EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF PLASMA-JET FORMING

Sheet metal forming has found increasing applications in modern industries. To eliminate use of expensive tools during product development, thermal forming, a rapid prototyping process that is flexible enough to decrease costs has been developed. Thermal forming processes use a heat source to perform the required deformation mainly by creating a thermal difference along the thickness of the sheet. Gas flames, lasers and plasma heat sources have been used for sheet metal bending by thermal forming. An alternative to laser and gas flames, plasma-jet forming has been developed that uses a non-transferred plasma arc as a heat source. The plasma-jet forming system uses a highly controllable non-transferred plasma torch as a heat source to create the necessary thermal gradient in the sheet metal that causes the required plastic deformation. Various experiments to produce simple linear bends and other complex shapes have been conducted by using different scanning options and coupling techniques. A computer simulated model using finite element method is being developed to study key parameters affecting this process and also to measure the thermal transient temperature distribution during the process. A predictive model to relate the deformation to the temperature gradient for various materials is being developed. Simulation results that are in accordance to experimental observations will further improve this material forming process to be highly controllable and more accurat

Thin Film Deposition of Silicon for Solar Cell Applications

Thin films of silicon have been formed using a patented electrostatic deposition method which utilizes charged particle motion in an electric field. After deposition, the films are heat treated for varying times and temperatures in a programmable furnace maintained under a purified argon atmosphere. X-ray diffraction (XRD) confirmed that these films were polycrystalline in nature. These films were found to have grain sizes of about 50 microns. Solar cells were fabricated using these large grained polycrystalline silicon films by sputtering pure gold as both front and back contacts. The cells have shown efficiencies of 1.8%. This paper reports on the growth of these large-grained polycrystalline thin silicon films and on the laser recrystallization setup to be used to increase the grain size up to 100 microns. Films grown via this electrostatic deposition method and subsequent laser recrystallization have a great potential for use in the solar cell industry

Design of Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

The research in Wireless Body area Networks (WBAN) has taken an exponential growth in last decade. The advances in wireless communication among the invasive / non-invasive micro sensors along with the Micro Electro Mechanical systems (MEMS) technology have enabled the deployment of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in and around the human body for e-health monitoring. The main aim of WBANs is to improve the speed, accuracy and reliability of communication of sensors inside in the close proximity of the human body. Wearable WBAN in medical applications can be used either for disability assistance or human performance management. In case of wearable BANs, the sensor nodes may be deployed in a wearable device like a brain cap, chest jacket or even a bracelet etc. The sensors sense the body parameters and send it to the base station for further processing. The resource constrained, miniature sized sensors meet several challenges while communicating to the base station. A routing protocol basically decides the energy consumption in the network. So, designing a routing protocol that will extend the life of sensors and hence the life of WBAN is the main goal. This thesis proposes a distributed clustering algorithm that aims to provide a longer network life time by the fair distribution of energy consumption among the sensor nodes

Antibacterial activity of Chitosan Nanoparticles against sea food pathogens

The present study was designed to investigate antibacterial activity of chitosan nanoparticles against sea food pathogens. Chitosan is an interesting polymer that has been used extensively in the medical field. It is either partially or fully deacetylated chitin. It is a good antibacterial and antifungal agent. Chitosan is synthesized by STPP method and its active range is evaluated by uv-vis spectroscopy. Then its antibacterial is tested against isolated Vibrio and also tested the antibacterial activity of chloramphenicol against the isolated species for knowing the strength of the strain. Chitosan is a good antibacterial agent that killed Vibrio around its active sites. But, chloramphenicol is a weak antibacterial agent than chitosan

InfiNet: Fully Convolutional Networks for Infant Brain MRI Segmentation

We present a novel, parameter-efficient and practical fully convolutional neural network architecture, termed InfiNet, aimed at voxel-wise semantic segmentation of infant brain MRI images at iso-intense stage, which can be easily extended for other segmentation tasks involving multi-modalities. InfiNet consists of double encoder arms for T1 and T2 input scans that feed into a joint-decoder arm that terminates in the classification layer. The novelty of InfiNet lies in the manner in which the decoder upsamples lower resolution input feature map(s) from multiple encoder arms. Specifically, the pooled indices computed in the max-pooling layers of each of the encoder blocks are related to the corresponding decoder block to perform non-linear learning-free upsampling. The sparse maps are concatenated with intermediate encoder representations (skip connections) and convolved with trainable filters to produce dense feature maps. InfiNet is trained end-to-end to optimize for the Generalized Dice Loss, which is well-suited for high class imbalance. InfiNet achieves the whole-volume segmentation in under 50 seconds and we demonstrate competitive performance against multiple state-of-the art deep architectures and their multi-modal variants.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, conference, IEEE ISBI, 201

The fetal cerebroplacental ratio in pregnancies complicated by gestational diabetes mellitus

To assess the relationship between the cerebroplacental ratio (CPR) and intrapartum and perinatal outcomes in pregnancies complicated by gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM).This was a retrospective cohort study of women with a non-anomalous singleton pregnancy diagnosed with GDM who delivered at Mater Mothers' Hospital between 2007 and 2015. CPR was measured in 1089 cases between 34 + 0 and 36 + 6 weeks' gestation. CPR values were compared between groups categorized according to GDM treatment (by diet, oral hypoglycemic agent (OHA) or insulin). The association between CPR and intrapartum and perinatal outcomes was evaluated.No difference in CPR was observed between treatment groups. Fetuses with CPR < 10 centile were significantly more likely to have adverse composite perinatal outcome (odds ratio (OR) = 2.93 (95% CI, 1.95-4.40)), preterm delivery and low birth weight than fetuses with CPR ≥ 10 centile (all P < 0.001). These associations were present regardless of the type of GDM treatment. Fetuses of women with insulin-controlled GDM had poorer neonatal outcomes than did fetuses of women treated with OHA or dietary control alone. The risk of adverse outcome was significantly increased in the insulin-treated group (OR = 1.75 (95% CI, 1.34-2.28); P < 0.001), which also had higher rates of preterm delivery and higher birth weight.Regardless of the type of treatment, a low CPR is associated with poorer neonatal outcome in women with GDM. Copyright © 2016 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Oral Health related treatment needs among Autistic Children: A Review

Autism is a neurodevelopment disorder allied with atypical brain constitution and function due to which communication, speech, behaviour, and cognitive functions weaken. Autism patients have many emotional, physical, health-related issues and oral health is one of them. As oral health is a wide range reflection of our general health, thus to achieve a good overall health focus on oral health is equally important. Every child has a unique characteristic, thus their emotional, physical and health needs are different. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review and discuss the literature related to oral health characteristics and treatment needs of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to facilitate the provision of care by dental practitioners

Addressing Queuing Bottlenecks at High Speeds

Modern routers and switch fabrics can have hundreds of input and output ports running at up to 10 Gb/s; 40 Gb/s systems are starting to appear. At these rates, the performance of the buffering and queuing subsystem becomes a significant bottleneck. In high performance routers with more than a few queues, packet buffering is typically implemented using DRAM for data storage and a combination of off-chip and on-chip SRAM for storing the linked-list nodes and packet length, and the queue headers, respectively. This paper focuses on the performance bottlenecks associated with the use of off-chip SRAM. We show how the combination of implicit buffer pointers and multi-buffer list nodes can dramatically reduce the impact of buffering and queuing subsystem on queuing performance. We also show how combining it with coarse-grained scheduling can improve the performance of fair queuing algorithms, while also reducing the amount of off-chip memory and bandwidth needed. These techniques can reduce the amount of SRAM needed to hold the list nodes by a factor of 10 at the cost of about 10% wastage of the DRAM space, assuming an aggregation degree of 16

The impact of fibroid characteristics on pregnancy outcome

Objective The objective of the study was to assess the influence of different characteristics of fibroids on pregnancy outcome. Study Design We identified women with fibroids 4 cm or greater in size on ultrasonography at the dating scan between January 2002 and December 2012. The size (4-7 cm, 7-10 cm, >10 cm), number (multiple/single), location (lower uterus/body of uterus), and type (intramural, combination of intramural/subserosal, subserosal) were ascertained. Medical records were reviewed to obtain pregnancy outcomes (preterm delivery, birthweight, mode of delivery, estimated blood loss, postpartum hemorrhage, and admission for fibroid-related pain)

Limiting blood loss in orthognathic surgery with Esmolol as a hypotensive agent

Orthognathic surgery may be complicated by difficulty in achieving hemostasis because unlike soft tissue, the vessels traversing bone cannot be identified and isolated before osteotomy. In this study we evaluated the amount of blood loss and duration of surgery under deliberate hypotensive anesthesia in comparison to amount of blood loss and duration of surgery under normotensive anesthesia on patients undergoing orthognathic surgical procedures. A total of 16 cases undergoing orthognathic surgery were included in this clinical study.Patients were randomly grouped under normotensive (group I) or hypotensive group (group 2). Patients in hypotensive anesthesia group were given Esmolol to maintain mean arterial pressure in the range of 70-80 mm of Hg till osteotomy segments were fixed. There was more than 40% reduction in blood loss in orthognathic surgical procedures when induced hypotension was used, but there was not statistically significant (p=0.91) reduction in the operative time. Based on surgeons and anesthetist’s assessment fast acting agents like Esmolol can be used intraoperatively to induce hypotension as and when required.