Compressed Stabilized Earth Block as a Sustainable Building Material

In recent years Environment pollution is the most concerned issue. Awareness growing to save the environment. In Bangladesh, burnt clay brick is the most commonly used building material. Which produce a significant amount of greenhouse gasses and also it destroys a huge amount of agricultural land every year. Concerning the issue of scientist searching for sustainable and eco-friendly building material. Compressed Stabilized Earth Block (CSEB) give the opportunity of energy efficient, eco-friendly, agriculture friendly and sustainable development. It does not produce any harmful gasses during production. In this study, river dredged soil used to produce CSEB, so it also helps to save the agricultural land. CSEB have been prepared with the different composition of cement, sand and river dredged soil. The compressive strength of different blocks is measured to find the suitable composition to produce CSEB and also to compare among them to find out the optimum composition. Keywords: Sustainability, Agriculture friendly, environment friendly, River dredged soil.

Groundwater Modelling of Dhaka City and Surrounding Areas and Evaluation of the Effect of Artificial Recharge to Aquifers

Dhaka city lies on the Madhupur Clay overlying the Plio-Pliestocene Dupi Tila Formation which forms the principal aquifer. Massive withdrawal of water from this aquifer caused fall of water table at an alarming rate which might provoke subsidence, ecological and environmental hazards [1]. It has been found that the aquifer system of the study area can be divided in to four aquifers and four aquitards up to a depth of 400m. The long term hydrographs for the observation wells within the Dhaka City shows a sharp decline of water level with little or even no fluctuation which indicates over exploitation of aquifers [2]. The water table contour maps of wet and dry season show a pointed cone of depression in the central part of the study area. The research work has been carried out to predict the future response of groundwater level after 20 years for increasing abstraction and assessment of the USAbility of the artificial recharge of aquifers of the Dhaka City using groundwater modelling technique. An eight layer transient groundwater flow model was set up with time steps of a month using MODFLOW. Two model scenarios were considered for model prediction. For the first scenario it has been found that after 20 years the elevation of groundwater level will decline to about -120m in the central part of the Dhaka City, and the mega cone of depression will spread over an area of about 1962 km2. For the second scenario substantial water is injected into the aquifer for recharging the aquifer artificially. The quantity of artificially recharged water was equal to the abstraction of water in Dhaka City. The model predicted that the elevation of the groundwater level after 20 years of pumping will not decline anymore and will be fixed at 70m which is the present minimum groundwater level. The area of the mega cone of depression around Dhaka city will reduce by 945km2 for the next 20 years. As a consequence of artificial recharge predicted environmental degradation in and around Dhaka City can be prevented

Wild Fodder Yielding Plants in the Protected Areas of Bangladesh

Wildlife habitat is degrading worldwide due to myriads of biotic and abiotic reasons. The governments across the world countries are trying to halt the degradation through declaring protected areas (PAs) with potential wildlife habitats and strengthening conservation initiatives. These measures are expected to uphold the richness and diversity of the fodder yielding plants. But there is a dire necessity of information on composition and overall status of the fodder yielding plants for continuous monitoring of these habitats. Moreover, the potentiality of the protected areas can also be judged based on the composition and richness of fodder yielding plants. Having all these in mind, we assessed the composition and conservation status of the fodder yielding plants of all habit forms from three recognized protected areas named Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary, Dudhpukuria-Dhopachari Wildlife Sanctuary, and Madhupur National Park. The study indicated the presence of 306 fodder yielding plant species of all habit forms in the three studied protected areas. This chapter describes the composition, status, habit forms, and nature of occurrences of the wild fodder yielding plants which is expected to be highly helpful in wildlife habitat monitoring and undertaking specific measures for multiplication and conservation of fodder yielding plants

Nanohybrid and microfilled composite resin in Class II restoration of permanent molar teeth

The aim of this study was to compare the clinical performance of nanohybrid composite resin in Class II restorations placed with a one-step self-etch adhesive with that of microfilled composite resin of permanent posterior molar teeth. A total of 100 participants who received Class II restorations either with nanohybrid composite resin bonded with a single step self-etch adhesive or conventional microfilled composite bonded with a single step self-etch adhesive. All restorations were evaluated by using slightly modified USPHS criteria at baseline and after 3, 6 and 12 months. The results revealed that nanohybrid composite resin showed better clinical outcome than that of the conventional microfilled composite resin restorations in respect to retention and marginal adaptation at 12 months observation period. It can be concluded that nanohybrid is superior to conventional microfilled composite resin in respect to retention, and marginal adaptation of Class II restorations of permanent molar teeth

Automatic driver distraction detection using deep convolutional neural networks

Recently, the number of road accidents has been increased worldwide due to the distraction of the drivers. This rapid road crush often leads to injuries, loss of properties, even deaths of the people. Therefore, it is essential to monitor and analyze the driver's behavior during the driving time to detect the distraction and mitigate the number of road accident. To detect various kinds of behavior like- using cell phone, talking to others, eating, sleeping or lack of concentration during driving; machine learning/deep learning can play significant role. However, this process may need high computational capacity to train the model by huge number of training dataset. In this paper, we made an effort to develop CNN based method to detect distracted driver and identify the cause of distractions like talking, sleeping or eating by means of face and hand localization. Four architectures namely CNN, VGG-16, ResNet50 and MobileNetV2 have been adopted for transfer learning. To verify the effectiveness, the proposed model is trained with thousands of images from a publicly available dataset containing ten different postures or conditions of a distracted driver and analyzed the results using various performance metrics. The performance results showed that the pre-trained MobileNetV2 model has the best classification efficiency. © 2022 The Author(s

An Overview of Affordable Housing in Bangladesh

A secured household is the base of a contented life and decent housing for all is the foundation of a good society. The current supreme challenge for the modern civilization is to confirm affordable housing for. Providing housing for all is the substantial issue for ensuring sustainable urban and rural development. Bangladesh is most densely populated country in the world. Within its 147,570km2 of area, in both rural and urban areas, unplanned housing is apparently creating extra pressure and making an adverse impact on the affordability of safe accommodation. This paper scrutinizes the existing housing affordability of the people comprising all-income group of the country. This paper will highlight some techniques and measures coming out from extensive research and study towards ensuring affordable and sustainable accommodation. Keywords: Sustainability, affordable, housing, ferro-cement, low cost. DOI: 10.7176/CER/11-11-02 Publication date: December 31st 2019

Landmark-based morphometric and meristic analysis in response to characterize the wild Bhagna, Labeo ariza populations for its conservation

The landmark-based morphometric and meristic analysis of three different stocks from the Atrai, the Jamuna and the Kangsha of Bhagna (Labeo ariza, Hamilton 1807) were examined from a phenotypical point of view to evaluate the population structure and to assess shape variation. A total of 90 Bhagna (L. ariza) were collected from three different water bodies: the Atrai, the Jamuna and the Kangsha of Bangladesh during January, 2017. Ten morphometric and nine meristic characters were analyzed along with twenty-two truss network measurements. One way ANOVA showed that all morphometric, meristic and truss network measurement were significantly different (P<0.001) among three different stock of the fish. For morphometric and landmark measurements, the first discriminant functions (DF) accounted for 98.6% and 97.9% and the second DF accounted for 1.4% and 2.1%, respectively among group variability, explaining 100% of total among groups variability. For the morphometric and truss network measurements, plotting discriminant functions showed a well-separated clusters of the stocks indicating that the measurement were significantly different among three stocks. The dendrogram based on morphometric and landmark distances data showed two major clusters; the Atrai and Jamuna stocks in one cluster and the Kangsha stock in another cluster. High degree of variation was observed in morphological characteristics among three different stocks (the Atrai, Jamuna and Kangsha) of L .ariza due to their environmental variation and separate geographical location. The results of this study are very useful for proper conservation and successful management of L. ariza and also for the scientific community for the further research

Investigation of the chemical profiles of seven wood species for their potential applications

Determination of the chemical composition of biomaterial is important for their valued utilization in biorefinery. In this study, the chemical composition of seven wood species, i.e. lambu (Khaya anthotheca), raj-koroi (Albizia richardiana), jhau (Casuarina equisetifolia), sil-koroi (Albizia procera), katbadam (Terminalia catappa), jolpai (Elaeocarpus robustus), and arjun (Terminalia arjuna) were examined. The chemical characterization of these wood species can expedite a further study on the extraction of cellulose, lignin, and extractive. alpha-cellulose content was in the range of 37.0% to 42.1% and lignin content was 20.4% to 34.1%. The solubility in 1% caustic soda was 16.1% to 24.3%. The a-cellulose and lignin content were similar to other wood species. Therefore, these species can be a potential source of raw material for biorefinery

Investigation of the potentiality of five bamboo species in biorefinery through analysis of chemical profiles

Determination of the chemical composition of biomaterial is important for their valued utilization in biorefinery. In this study, the chemical composition of five bamboo species, i.e., mitinga (Bambusa tulda), borak (Bambusa balcooa), rengoon (Thyrsostachys oliveri), orah (Dendrocalamus longispathus), and bajja (Bambusa vulgaris) were determined. The chemical characterization of these bamboo species can expedite a further study on the extraction of cellulose and lignin. alpha-cellulose content was in the range of 42.7-45.7% and Klason lignin content was 22.4-28.2%. The ash content was 1.8-4.3% for the studied five bamboo species. The alpha-cellulose and lignin content were similar to other non-timber spices. The ash content was lower than other non-timber species. Therefore, these species can be a potential source of raw material for biorefinery

Effect of pre-sowing treatments on seed germination and initial seedling growth performance of Canarium resiniferum: A native threatened tree of Bangladesh

Canarium resiniferum is an economically and aesthetically important native threatened tree species of Bangladesh. In natural condition 78.5 - 98.7% seeds do not germinate due to seed predation. A study was conducted in the Seed Research Laboratory and nursery of Institute of Forestry and Environmental Sciences Chittagong University, Bangladesh in 2013 to find out appropriate pre-sowing treatment for maximizing germination and initial seedling growth. Eleven pre-sowing treatments were provided in both the seeds sown in polybags and seeds sown in propagator house. Results revealed that, germination started at first (after 20 days of seed sown) in seeds immersed in cold water for 24 hours and germination completed within 38 days. Significantly higher (p&lt;0.05) germination percentage (33%), germination energy (16.7%), plant percent (33%) and germination value (0.4) was found with seeds immersed in cold water for 24 hours. Seedling height measured at three, four and five months after the seed germination in case of seeds treated by immersion in cold water for 24 hours was also greater than others. Therefore, pre-sowing treatment by immersion in cold water for 24 hours was more effective in germination and production of quality vigor seedling of Dhup (C. resiniferum)