Historical and Projected Surface Temperature over India during the 20th and 21st century.

Surface Temperature (ST) over India has increased by ~0.055 K/decade during 1860-2005 and follows the global warming trend. Here, the natural and external forcings (e.g., natural and anthropogenic) responsible for ST variability are studied from Coupled Model Inter-comparison phase 5 (CMIP5) models during the 20th century and projections during the 21st century along with seasonal variability. Greenhouse Gases (GHG) and Land Use (LU) are the major factors that gave rise to warming during the 20th century. Anthropogenic Aerosols (AA) have slowed down the warming rate. The CMIP5 projection over India shows a sharp increase in ST under Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 8.5 where it reaches a maximum of 5 K by the end of the 21st century. Under RCP2.6 emission scenarios, ST increases up to the year 2050 and decreases afterwards. The seasonal variability of ST during the 21st century shows significant increase during summer. Analysis of rare heat and cold events for 2080-2099 relative to a base period of 1986-2006 under RCP8.5 scenarios reveals that both are likely to increase substantially. However, by controlling the regional AA and LU change in India, a reduction in further warming over India region might be achieved

Improving the Energy Efficiency of Mobile Terminals Using Dynamic Multilevel Priority Packet Scheduling in Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication is an efficient method for reducing the energy consumption of mobile terminal in wireless cellular network. However, it is hard to implement due to the lack of motivations for the Mobile terminals to cooperate. For this scenario as the benchmark case, where the information of the helping mobile terminals such as the channel and battery conditions is completely known by the source node terminal, the problem is formulated as a relay selection problem. Efficient algorithms based on dichotomous search and alternative optimizations are proposed to solve the problem for the cases of split and non-split data at the source MT, respectively. The cooperative communications scheme with pricing mechanism can decrease both the battery outages and communications for the mobile node, and can also increase the average battery level during the mobile terminals operation. In this paper, we state a Dynamic Multilevel Priority (DMP) packet scheduling scheme. In the proposed system, each node, except those which are at the last level of the virtual hierarchy in the zone based topology of Wireless sensor network , have three levels of priority queues. Real-time packets are placed in the highest-priority queue and can preempt data packets in other queues. Non-real-time packets are placed in other two queues based on a certain threshold of their estimated processing time. Leaf nodes will have two queues for real-time and non-real-time data packets since they do not receive data from other nodes and so this reduce end to- end delay. The performance of the proposed Dynamic multilevel priority packet scheduling scheme through simulations for real-time and non-real-time data packet. Simulation results shows that the DMP packet scheduling scheme outperforms conventional schemes interms of average data waiting time and end-to-end delay

Energy usage and drying capacity of flat-bed and inclined-bed dryers for rough rice drying

The evaluation of a dryer performance in terms of energy consumption, drying capacity and quality of final product is the main concern of rice milling industry at any time. A study was implemented to investigate on the benefits of common drying practices by studying the drying performances of flat-bed and inclined-bed dryers which are popular in rice industry in Malaysia and neighbouring countries. For this purpose, flat-bed dryer (FBD) and inclined-bed dryer (IBD) were designed, fabricated and operated in the laboratory based on actual industrial drying conditions. The results revealed that inclined-bed drying significantly increased drying capacity (ton m-2 h-1) of up to 25 % at drying temperature of 42-43°C and almost 29 % at 38-39°C drying air temperature compared to flat-bed drying. Furthermore, overall drying energy consumption in IBD was found to vary between 78.6 to 91.97 kW.h ton-1, while for FBD the energy consumption was more than 200 kW.h ton-1 for both levels of drying air temperatures. Both dryers were found to produce rice with desired/ acceptable commercial quality index, even though the head rice yields of FBD were higher than that of IBDs

Numerical predictions of laminar and turbulent forced convection: Lattice Boltzmann simulations using parallel libraries

This paper presents the performance comparison of various parallel lattice Boltzmann codes for simulation of incompressible laminar convection in 2D and 3D channels. Five different parallel libraries namely; matlabpool, pMatlab, GPU-Matlab, OpenMP and OpenMP+OpenMPI were used to parallelize the serial lattice Boltzmann method code. Domain decomposition method was adopted for parallelism for 2D and 3D uniform lattice grids. Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook approximation with lattice types D2Q9, D2Q19 and D2Q5, D2Q6 were considered to solve 2D and 3D fluid flow and heat transfer respectively. Parallel computations were conducted on a workstation and an IBM HPC cluster with 32 nodes. Laminar forced convection in a 2D and turbulent forced convection in a 3D channels was considered as a test case. The performance of parallel LBM codes was compared with serial LBM code. Results show that for a given problem, parallel simulations using matlabpool and pMatlab library perform almost equal. Parallel simulations using C language with OpenMP libraries were 10 times faster than simulations involving Matlab parallel libraries. Parallel simulations with OpenMP+OpenMPI were 0.35 times faster than the reported parallel lattice Boltzmann method code in the literature

Spousal Concordance of Diabetes Mellitus among Women in Ajman, United Arab Emirates

Objectives: Spousal concordance is defined as similar behaviours and associated health statuses between spouses. This study aimed to identify the concordance of diabetes mellitus (DM) and related variables among genetically unrelated couples in Ajman, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Methods: This cross-sectional study included 270 married women attending either the Mushairef Health Center or the Gulf Medical College Hospital in Ajman between May and November 2012. A validated questionnaire was designed to determine sociodemographic characteristics and a history or family history of DM, hypertension, coronary artery disease or dyslipidaemia among the women and their husbands. The weight, height, body mass index, waist circumference, fasting blood sugar and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) levels of all women were measured. Results: Of the women, 39.3% of those with diabetic husbands and 39.9% of those with non-diabetic husbands were diabetic themselves (P >0.050). The prevalence of DM spousal concordance was 17.8%. A history of hypertension, coronary artery disease and dyslipidaemia was significantly more frequent among women whose husbands had a history of the same conditions (P = 0.001, 0.040 and 0.002, respectively). Spousal concordance of abnormal glycaemia among non-diabetic women with diabetic husbands was significant (P = 0.001). Having a diabetic husband (P = 0.006) and being obese (P = 0.009) were the only significant predictors of hyperglycaemia among non-diabetic women after controlling for confounding factors. Conclusion: There was significant concordance of abnormal glycaemia among non-diabetic women with diabetic husbands. The spouses of diabetic patients may therefore be a target population for regular hyperglycaemia and DM screening