Topical antihistamines and mast cell stabilisers for treating seasonal and perennial allergic conjunctivitis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Wind energy potential at Kano airport via weibull parameters

A clean, source free and environmentally friendly alternate source of energy such as wind energy can be use for providing sustainable power supply to remedied an epileptic and unreliable power supply systems. This paper carried out an analysis of wind speed data at Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport in Nigeria using Weibull distribution methods to determine the wind features and its potentials necessary for power supply generation. Weibull parameter methods have been chosen for this analysis because of its efficiency. A six years (2009-2014) monthly mean wind speed data measured at 10 m height was collected and extrapolated to 100 m height level for statistical analysis. The average wind speed, standard deviation, Weibull scale and shape parameters has been analyzed for both 10 m and 100 m height levels. The minimum average wind speed was found to be 5m/s and the maximum average wind speed was 12.5 m/s at the 10 m height level, the Weibull scale parameters were found generally higher than the shape parameters. The Weibull parameter models were validated by RMSE. The site has been found to have great potentials for utility power generation capacity

High strain rate behavior of a SiC particulate reinforced Al2O3 ceramic matrix composite

The high strain rate deformation behavior of composite materials is important for several reasons. First, knowledge of the mechanical properties of composites at high strain rates is needed for designing with these materials in applications where sudden changes in loading rates are likely to occur. Second, knowledge of both the dynamic and quasi-static mechanical responses can be used to establish the constitutive equations which are necessary to increase the confidence limits of these materials, particularly if they are to be used in critical structural applications. Moreover, dynamic studies and the knowledge gained form them are essential for the further development of new material systems for impact applications. In this study, the high strain rate compressive deformation behavior of a ceramic matrix composite (CMC) consisting of SiC particles and an Al{sub 2}O{sub 3} matrix was studied and compared with its quasi-static behavior. Microscopic observations were conducted to investigate the deformation and fracture mechanism of the composite

High strain rate testing of a unidirectionally reinforced graphite epoxy composite

Since accurate, reproducible methods of testing polymer composites are not very well developed or standardized, this research forms part of a program to gain a better understanding of the mechanical properties and failure mechanisms of polymer composites at high strain rates. Since failure modes differ markedly depending on fiber architecture, orientation, fiber/matrix combination and so forth, these initial tests were carried out using a simple unidirectionally reinforced composite. Beginning with testing in the longitudinal and transverse directions, reported here, future experiments are being carried out to determine how the high strain rate properties vary with angle of testing, and then move on to other simple fiber lay-ups, ±90◦, ±45◦, etc

Bound - states for truncated Coulomb potentials

The pseudoperturbative shifted - $l$ expansion technique PSLET is generalized for states with arbitrary number of nodal zeros. Bound- states energy eigenvalues for two truncated coulombic potentials are calculated using PSLET. In contrast with shifted large-N expansion technique, PSLET results compare excellently with those from direct numerical integration.Comment: TEX file, 22 pages. To appear in J. Phys. A: Math. & Ge

A cuckoo search optimization scheme for non-convex economic load dispatch

This paper presents a Cuckoo Search (CS) based algorithm to solve constrained economic load dispatch (ELD) problems. The proposed methodology easily deals with non-smoothness of cost function arising due to the use of valve point effects. The performance of the algorithm has been tested on systems possessing 13 and 40 generating units involving varying degrees of complexity. The findings affirm that the method outperforms the existing techniques, and can be a promising alternative approach for solving the ELD problems in practical power system

Can Van Hove singularities be observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions ?

Based on general arguments the in-medium quark propagator in a quark-gluon plasma leads to a quark dispersion relation consisting of two branches, of which one exhibits a minimum at some finite momentum. This results in a vanishing group velocity for collective quark modes. Important quantities such as the production rate of low mass lepton pairs and mesonic correlators depend inversely on this group velocity. Therefore these quantities, which follow from self energy diagrams containing a quark loop, are strongly affected by Van Hove singularities (peaks and gaps). If these sharp structures could be observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions it would reveal the physical picture of the QGP as a gas of quasiparticles.Comment: 12 pages including nine figures and style files, invited talk given at the ICPAQGP-2001, November 26-30, 2001, Jaipur, Indi

SPSens: a software package for stochastic parameter sensitivity analysis of biochemical reaction networks

Summary: SPSens is a software package for the efficient computation of stochastic parameter sensitivities of biochemical reaction networks. Parameter sensitivity analysis is a valuable tool that can be used to study robustness properties, for drug targeting, and many other purposes. However its application to stochastic models has been limited when Monte Carlo methods are required due to extremely high computational costs. SPSens provides efficient, state of the art sensitivity analysis algorithms in a single software package so that sensitivity analysis can be easily performed on stochastic models of biochemical reaction networks. SPSens implements the algorithms in C and estimates sensitivities with respect to both infinitesimal and finite perturbations to system parameters, in many cases reducing variance by orders of magnitude compared to basic methods. Included among the features of SPSens are serial and parallel command line versions, an interface with Matlab, and several example problems. Availability: SPSens is distributed freely under GPL version 3 and can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/spsens/. The software can be run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms. Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin