A Comparative Study of Consumer Perception of Product Quality: Chinese versus Non-Chinese Products

Product quality is a critical determinant of consumer satisfaction. The demand for a product depends upon the quality that a manufacturer is providing to their consumers. China, which is a growing economic power, exports its manufactured goods to the entire global markets. Chinese goods have been successful to capture market because of its competitive price strategy as compared to the products of other countries. The major problem with the Chinese products is that these are perceived as of relatively inferior quality in comparison to the products of other countries. This study is an attempt to assess the perceptions of customers regarding price and quality aspects of Chinese and non Chinese products. To compare the relative effectiveness of price and quality, the concepts of perceived life and perceived value are used. It is found that the Chinese products are perceived as price effective but the area of product quality requires immediate attention because Chinese products are perceived as of low qualit

Passivity-based Rieman Liouville fractional order sliding mode control of three phase inverter in a grid-connected photovoltaic system

Photovoltaic (PV) system parameters are always non-linear due to variable environmental conditions. The Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is difficult under multiple uncertainties, disruptions and the occurrence of time-varying stochastic conditions. Therefore, Passivity based Fractional order Sliding-Mode controller (PBSMC) is proposed to examine and develop a storage function in error tracking for PV power and direct voltage in this research work. A unique sliding surface for Fractional Order Sliding Mode Control (FOSMC) framework is proposed and its stability and finite time convergence is proved by implementing Lyapunov stability method. An additional input of sliding mode control (SMC) is also added to a passive system to boost the controller performance by removing the rapid uncertainties and disturbances. Therefore, PBSMC, along with globally consistent control efficiency under varying operating conditions is implemented with enhanced system damping and substantial robustness. The novelty of the proposed technique lies in a unique sliding surface for FOSMC framework based on Riemann Liouville (R-L) fractional calculus. Results have shown that the proposed control technique reduces the tracking error in PV output power, under variable irradiance conditions, by 81%, compared to fractional order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller. It is reduced by 39%, when compared to passivity based control (PBC) and 28%, when compared to passivity based FOPID (EPBFOPID). The proposed technique led to the least total harmonic distortion in the grid side voltage and current. The tracking time of PV output power is 0.025 seconds in PBSMC under varying solar irradiance, however FOPID, PBC, EPBFOPID, have failed to converge fully. Similarly the dc link voltage has tracked the reference voltage in 0.05 seconds however the rest of the methods either could not converge, or converged after significant amount of time. During solar irradiance and temperature change, the photovoltaic output power has converged in 0.018 seconds using PBSMC, however remaining methods failed to converge or track fully and the dc link voltage has minimum tracking error due to PBSMC as compared to the other methods. Furthermore, the photovoltaic output power converges to the reference power in 0.1 seconds in power grid voltage drop, whereas other methods failed to converge fully. In addition power is also injected from the PV inverter into the grid at unity power factor

Nonlinear control of two-stage single-phase standalone photovoltaic system

This paper presents a single-phase Photovoltaic (PV) inverter with its superior and robust control in a standalone mode. Initially, modeling and layout of the Buck-Boost DC-DC converter by adopting a non-linear Robust Integral Back-stepping controller (RIBSC) is provided. The controller makes use of a reference voltage generated through the regression plane so that the operating point corresponding to the maximum power point (MPP) could be achieved through the converter under changing climatic conditions. The other main purpose of the Buck-Boost converter is to act like a transformer and produce an increased voltage at the inverter input whenever desired. By not using a transformer makes the circuit size more compact and cost-effective. The proposed RIBSC is applied to an H-bridge inverter with an LC filter to produce the sinusoidal wave in the presence of variations in the output to minimize the difference between the output voltage and the reference voltage. Lyapunov stability criterion has been used to verify the stability and finite-time convergence of the overall system. The overall system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to test the system performance with different loads, varying climatic conditions and inverter reference voltages. The proposed methodology is compared with a back-stepping controller and Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller under rapidly varying climatic conditions. Results demonstrated that the proposed technique yielded a tracking time of 0.01s, a total harmonic distortion of 9.71% and a root means square error of 0.3998 in the case of resistive load thus showing superior control performance compared to the state-of-the-art control techniques

Chemical Composition of Different Varieties of Linseed

The present study was conducted to investigate chemical composition of six varieties of linseed (Chandni, LS-29, LS-49, LS-70, LS-75 and LS-76). Proximate composition, mineral profile and cyanogenic glycosides (linamarin) were determined. Average proximate composition values for linseed i.e. crude protein, ether extract, crude fiber, ash and nitrogen free extract were 24.18, 37.77, 4.78, 3.50 and 25.86%, respectively. Higher values of crude protein, ether extract, crude fiber and nitrogen free extract were observed in varieties LS-49, LS-70, LS-29 and Chandni, respectively. Average mineral contents in linseed i.e. Ca, Mg, K, Na, Cl, P, Cu, Fe, Mn and Zn were 0.39, 0.09, 1.41, 0.05, 0.08, 0.89, 4.67, 50.56, 8.29 and 13.55 ppm, respectively. Among micro minerals, varieties LS-29 and LS-70 were higher in Cu contents; LS-75 was higher in Fe content, while LS-49 was higher in Mn and Zn contents. Among macro minerals, level of Ca was higher in LS-70, levels of Mg, K and Na were higher in Chandni, while P was higher in LS-49. Average amount of linamarin in linseed was 31.05mg/100 gm DM. The variety LS-75 had the highest (35.22 mg/100 gm) linamarin content, while variety LS-70 had least (26.22 mg/100 gm) amount of linamarin. In conclusion, there is significant difference in chemical composition among linseed varieties. The varieties LS-49 showed higher crude protein content, LS-70 showed greater oil content, while LS-75 had higher content of linamarin

In vitro Direct Regeneration and Agrobacterium Tumefaciens mediated in planta Transformation of Ocimum sanctum L.

An in vitro regeneration system for propagation has been successfully developed for a valuable medicinal and aromatic plant ‘Ocimum sanctum L’. In the present study, petiole explants, from in-vitro grown cultures of O. sanctum, was used for direct regeneration. The developed protocol employed 98% of regeneration frequency in addition to 9.6 shoots per explant when cultured on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium fortified with 3 mg/L benzylamino purine (BAP) and 1 mg/L Naphthalene acetic acid (NAA). Furthermore, Agrobacterium tumefaciens Mediated genetic Transformation (ATMT) protocol (transient and stable) was also developed using LBA4404 strain harboring pBI121 with uid-A and neomycin phosphotransferase genes. The regenerated transformants were shifted on MS with kanamycin (50 mg/L) and afterwards placed on the half-strength MS medium. The validation was done through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with neomycin phosphotransferase-II (npt-II) & β-glucoronidase (uid-A) gene primers. The maximum stable transformation frequency of 70% ± 0.35 was achieved. Hence, it is apparent that the established protocols i.e. in vitro direct regeneration and ATMT are appropriate for integrating novel enzymes/genes through high throughput techniques such as gene tagging, and targeted gene replacement to modulate the primary as well as secondary metabolic flux towards desired agronomic product or trait in planta

Mitigating Anomalous Electricity Consumption in Smart Cities Using an AI-Based Stacked-Generalization Technique

Energy management and efficient asset utilization play an important role in the economic development of a country. The electricity produced at the power station faces two types of losses from the generation point to the end user. These losses are technical losses (TL) and non-technical losses (NTL). TLs occurs due to the use of inefficient equipment. While NTLs occur due to the anomalous consumption of electricity by the customers, which happens in many ways; energy theft being one of them. Energy theft majorly happens to cut down on the electricity bills. These losses in the smart grid (SG) are the main issue in maintaining grid stability and cause revenue loss to the utility. The automatic metering infrastructure (AMI) system has reduced grid instability but it has opened up new ways for NTLs in the form of different cyber-physical theft attacks (CPTA). Machine learning (ML) techniques can be used to detect and minimize CPTA. However, they have certain limitations and cannot capture the energy consumption patterns (ECPs) of all the users, which decreases the performance of ML techniques in detecting malicious users. In this paper, we propose a novel ML-based stacked generalization method for the cyber-physical theft issue in the smart grid. The original data obtained from the grid is preprocessed to improve model training and processing. This includes NaN-imputation, normalization, outliers\u27 capping, support vector machine-synthetic minority oversampling technique (SVM-SMOTE) balancing, and principal component analysis (PCA) based data reduction techniques. The pre-processed dataset is provided to the ML models light gradient boosting (LGB), extra trees (ET), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and random forest (RF), to accurately capture all consumers\u27 overall ECP. The predictions from these base models are fed to a meta-classifier multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The MLP combines the learning capability of all the base models and gives an improved final prediction. The proposed structure is implemented and verified on the publicly available real-time large dataset of the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC). The proposed model outperformed the individual base classifiers and the existing research in terms of CPTA detection with false positive rate (FPR), false negative rate (FNR), F1-score, and accuracy values of 0.72%, 2.05%, 97.6%, and 97.69%, respectively

Cost Benefits Analysis of Anthelmintic Treatment of Cattle and Buffaloes

A study was carried out to determine the point prevalence of various helminths of cattle and buffalo population of district Toba Tek Singh, Pakistan and economic benefits of deworming with oxyclozanide. Out of 540 fecal samples examined, 205 (37.96%) were found infected with helminths. Significantly higher (OR=2.2; P<0.05) prevalence of helminths was recorded in buffaloes (40%; 112/280) as compared to cattle (35.77%; 93/260). Oesophagostomum, Cooperia, Trichostrongylus, Strongyloide, Ostertagia, Fasciola (F.) hepatica, F. gigantica and Haemonchus contortus were the helminth species identified in the study area. Oxyclozanide medicated buffaloes (E=96.66%) and cattle (E=95.64%) showed a significant decrease in fecal egg counts on day 14 post-treatment. An average daily increase of 0.89 and 0.71 liters of milk along with 0.42 and 0.37% more fat per buffalo and cattle, respectively was observed in oxyclozanide medication. The economic value of reduced production of infected animals was estimated as US$0.47 (Pak Rupees 40) and US$ 0.41 (Pak Rupees 35) per animal per day for cattle and buffaloes, respectively. It can be concluded that single dose of oxyclozanide is effective against all bovine helminths