Fabrication and characterization of WSi2/p-si and TaSi2/p-si devices

Thin films Silicides of Tungsten and Tantalum have become very important for IC manufacturing. W and TaSi2 films were deposited on silicon substrates by CVD and Co-sputtering techniques respectively. These films have been characterized using current-voltage technique. The analysis of the obtained experimental measurements has been performed in the light of Schottky-Mott theory. The effects of annealing were studied using Rapid Thermal Processing technique in the temperature range of 500 to 700°C, in nitrogen atmosphere at a constant pressure of 5x10-6 ton for a duration of 30 seconds.The increase in annealing temperature resulted in the formation of ohmic contact evidenced by current-voltage and sheet-resistance measurements. Typical sheet -resistances were found to be in the order of 6-12Q /square for tungsten silicide and 2-7Q /square for tantalum silicide. The RTP technique,as concluded from the results, was found to be very effective in the formation of ohmic contacts

Automation of Production Servers using DevOps (Puppet) Tools

As the technology advances, organizations keep changing their business-related software applications. These applications were very important in daily business activities like marketing their products, selling their goods and services, billing customer and maintaining the inventory. Out of several areas of business, server maintenance is one of the sensitive department with which customers have direct link for money related issues. So, it is very important to maintain a robust automated system for any organization. Especially it is much more important in the Banking and Healthcare industry. Therefore, this project mainly focused on developing a robust automated system for such organizations and it brings all the necessary steps in the server maintenance under one roof. With this application, most of the billing related issues can be processed automatically which reduces the overall manual inputs and thus reduces the probability of causing errors

Examining the Lacunae in the International Aviation Regime in the Context of the MH 17 Incident

In this paper, the researcher examines the liability regime that governs the international aircraft carriers in the context of the recent Malaysian plane (MH 17) crash. The researcher analyses the efficacy of the Warsaw and Montreal Convention frameworks in affixing liability on the state parties. The international aviation regime as regulated by the ICAO and its inability to confirm legal responsibility is also dealt with in reference to the previous incidents of air crash. The paper concludes on a note that the international aviation regime is not adequately equipped to deal with questions of state responsibility for acts of unlawful interference with international civil aviation regime

Influence of in-office oral hygiene instructions on the parental assessment of their child\u27s oral health.

Purpose: To identify the relation between oral health education and parental assessment of their child’s dental condition. Methods: Our study population included 33,342 children, from Smile KY! annual screenings from 2002 to 20014. Data collection was through questionnaire forms. Our primary risk factor was “dental health instructions received” (yes/no) and our outcome of interest was “parental assessment of your child’s dental health” (good/fair/poor). We had 13 years of data from 2002 to 2014 and used ‘SAS’ statistical software for data manipulation and recoding. Descriptive statistics, chi-square test of independence, trend analysis and multiple logistic regression modeling were performed on ‘SPSS’ and ‘SAS’ statistical software at P

Moore’s Law and Space Exploration: New Insights and Next Steps

Understanding how technology changes over time is important for industry, science, and government policy. Empirical examination of the capability of technologies across various domains reveals that they often progress at an exponential rate. In addition, mathematical models of technological development have proven successful in deepening our understanding. One area that has not been shown to demonstrate exponential trends, until recently, has been space travel. This paper will present plots illustrating trends in the mean lifespan of satellites whose lifespans ended in a given year. Our study identifies both Wright’s law and Moore’s law regressions. For the Moore’s law regression, we found a doubling time of approximately 15 years. For Wright’s law we can see an approximate doubling of lifespan with every doubling of accumulated launches. We conclude by presenting a conundrum generated by the use of Moore’s law that is the subject of ongoing research

Role of Cerebral Vasculature and Effect of Circulating Exosomes in Propagation of Systemic Inflammatory Responses into the Central Nervous System

Sepsis-associated encephalopathy (SAE) is an acutely progressing brain dysfunction induced by systemic inflammation. The mechanism of initiation of neuroinflammation during SAE, which ultimately leads to delirium and cognitive dysfunction, remains elusive. The goal of this project was to study the molecular events of SAE to capture its onset and progression into the central nervous system (CNS), and further identify the cellular players involved in mediating acute inflammatory signaling. Gene expression profiling on the cerebral vessels isolated from the brains of the mice treated with peripheral lipopolysaccharide (LPS) revealed that the cerebral vasculature responds within minutes to acute systemic inflammation by upregulating the expression of immediate early response genes, followed by activation of the NF-κB pathway. To identify the earliest responding cell type, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) was utilized to sort the immunolabelled glial and vascular cells from the brains of the mice treated with LPS at different time points and gene expression profiling was performed. Bioinformatic analysis of the sequencing data followed by further validation revealed that the cerebral endothelial cells (CECs) activation is the earliest event in the CNS and that they are the most likely source of proinflammatory mediators that could further initiate glial cell activation. This is further followed by the activation of apoptotic signaling in the CECs which is known to lead to blood brain barrier (BBB) disruption and allow the peripheral cytokines to leak into the CNS, exacerbate the gliosis and result in neuroinflammatory cascade. Together, these results model the sequential events during the advancement of systemic inflammation into the CNS, and facilitate better understanding of the interplay between the vascular and glial cells in initiating and driving acute neuroinflammation during SAE. Systemic inflammation does lead to neuroinflammation, thereby linking the peripheral inflammatory conditions to the CNS. However, the mechanisms through which systemic inflammation exerts its effect on the CNS are poorly understood. Exosomes are small (30 to 100 nanometers) membrane bound extracellular vesicles released by most of the mammalian cells. Exosomes play a vital role in cell to cell communication. This includes regulation of inflammatory responses by shuttling mRNAs, miRNAs and cytokines both locally and systemically to the neighboring as well as distant cells to further modulate their transcriptional and/or translational states and affect the functional phenotype of those cells which have taken up these exosomes. The role of circulating blood exosomes in mediating neuroinflammation during systemic inflammation was thus studied. Serum derived exosomes from LPS-challenged mice (SDEL) were freshly isolated from the sera of the mice which were earlier treated with LPS and used to study SDEL effects on neuroinflammation. Exosomes isolated from the sera of the mice injected with saline were used as control. In vitro studies showed that the SDEL upregulate pro-inflammatory cytokine gene expression in the cell lines of microglia (BV2), astrocytes (C8-D1A) and cerebral microvascular endothelial cells (Bend.3). To further study their effects in vivo, SDEL were then intravenously injected into normal adult mice. The recipient mice that received SDEL exhibited elevated microglial activation. Moreover, increased astrogliosis, and elevated CNS expression of pro-inflammatory cytokine mRNA were observed in SDEL recipient mice. Additionally, SDEL injected directly into the cerebral ventricles resulted in significant microgliosis as well as, astrogliosis. Together, these results demonstrate a novel role of peripheral circulating exosomes in causing neuroinflammation during systemic inflammatory conditions

Development of Web Application for Monitoring Rail Track Quality

All the rail industries in the present world spend lot of money and resources on track inspections. There are various modern technologies in the modern world for the rail track inspections but neither completely operable at the ground level nor economical for the industries. There is no specific tool or application available in the present market which intakes all the track related data, keep track of the inspections and notify users the schedule of inspections. All this process depends upon the quality of data being collected from the tracks, defining objective from the collected data and achieving the results. For this purpose in this project objectives for the data collection has been given prominent importance and it is done in two ways. Validations are performed before the data is stored into the database. In order to analyze, define and project the data into useful form a robust application is needed which responds to user request dynamically. Our mission here was to understand the user requirements to keep track of the rail track data and automate the process of scheduling inspections and notifying the users. Therefore this project mainly focuses on developing the robust web application which checks the quality data being collected, properly validated and interact with users to help them in scheduling and maintaining inspections. This project helps management to bring legacy systems to bring under one roof and also to expand the existing application in the future according to the changing needs

Development of Web Based Application for Supply Chain Management

As a firm staying competitive in the market is never easy. It faces a lot competition from each and every competitor. The firms have to always come up with a better strategy to satisfy their customers, incorporate latest technologies to provide better service to their customers. The web based application for the supply chain management is a solution that supports collaboration in Supply Chain as the foundation for gaining competitive advantage and maintain market share. There are some other ways to obtain the collaboration but this is a better solution. There are several technologies that are needed for the design and implementation of this web application, some of the include technologies like Java, HTML, CSS, Java Script, Angular JS, Angular Schema form. There is a high level integration needed to bring this on to a single track and make this work. This web application has used the up to date technologies so this way the application can be the most sophisticated one on the market. This application uses technologies that are completely open source and involves a lot less capital than other tools out there in the world. This way the firm whoever uses this technology will be able to see a growth in the productivity, higher profits and the most important thing would be to make the customers happier. With some minor changes to the application it shall be able to make it available to other companies as well. This report describes the technologies used and how are they integrated, if this application was really able to manage the supply chain management in the company. This section gives an overview about the design of the application, the forecasting of the demand. The results showed an improvement in the manufacturing process of the company, reduction in the transportation costs

Simulation based characterization and performance enhancement of heterogeneous polymer solar cells

Polymer based photovoltaic devices have the potential for widespread usage due to their low cost-per-watt and mechanical flexibility. Efficiencies close to 10 % have been achieved recently in conjugated polymer based organic solar cells. These devices were fabricated using solvent-based processing of electron-donating and electron-accepting materials into the so-called bulk heterojunction (BHJ) architecture. Experimental evidence suggests that a key property determining the power-conversion efficiency of such devices is the final morphological distribution of the donor and acceptor constituents. In order to understand the role of morphology on device performance, we develop a scalable computational framework that efficiently interrogates organic solar cells to investigate relationships between the morphology at the nano-scale with the device performance. In this work, we extend the Buxton and Clarke (2007) model to simulate realistic devices with complex active layer morphologies using a dimensionally independent, scalable, finite element method. We incorporate all stages involved in current generation, namely 1) exciton generation and diffusion, 2) charge generation, and 3) charge transport in a modular fashion. The numerical challenges encountered during interrogation of realistic microstructures are detailed. We compare each stage of the photovoltaic process for two microstructures -- a bulk heterojunction morphology and an idealized sawtooth morphology. The results are presented for both two and three dimensional structures. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the short-circuit current, Jsc, to the input parameters is performed. This helps in rank ordering the input parameters and operating conditions -- by strength and relevance -- on their impact on Jsc. We particularly focus our investigations on understanding how the active layer morphology affects the sensitivity of Jsc. To accomplish this we analyze three classes of morphologies: bilayer, BHJ, and sawtooth. The results show significant differences in sensitivities between BHJ, sawtooth and bilayer morphologies. Short-circuit current in BHJ structure shows higher sensitivity to material properties than either sawtooth and bilayer structure, suggesting the necessity for finer control of material properties to counteract the increased disorder in the active layer morphology. The electrode current is found to be most sensitive to illumination intensity for all three morphologies. We report some interesting trends that may help choose the most sensitive parameters to vary for designing OSC\u27s with better performance. It is known that morphology plays a critical role in determining the PCE. Morphology control and tailoring has been the focus of extensive research over the past decade, driven by the hypothesis that morphologies having interdigitated columnar domains will make optimal devices. Here we disprove this hypothesis by computationally discovering a family of morphologies that perform better than the hitherto thought optimal morphology by as much as 25 %. This family of morphologies are simply topological perturbations to the interdigitated columnar morphology, thus maintaining most of the features -- connectivity and domain sizes -- exhibited by the latter. The discovery of a whole class of morphologies with improved performance will have an impact on the field of organic photovoltaic from molecular design and fabrication tailoring to the question of discovering the optimal morphology. These results also allow us to posit that wrinkling or buckling along the thickness dimension can enhance the performance of micro-scale interdigitated columnar morphologies, which are easier to scalably fabricate compared to nano-scale columns