that the fragility estimations of both roof to wall connections and sheathing panel systems are not sensitive to the spatial correlation of wind pressure for wind perpendicular to the ridge

FAULT DETECTION AND CONTROLLING OF SHELL AND TUBE HEAT EXCHANGER USING ANN

Fault Detection and controlling is important in many industries to provide safe operation of a process. Heat Exchangers are generally used in process industries. Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger  is a common type of heat exchanger used in oil refineries, chemical processes .It is suited for higher-pressure applications. Actuator faults, sensor faults and process faults are the common faults occurring in chemical processes. To identify and remove these type of faults in the system fault detection and controlling techniques are proposed.  In this present work Sensor and Process faults of Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger is detected and controlled using Artificial Neural Network(ANN).NARX network (Nonlinear Auto regressive with External input) is used as ANN network structure. Network is trained using Levenberg Marquardt and Bayesian Regularization algorithms. The performance parameters such as Mean Square Error, Integral Absolute Error (IAE), Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE) and Integral Square Error (ISE) are obtained for the above said methods which are shown in simulation results. Tabulated results shows the comparison between the three algorithms. Simulation results also shows the comparison between the controlled response obtained from ANN with and without PID Controller.Â

Studies on nutrient solubilization, biocontrol and plant growth promoting traits of Burkholderia cepacia from tea soil

A study was undertaken to isolate a novel indigenous bacterial strain namely Burkholderia cepacia from tea soils to solubilize potassium (K) and phosphorus (P) sources respectively. The isolated strain was screened based on its solubilization potential in both broth and agarized medium amended with various K and P sources. Plant growth promoting traits and biocontrol activity of the purified strain against tea pathogens such as Pestalotiopsis theae, Glomerella cingulata, Poria hypolateritia, Phomopsis theae and Hypoxylon serpens were studied. Results revealed a significant solubilizing zone in agar medium blended with muriate of potash (MOP) (2.0 cm), sulphate of potash (SOP) (1.2 cm), rock phosphate (1.6 cm) and single super phosphate (0.8 cm). The release of available K was quantified in liquid medium supplemented with MOP and was found to be higher (41.5 mg L-1) than SOP. Among different P sources, rock phosphate (35.2 mg L-1) showed higher solubilization than single super phosphate (30.2 mg L-1) by the test organism on 5th day of incubation. B. cepacia was found to produce a large amount of bioactive compounds like siderophore (12.3 μg mL-1), IAA (263.3 μg mL-1) and GA3 (14.9 μg mL-1) including exo-polysaccharides (46.8 ppm). The test organism also showed a remarkable biocontrol activity against P. theae (52.5%), G. cingulata (42.5%), H. serpens (47.5%), Phomopsis theae (32.7%) and P. hypolateritia (30.9%). The secondary metabolites production by an efficient strain B. cepacia revealed that the strain could produce a wide range of volatile compounds

Antimicrobial activity of important Indian medicinal plants against Pyogenic infection

The antimicrobial activity of crude extracts of five medicinal plants used in traditional Indian medicine was tested against five   important  pyogenic bacteria.They are Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Streptococcus pneumoniae. Of the five medicinal plants used only three were showed considerable antimicrobial activity against one or more species of microorganisms tested. Among the three solvents used the most effective extract was found to be methanol extraction. The most effective antimicrobial plant was identified as Glycyrriza glabra followed by Dathura metal, Coccinia grandis. Least activity was observed in  Sida spinosa, and Lab lab purpureus.       ÂÂ

A SECURED SEARCHING IN CLOUD DATA USING CRYPTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUE

ABSTRACT Cloud computing is the long dreamed vision of computing as a utility, where users can remotely store their data into the cloud so as to enjoy the on-demand high quality applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing. Today, many such applications require a proof of result correctness. It has been envisioned as the next generation architecture of IT Enterprise. As it becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive information are being centralized into the cloud. In contrast to traditional solutions, where the IT services are under proper physical, logical and personnel controls, Cloud Computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centers, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. For the protection of data privacy, sensitive data usually have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes effective data utilization a very challenging task. With the advent of cloud computing, data owners are motivated to outsource their complex data management systems from local sites to commercial public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. But for protecting data privacy, which obsoletes traditional data utilization based on plaintext keyword search. Multistep processing is commonly used for nearest neighbor (NN) and similarity search in applications involving high dimensional data and/or costly distance computations. Although traditional searchable encryption schemes allow a user to securely search over encrypted data through keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest, these techniques support only exact keyword search. This paper explores various secured searching algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Secured Socket Layer (SSL), and Knowledge nearest Neighbor (k-NN)

Probing Arabidopsis Chloroplast Diacylglycerol Pools by Selectively Targeting Bacterial Diacylglycerol Kinase to Suborganellar Membranes

Diacylglycerol (DAG) is an intermediate in metabolism of both triacylglycerols and membrane lipids. Probing the steady-state pools of DAG and understanding how they contribute to the synthesis of different lipids is important when designing plants with altered lipid metabolism. However, traditional methods of assaying DAG pools are difficult, because its abundance is low and because fractionation of subcellular membranes affects DAG pools. To manipulate and probe DAG pools in an in vivo context, we generated multiple stable transgenic lines of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) that target an Escherichia coli DAGkinase (DAGK) to each leaflet of each chloroplast envelope membrane. E. coli DAGKis small, self inserts into membranes, and has catalytic activity on only one side of each membrane. By comparing whole-tissue lipid profiles between our lines, we show that each line has an individual pattern of DAG, phosphatidic acid, phosphatidylcholine, and triacylglycerol steady-state levels, which supports an individual function of DAG in each membrane leaflet. Furthermore, conversion of DAG in the leaflets facing the chloroplast intermembrane space by DAGK impairs plant growth. As a result of DAGK presence in the outer leaflet of the outer envelope membrane, phosphatidic acid accumulation is not observed, likely because it is either converted into other lipids or removed to othermembranes. Finally, we use the outer envelope-targeted DAGK line as a tool to probe the accessibility of DAG generated in response to osmotic stress

Current Trends in Usage of Traditional System of Medicine in Tamilnadu, India - From the Perspective of Occupation

Socio-economic parameters have significant impact on consumer’s attitude towards the usage of traditional system of medicine in Tamilnadu, India. Though traditional systems of medicine have made significant contributions towards fulfilling healthcare needs of the people in the past, impacts of modern medicine have been so large that traditional medicine witnessed a dark period in India. While such practices are common in the rural/ remote areas, off late, change in the trend with respect to the usage of Siddha medicine as complementary alternative therapy among urban population has been observed. Present study aims to evaluate the resurgence of interest in Siddha medicine among the people working in different sectors (occupation) in Tamilnadu, India

RESEARCH AND REVIEWS: JOURNAL OF MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY Farewell, Chloramphenicol? Is this True?: A Review

ABSTRACT Chloramphenicol has remained as a potent broad spectrum antibiotic over decades and due to its side effects its usage has been limited. In an era of increasing resistance to many antibacterial agents, chloramphenicol might have a role in the treatment of intra abdominal infections and respiratory tract infections caused by multi drug-resistant pathogens. This review article focuses on the spectrum of activity of chloramphenicol, mechanism of action , side effects , its parentral and oral use, its resistance mechanisms, toxicity elucidated by enteric pathogens against it and also on the possibility of its therapeutic use in treatment of multi -drug resistant bacterial infections

IN VITRO ANTI-INFLAMMATORY ACTIVITY OF 4-BENZYLPIPERIDINE

ABSTRACTObjective: To study the in vitro anti-inflammatory activity of 4-benzylpiperidine.Methods: This study was conducted to evaluate the in vitro anti-inflammatory activity of 4-benzylpiperidine using in vitro models such as inhibitionof albumin denaturation and proteinase inhibitory activity.Results: This study revealed the dose-dependent inhibition of protein denaturation and proteinase inhibitory activity by 4-benzylpiperidine.Conclusion: In the present study, results indicate that the 4-benzylpiperidine possess anti-inflammatory properties. The drug inhibited the heatinduced albumin denaturation and proteinase inhibitory activity. It shows dose-dependent significant activity when compared with a standard drug.Hence, this study gives an idea that the 4-benzylpiperidine can be used as a lead compound for designing a potent anti-inflammatory drug which canbe used to cure inflammation.Keywords: Anti-inflammatory activity, 4-Benzylpiperidine, Protein denaturation, Proteinase inhibitory activity