Design and Testing of a Prototype High Speed Data Acquisition System for Nasa

Modern radar and signal processing applications require data acquisition systems capable of high-speed analog data reception and processing. These systems need to support sophisticated signal processing algorithms and reliable high-speed interfaces. The objective of this project is to develop a prototype of a state of the art data acquisition system to aid NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. The SWOT mission aims at monitoring water levels of various water bodies to predict and avoid any catastrophic events. The principal instrument is a Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIN) that is used for the measurement of water levels. The collected data need to be digitized and processed using an FPGA based-data acquisition system housed in a satellite. The scope of this project involves the design, implementation and test of a high-speed printed circuit board (PCB) that serves as the prototype data acquisition system. A lot of emphasis is placed on layout design, as the PCB needs to support data rates up to three Giga samples per second. The goal of this research is to provide Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA with a prototype version of the high- speed acquisition system that can be integrated with the KaRIN system in future

Environmental impact assessment for water resources projects : planning procedure and analytical methods

This thesis presents a state of the art review of environmental impact assessment procedures utilised in the water resources projects which have evolved over the past two decades. The methodologies employed and some of their limitations which exist and are inherent in both the planning and assessment phases of analysis are identified. The above was supplemented by an investigation of the various views of professionals currently employing the above methodologies. The review effort summarizes the relevant information obtained from the literature which is rather dynamic because of the ever evolving nature of the field. One conclusion drawn from this study is that the recent changes in water planning guidelines are but a pragmatic adaptation to the way planning actually takes place and that multiobjective methods will continue to play a role. Among suggestions offered by this author, in the case of analytical methods are needs for adapting more to the new institutional environment and for greater usage of conflict management techniques. It is believed that some of the recommendations in this thesis would serve to strengthen the process and the projects developed as part of the assessment program

The effect of the ultraviolet portion of the sun spectrum on chlorine residuals in water supplies

The effect of sunlight on chlorine residuals in water supplies was investigated to provide original and basic information of value to the water purification field. Three different water systems were employed: (a) The Simplified Water System, (b) The Ground Water System, and (c) The Surface Water System. The RS Sunlamp provided an appropriate source of ultraviolet radiation. A 10 mg/1 chlorine concentration was used. The pH values of 7 and 10 and the illumination intensities of 145 and 200 foot candles were employed. Iodometric determination of chlorine residuals was the main parameter used. It was found that the chlorine residuals were effectively destroyed by the ultraviolet portion of the sun spectrum within a short period of time. Larger reductions were observed at the higher pH value of 10. Presence of dissolved and suspended impurities decreased the chlorine removal, as did the increased depths. Better reductions were obtained with the higher illumination intensity --Abstract

Recognition of compound characters in Kannada language

Recognition of degraded printed compound Kannada characters is a challenging research problem. It has been verified experimentally that noise removal is an essential preprocessing step. Proposed are two methods for degraded Kannada character recognition problem. Method 1 is conventionally used histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature extraction for character recognition problem. Extracted features are transformed and reduced using principal component analysis (PCA) and classification performed. Various classifiers are experimented with. Simple compound character classification is satisfactory (more than 98% accuracy) with this method. However, the method does not perform well on other two compound types. Method 2 is deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) model for classification. This outperforms HOG features and classification. The highest classification accuracy is found as 98.8% for simple compound character classification. The performance of deep CNN is far better for other two compound types. Deep CNN turns out to better for pooled character classes

Aggressive angiomyxoma of uterine corpus

Aggressive angiomyxoma (AA) is a rare slow growing mesenchymal tumour that preferentially involves the vulvovaginal, pelvic or perineal regions. It is called aggressive due its frequent local recurrences and infiltrative behavior. They occur most commonly in the reproductive age group in women. A 37 year old with AA of endometrial polyp, presenting with acute pain abdomen and friable, fleshy mass protruding out of introitus, precipitated by a dilatation and curettage for heavy menstrual bleeding. A clinical diagnosis of fibroid polyp with acute red degeneration was considered. There was a spontaneous expulsion of fleshy mass. HPE showed AA with features of torsion. MRI showed T2 heterogenous hyperintense mass lesion of 9 x 3 x 3.9 cm pedunculated polypoidal arising from upper anterior uterine wall. Hysterectomy specimen confirmed HPE findings of AA. Radiological studies and pathological evaluation aids in the diagnosis and planning of appropriate treatment of AA. Close and long term follow up of these patients should be emphasized due to high rate of local recurrence

Bulk photonic metamaterial with hyperbolic dispersion

In this work, we demonstrate a self-standing bulk three-dimensional metamaterial based on the network of silver nanowires in an alumina membrane. This constitutes an anisotropic effective medium with hyperbolic dispersion, which can be used in sub-diffraction imaging or optical cloaks. Highly anisotropic dielectric constants of the material range from positive to negative, and the transmitted laser beam shifts both toward the normal to the surface, as in regular dielectrics, and off the normal, as in anisotropic dielectrics with the refraction index smaller than one. The designed photonic metamaterial is the thickest reported in the literature, both in terms of its physical size 1cm x 1cm x 51 mm, and the number of vacuum wavelengths, N=61 at l=0.84 mm.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figur

Comparative efficacy of behavioral despair models in depicting antidepressant-like effect of tramadol

Background: Experimental evaluation of antidepressants (ADs) in diverse animal models is the need of time. There is a constant search for newer models with ease and rapid screening of AD activity. As earlier studies highlight AD effect of tramadol in animal models, the study was undertaken to compare antidepressant-like effect of tramadol in two models of behavioural despair in mice.Methods: Tramadol was administered intraperitoneally (i.p.) at two different doses of 20 and 40 mg/kg, once daily for 7 days to Swiss albino mice. The immobility period of control and drug-treated mice was recorded in tail suspension test (TST) and forced swim test (FST). The antidepressant (AD) effect of tramadol was compared with control (NS) and reference drug imipramine (10 mg/kg, p.o.), administered orally (p.o.) for seven successive days.Results: Tramadol in tail suspension test (TST) produced significant antidepressant effect at 20 and 40 mg/kg doses, as depicted by reduction in immobility period of drug-treated mice compared to control group. The efficacy of tramadol at dose of 40 mg/kg was comparable to that of imipramine treated group (p0.05).Conclusion: The results of the present study depict antidepressant-like activity of tramadol in both the models of depression TST and FST. But TST in mice seems to be more efficacious in appraising the antidepressant like effect of tramadol

Spatio-Temporal Representation for Reasoning with Action Genome

Representing Spatio-temporal information in videos has proven to be a difficult task compared to action recognition in videos involving multiple actions. A single activity consists many smaller actions that can provide a better understanding of the activity. This paper tries to represent the varying information in a scene-graph format in order to answer temporal questions to obtain improved insights for the video, resulting in a directed temporal information graph. This project will use the Action Genome dataset, which is a variation of the charades dataset, to capture pairwise relationships in a graph. The model performs significantly better than the benchmark results of the dataset providing state-of-the-art results in predicate classification. The paper presents a novel Spatio-temporal scene graph for videos, represented as a directed acyclic graph that maximizes the information in the scene. The results obtained in the counting task suggest some interesting finds that are described in the paper. The graph can be used for reasoning with a much lower computational requirement explored in this work among other downstream tasks such as video captioning, action recognition, and more, trying to bridge the gap between videos and textual analysis

Determination of Stress Intensity Factor of Banana Fibre Reinforced Hybrid Polymer Matrix Composite Using Finite Element Method

In the current scene on material field, designers are focusing on the development of lightweight, high strength, recyclable and environment friendly materials. Due to increasing environmental admiration, ecological concerns and new statutory laws, natural fibre reinforced polymer matrix composites have found increasing attention from the recent decades. Past studies show that synthetic and natural fibres such as glass, carbon, jute, coir etc., have been used in fibre reinforced polymer matrix composite. In this work, banana fibre is used as reinforcement. An investigation is carried out to make use of banana fibre made hybrid polymer matrix composite. Bio-degradable polymer like Cashew Nut Shell Liquid (CNSL) in different percentage is used with General Purpose (GP) resin to make a hybrid polymer matrix. This work intends to study the fracture analysis of composite by using experimental and Finite Element methods. The critical stress intensity factor (KIC or critical SIF) has been evaluated and validated