Significant Amount Of Improvement Research Articles

Ex Situ Catalytic Pyrolysis of Invasive Pennisetum purpureum Grass with Activated Carbon for Upgrading Bio-Oil

Energy demands keep increasing in this modern world as the world population increases, which leads to a reduction in fossil fuels. To resolve these challenges, Pennisetum purpureum, an invasive grass in Brunei Darussalam, was examined as the feedstock for renewable energy through a catalytic pyrolysis process. The activated carbon was applied as the catalyst for a simple and economical solution. The catalytic pyrolysis was executed at 500 °C (the temperature for the highest biofuel yield) for both reactors to produce the highest amount of upgraded biofuels. The biochar produced from the non-catalytic and catalytic pyrolysis processes showed a consistent yield due to stable operating conditions, from which the activated carbon was generated and used as the catalyst in this work. A significant amount of improvement was found in the production of biofuels, especially bio-oil. It was found that for catalysts, the number of phenolic, alcohol, furans, and ketones was increased by reducing the amount of acidic, aldehyde, miscellaneous oxygenated, and nitrogenous composites in bio-oils. The highest amount of phenolic compounds was produced due to a number of functional groups (-C=O and -OH) in activated carbon. The regenerated activated carbons also showed promising outcomes as catalysts for upgrading the bio-oils. The overall performance of synthesized and regenerated activated carbon as a catalyst in catalytic pyrolysis was highly promising for improving the quality and stability of bio-oil.

Effect of Sacubitril/Valsartan on Echocardiographic Parameters and Functional Class in Patients of Heart Failure with Reduced Ejection Fraction


 Background: This study sought to determine, in retrospect, the effect of Sacubitril/Valsartan on the echocardiographic and functional class of ambulatory HFrEF patients taking conventional heart failure therapy.
 Methods: We conducted a retrospective observational single-center cohort of ninety HFrEF patients with NYHA Class II-III attending as an outpatient at a tertiary cardiac care facility between November 2018 and January 2020. Standardized two-dimensional transthoracic echocardiography and functional class evaluation were conducted at baseline and after 03-month of SV treatment.
 Results: At 03-month follow-up evaluation, SV treatment was found to contribute substantially in reversing the cardiac remodeling of HFrEF patients as evidenced by improvement in LVEF (28.51±5.06 to 36.01±10.63; p < 0.001), LVEDD (57.29±7.99 to 53.14±8.22; p <0.001), and LVESD (46.07±9.49 to 43.20±9.22; p <0.001). Additionally, an improvement in sPAP (34.13±9.49 to 32.46±8.14; p <0.001) was observed along with a significant NYHA functional class recovery (2.76 to 1.89, p < 0.001). Upon gender-based stratification, the data suggested no gender-based differences in reverse remodeling effects of SV; though statistically insignificant, LA (38.51±8.23 to 37.3±5.92 mm) and RV (27.10±5.74 to 26.42±2.81 mm) diameters were observed to reduce only in men.
 Conclusion: Our study maintained that earlier commencement of SV in parallel with conventional heart failure therapy results in a significant amount of improvement in LVEF, LVEDD, LVESD, and sPAP in HFrEF patients irrespective of their gender. Simultaneously, SV alleviates the heart failure-related morbidity through rapid functional status (NYHA Class) recovery.

Investigating the influence of carbon nanotube on the performance of asphalt binder

The purpose of this study aims at investigating the impact of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT’s) on the properties of low viscosity grade asphalt binder. Asphalt binder with viscosity grade-10 is selected as the control binder and later it is modified with different percentages of MWCNT’s (0.5–2.5%). Penetration, softening point, ductility and rotational viscosity test were employed for evaluating the effect of MWCNT’s on basic physical properties of modified asphalt binder. Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR) is used for evaluating the rheological properties of the base and modified bitumen, for both aged and unaged bitumen. Based on the conventional and basic rheological tests, it was seen that the addition of MWCNT’s improved the high-temperature performance of modified bitumen. Multiple Stress Creep and Recovery (MSCR) test results revealed that the addition of MWCNT’s improved the creep and recovery of modified binders for both stress intensities (0.1 kPa and 3.2 kPa) which confirms that the modified binder is more rut resistant. Moreover, it was observed that there was a significant improvement in the aging resistance of the asphalt binder due to addition of MWCNTs. However low temperature performance of MWCNTs was not encouraging. Also, MWCNTs addition to asphalt binder was found to be stable under high-temperature storage condition. Overall, there is a significant amount of improvement using MWCNTs in the base asphalt binder.

A hybrid approach of firefly and genetic algorithm for solving optimisation problems

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a newly developed nature-inspired, metaheuristic, stochastic algorithm that has seen many applications in solving problems of optimisation nature since its introduction just a couple of years ago. FA is a simple, flexible, easily implementable and robust approach inspired from natural phenomenon of light emission by fireflies but a major drawback associated with FA is the random initial solution set generation that degrade the solution quality. In this work, the targeted issue has been resolved by introducing genetic algorithm (GA) operators namely selection, mutation and cross over operators during initial solution set generation for standard FA. The proposed technique has been applied to few standard benchmark minimisation and maximisation functions and the results have been compared with standard FA and GA. A significant amount of improvement in the convergence rate can be observed that results in high quality solution for solving optimisation problems.

Heat treatment and analysis of nickel super alloy for gas turbine applications

Abstract In this study heat treatment of Monel 400 material (Ni 60%, Cu 33%, and Fe 6.5%) was carried out to study the effect of heat treatment over the fatigue and wear properties for verifying its feasibility in application of high temperature applications. The heat treatment process was carried out using muffle furnace to a temperature of 850 °C, which is maintained at the same temperature for 2hrs followed by the quenching process in a salt bath solution. The heat treated specimens were subjected to various tests like tensile, hardness, impact tests to calculate its mechanical properties. The 3D model of rotor blade was created using CATIA software and was analyzed by Ansys workbench 16.0 for calculating mechanical stresses. In FEM analysis the mechanical properties of the material were assumed as per test results and the static structural analysis has been done on NACA (N series) blade pro-file. The blade deformation and stress were compared with two materials, one is nickel 825 CMSX4 and another one was heat treated Monel 400. The experimental study results shows a significant amount of improvement in properties of Monel 400 and the same results were validated with FEM analysis.

Effect of combination of natural dyes and post-TiCl4 treatment in improving the photovoltaic performance of dye-sensitized solar cells

Herein, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been sensitized with natural red dye (extracted from red spinach) and yellow dye (extracted from turmeric) and five different combinations of red and yellow dyes (at different volume ratios) to determine the optimum combination of red and yellow dyes for the maximum cell efficiency. In addition, the effect of post-TiCl 4 treatment in improving cell efficiency has been studied. From UV-vis absorption spectrum, higher absorbance and cumulative absorption properties over the entire visible region show that the combination of red and yellow dyes absorbs light better than the individual red or yellow dyes. DSSCs sensitized with red and yellow dyes have a photoconversion efficiency of 0.416% and 0.921%, respectively. DSSCs sensitized with the combination of red and yellow dyes showed higher cell parameters than the DSSCs sensitized with the individual yellow or red dye. The photoelectrical parameters of DSSCs cosensitized with the optimum combination of dyes (40% red + 60% yellow) were as follows: short-circuit current ( I sc ) = 5.343 mA, open-circuit voltage ( V oc ) = 0.493 V, fill factor (FF) = 0.481, and overall photoconversion efficiency = 1.267%. However, after the treatment of FTO (fluorine doped tin oxide) / TiO 2 with TiCl 4 , a significant amount of improvement in the I sc , V oc , and FF was observed. DSSCs fabricated with TiCl 4 -treated FTO/TiO 2 and sensitized with the optimum combination of red and yellow dyes showed the following cell parameters: I sc = 5.829 mA, V oc = 0.498 V, and F·F = 0.541. Hence, the efficiency obtained was 1.572%, which is almost 1.24 times higher than that of the DSSCs fabricated without TiCl 4 treatment. Finally, the possible effect of water content in the combination of dyes has been observed with a fixed amount of red dye in the combination.

Context Aware Quick Sensor Service (CQSS) to Remote Patients

Using sensors in healthcare can greatly improve the quality of life, especially for elderly patients. The data from the sensors of the patients is constantly monitored for abnormalities at a server. Whenever this data crosses a threshold value, the information is notified to the corresponding doctor. The doctor can then take the necessary action. However an inspection of historical data has shown that some conditions of patients have cyclic patterns and the medications are often repeated. The proposed system is designed to assist the doctor in diagnosis by retrieving those patterns. We have compared the times taken for receiving responses from the two different systems and a significant amount of improvement was noticed. We have introduced a Dynamic Context Aware Technique (DCAT) which can improve the quality of 24 hour monitoring patient. This paper presents the design and implementation of a system based on DCAT using SAMSUNG GEAR S (Heart rate monitor sensor.The backend remote centralized computation and data storage can decreases the workload of the remote health care provider by avoiding of sending the identical and similar cases data to the doctors. This improves the processing speed and also gives solutions in case of the unavailability of doctors in some cases. Experimental results based on real datasets show that our system is highly efficient and scalable to a long time monitoring patients.

Bearing Capacity of Square Footing Resting on Fibre-Reinforced Pond Ash Overlying Soft Clay

This paper presents the results of an experimental and numerical investigation carried out on a two layered soil system which contains unreinforced/randomly distributed fibre-reinforced pond ash (RDFP) layer overlying a soft clay layer. Model tests have been performed on square footing resting on unreinforced/RDFP layer overlying soft clay. The effect of pond ash layer (unreinforced/reinforced) has been studied by varying its thickness as 0.5B, 1.0B and 1.5B where B is the width of the footing. The effect of polypropylene fibres of lengths 6 mm, 12 mm and 18 mm have also been studied with varying in their percentage as 0.5%, 0.75% and 1%. Results have shown that there is significant amount of improvement in ultimate bearing capacity as well as in the settlement of the soil system due to the provision of pond ash layer over soft clay. Finite element analysis of the model footing has also been done with PLAXIS 3D software. The experimental results have been validated by the results obtained numerically.

Performance Analysis of TBC-ACO Routing Protocol with Existing Routing Protocols of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks, have witnessed significant amount of improvement in research across various areas like Routing, Security, Localization, Deployment and above all Energy Efficiency. Congestion is a problem of importance in resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks, especially for large networks, where the traffic loads exceed the available capacity of the resources . Sensor nodes are prone to failure and the misbehaviour of these faulty nodes creates further congestion. The resulting effect is a degradation in network performance, additional computation and increased energy consumption, which in turn decreases network lifetime. Hence, the data packet routing algorithm should consider congestion as one of the parameters, in addition to the role of the faulty nodes and not merely energy efficient protocols .Nowadays, the main central point of attraction is the concept of Swarm Intelligence based techniques integration in WSN. Swarm Intelligence based Computational Swarm Intelligence Techniques have improvised WSN in terms of efficiency, Performance, robustness and scalability. The main objective of this research paper is to propose congestion aware , energy efficient, routing approach that utilizes Ant Colony Optimization, in which faulty nodes are isolated by means of the concept of trust further we compare the performance of various existing routing protocols like AODV, DSDV and DSR routing protocols, ACO Based Routing Protocol with Trust Based Congestion aware ACO Based Routing in terms of End to End Delay, Packet Delivery Rate, Routing Overhead, Throughput and Energy Efficiency. Simulation based results and data analysis shows that overall TBC-ACO is 150% more efficient in terms of overall performance as compared to other existing routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Operation and preventive maintenance scheduling for containerships: Mathematical model and solution algorithm

This paper considers the problem of determining operation and maintenance schedules for a containership equipped with various subsystems during its sailing according to a pre-determined navigation schedule. The operation schedule, which specifies working time of each subsystem, determines the due-date of each maintenance activity and the maintenance schedule specifies the actual start time of each maintenance activity. The main constraints are subsystem requirements, workforce availability, working time limitation, and inter-maintenance time. To represent the problem mathematically, a mixed integer programming model is developed. Then, due to the complexity of the problem, we suggest a heuristic algorithm that minimizes the sum of earliness and tardiness between the due-date and the actual start time for each maintenance activity. Computational experiments were done on various test instances and the results are reported. In particular, a case study was done on a real instance and a significant amount of improvement is reported over the experience based conventional method.

Correlating the efficacy of knee viscosupplementation with osteoarthritic changes on roentgenological examination

This study was designed to identify the roentgenological changes of the knee that correlated with an unfavourable outcome when treated with an intra-articular knee viscoelastic supplementation. A prospective cohort of 60 patients receiving a standard course of intra-articular knee viscoelastic supplementation with a commercial uncross-linked hyaluronic acid derivative of an intermediate molecular weight were studied. Follow up was for 12 weeks post-treatment with clinical improvement measured using the Western Ontario and McMasters Universities Osteoarthritis Index. X-Rays of the relevant knee were viewed and graded for the severity of joint space, osteophyte, tibial spine, sclerosis, cyst formation, alignment and general severity by an observer blinded to the outcome of the treatment. There were no appreciable differences noted in the age, sex, length of follow up, pre-treatment, the severity of symptoms before treatment and number of intra-articular injections given per course in each X-ray category identified. There was a significant amount of improvement in patients with a minor loss of medial and lateral joint space in all outcome measures. Minimal changes in tibial spine and global appearance also indicated a positive outcome in stiffness, pain and overall improvement. Thus, patients with moderate to severe osteoarthritic changes in joint space on roentgenological examination would not significantly benefit from intra-articular knee viscoelastic supplementation. In addition, we feel that changes in the tibial spine and global appearance are not reviewed consistently enough to be included as part of our recommendation. As such, we conclude that only patients with a minimal to mild loss in joint space on roentgenological examination should form part of the target group who are likely to benefit from intra-articular knee viscoelastic supplementation.

Performance analysis of integrated‐services load‐adaptive/TDMA satellite networks

AbstractA load‐adaptive/TDMA multiple‐access communications system which serves to interconnect broad‐band multimedia packet streams is considered. In particular, the use of a satellite backbone communications link whose channels are dynamically assigned to network stations is investigated. Each station supports packetized voice and data message streams. Incoming streams to a station are statistically multiplexed by the station across the backbone channels currently allocated to this station. To enhance the multiplexing process, a variable bit‐rate packet‐voice encoding scheme is also employed. Stations periodically issue requests for backbone channel allocations, based upon their estimated loading status. We introduce two distinct multiple‐access algorithms for allocating the shared backbone channels to the stations. We develop analytical methods for the analysis and design of such integrated multiplexing/multiple‐access networks. Performance measures include voice and data packet delays and packet blocking probabilities. Voice stream performance is also characterized by the average number of bits per sample used by the voice encoding scheme. The effects of the propagation delay across the backbone link are especially demonstrated. Also illustrated are the performance improvements attained due to the use of the load‐adaptive/TDMA scheme. Under the example of the ’all‐voice’ traffic loading, an LA/TDMA scheme exhibits no obvious performance improvement over a fix‐assigned scheme. However, as the burstiness of the traffic loading increases in the example of the ’data‐voice’ traffic loading, a significant amount of improvement (36 per cent bandwidth savings) is realized by a LA/TDMA scheme.

Critical evaluation of a total push program for regressed schizophrenics in a state hospital.

Two groups of regressed schizophrenic patients, 85 in total, were placed on successive six-monthtotal push programs at Fergus Falls State Hospital, Fergus Falls, Minn. The treatment program utilized an integration of electric shock, recreational, occupational, social, and psychological therapies. An evaluation of the success of the treatment was made by observing the differences between pre- and post-behavioral levels, as measured by the L-M Fergus Falls Behavior Rating Scale, and as measured by qualitative changes. Both groups showed a statistically significant amount of improvement as measured by the scale as well as considerable qualitative change for the better. Three factors (better initial behavior, shorter length of hospitalization, and having a diagnosis other than hebephrenic schizophrenia) appeared to differentiate between those patients who improved and those who did not improve in the first group. These factors, however, were found lacking when they were tested as prognosticators for the second group. More research on prognosticators for the total push type of therapy seems indicated. A follow-up study indicated that the male patients held their improvement, while the women did not. The hypothesis was offered that the men held their improvement because they enjoyed better post-treatment placement than the women. It was further suggested that, for many individuals at least, total push may not result in long-term improvement and that careful post-treatment placement may be necessary in order to maintain gains made on the program.