Solidification of Metals and Alloys

In order to analyse the process of solidification of metals and alloys critically, it is most pertinent to understand the different modes of nucleation and the uneven rates of growth throughout the melt. It is also important to take a note of the constraints in the growth process that definitely influence the crystal structure and the structure related properties of the casting. The freezing pattern of the liquid melt decides the feeding of the mould which is instrumental in producing a complete and compact casting. For pure metals and even in case of alloys with a narrow freezing range a well defined solid–liquid macro-interface exists. Here feeding of the solidifying casting is the easiest, by the common lowering of the liquid metal surface in the mould. However, in many instances, a well defined interface is not witnessed. The solid–liquid interface could be discrete and not continuous. Here process of feeding the solidification sites that witness considerable shrinkages, may become complicated. On grounds of above it is implied, the process of solidification constitutes an important aspects in the production of a defect free casting

Study of cutting ability of centrifugal cast HSS cutting tool in optimized process parameters

The purpose of the investigation is to propose an innovative method of single point cutting tool development adopting centrifugal casting operations. Scrapped cutting tools are melted, cast into cylindrical bars adopting centrifugal casting method, machined for developing single point cutting tools, and heat-treated for the conduct of cutting operations. Adopting Taguchi optimisation technique and considering the-smaller-the better approach, optimisation of cutting parameters viz, cutting velocity, depth of cut and feed rate for minimum surface roughness and cutting force are attempted during dry turning of mild steel (A36). Evaluation of the effect of cutting parameters on the output such as the surface roughness and the cutting force is done by using ANOVA software. The above mention studies are also repeated with the HSS cutting tool available in the market (HSS M2). The cutting ability of both tools on the basis of cutting parameters, as mentioned above is found to be at par. Also, analysis of wear characteristics yielded almost similar results. The study verifies the centrifugal casting method as a viable method for the development of single point cutting tools using scrapped tools

Nutrient Profiling and Identification of Genetic Marker for \u3cem\u3eAzolla\u3c/em\u3e sp.

Azolla (mosquito fern, duckweed fern, fairy moss and water fern) is a genus of seven species of aquatic ferns. They float on the surface of water by means of scale-like leaves, with their roots hanging in the water. Azolla is able to fix unlinked nitrogen (N2) directly from the atmosphere because of its endosymbiotic blue alga Anabaena azollae (Van Hove, 1989), and is thus a very promising supply of nitrogen to aquatic ecosystems. In recent years, apart of traditional cultivation of Azolla as a bio-fertilizer for wetland paddy, also find increasing use for sustainable production of livestock feed. Since the demand for milk and meat in India is creating new potential in the profitability of animal husbandry as an occupation. Yet, at the same time, there is a substantial decline in fodder availability. The area under forest and grasslands is decreasing as is the amount of various crop residues available for feed, largely due to the introduction of high yielding dwarf varieties. The shortage of fodder is therefore compensated with commercial feed, resulting in increased costs in meat and milk production. Moreover, as commercial feed is mixed with urea and other artificial milk boosters, it has a negative effect on the quality of milk and the health of the livestock. The search for alternatives to concentrates led us to a wonderful plant azolla, which holds the promise of providing a sustainable feed for livestock

Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Detailed assessments of mortality patterns, particularly age-specific mortality, represent a crucial input that enables health systems to target interventions to specific populations. Understanding how all-cause mortality has changed with respect to development status can identify exemplars for best practice. To accomplish this, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) estimated age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality between 1970 and 2016 for 195 countries and territories and at the subnational level for the five countries with a population greater than 200 million in 2016. METHODS: We have evaluated how well civil registration systems captured deaths using a set of demographic methods called death distribution methods for adults and from consideration of survey and census data for children younger than 5 years. We generated an overall assessment of completeness of registration of deaths by dividing registered deaths in each location-year by our estimate of all-age deaths generated from our overall estimation process. For 163 locations, including subnational units in countries with a population greater than 200 million with complete vital registration (VR) systems, our estimates were largely driven by the observed data, with corrections for small fluctuations in numbers and estimation for recent years where there were lags in data reporting (lags were variable by location, generally between 1 year and 6 years). For other locations, we took advantage of different data sources available to measure under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) using complete birth histories, summary birth histories, and incomplete VR with adjustments; we measured adult mortality rate (the probability of death in individuals aged 15-60 years) using adjusted incomplete VR, sibling histories, and household death recall. We used the U5MR and adult mortality rate, together with crude death rate due to HIV in the GBD model life table system, to estimate age-specific and sex-specific death rates for each location-year. Using various international databases, we identified fatal discontinuities, which we defined as increases in the death rate of more than one death per million, resulting from conflict and terrorism, natural disasters, major transport or technological accidents, and a subset of epidemic infectious diseases; these were added to estimates in the relevant years. In 47 countries with an identified peak adult prevalence for HIV/AIDS of more than 0·5% and where VR systems were less than 65% complete, we informed our estimates of age-sex-specific mortality using the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP)-Spectrum model fitted to national HIV/AIDS prevalence surveys and antenatal clinic serosurveillance systems. We estimated stillbirths, early neonatal, late neonatal, and childhood mortality using both survey and VR data in spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression models. We estimated abridged life tables for all location-years using age-specific death rates. We grouped locations into development quintiles based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and analysed mortality trends by quintile. Using spline regression, we estimated the expected mortality rate for each age-sex group as a function of SDI. We identified countries with higher life expectancy than expected by comparing observed life expectancy to anticipated life expectancy on the basis of development status alone. FINDINGS: Completeness in the registration of deaths increased from 28% in 1970 to a peak of 45% in 2013; completeness was lower after 2013 because of lags in reporting. Total deaths in children younger than 5 years decreased from 1970 to 2016, and slower decreases occurred at ages 5-24 years. By contrast, numbers of adult deaths increased in each 5-year age bracket above the age of 25 years. The distribution of annualised rates of change in age-specific mortality rate differed over the period 2000 to 2016 compared with earlier decades: increasing annualised rates of change were less frequent, although rising annualised rates of change still occurred in some locations, particularly for adolescent and younger adult age groups. Rates of stillbirths and under-5 mortality both decreased globally from 1970. Evidence for global convergence of death rates was mixed; although the absolute difference between age-standardised death rates narrowed between countries at the lowest and highest levels of SDI, the ratio of these death rates-a measure of relative inequality-increased slightly. There was a strong shift between 1970 and 2016 toward higher life expectancy, most noticeably at higher levels of SDI. Among countries with populations greater than 1 million in 2016, life expectancy at birth was highest for women in Japan, at 86·9 years (95% UI 86·7-87·2), and for men in Singapore, at 81·3 years (78·8-83·7) in 2016. Male life expectancy was generally lower than female life expectancy between 1970 and 2016, an

Healthcare Access and Quality Index based on mortality from causes amenable to personal health care in 195 countries and territories, 1990-2015 : a novel analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Background National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. Methods We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure-the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index-on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r= 0.88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r= 0.83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r= 0.77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Findings Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28.6 to 94.6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40.7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39.0-42.8) in 1990 to 53.7 (52.2-55.4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21.2 in 1990 to 20.1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73.8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. Interpretation This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-systemcharacteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

Effect of processing factors on the characteristics of centrifugal casting

Centrifugal castings are produced by pouring liquid metal into rotating moulds. It solidifies under the influence of centrifugal forces, directed from the center to the periphery of the mould on account of mould rotation, and exhibits directionality in solidification which helps to eliminate voids and discontinuities in the resultant casting, usually encountered in gravity castings. Also, a compositional gradient is sat up in the melt which can be monitored, to produce functionally graded materials (FGMs) of choice with multi-functionality. The pouring rate, pouring temperature, mould temperature, and mould material can be suitably selected and altered in isolation or in combination, to generate a desired thermal gradient in the melt which decides its cooling rate. The cooling rate of the melt has the greatest impact on the grain structure of the casting. On the other hand, the grain structure of the casting governs its mechanical performance and decides the suitability for any specific end-use. Thus, different processing factors influence the characteristics of centrifugal casting. In the present article, a sincere attempt is made to analyze the effect of these factors and to enumerate the role played by each one of these factors in deciding the centrifugal casting characteristics

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Not AvailableSoil bacterial communities are considered as an essential member of the microbial community, contributing to soil health. Continuous application of chemical fertilizers alters the bacterial community structure (BCS) thereby disturbing the soil biogeochemical cycling. The present study highlights the 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing-based variation of BCS through Illumina-MiSeq® in a 47 years old long-term fertilized paddy soil and its relation with grain yield (GY), straw biomass (SB) and various soil properties. The experiment comprising six treatments: control (no fertilizers), nitrogen (N), nitrogen + phosphorus (P) + potassium (K), farmyard manure (FYM), FYM + N and FYM + NPK. Data on rice crop performance indicated that GY and SB significantly (p ≤ 0.05) enhanced by 45.1%–49.3% and 36.9–39.4% in FYM + NPK compared to control. Relative abundance of bacterial phyla varied across inorganic and organic fertilizer treatments. Dominant phyla across all treatments were Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, and Firmicutes, accounting for about 80–85% of total operational taxonomic units (OTUs). N application alone over 47 years encouraged certain bacterial phyla (Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, and Nitrospira) while major (Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria and Cyanobacteria) and minor (Fibrobacteres, Spirochaetes, TM7 and GNO4) bacterial phyla were found to be suppressed compared to other treatments. Moreover, continuous use of chemical N in paddy soil, considerably suppressed some diazotrophs taxa Burkholderiales, Enterobacteriaceae, and other taxa Kaistobacter, Anaeromyxobacter, Bdellovibrio, and MND1. Redundancy analysis coupled with principal component analysis revealed that BCS was significantly influenced by soil pH and presence of higher nitrogen content. Interestingly, the highest proportion of bacterial OTUs was recorded in balanced fertilizer (NPK) (without FYM) and therefore, this result suggested for the first time that continuous application of NPK encouraged the beneficial bacterial community without compromising of GY and SB. Overall, the present study indicated that continuous application of N and NPK with or without FYM for more than four decades in paddy soil, encouraged certain BCS whereas, N application alone suppressed certain beneficial bacterial phyla, resulting in the alteration of soil biodiversity and rice productivityICA

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Not AvailableBiochar plays a pivotal role in carbon storage-fractionation-mineralization process in soil. However, uncertainty still remains about the influence of biochar on these inter-related processes that links to C cycling in soil. A three years field experiment was initiated in 2013 at ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, India, to study the deviation in C mineralization and C fractions caused by the application of six doses of rice husk derived biochar (RHB), ranging from 0.5 t ha−1 to 10.0 t ha−1. The results showed an increase in cumulative CO2-C emission with increasing RHB rates. However, the model-fitted mineralization rates (dC/dt) did not show significant difference between treated and control soils at the end of incubation period in a laboratory study. In addition, microbial quotient and % C from RHB utilized showed a decreasing trend with increasing rates of RHB application, establishing the carbon sequestration potential of RHB. The highest rate (10.0 t ha−1) of RHB application accumulated maximum total organic C (3.26%) and a larger share of non-labile C (63.8%) among the treatments. An increase in rice grain yield (1–24%, depending on rate of RHB application) was observed with increasing rates of RHB which further established that RHB application not only enhanced C storage but also enhanced the productivity of rice by enhancing the soil fertility.ICA

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Not AvailableClimate change is widely recognized as one of the most pressing issues confronting humanity today. It is considered to be a direct threat to our food production system including rice. Climate change affects rice production in various ways. The variability in temperature and precipitation increases, predictability of seasonal weather patterns reduces and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and cyclones increases. In India, the effect of natural disasters on agriculture, including disasters caused by climate change has been gradually growing. It is believed that during the mid and end century India's future rice production is projected to reduced by 2.5 to 5% from the current level. As there is less scope for rice area to grow in the future, any growth in rice production will have to come only from productivity gains. Since climate change is a continuous process, the rice production system requires specific adaptation strategies to prevent rice yield losses and its variability. Therefore, it's critical to understand how climate change affects rice crop and to follow better production practises including crop establishment methods, water management, weed management, nutrient management and microbial resources utilization that make cropping systems more resilient to extreme weather events. The spread of climate resilient production technologies would benefit rice production systems' resilience. KeyNot Availabl