Android App for Argo Floats

INCOIS has deployed more than 400 Argo floats till now and soon reaching a special milestone of 500 Indian Argo floats. In this context there is a necessity to have a unique application by which scientists can effectively and efficiently track all the information of these floats and also monitor the active floats among them regularly. The present work describes about an Android application or app which eases the work of researchers to track the information of these Argo floats as well as monitor them regularly. This app is designed and developed to give all the information related to Argo floats like its various types, its deployed positions, its current positions, its functionality, search option, etc., in the form of maps and charts in turn uses real time data to give latest status of Argo floats. In addition to it, this app is also useful in advising the scientists involved in Argo program about the floats in danger of getting grounded or beached that need immediate attention. This app is a very useful tool for the scientists to check the current status of Argo floats from anywhere or anytime using a smart phone

Development of stripper harvester for paddy

Konkan is the coastal part of Maharashtra between Western Ghat and Arabian seacoast. Rice is a major crop grown over 3.86 lakh hectares. Stripper harvesting technology, which strips only seeds and keeps straw erect-ed in the field present bright prospect for the development of small, light, efficient mechanism by reducing number of operation with increased capacity and lesser power compared to conventional cutter bar combine harvester. The big machines like combine harvester and high capacity threshers for harvesting and threshing have limitations. A proto-type of paddy stripper harvester was developed considering the limitation of Konkan like small, fragmented land, hilly, terrace farming and high rainfall. It consisted of stripping mechanism, grain tank, hydraulic system, steering system, gear box, engine, cage wheel and chassis. The arrangement of V-belt and set of pulleys were made to transmit power from gear box to stripper rotor. The effect of forward speed and peripheral speed on shattered and un-stripped grain loss was studied. The shattered grain loss was decreased with increase in forward speed whereas decreased initially and then increased with increase in peripheral speed. The un-stripped grain loss was decreased with increase in forward and peripheral speed. The performance of the developed prototype was found better at forward speed of 2.25 km/h and peripheral speed of 19.78 m/s. During final testing of prototype, shattered and un-stripped grain loss was found 5.95 and 1.89 %, respectively. The average field capacity and field efficiency of paddy stripper harvester machine was found 0.14 ha/h and 69.38 per cent respectively

INCOIS-GODAS-MOM: Ocean Analysis for the Indian Ocean: Configuration, Validation and Product Dissemination

The ocean covers approximately 71% of the earth surface and it significantly influences the global and regional climates and the weather and monsoon systems. Climate variability and its socio-economic impact clearly emphasizes the need to understand the system to enable better forecasts. Unlike land, where the operational networks of meteorological observations placed all over the world have enabled us to monitor changes in the global atmosphere, the global coverage of the subsurface observations in the ocean is largely under sampled. With the advent of Argo and moored buoy programs, there was a considerable increase in the amount of oceanic data during the last decade. However, the data is still inadequate to understand the dynamics and thermodynamics of the ocean on different spatial and temporal scale

Density-functional study of LixMoS2 intercalates (0<=x<=1)

The stability of Lithium intercalated 2H- and 1T allotropes of Molybdenum disulfide (LixMoS2) is studied within a density-functional theory framework as function of the Li content (x) and the intercalation sites. Octahedral coordination of Li interstitials in the van der Waals gap is found as the most favorite for both allotropes. The critical content of Lithium, required for the initialization of a 2H->1T phase transition is estimated to x ~ 0.4. For smaller Li contents the hexagonal 2H crystal structure is not changed, while 1T-LixMoS2 compounds adopt a monoclinic lattice. All allotropic forms of LixMoS2 - excluding the monoclinic Li1.0MoS2 structure - show metallic-like character. The monoclinic Li1.0MoS2 is a semiconductor with a band gap of 1.1 eV. Finally, the influence of Li intercalation on the stability of multiwalled MoS2 nanotubes is discussed within a phenomenological model.Comment: submitted to Comput.Mater.Sc

What controls seasonal evolution of sea surface temperature in the Bay of Bengal? Mixed layer heat budget analysis using moored buoy observations along 90°E

Author Posting. © The Oceanography Society, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of The Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 29, no. 2 (2016): 202–213, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2016.52.Continuous time-series measurements of near surface meteorological and ocean variables obtained from Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction (RAMA) moorings at 15°N, 90°E; 12°N, 90°E; and 8°N, 90°E and an Ocean Moored buoy Network for Northern Indian Ocean (OMNI) mooring at 18°N, 90°E are used to improve understanding of air-sea interaction processes and mixed layer (ML) temperature variability in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) at seasonal time scales. Consistent with earlier studies, this analysis reveals that net surface heat flux primarily controls the ML heat balance. The penetrative component of shortwave radiation plays a crucial role in the ML heat budget in the BoB, especially during the spring warming phase when the ML is thin. During winter and summer, vertical processes contribute significantly to the ML heat budget. During winter, the presence of a strong barrier layer and a temperature inversion (warmer water below the ML) leads to warming of the ML by entrainment of warm subsurface water into the ML. During summer, the barrier layer is relatively weak, and the ML is warmer than the underlying water (i.e., no temperature inversion); hence, the entrainment cools the mixed layer. The contribution of horizontal advection to the ML heat budget is greatest during winter when it serves to warm the upper ocean. In general, the residual term in the ML heat budget equation is quite large during the ML cooling phase compared to the warming phase when the contribution from vertical heat flux is small.WHOI buoy deployment was supported by the US Office of Naval Research (grant no. N00014- 13-10453)

Development of an advanced geometry toolkit framework for fitting complex topology-optimized mesh structures

Additive Manufacturing is playing a significant role in developing complex geometries which are not possible by conventional Manufacturing Processes. Topology optimization is playing key a role in deciding conceptual design for additive manufacturing. The output of topology optimization is rough and noisy surfaces. Fitting these surfaces poses challenging task to a designer as it is a tedious and a time-consuming process. The main aim of this research is to automate the process of smoothing noisy meshes. In this research work, I have developed algorithms in MATLAB to create NURBS (Non-Uniform B-Spline) surface patches from given a set of control points. NURBS is a powerful tool in geometric modeling with flexibility. Different types of NURBS Surfaces are discussed along with examples. Each type has its usage. STEP standard has been used for geometry data exchange between MATAB and CAD Software. The algorithm to export NURBS into STEP file has been developed to support data exchange

Diaspora and multiculturalism: British South Asian women’s writing

This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature