Development and Promotion of Mass Timber Noise Barrier for Highways

Highways are some of the biggest causes of noise pollution in the United States of America. To deal with the traffic noise coming from these highways, noise barriers have been erected across major highways. The goal is to reduce as much noise as possible through a sustainable solution. Unfortunately, the use of steel and concrete, commonly used materials, have undesired environmental impacts. A suggested sustainable alternative material would be mass timber. Mass timber products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and mass plywood panels (MPP) has attracted the attention of the construction industry in the U.S, as they are sustainable, light, cost-effective and have a net positive environmental impact as compared to traditional materials used in the industry. Additionally, they are expected to lose 20 dB(A) in transmission since they weigh more than 4 psf. In this study, the objective of the research was to evaluate and determine whether mass timber is a competitive alternative material for constructing noise barriers compared to concrete or steel. The design of prototype CLT noise barrier was carried out including seismic and wind loads representative of several regions across the U.S. Next, the environmental impact and cost was compared between a CLT and concrete noise barrier. Finally, a prototype using the proposed noise barrier design was erected to assess constructability and instrument it for log-term moisture monitoring to assess the performance of two different protective coatings. As a result of the study, CLT proved to be a viable alternative to concrete noise barrier while the moisture content in CLT varied from 28% during rainy condition to 10% under dry conditions

Parental stress in Asian American and non-Asian American families of children with developmental disabilities during COVID-19

Past research has found higher levels of parental stress in Asian American families of children with developmental disabilities as compared to their non-Asian counterparts. This study examined whether this trend remains in the setting of the COVID-19 global pandemic, as well as considering the relationships between parental stress and COVID-19 stressors, the experience of discrimination during the pandemic, the type and severity of developmental disability, and child age. This study used a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach to quantitatively measure parental stress in 48 Asian American and 62 non-Asian American parents, and qualitatively collect data regarding the specific personal experiences of a subset of these families during the COVID-19 pandemic. As expected, the Asian American parents demonstrated higher levels of parental stress than the non-Asian American parents, and all parents perceived the COVID-19 pandemic as a stressful experience that has significantly impacted both themselves and their children with developmental disabilities. This research has important implications for supporting and advocating for Asian American and non-Asian American families of children with developmental disabilities in times of crisis

Operational Trans-Resistance Amplifier Based Tunable Wave Active Filter

In this paper, Operational Trans-Resistance Amplifier (OTRA) based wave active filter structures are presented. They are flexible and modular, making them suitable to implement higher order filters. The circuits implement the resistors using matched transistors, operating in linear region, making them well suited for IC fabrication. They are insensitive to parasitic input capacitances and input resistances due to the internally grounded input terminals of OTRA. As an application, a doubly terminated third order Butterworth low pass filter has been implemented, by substituting OTRA based wave equivalents of passive elements. PSPICE simulations are given to verify the theoretical analysis

Solar cells in bulk InP using an open tube diffusion process

A simple open tube diffusion technique for the fabrication of n+p junction solar cells is described. Large area (greater than 0.25 square cm) solar cells have been made by this process with a photovoltaic conversion efficiency of 15.2 percent under simulated AMO illumination. An ideality factor is 1.04 and a saturation current density of 9.6 times 10 to the minus 16th power A/square cm have been observed for these cells. These are the lowest (best) values reported to date for diffused structures in bulk InP

The Anuvrat Movement: Theory and Practice

The slogan: “Self-restraint is life,” forms the philosophical ideal behind the Anuvrat Movement. The purpose of my thesis is to evaluate the Anuvrat Movement introduced by Acharya Tulsi as a non-sectarian, ethical-spiritual movement. The study considered in some detail the historical context within which the movement emerged. The thesis provides a much-needed analysis of the 11 vows formulated by Tulsi in the model of the traditional vows in Jainism. It explored the question whether these vows are relevant and effective in the contemporary Indian society, and whether Tulsi’s movement can cross the geographical boundaries of the Indian sub-continent to be a part of larger global initiatives. The study explored the social significance of the concepts of nonviolence, social justice and sustainability in the wider global community. The study suggests a positive association between the exemplary charismatic role of a leader and the popularity and longevity of social movements in India

Preparation and characterization of poly vinyl alcohol - gelatin- carboxy methyl chitosan polymer films

Present work delineate the preparation and characterization of polymer films of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), gelatin and carboxy methyl chitosan. The films were prepared by esterification followed by glutaraldehyde crosslinking. Swelling behaviour and biodegradability of the polymer films were studied at physiological pH. Further, hemocompatibility and biocompatibility of the polymer film was also evaluated. Result showed that films of different composition have water-swelling capacity around 80%. Biodegradation study revealed that 35% degradation could be achieved by varying the composition. All the polymeric films were found hemocompatible and biocompatible. From this preliminary study it can be said that such films could be used for biomedical application

Seismic Fragility Updating of Highway Bridges using Field Instrumentation Data

Seismic fragility assessment of deteriorating highway bridges using analytical methods often rely on empirical, semi-empirical or numerical models to predict the rate and nature of degradation. Consequently, the predicted structural vulnerabilities of bridge components or overall bridge system during seismic shaking are only as good as the adopted deterioration models. For the sake of simplicity and ease of computational modeling, these deterioration models are often far removed from observed manifestations of time-dependent aging. One such example is the nature of corrosion in reinforced concrete bridge components under chloride attacks. While this deterioration mechanism leads to the formation of pits along the length of the rebar, past literature often adopts the simplified uniform area loss model. This study proposes a probabilistic framework that assists in improved deterioration modeling of highway bridges by explicitly modeling pit formation and also provides the opportunity of updating the analytical models with field measurement data using Bayesian techniques. The framework and case-study results presented in this study are believed to render realistic seismic fragilities for highway bridges when located in moderate to high seismic zones.This research was funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board Grant No. ECR/2016/001622. Their support is gratefully acknowledged

Hybrid JAYA algorithm for workflow scheduling in cloud

Workflow scheduling and resource provisioning are two of the most critical issues in cloud computing. Developing an optimal workflow scheduling strategy in the heterogeneous cloud environment is extremely difficult due to its NP-complete nature. Various optimization algorithms have been used to schedule the workflow so that users can receive Quality of Service (QoS) from cloud service providers as well as service providers can achieve maximum gain but there is no such model that can simultaneously minimize execution time and cost while balancing the load among virtual machines in a heterogeneous environment using JAYA approach. In this article, we employed the hybrid JAYA algorithm to minimize the computation cost and completion time during workflow scheduling. We considered the heterogeneous cloud computing environment and made an effort to evenly distribute the load among the virtual machines. To achieve our goals, we used the Task Duplication Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT-TD) and Predict Earliest Finish Time (PEFT). The makespan is greatly shortened by HEFT-TD which is based on the Optimistic Cost Table. We used a greedy technique to distribute the workload among Virtual Machines (VMs) in a heterogeneous environment. Greedy approach assigns the upcoming task to a VM which have lowest load. In addition, we also considered performance variation, termination delay, and booting time of virtual machines to achieve our objectives in our proposed model. We used Montage, LIGO, Cybershake, and Epigenomics datasets to experimentally analyze the suggested model in order to validate the concept. Our meticulous experiments show that our hybrid approach outperforms other recent algorithms in minimizing the execution cost and makespan, such as the Cost Effective Genetic Algorithm (CEGA), Cost-effective Load-balanced Genetic Algorithm (CLGA), Cost effective Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (CHGA), and Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC)