Study of the settling charactristics of fly ash-water slurry and designing of a settling pond

Fly ash is a very fine material which is produced by burning of pulverized coal in boilers of thermal power plants. Worldwide, more than 65% of fly ash produced from coal power stations is disposed off in landfills and ash ponds. The fly ash is sent to ash ponds in the form of slurry with water since it is economical. This fly ash being finer and lighter than river sand has lower settlement rate, which can be increased by adding a suitable polymer to the ash slurry in the pond. It is desired that the rate of of settling is fast, so that the water can be easily drained out form the ash pond. If the water height is built up for a long period of time, then it will result in the building up off the hydrostatic pressure which may damage the pond and lead to leakage of fly ash-water slurry from the pond causing various industrial hazards. The objective of this report is to provide a detailed study of the settling rates of fly ash in ash pond for polymer (carboxy methyl cellulose) added, and at different concentration levels. This report also aims at suggesting the aspects to be considered while constructing an ash pond for the fly ash disposal. The turbidity of the fly ash-water slurry along with the polymer mixed to it is studied at some specific time intervals with the help of a Nephelo turbidity meter to determine the rate of decrease of turbidity of the clear liquid at the top of the fly ash-water slurry. This helps in determining the optimum concentration of polymer dosage for faster settlement of fly ash. From the experiments conducted and results obtained, it is concluded that the optimum concentration of the polymer solution to be added is 2ppm (2ml of 10-2 range polymer solution). The gravitational settling rate of the fly ash is calculated after the addition of the above concentration of the polymer. It is concluded that the settling rate of fly ash in ash pond of thermal power plants can be increased by the addition of the polymer of optimum concentration

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationXenobiotic compounds, such as pollutants, pesticides and other foreign chemicals, represent a constant threat to the survival of all organisms. To overcome this threat, animals mount an elaborate transcriptional response, regulating a battery of genes that provide detoxification and protective functions. Proper regulation of this response is crucial as misregulation of detoxification gene expression leads to serious consequences, including resistance to cancer chemotherapy. Similarly, insects overexpressing detoxifying genes develop resistance to pesticides, which has important implications for agricultural crop protection and the control of vector borne diseases. Although much is known about how transcription factors control xenobiotic detoxification in vertebrates, we still have a limited understanding about how this response is regulated in insects. In this thesis, I describe the use of the fruit fly, Drosophila, as a simple system to define the molecular mechanisms of xenobiotic detoxification. Exposure of flies to diverse chemicals, including phenobarbital, caffeine and chlorpromazine, triggers a rapid and coordinated change in the expression of a large battery of detoxification genes, with similar time course and dose-response profiles, suggesting that a common set of transacting factors regulate this process. I showed that the CncC/Keap1 pathway plays a central role in regulating xenobiotic responses in Drosophila. Consistent with this role of CncC in detoxification gene expression, constitutive activation of the pathway provides protection against the pesticide malathion. Further, I explored the role of the CncC/Keap1 iv pathway in acquired insecticide resistance. Several field-derived and laboratory-selected insecticide resistant strains of Drosophila overexpress a number of detoxifying genes. However, the mechanisms underlying this coordinate transcriptional response remain unknown. I showed that the CncC/Keap1 pathway is constitutively active in the two DDT resistant strains of Drosophila that are currently available. I further showed that the mutation that leads to constitutive activation of the pathway is located on the third chromosome in both of these strains. Taken together, these studies identify the evolutionarily conserved CncC/Keap1 pathway as a key regulator of xenobiotic detoxification in Drosophila, define activation of this pathway as a potential mechanism for the acquisition of metabolic insecticide resistance, and provide new directions for the control of insect populations

Influence of Random Reinforcement on Strength Properties of Fly Ash

Soil reinforcement is a successful and solid procedure for expanding the quality and strength of soils. The system is utilized today as a part of a mixture of uses running from holding structures and banks to sub level adjustment underneath footings and asphalts. In correlation with methodically strengthened soils, arbitrarily appropriated fiber reinforced soils display a few favorable circumstances. Arrangement of arbitrarily disseminated fiber strengthened soils speaks to soil adjustment by admixture. Discrete filaments are essentially included and blended with the dirt, much like concrete, lime, or different added substances. In current study strength analysis of fly ash reinforced with two types of fibers separately, is done. Recron fiber and Coir fiber are used as reinforcement of different length and quantity varying from 0.2 % to 2 %.Thus reinforced fly ash samples are prepared and tested. Based on the findings of the present investigation the main conclusion arrived was Both Coir and Recron fibers are effective in increasing the strength of the compacted fly ash. This also modifies the stress-strain behavior of the mass.Increase in fiber content by mass causes increase in strength. In case of using coir fiber as reinforcement material, when the length of the fiber is increased, there is an increase in strength as well. Samples prepared under modified proctor conditions tests to show more strength than the samples prepared under standard proctor conditions at same fiber content

Anomaly Detection in Ethernet Networks Using Self Organising Maps

The network is a highly vulnerable venture for any organization that needs to have a set of computers for their work and needs to communicate among them. Any large organization that sets up a network needs a basic Ethernet or wireless framework for transferring data. Nevertheless the security concern of the organization creeps in and the computers storing the highly sensitive data need to be safeguarded. The threat to the network comes from the internal network as well as the external network. The amount of monitoring data generated in computer networks is enormous. Tools are needed to ease the work of system operators. Anomaly detection attempts to recognize abnormal behavior to detect intrusions. We have concentrated to design a prototype UNIX Anomaly Detection System. Neural Networks are tolerant of imprecise data and uncertain information. We worked to devise a tool for detecting such intrusions into the network. The tool uses the machine learning approaches ad clustering techniques like Self Organizing Map and compares it with the k-means approach. Our system is described for applying hierarchical unsupervised neural network to intrusion detection system. The network connection is characterized by six parameters and specified as a six dimensional vectors. The self organizing map creates a two dimensional lattice of neurons for network for each network service. During real time analysis, network features are fed to the neural network approaches and a winner is selected by finding a neuron that is closest in distance to it. The network is then classified as an intrusion if the distance is more than a preset threshold. The evaluation of this approach will be based on data sets provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) IDS evaluation in 1999

Application of Group Hunting Search Optimized Cascade PD-Fractional Order PID Controller in Interconnected Thermal Power System

This paper is an endeavor to enhance the performance of the Automatic Generation Control (AGC) by adopting cascade PD-FOPID (Proportional Derivative - Fractional Order PID) controller in a two-area mutually connected thermal power plant with Generation Rate Constraint (GRC). The performance of the cascade PD-FOPID controller is validated by contrasting PID and FOPID controllers implemented in each area as AGC. The basic goal of the design of these controllers is to lessen the area control error (ACE) of corresponding area by conceding the frequency and tie-line power deviation. Group Hunting Search (GHS) algorithm is adopted to explore the gain parameters of the controllers to lessen the objective function (ITAE). A small step load transition of 0.01 p.u. is enforced in area-1 to investigate the controller performance. Cascade PD-FOPID controller optimized by GHS algorithm performs precisely better than PID and FOPID controller in the proposed system. Citation: Nayak, J. R., and Shaw, B. (2018). Application of Group Hunting Search Optimized Cascade PD-Fractional Order PID Controller in Interconnected Thermal Power System. Trends in Renewable Energy, 4, 22-33. DOI: 10.17737/tre.2018.4.3.004

Salt effect on liquid liquid equilibrium for ternary system water +1-propanol +ethyl acetate

Liquid/liquid extraction is a very common method used in the organic laboratory. Organic reactions often yield a number of by-products, some inorganic, some organic... Liquid/liquid extraction is often used as the initial step in the work-up of a reaction, before final purification of the product by recrystallization, distillation or sublimation. Salting-out effect can be used to improve the extraction of some solutes by modifying the solute distribution between two liquid phases. Experiments are conducted on the system Water + 1-propanol + Ethyl acetate with varying salt concentrations and varying temperatures. The basic objective of this project is to determine the best temperature range and the salt from NaCl and (NH4)2SO4 which enhances the separation or extraction of the solute by the specified solvent. The experiments were conducted and the resulting extract and raffinate phase was analyzed with the help of the gas chromatography. The plots of voltage vs time was obtained from the gas chromatography, showing the percent volume of the different components present in both the phases. For each phase a separate plot is obtained. Here we have considered two salts: NaCl and (NH4)2SO4. We have tried to show the effect of these two salts on the system at temperatures 27ºC, 32ºC and 37ºC.The solubility data are tabulated in Table 5.1 and the equilibrium data are tabulated in Table 5.2. Considering these data the solubility curves and the distribution curves were plotted. All salt containing data are reported on salt free basis. The experimental tie-line data under no salt condition were determined and presented in respective tables. It can be seen from the diagrams that the addition of the salts shifts the distribution in favour of ethyl acetate layer especially at higher salt concentrations. The presence of the salt decreases the solubility of the system increasing the heterogeneous zone. Heterogeneous area is an important characteristic. In the present system, the areas of the solubility curves are more in case of salt addition than that of without salt. At increasing salt concentrations more 1-propanol is transferred to the ethyl acetate phase. This process is usually referred to as salting out and is caused by the fact that the presence of high amounts of hydrated ions reduces the availability of the water molecules in the aqueous phase to the salvation of other solvents. Presence of salts mainly increase the concentrations of 1-propanol in organic phase and hence enlargement of the two-phase region occurred

Voltage to Frequency Converter: Modeling and Design

In this thesis a study on conventional voltage to frequency converter is given. A linear voltage to frequency converter is assumed i.e. the output frequency level changes with the varying input voltage level. Then as per the findings of our study a voltage to frequency converter is designed and a physical model of the designed circuit is prepared. A transformer and full wave rectifier are used to reach the optimal dc voltage level while the regulator is used for controlled power supply. An op-Amp based voltage to frequency converter is designed whose output is obtained through a 555 timer. The main operation of the op-Amp is to serve as a voltage integrator which is necessary for triangular wave generation and also as a comparator for converting the triangular wave into square wave. The timer circuit is operated in monostable mode. A simple and low cost voltage to frequency converter design and its performance analysis is the main objective of this thesis

Investigation and proximate analysis of carbon black from waste tyre

The disposal of waste tire is increasing day by day at exponential rate. This waste tyre covers a huge amount of valuable land area and can also create a threat of fire accident. The world produces 1.5 billion scrap tires per year are produced and a major portion of which come from India and China (41%). A better solution from an environmental and economic standpoint is to thermally reprocess the tires into valuable products such as activated carbon, other solid carbon forms (carbon black, graphite, and carbon fibers), and liquid fuels to use it more effectively. One of the thermal processes is pyrolysis that waste tyres can be converted into gas, oil and solid product. For instance, solid product can be used as carbon black with some quality improvements especially removal of ash and sulphur. Due to the presence of high ash content limits its application in different products. The pyrolytic carbon black (CB) obtained was contaminated by various additives of the original tyre. Contaminants were also produced by chemical reactions occurring in the pyrolysis reactor. The carbon black obtained from pyrolysis of waste tyre contains some unnecessary metal content, so we need to separate the metal content so that we take maximum advantage of activated carbon

Study of Distance-Based Outlier Detection Methods

An Outlier is an observation which is dierent from the others in a sample. Usually an anomaly occurs in every data due to measurement error. Anomaly detection is identifying anomalous data for given dataset that does not show normal behavior. Anomaly detection can be classified into three categories: Unsupervised, Supervised and Semisupervised anomaly detection. Anomaly detection is used variety of domains like fault detection, fraud detection, health monitoring system, intrusion detection. The outlier detection can be grouped into 5 main categories: statistical-based approaches, depth-based approaches, clustering approaches, distance-based approaches and density-based approaches. Distance -based methods i.e. Index-based algorithm, Nested-loop algorithm and LDOF are discussed. To reduce the false positive error in LDOF, we proposed MLDOF algorithm. We tested LDOF and MLDOF by implementing on several large and high-dimensional real datasets obtained from UCI machine repository. The experiments show that the MLDOF improves accuracy of anomaly detection with respect to LDOF and reduces the false positive error

Structure, magnetic morphology and magnetization correlations in pulsed laser deposited CoFe2O4 (111) thin films

The present paper reports a complete study on the correlation between structure, morphology, and magnetic properties of (111)-oriented cobalt ferrite (CoFe2O4) thin films with varying film thickness. The CoFe2O4 (CFO) thin films were deposited on Pt-coated Si substrate by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) at 550 °C. The x-ray diffraction (XRD) data confirms the (111)-oriented growth of the cobalt ferrite films. The in-plane morphology of the films in the field emission scanning electron micrographs ensure the Stranski–Krastanov growth mechanism, and the atomic force micrographs confirms the effect of lattice relaxation on the morphology of the films with varying thickness. The possible cation distributions for the samples were determined from the Raman spectroscopy, which revealed the crystal structure-magnetic property correlations in cobalt ferrite films. The magnetic hysteresis (M−H) loops show a significant spin reorientation by showing the variation between the in-plane (IP) and out-of-plane (OP) magnetization. The presence of a kink on the OP M−H loops and its variation with film thickness clearly establishes the existence of competing magnetic anisotropies in the films. The high coercivity (HC) values observed for OP magnetization of cobalt ferrite films with thicknesses 115 nm and 125 nm may be explored for possible room-temperature (RT) device applications