Women empowerment and micro finance : Case study from Kerala

The subject of micro-finance is considered as significant and emerging trend in the present scenario for the empowerment of women. Micro finance programmes are promoted as an important strategy for women’s empowerment. Micro finance builds mutual trust and confidence between bankers and rural poor to encourage banking in a segment of population where formal financial institutions usually find difficult to reach. The present paper examines the economic impact of micro finance beneficiaries and whether the economic empowerment has resulted in the generation of a set of self reliant women. The Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala State was selected for the case study. The survey shows about the positive impact of the development programme of Kudumbashree, a micro financial institution in Kerala, India.women empowerment micro finance poverty.

Mass transfer studies of Direct Orange 102 dye onto a non-conventional adsorbent

79-84Activated carbon with surface area of 896 m2/g has been prepared from the wood of Thevetia Neriifolia Juss (TNJAC). The fitness of the prepared activated carbon is tested for its adsorption capability towards the textile dye direct orange 102 (DO102). On increasing the solution pH from 2 to 12, the percentage of DO102 adsorption increases from 41 to 75%. The adsorption kinetics is analyzed using pseudo-first order and pseudo-second order kinetic models. Pseudo-second order model is more appropriate to describe the adsorption kinetics with a correlation coefficient of 0.93112< 0.9871. On analyzing the adsorption isotherm using Langmuir and Freundlich models, the adsorption of DO102 by TNJAC follows Langmuir type of isotherm with energetically homogeneous sorbent surface

Learning for Multi-robot Cooperation in Partially Observable Stochastic Environments with Macro-actions

This paper presents a data-driven approach for multi-robot coordination in partially-observable domains based on Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and macro-actions (MAs). Dec-POMDPs provide a general framework for cooperative sequential decision making under uncertainty and MAs allow temporally extended and asynchronous action execution. To date, most methods assume the underlying Dec-POMDP model is known a priori or a full simulator is available during planning time. Previous methods which aim to address these issues suffer from local optimality and sensitivity to initial conditions. Additionally, few hardware demonstrations involving a large team of heterogeneous robots and with long planning horizons exist. This work addresses these gaps by proposing an iterative sampling based Expectation-Maximization algorithm (iSEM) to learn polices using only trajectory data containing observations, MAs, and rewards. Our experiments show the algorithm is able to achieve better solution quality than the state-of-the-art learning-based methods. We implement two variants of multi-robot Search and Rescue (SAR) domains (with and without obstacles) on hardware to demonstrate the learned policies can effectively control a team of distributed robots to cooperate in a partially observable stochastic environment.Comment: Accepted to the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017

Antipathogenic Activity of Spirulina Powder

Spirulina is a microscopic blue-green alga in the shape of a spiral coil, living both in sea and fresh water. In this study, dried Spirulina was extracted at different solvents such as Hexane, Ethyl acetate, Ethanol, Butanol, Acetone, Methanol and chloroform. That extracts were stored in an airtight glass bottles in a refrigerator. Antimicrobial activity analysis from different pathogens and using well diffusion methods. Butanol extract of Spirulina also gave the highest antimicrobial activity of 19 mm against Staphylococcus epidermids, 18mm against Staphylococcus aureus and Aeromonas liquefaciens, 13mm against Candida glabrata, 12mm against Enterococcus feacalis, 11mm against Campylobacter coil and Vibrio cholerae and low activity against 5mm Salmonella typhi. Remaining solvents extracts antimicrobial activity low compare to butanol

Feasibility Analysis of Solar Power for the Safety of Fast Reactors during beyond Design Basis Events

This chapter presents a new design that unites the favorable technical and ecological characteristics of the solar and nuclear power plants. The current designs of nuclear reactors promise integral configuration of the primary coolant loop, secondary coolant loop, and a number of passive safety functions and overall simplification of the reactor. The present nuclear reactor design emphasizes on the safety of the reactor core at all times, i.e., controlling the reactor, cooling the reactor core, and maintaining containment. In case of non-availability of standby emergency DGs during beyond design basis event like Fukushima incident, etc., leading to extended station blackout conditions, the passive decay heat removal system will be affected. Hence, additional DGs have been made as a mandatory requirement in nuclear power plants. In case the ADG could not be mobilized during BDBE, an additional backup power source not affected by BDBE is appreciated. Hence in addition to the diesel power sources (EDG and ADG), a new design was developed for integration of diesel power with solar power. The hybrid system was designed to improve the reliability and availability of passive heat removal system, to ensure a reliable supply without interruption, and to improve the overall system reliability (by the integration with the battery bank). This hybrid power also gives the redundant power supply to the safety critical systems. This chapter also features a detailed reliability analysis carried out for power supplies to the safety critical loads. In addition a comparison was made between PV/diesel/battery with diesel/battery. These new hybrid systems conserves diesel fuel and reduce CO2 as well as particulate emissions that are harmful to environment health. Integration of solar power to the existing battery power will increase the reliability and extended availability of the system and thereby ensures safety of the plant during crisis/calamities

Optimisation of Diesel Engine for Hybrid Military Tracked Vehicles using Matlab-Simulink

The demand in the technology requirements for diesel engines is growing keeping hybrid vehicles in mind. In future the diesel engine no longer drives the wheels directly; as a result the engine can be engaged at a limited number of operating points, thus, offering an opportunity to optimise the fuel efficiency and performance at those operating points. The extent to which this optimisation is possible is limited by practical considerations. Also if the positive and negative power peaks in vehicle during mobility (e.g. acceleration and regenerative braking respectively) can be accommodated by high-power batteries, then the size of the engine can be considerably reduced. The engine’s operating points depend on the power-control strategy. The consequences of modifications to these operating points will have an effect on performance and efficiency. As in series hybrid only a limited number of operating points are involved and dynamic performance requirements are not imposed on the diesel engine, significant improvements can be achieved by the optimisation of the diesel engine at these operating points. The feasibility of optimisation of the engine at these operating points can be done by modification on the injection systems, the valve timings and other such parameters. This kind of approach requires the use of complex and repeated experimental analysis of the engine which is costly, cumbersome and time consuming. An alternative to this kind of experimental approach is to develop a simulation model of the engine with the generator in Matlab- Simulink

Congestion-aware wireless network-on-chip for high-speed communication

The design of system-on-chip (SoC) requires the complex integration between a multi-number of cores on a single chip. To establish the effective communication between multiple cores there aremore challenging issues on designing the network-on-chip (NoC) architectures. The proposed system deals with the utilization of on-chip antennas for the wireless communication between the long distance cores to minimize the latency and power. In this proposed work, we have designed high-speed wireless NoC (WiNoC) for on-chip communication. This high-speed WiNoC has been achieved by designing a congestion measure unit, which monitors and measures the congestion in the input data and establishes the effective wireless communication between the output channels and routers. The designed architecture is synthesized and implemented by using Altera Quartus II, where the SoC is designed using Qsys builder. The proposed WiNoC shows better performance parameters like throughput, latency and power than the conventional NoC

Influence of Processing Parameters in Sicp - Aluminium Alloy Composite Produced by Stir Casting Method

Metal matrix composites are gaining wider acceptance in aerospace and defence industries due to their starving need for lightweight — high strength materials. The control of processing parameters is very important in order to obtain good quality casing with minimal defects. In this study the influence of processing parameters on the properties of SiC particle reinforced aluminium alloy (Al- 10%Si- 0.6%Mg) composite was investigated. The composites are prepared by stir casting method. This method involves mixing of SiC in the molten aluminium alloy aided with mechanical agitation. The processing parameters that were investigated include melt temperature and stirring speed. Specimens produced were subjected to mechanical testing. Microstructure observed through scanning electron microscope and optical microscope was correlated to the observed mechanical behavior. The results show that the melt temperature appears to have little effect on the mechanical properties and particle settling. SEM photographs show that there is particle clustering at low melt temperature