Smart Irrigation Employing Direct Root Watering

This paper proposes implementation an automated irrigation system using which the watering is carried out bypassing the top soil and directly irrigating to the root zone of the plant. This system makes use of a soil moisture sensor that monitors the moisture content of the plant’s root zone continuously and compares it with the previously set values as threshold. Monitoring the soil moisture sensor readings, water is supplied only to the root area of the plant. Zigbee modules are used to facilitate the wireless communication of remote sensor with the controller and increase the flexibility of the system. The system design eliminates the loss of water before reaching the root zone that is absorbed by the top soil and makes a system well suitable for dry and drought prone areas

Emulated Control System for a Nuclear Reactor

This paper discusses some of the instrumentation aspects of process control system developed for a nuclear power plant. Monitoring and controlling are the essential elements in the normal, abnormal and emergency operation of nuclear power plant. Through their sensors and transmitters, control systems measure process variables and inturn to control valves, motors and other electromechanical equipments of the nuclear plant. In this context, we have developed a Labview based such control system aimed at developing a real time system to deploy via IoT(Internet of Things). We represent here our conceptual design developed in Labview platform integrated with Arduino Uno microcontroller. The instrumentation and control system measures basic physical parameters like level, temperature and pressure using sensors. The monitoring and control of the temperature is done using virtual instrument software LabView, which acts as data acquisition module. It monitors performance and helps in controlling the nuclear plant operations to keep the process variables within the plant design limits and ensures the plant safety. The transmission of data from one end to another end is done through wireless technology ZigBee, to monitor and analyzeplant processes and equipment on the Labview platform

Nanostructured mesoporous carbon as electrodes for supercapacitors

Symmetrical carbon/carbon double layer capacitors (EDLCs) were fabricated employing nanostructured mesoporous nongraphitized carbon black (NMCB) powders and their EDLC behavior was studied using electrochemical techniques viz., cyclic voltammetry, a.c.-impedance, and constant current cycling. Rectangular shape cyclic characteristics were observed indicating the double layer behavior of the NMCB carbon electrodes. The mechanism of double layer formation and frequency dependent capacitance were deduced from the ac-impedance analysis. Specific capacitance, power density and energy density were derived from constant current charge/discharge measurements. NMCB powders demonstrated a specific capacitance of about ∼39 F g−1 and the power density of 782 W kg−1 at a current density of 32 mA cm−2. Nevertheless, at a low current density (3 mA cm−2), the specific capacitance of ∼44 F g−1 was achieved, which corroborates with the values obtained by means of ac-impedance (40 F g−1) and cyclic voltammetry (41.5 F g−1). The test cells demonstrated the stable cycle performance over several hundreds of cycles

Non-Destructive Oil-Gas Pipeline Corrosion Monitoring

This paper proposes an in-line corrosion monitoring of oil-gas pipeline and evaluating the associated risks in minutes through real time data logging. The rapid changes in the resistive layer of the steel pipeline when it gets corroded are taken in account. When corrosion begins, thickness of the material of the pipeline decreases. The current passing through the layer varies and hence the potential. This change in the potential is measured and processed so that the control station is alerted about the progressive changes and necessary measures are taken to solve the issue. The proposed work saves the economic loss by preventing the digging of the whole area. It implies a kind of non-destructive approach. This is a long time process and whenever the system finds some rapid changes in the rate of corrosion, an alert is made so that it can facilitate in taking necessary measures to control the situation

Modified Variational Mode Decomposition for Power Line Interference Removal in ECG Signals

Power line interferences (PLI) occurring at 50/60 Hz can corrupt the biomedical recordings like ECG signals and which leads to an improper diagnosis of disease conditions. Proper interference cancellation techniques are therefore required for the removal of these power line disturbances from biomedical recordings. The non-linear time varying characteristics of biomedical signals make the interference removal a difficult task without compromising the actual signal characteristics. In this paper, a modified variational mode decomposition based approach is proposed for PLI removal from the ECG signals. In this approach, the central frequency of an intrinsic mode function is fixed corresponding to the normalized power line disturbance frequency. The experimental results show that the PLI interference is exactly captured both in magnitude and phase and are removed. The proposed approach is experimented with ECG signal records from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and compared with traditional notch filtering

Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting and Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting holds a promising future for generating a small amount of electrical power to drive partial circuits in wirelessly communicating electronics devices. Reducing power consumption has become a major challenge in wireless sensor networks. As a vital factor affecting system cost and lifetime, energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is an emerging and active research area. This chapter presents a practical approach for RF Energy harvesting and management of the harvested and available energy for wireless sensor networks using the Improved Energy Efficient Ant Based Routing Algorithm (IEEABR) as our proposed algorithm. The chapter looks at measurement of the RF power density, calculation of the received power, storage of the harvested power, and management of the power in wireless sensor networks. The routing uses IEEABR technique for energy management. Practical and real-time implementations of the RF Energy using Powercast harvesters and simulations using the energy model of our Libelium Waspmote to verify the approach were performed. The chapter concludes with performance analysis of the harvested energy, comparison of IEEABR and other traditional energy management techniques, while also looking at open research areas of energy harvesting and management for wireless sensor networks.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, Book chapte

Recent development in spinel cobaltites for supercapacitor application

Precious metal oxides exhibit impressive characteristics that caught worldwide attention due to their promising capacitive performance, excellent electrochemical stability and low resistance, and these metal oxides have been extensively employed in supercapacitor application. This type of supercapacitors is known as redox supercapacitors or pseudocapacitors which applied faradaic process in storing energy in their systems. Thus, new materials with impressive electrochemical performance are highly demanded. In this aspect, cobaltite system with spinel structure has been the subject of intense research due to its established applications in electrochemistry. Besides, carbonaceous materials like activated carbons, carbon nanotubes, graphites, graphenes and fullerenes utilize electric double-layer capacitance whereby energy is stored by charge separation at an electrode/electrolyte interface. With greater development conducted on metal oxides and carbonaceous materials for supercapacitor application, introduction of hybrid and composite electrodes comprise of these two types of materials have been well received

Nicotine stabilization in composite sodium alginate based wafers and films for nicotine replacement therapy

Composite wafers and films comprising HPMC and sodium alginate (SA) were formulated for nicotine (NIC) replacement therapy via the buccal route. Magnesium aluminium silicate (MAS) was added in different concentration ratios (0.25, 0.5, 0.75) to stabilize NIC and its effect on mechanical properties, internal and surface morphology, physical form, thermal properties, swelling, mucoadhesion, drug content and release behaviour of the formulations was investigated. MAS changed the physico-mechanical properties of the composite formulations causing a decrease in mechanical hardness, collapsed wafer pores, increased roughness of film surface, increase in crystallinity and decreased mucoadhesion of the wafers. However, MAS increased swelling in both films and wafers as well as interaction between NIC and SA, which increased drug-loading capacity. Further, MAS resulted in rapid and slow release of NIC from wafers and films respectively. The results suggest that the ideal formulation for the stabilization of NIC in the composite formulations was MAS 0.25