The Department of Census and Statistics of Sri Lanka carries out an island-wide scheme of estimating paddy's average yield, called the Crop Cutting Survey. It was debated and argued about the accuracy of the data generated through a cumbersome approach which consumes a lot of labour and resources. The objective of this study was to develop an efficient method that would help overcome the limitations of the current method. This study was accomplished through a questionnaire survey and an experimental survey. The GIS technology has been applied to measure the cultivated area and yield measurements by weighting the harvested yield. The weight measurements were subjected to different scaling factors derived through the study. The sample survey of the new methodology was carried out in the Ampara district for 2 paddy varieties namely BG357 and AT362 for the 2017/2018 Maha season. A stratified Random sampling method was used for the selection of paddy parcels. Average paddy yield, scaling factors, and cost of production of these two paddy varieties were calculated separately. The district's estimated paddy yield through the proposed method is 4568.17 kg/ ha, which is not significantly different from the published average (4562 kg ha-1) in paddy statistics of 2017/2018. This is obvious that the proposed method was more effective and efficient than the current method, which assists the government in planning and making policy decisions at the correct time.

Steel jacketing has become an attractive strengthening technique for reinforced concrete (RC) columns due to ease of construction and less space requirement. The steel cage consists of angle sections placed at corners and held together by battens at intervals along the RC column height. A numerical investigation of the effective use of steel jackets as a strengthening technique in RC columns is presented in this paper. First, the finite element models of the strengthened column were developed and validated using past experimental data. Then, with the validated model, six sets of steel jacket sections with modified cross-sections such as batten spacing, batten thickness, batten width, end batten width, L angle thickness and steel jacket height were tested under constant axial and lateral loading to understand the effectiveness of steel jackets as the strengthening technique. AnunstrengthenRC column were also analysed to compare the performance of a similar column strengthened by steel jackets with modified parameters. It was shown that strengthening RC columns with steel jackets was effective in enhancing the lateral performance of the columns and resulted in a more stable load-displacement curve with lower strength degradations as compared with the un-strengthened ones. Additionally, it was found that the most effective method to increase the lateral strength and ductility is increasing the L angle thickness. On the other hand, increasing the steel jacket height also increases the lateral performance, however, it was identified that increasing the jacket height is effective only up to 1/3rd of the RC column height. Finally, the obtained results for each parameter were compared to study the behaviour of each component of the steel jacket towards lateral strength and ductility improvements.

Cinnamon is the most valuable and important spice export crop in Sri Lanka which accounts over 85% of the world cinnamon exports. Competitiveness is one of the major challenges in cinnamon trade in an era of free trade. Intense competition faced by Sri Lanka with other countries results in adverse impacts on cinnamon trade thus decreasing its potential trading opportunities. This study aims to analyze the export competitiveness of Sri Lankan cinnamon in the world market. The study also considers the world’s top 10 cinnamon exporters. The contribution of this paper is that it measures the comparative advantage using a range of indexes namely the Balassa Revealed Comparative Advantage Index (BRCA), Additive Revealed Comparative Advantage Index (ARCA), Normalized Revealed Comparative Advantage Index (NRCA), Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage Index (RSCA) and Trade Balance Index (TBI) for the period from 2001 to 2020. Data are extracted from the International Trade Center (ITC) trade map (COMTRADE) database. BRCA (566.49), ARCA (0.01207), NRCA (7.28*10-6), and RSCA (0.996) result indicate that Sri Lanka has the highest comparative advantage in the global cinnamon export market. Madagascar (0.999) has the highest TBI value. The result of product mapping indicates that Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Vietnam, Indonesia and China have both comparative advantage and positive trade balances over other countries.

Abstract Collision force exerted by single cuboid elements with different dimensions and sizes, subjected to dissimilar dam-break waves were investigated in this study to determine their ability to induce forces on a one storey residential structure with respect to the wave only forces. The observations indicated that a significant amount of additional force was exerted on the house model with several delivery modes and impacting patterns. The smaller size of cuboid subjected with lower wave conditions induced a considerably larger force, whereas for higher flow conditions, it was not as sensitive to the wave forces. In contrast, the larger size of the cuboid yielded a lower force for lower wave condition and displayed a considerable increment for larger waves. Several governing parameters were identified to be incorporated in the presently available formulations to estimate the debris impacts.