Supply Chain Analysis of Onion and Cauliflower in Punjab

The present study was conducted in Rajpura block of Patiala district in Punjab with a sample of 50 vegetables growers. The total cost of cultivation was estimated at Rs 49563/ha for onion and Rs 34840/ha for cauliflower. The net returns were found higher for onion (Rs 74597/ha) as compared to that from cauliflower (Rs 38072/ha). Majority of these vegetables were being disposed off through commission agent/wholesaler (more than 90 per cent) followed by retailer and directly to the consumer. The efficiency of the these market channels can be enhanced through competition by organized retail chains and modernizing the vegetable market system in the state. The wholesale markets of Pune, Ludhiana and Patiala for onion and that of Shimla, Ludhiana and Patiala for cauliflower have been found integrated with price of onion and cauliflower transmitting quickly from the independent to the dependent markets. The highest elasticity of price transmission in onion has been observed between Ludhiana and Patiala markets with almost 90 per cent of the price change in Ludhiana getting transmitted to the Patiala market. Such transmission has been 100 per cent for cauliflower between Shimla and Patiala markets. The price transmission has been observed faster in cauliflower than onion. Though a long-term equilibrium relationship exists between all the studied markets in terms of weekly price of the two vegetables crops, there also exists a short-run disequilibrium between some of the market pairs with almost 15 to 25 per cent of the fluctuations usually getting corrected within a week. Greater integration in these markets may help the farmers as well as consumers of the vegetables through better price signals.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Investigations on Tool Wear Rate of AISI D2 Die Steel in EDM using Taguchi Methods

EDM has become an important and cost-effective method of machining extremely tough and brittle electrically conductive materials. It is widely used in the process of making moulds and dies and sections of complex geometry and intricate shapes. The workpiece material selected in this study is AISI D2 Die Steel. The input parameters are voltage, current, pulse on time and pulse off time. L9 orthogonal array was selected as per the Taguchi method. The data have been analyzed using Minitab15 Software. The effect of above mentioned parameters upon machining performance characteristics such as Tool Wear Rate (TWR) are studied and investigated on the machine model C-3822 with PSR-20 Electric Discharge Machine.  The copper alloy was used as tool material.The results obtained showed that the optimum condition for tool wear rate (TWR) is A3, B2, C2, D3 i.e. Ton (40µs),Toff (8 µs), Ip (8 amp) and Vg (60V). The order of process parameters influencing the tool wear rate is Toff 12>"> Ip 12>"> Ton 12>"> Vg. Hence, pulse off parameter has more contribution to tool wear rate whereas gap voltage has the least contribution. As per the optimal level of parameters, the optimum value of TWR is 0.117 mm3/min. These results were validated by conducting confirmation experiments and found satisfactory. Keywords: EDM,TWR, MRR, ANOVA, Taguchi method, AISI D2 Die steel, copper electrod

Investigations on Material Removal Rate of AISI D2 Die Steel in EDM using Taguchi Methods

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) process is one of the most commonly used non conventional precise material removal & world class standard non contacting machining processes. The work piece must be a conductive electricity material which is submerged into the dielectric fluid for better erosion. This process widely used for machining of hard, brittle, component   material,  complex geometry, intricate shapes, making moulds & deep holes by arc erosion in all kinds of electro conductive materials. The workpiece material selected in this study is AISI D2 Die Steel. The input parameters are voltage, current, pulse on time and pulse off time. L9 orthogonal array was selected as per the Taguchi method. The data have been analyzed using Minitab15 Software. The effect of above mentioned parameters upon machining performance characteristics such as Material Removal Rate (MRR) is studied and investigated on the machine model C-3822 with PSR-20 Electric Discharge Machine.  The copper alloy was used as tool material. Keywords: EDM, MRR, ANOVA, Taguchi method, AISI D2 Die steel, copper electrod

Design and fabrication of dual chargeable bicycle

With the increase in fuel prices, pollution content in atmosphere and due to gradual end of the non renewable sources of energy we have to alter the source of our energy in our vehicles. Considering all these reasons we have to switch over to other sources of energy instead of using conventional sources such as petrol which in future will be going to extinct. One way to alter the energy source is to go for electric vehicles or e bikes. Electric driven vehicles uses battery as a source of energy which provide power to motor which in turn provide  torque to wheels .The old design of electric bicycle was having only a single mode of charging, it was just capable to travel 15 km through battery and was not ergonomically good. The new design uses a low rpm alternator for charging the battery by keeping it in contact with front wheel .A Motor of 0.5hp provides torque to the rear wheel and the gear ratio is kept 5:2 .battery discharging time is approximately 2 hrs and charging time through alternator is 1 hour and the bicycle can attain a maximum speed of 15 km/hr. This work is more beneficial in hilly region and confined areas like college campus and schools, generating zero pollution, zero noise effect and no fuel consumption. Keywords: Dual chargeable bicycle, EABs, EPBs, Battery, Alternator, Controller

Cloud capacity planning and HSI based optimal resource provisioning

Cloud service providers offer spot instances through highest bidding plans that are at a very economical price compared to other pricing plans, namely on-demand and reservation. The usage of spot instance enables utilization of idle resources and provide service for cost sensitive tasks. However, this approach introduces the problem of cloud capacity allocation to different pricing plans that will have impact on the task completion time. To address these issues and improve the providers revenue, in this paper a capacity planning has been carried out based on the prediction of resource requirements for each of the different resource pricing pools. The paper also presents a solution to overcome the burden faced by the service provider due to the free issue of last hour at the time of out-of-bid situation. Simulation carried out based on capacity planning along with hybrid spot instance using Amazon EC2's price show that the resource utilization is improved across the different resource pricing pools with increased number of task completion and improved provider's revenue. © 2017 IEEE

Complement to the study of the Indian Paleocene osteoglossid fish genus <i>Taverneichthys</i> (Teleostei, Osteoglossomorpha)

A series of osteological characters of Taverneichthys bikanericus from the continental Paleocene of India are studied, allowing specifying its systematic position within the Osteoglossidae. It is shown that on the basis of its peculiar snout morphology this species occupies an intermediate position between genera such as Chanopsis and Phareodus, which possess a primitive snout with a large dermethmoid reaching the frontals and separating the two nasals from each other, and such as Brychaetus, Musperia, Opsithrissops, Osteoglossum and Scleropages, which exhibit an evolved snout. The latter presents nasals, which are articulated to the frontals, meeting each other on the mid-line, except at their anterior edge, where a small dermethmoid, largely separated from the frontals, is inserted between

Performance investigation of an innovative H-bridge derived multilevel inverter topology for marine applications

441-449An innovative single-phase and three-phase H-bridge derived multilevel inverter topology is being proposed in this manuscript. The proposed topology makes use of relatively fewer switching devices compared to conventional Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) multilevel inverter. In other words, the proposed inverter topology is capable of producing more number of levels in the voltage waveform with same number of switching devices. It is also established in this paper, that this proposed topology is superior in terms of requirement of lesser number of gate driving circuits and reduction in the harmonic content in the output voltage waveform. The proposed inverter topologies are driven by SPWM modulation technique. These converter topologies are not only beneficial for the power conditioning systems in the power system network but also for the other novel applications like in marine ships. In this manuscript, the performance comparisons of the proposed inverter topologies with that of conventional topology based on simulation results with MATLAB/SIMULINK have been presented

Hybrid spot instance based resource provisioning strategy in dynamic cloud environment

Utilization of resources to the maximum extent in large scale distributed cloud environment is a major challenge due to the nature of cloud. Spot Instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are provisioned based on highest bid with no guarantee of task completion but incurs the overhead of longer task execution time and price. The paper demonstrates the last partial hour and cost overhead that can be avoided by the proposed strategy of Hybrid Spot Instance. It aims to provide reliable service to the ongoing task so as to complete the execution without abruptly interrupting the long running tasks by redefining the bid price. The strategy also considers that on-demand resource services can be acquired when spot price crosses on-demand price and thereby availing high reliability. This will overcome the overhead involved during checkpointing, restarting and workload migration as in the existing system, leading to efficient resources usage for both the providers and users. Service providers revenue is carefully optimized by eliminating the free issue of last partial hour which is a taxing factor for the provider. Simulation carried out based on real time price of various instances considering heterogenous applications shows that the number of out-of-bid scenarios can be reduced largely which leads to the increased number of task completion. Checkpointing is also minimized maximally due to which the overhead associated with it is reduced. This resource provisioning strategy aims to provide preference to existing customers and the task which are nearing the execution completion

Fuzzy Association Rule Mining based Model to Predict Students’ Performance

The major intention of higher education institutions is to supply quality education to its students. One approach to get maximum level of quality in higher education system is by discovering knowledge for prediction regarding the internal assessment and end semester examination. The projected work intends to approach this objective by taking the advantage of fuzzy inference technique to classify student scores data according to the level of their performance. In this paper, student’s performance is evaluated using fuzzy association rule mining that describes Prediction of performance of the students at the end of the semester, on the basis of previous database like Attendance, Midsem Marks, Previous semester marks and Previous Academic Records were collected from the student’s previous database, to identify those students which needed individual attention to decrease fail ration and taking suitable action for the next semester examination