Geotechnical properties of fiber reinforced pond ash

In the recent past huge amount of Fly ash and Pond ash are generated by the thermal power plants. It is a major cause of concern for the people living around the power plants. The current rate of deposition of Pond ash in India has reached 170 million tons per annum. About 90,000 acres of precious land is used for the storage of abandoned Pond ash. But current rate of utilization of ash is only about 35-40%.The unused ash leads to an ever increasing ponding area for storing ash and related environmental issues for the people around the power plants. Besides this, over the last few years, the construction of highways and roads has taken a boost. This requires a huge amount of natural soil and aggregates to excavated or to be deposited. Again this is an environmental issue and economical too. These are some issues now-a-days which motivates in development of alternative methods to overcome those environmental and also the economic issues. This leads to the reuse of suitable industrial byproducts which can fix those issues and also fulfill the specifications. Pond ash is one such byproduct. It is a non-plastic and lightweight material. During this work, the effect of moisture content, degree of compaction, synthetic fiber as a reinforcement etc. on various geotechnical properties of pond ash are studied. A series of tests such as direct shear test, CBR test, light compaction as well as heavy compaction test, Unconfined compression test are done to estimate the strength characteristics of compacted pond ash using synthetic fiber as a reinforcement as well as tests like specific gravity test, grain size distribution test by mechanical sieve analysis and hydrometer test etc. are performed to obtain some physical properties of the pond ash.These results will be very much helpful for the successful application of pond ash in different fields such as embankment construction, road base and sub-base construction, designing of retaining walls etc. as well as the disposal of pond ash in an ecofriendly manner

Development of Vision-based Response of Autonomous Vehicles Towards Emergency Vehicles Using Infrastructure Enabled Autonomy

The effectiveness of law enforcement and public safety is directly dependent on the time taken by first responders to arrive at the scene of an emergency. The primary objective of this thesis is to develop techniques and actions of response for an autonomous vehicle in emergency scenarios. This work discusses the methods developed to identify Emergency Vehicles (EV) and use its localized information to develop response actions for autonomous vehicles in emergency scenarios using an Infrastructure-Enabled Autonomy (IEA) setup. IEA is a new paradigm in autonomous vehicles research that aims at distributed intelligence architecture by transferring the core functionalities of sensing and localization to a roadside infrastructure setup. In this work two independent frameworks were developed to identify Emergency vehicles in a video feed using computer vision techniques: (1) A one-stage framework where an object detection algorithm is trained on a custom dataset to detect EVs, (2) A two-stage framework where an object classification is independently implemented in series with an object detection pipeline to classify vehicles into EVs and nonEVs. The performance of many popular classification models were compared on a combination of multi-spectral feature vectors of an image to identify the ideal combination to be used for EV identification rule. Localized position co-ordinates of an EV are obtained by deploying the classification routine on IEA. This position information is used as an input in an autonomous vehicle and an ideal response action is developed

Designing Novel Lead Molecules for Human Coagulation Factor XIII B Involved in Cardiovascular Diseases

The coagulation of blood is very important characteristics of the blood since it protects us from excess bleeding by forming clots and binding it. This is done by protein called fibrin stabilizing protein (XIIIB) and plays an important role in clot stabilization by crosslinking fibrin chains. However it has been found that these fibrin stabilizing factor also known as blood coagulation factor XIII is responsible for many cardiovascular diseases. But very little is known about the role of FXIII in vascular diseases. Although it showed increased levels of FXIII A-subunit antigen in patients with obliterative atherosclerosis of the lower limbs and in patients with diabetic angiopathy, small patient numbers make the interpretation of these data difficult. However, increased plasma concentration of cross-linked fibrin polymers in acute myocardial infarction has been described, assuming the presence of increased plasma FXIII plasma activity in patients with coronary artery disease. The research work aims to develop a novel lead molecule for coagulation factor XIIIB involved in cardiovascular diseases. The proposed work defines the protein structure, identifies the proposed ligands and develops the molecule by docking

Controller Design for Magnetic Levitation System

Magnetic Levitation is a method by which an object is suspended in air by means of magnetic force. Earnshaw stated that static arrangements of magnet cannot levitate a body. The exception comes in case of diamagnetic and superconducting materials and by controlling magnetic field by control method. Diamagnetic materials or superconducting materials when placed in magnetic field produce magnetic field in opposite direction. Here the problem of controlling the magnetic field by control method is taken up to levitate a metal hollow sphere. The control problem is to supply controlled current to coil such that the magnetic force on the levitated body and gravitational force acting on it are exactly equal. Thus the magnetic levitation system is inherently unstable without any control action. It is desirable to not only levitate the object but also at desired position or continuously track a desired path. Here a linear and two nonlinear controllers are designed for magnetic levitation system. First a robust adaptive backstepping controller is designed for the system and simulated. The simulation results shows tracking error less than 0.0001m. The immeasurable state present is estimated by Kreisselmeier filter. The Kreisselmeier filter is a nonlinear estimator as well as preserves the output feedback form. However the control output is too high. To counteract the above problem Nesic backstepping controller is designed for the system by taking Euler approximate model of the system. The controller output is well within the range of 0.5~1 voltage. The reference tracking is also verified in simulation and the tracking error comes in range of 0.00015m. A linear controller is also designed for MagLev system as the region of operation of magnetic levitation setup is too small. A two degree freedom (2DOF) PID controller is designed satisfying a desired characteristics equation. The controller parameters are obtained by pole placement technique. The 2DOF PID controller is simulated and experimentally validated and it is seen that better result are obtained in 2DOF PID than 1DOF PID controller

Sarcomas of the scalp: a case series

Sarcomas of the scalp are a diverse group of rare and aggressive neoplasms of the head and neck originating from bony or soft tissue elements. Clinical manifestations of sarcomas of the scalp vary from small plaque-like lesions to multifocal nodules with involvement of deeper layers, and it is the extent and grade of the tumor that determines the treatment plan. Majority of the cases are managed surgically with three-dimensional wide excision and robust reconstruction. The role of adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy is limited to those cases with poor prognosis. Very few cases of sarcomas involving the scalp have been reported in the literature. We wish to share a series of three rare mesenchymal tumors of the scalp, two of which were locally advanced at the time of presentation. This case series highlights the surgical management, options for reconstruction and outcomes of these tumors

Agroforestry practices for physiological amelioration of salt aff ected soils

Agroforestry is a sustainable land use system act as an alternative form of biological reclamation in salt affected soils apart from sustainable production, continuous income, and regular employment along with food and nutrition security. In general, salt affected soils get ameliorated by tree species; however, following factors such as nature and type of tree species planted, growth habit, quantity and quality of litter production, planting density, nitrogen fixation, and different management practices are influenced. In the present study, various studies pertaining to soil reclamation in the salt affected soils are reviewed. Overall result showed that trees grown with crops, horticultural crops, pastures resulted in improvement of physical and chemical properties of soil under various agroforestry systems. For instance, reduction of soil pH, electrical conductivity, and exchangeable sodium percentage minimization of salt deposition in the upper layers of the soil, improvement of water permeability and water holding capacity, improvement of infiltration rate and hydraulic conductivity with soil fertility, enhancement of cation exchange capacity, and other features are characteristics of soil as influenced by tree species, as well as through agroforestry practices. Various multipurpose tree species such as Acacia auriculiformis, Acacia nilotica, Albizia lebbeck, Terminalia arjuna, Casuarina equisetifolia, Prosopis cineraria, Prosopis juliflora; and fruit trees such as Zizyphus jujuba, Emblica officinalis, Syzygium cumini, and Tamarindus indica ameliorated the different salt affected soils in different agroforestry systems viz., agrisilvicultural system, silvipastoral system, multipurpose wood lot, and agrihorisilvicultural system. Thus, agroforestry system provides an alternative for restoring soil health and amelioration of salt affected soils for further yield improvement. Therefore, these species are suggested for reclamation of salt affected soil through agroforestry systems