Effect of waste synthetic bag pieces on the CBR value of expansive Soil

Expansive soils such as black cotton soil which are widely distributed in India have a tendency for volume changes due to change in moisture content. Also exhibits very low bearing capacity and high compressibility. Stabilization of such soil by admixture is used commonly now days. But no mix is suitable to improve all the types of soil. But it is obvious that depending on type of soil type of admixture the optimum mix can be designed.  In this paper a mix has been designed to improve the bearing capacity of soil by using fly ash and lime mixture, reinforced with waste synthetic bag pieces. Various tests are carried out to determine the CBR value and other soil properties with and without using any admixture and reinforcement. The maximum value of CBR was found to be23.82% for 2.5 mm penetration and 22.21% for 5 mm penetration, when waste synthetic bag pieces of size 2 cm * 2 cm were used at a proportion of 0.1%

Goal-Oriented Next Best Activity Recommendation using Reinforcement Learning

Recommending a sequence of activities for an ongoing case requires that the recommendations conform to the underlying business process and meet the performance goal of either completion time or process outcome. Existing work on next activity prediction can predict the future activity but cannot provide guarantees of the prediction being conformant or meeting the goal. Hence, we propose a goal-oriented next best activity recommendation. Our proposed framework uses a deep learning model to predict the next best activity and an estimated value of a goal given the activity. A reinforcement learning method explores the sequence of activities based on the estimates likely to meet one or more goals. We further address a real-world problem of multiple goals by introducing an additional reward function to balance the outcome of a recommended activity and satisfy the goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on four real-world datasets with different characteristics. The results show that the recommendations from our proposed approach outperform in goal satisfaction and conformance compared to the existing state-of-the-art next best activity recommendation techniques

Natural Windbreaks Sustain Bird Diversity in a Tea- Dominated Landscape

Windbreaks often form networks of forest habitats that improve connectivity and thus conserve biodiversity, but little is known of such effects in the tropics. We determined bird species richness and community composition in windbreaks composed of remnant native vegetation amongst tea plantations (natural windbreaks), and compared it with the surrounding primary forests. Fifty-one, ten-minute point counts were conducted in each habitat type over three days. Despite the limited sampling period, our bird inventories in both natural windbreaks and primary forests were nearly complete, as indicated by bootstrap true richness estimator. Bird species richness and abundance between primary forests and windbreaks were similar, however a difference in bird community composition was observed. Abundances of important functional groups such as frugivores and insectivores did not vary between habitat types but nectarivores were more abundant in windbreaks, potentially as a result of the use of windbreaks as traveling routes, foraging and nesting sites. This preliminary study suggests that natural windbreaks may be important habitats for the persistence of bird species in a production landscape. However, a better understanding of the required physical and compositional characteristics for windbreaks to sustain bird communities is needed for effective conservation management

PV Output forecasting based on weather classification, SVM and ANN

211-217The expansion in solar power is expected to be dramatic soon. A number of solar parks with high capacities are being setup to harness the potential of this renewable resource. However, the variability of solar power remains an important issue for grid integration of solar PV power plants. Changing weather conditions have affected the PV output. Thus, developing methods for accurately forecasting solar PV output is essential for enabling large-scale PV deployment. This paper has proposed a model for forecasting PV output based on weather classification, using a solar PV plant in Maharashtra, India, as the sample system. The input data is first classified using RBF-SVM (Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machines) into three types based on weather conditions, namely, sunny, rainy and cloudy. Then, the neural network model corresponding to that weather type has been applied to forecast the solar PV output. The obtained results for the overall model is studied for its effectiveness and are compared with existing research

Successful maternal outcome after vaginal delivery in a patient with Eisenmenger Syndrome

Patients with Eisenmenger syndrome are advised against pregnancy. Sometimes patients are diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome for the first time during pregnancy. This is what has happened in our case. A primigravida was diagnosed with ventricular septal defect with severe pulmonary artery hypertension for the first time during pregnancy at 34 weeks period of gestation. Management of such patients is challenging with different studies showing variable results. Here we describe such a case which was managed conservatively and was allowed to go into labour spontaneously with vacuum extraction during second stage which subsequently led to a favourable maternal outcome

Passive micropump for microfluidics based devices

One of the essential elements of microfluidics is driving liquid flow in microchannels. Device discussed gives a way to pump liquid passively through a microchannel. The present work represents fiber and paper based passive micro-pumping of liquids through microfluidic devices. The porous structure and network of capillaries inside the paper and fiber materials support spontaneous liquid movement. Agarose gel coating is used with paper in order to achieve variations flow rates. The effect of gel concentration on liquid flow is studied. The concept can be used ubiquitously for microfluidics device application. For its low-cost and is feasible to integrate with devices for low resource settings