Characterization and tribological behavior of diamond-like carbon and nitrogen-doped diamond-like carbon thin films

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) films have been extensively studied for more than two decades due to their highly attractive properties. These films exhibit unique mechanical, electrical and tribological behavior and thus, possess great potential for applications in tribology. However, the high level of internal stress developed and low thermal stability are the main drawbacks. Synthesis of nitrogen-doped DLC (N-DLC) offers the possibility of overcoming these drawbacks. In the present study, DLC and N-DLC films (with low N content) were deposited on Si substrates using a hybrid plasma-assisted CVD/PVD process. Film characterization in terms of microstructure, composition and chemical state of components was carried out by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Mechanical properties of the films were characterized by microhardness testing. The tribological properties were studied by conducting pin-on-disc experiments. Surface optical profilometry was used to analyze the wear profiles and calculate the Archard wear rates. TEM and XPS analysis showed that low amounts of N-doping results in the formation of an amorphous structure with the presence of short-ranged diamond-like structure (sp3). N-doped DLC films were found to possess comparable hardness with that of DLC films. They exhibited friction coefficients as low as 0.04 compared to 0.2 for DLC, but maintained comparable Archard wear rates with DLC of the order of 10-7 mm3/Nm. The N-DLC film with 0.73 at. % N exhibited the best tribological behavior. The nanosmooth appearance of the surface, ultralow friction coefficients and low Archard wear rates of N-DLC films obtained with low doping of N in the DLC matrix, show promise for applications such as magnetic hard drives and medical implants

Importance of Defining Roi: a Semi- Automated Algorithm for Predicting Importance Maps

The importance of defining ROI in gray scale images is clearly established. A new way of proportionating the distortion between ROI and non-ROI is found out. The various factors influencing the ROI have been studied and the relationship between these factors and the perceived interest has been established. A new Algorithm has been proposed to produce an importance map for a given gray scale image. The algorithm takes into account various factors like Size, Location, Blur and Contrast. The results of the algorithm have been found to be satisfactory. A comparison was made between the proposed algorithm and two other widely used algorithm and the proposed algorithm has significantly better results.School of Electrical & Computer Engineerin

Evaluation of Minimum Required Safe Distance between Two Consecutive Dental Chairs for Optimal Asepsis

Cross infection and self-protection, these two words are like a lurid to the health care professionals. A balance has to be maintained among those two words if not, it’s after affects areunpredictable. It is believed that even after following the code of practice, some elements such as the aerosols that are evolved during the use of high speed rotary instruments such as airotor and scaler are difficult to handle. Aerosols containing microbes from oral cavity of the patient are a risky source of infection. The best way to fight against these aerosols is to keep a distance from them. But it is not known how far these airborne microorganisms spread under various clinical environments. This article emphasizes the safe distance that has to bemaintained around each dental chair to prevent cross contamination

Implementing ChaCha based crypto primitives on programmable SmartNICs

Control and management plane applications such as serverless function orchestration and 4G/5G control plane functions are offloaded to smartNICs to reduce communication and processing latency. Such applications involve multiple inter-host interactions that were traditionally secured using SSL/TLS gRPC-based communication channels. Offloading the applications to smartNIC implies that we must also offload the security algorithms. Otherwise, we need to send the application messages to the host VM/container for crypto operations, negating offload benefits. We propose crypto externs for Netronome Agilio smartNICs that implement authentication and confidentiality (encryption/decryption) using the ChaCha stream cipher algorithm. AES and ChaCha are two popular cipher suites, but we chose ChaCha since none of the smartNICs have ChaCha-based crypto accelerators. However, smartNICs have restricted instruction set, and limited memory, making it difficult to implement security algorithms. This paper identifies and addresses several challenges to implement ChaCha crypto primitives successfully. Our evaluations show that our crypto extern implementation satisfies the scalability requirement of popular applications such as serverless management functions and host in-band network telemetry. © 2022 ACM

Genetic analysis for yield and its components in okra (Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench)

Combining ability variances and effects of yield and its components in okra (Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench)were studied through half diallel analysis of 45 F1 hybrids derived by crossing 10 nearly homozygous germplasm lines namelyP1(IC282248), P2(IC27826-A), P3(IC29119-B), P4(IC31398-A), P5(IC45732), P6(IC89819), P7(IC89976), P8(IC90107), P9(IC99716) andP10(IC111443) during mid kharif (July-October), 2009, at the Vegetable Research Station, Rajendranagar, Andhra Pradesh,India. Both additive and non-additive variances were important for a majority of the characters except plant height, fruit andshoot borer infestation on fruits and shoots and yellow vein mosaic virus infestation on plants. Genetic analysis revealed apreponderance of non-additive gene action for plant height, internodal length, days to 50% flowering, first flowering andfruiting node, fruit length and weight, total number of fruits and number of marketable fruits per plant, total yield and marketableyield per plant and yellow vein mosaic virus infestation on fruits and plants and a preponderance of additive gene actionfor number of branches per plant and fruit and shoot borer infestation on fruits and shoots. The parents P5(IC45732), P6(IC89819) and P7(IC89976) were high general combiners for total and marketable yield per plant and their associated traits,which could be exploited for developing prolific pure line varieties of okra. The crosses C23(IC29119-B × IC99716), C17(IC27826-A × IC111443), C42(IC89976 × IC111443) were superior specific combiners for total and marketable yield per plant withthe potential of being commercially exploited for the production of F1 hybrids. The cross combinations C42 (IC89976 × IC111443) and (IC27826-A × IC89819) having one of the parents with positively significant general combining ability effects fortotal yield and marketable yield per plant could be utilized in recombination breeding with single plant selection in the passinggenerations to capitalize additive gene action to develop high yielding lines or varieties in okra

Correlation and path coefficient analysis of quantitative characters in okra (Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench)

One hundred germplasm lines of okra (Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench) were evaluated in a randomized block design with two replications at the Vegetable Research Station, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, during kharif, 2008. Correlation and path coefficient analysis were carried out to study the character association and contribution, respectively, for thirteen quantitative characters, namely plant height (cm), number of branches per plant, internodal length(cm), days to 50% flowering, first flowering node, first fruiting node, fruit length (cm), fruit width (cm), fruit weight (g), total number of fruits per plant, number of marketable fruits per plant, total yield per plant (g) and marketable yield per plant (g) for the identification of appropriate selection indices. Phenotypic and genotypic correlation coefficient analysis revealed that plant height, fruit length, fruit width, fruit weight, total number of fruits per plant, number of marketable fruits per plant and total yield per plant had significant positive correlation, while number of branches per plant, internodal length, days to 50% flowering, first flowering node and first fruiting node had significant negative correlation with marketable yield per plant.Genotypic path coefficient analysis revealed that fruit weight, total number of fruits per plant and number of marketable fruits per plant had positively high direct effect on marketable pod yield per plant. Correlation and path coefficient analyses revealed that fruit weight, total number of fruits per plant and number of marketable fruits per plant not only had positively significant association with marketable pod yield per plant, but also had positively high direct effect on marketable pod yield per plant and are regarded as the main determinants of marketable pod yield per plant. The improvement in marketable pod yield per plant will be efficient, if the selection is based on fruit weight, total number of fruits per plant and number of marketable fruits per plant

Development of eAgromet Prototype to Improve the Performance of Integrated Agromet Advisory Service

In several countries, the systems for forecasting weather are being operated to deal with weather and its related factors affecting agricultural production. India meteorological department (IMD) is providing several types of weather forecasts. One of the forecast service is medium range forecast (MRF). As a part of MRF, the expected values of rain fall, temperature, cloud cover, humidity, wind speed and wind direction for next five days are forecasted twice a week by considering district as a unit. Agriculture is markedly affected by weather condition during crop season. IMD in collaboration with Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and State Agriculture Universities (SAUs) has set-up about 130 Agro-meteorological Field Units (AMFUs) and each AMFU covers about five districts. Based on MRF, IMD is rendering Integrated Agromet Advisory Service to the farming community of the country in the form of agromet advisory bulletin. The agromet advisory bulletins contain possible risk mitigation measures for the major crops and livestock. Based on the weather forecast, a group of interdisciplinary scientists and agromet scientists at AMFU prepare district-level agromet advisory bulletins. These bulletins are sent to the farmers and other stakeholders of the corresponding district. To ease the process of preparing agromet bulletins, an effort has started to build IT-based agrometeorological advisory system called, eAgromet. In this paper, we explain the concepts of eAgromet and its operation