Effect of binder-phase modification and Cr3C2 addition on properties of WC-IOC0 cemented carbide

For production of fine-grained and corrosion-resistant tungsten carbide (WC) based cemented carbides, addition of chromium carbide (Cr₃3C₂) in small amounts is standard practice. No systematic study, however, has been made of the effects of large additions (maximum 6 wt % ) of Cr₃C₂ as a substitute for tungsten carbide. This study focuses on the effect of hard-phase substitution by C₃C₂ in WC-1OCo cemented carbide. An attempt is also made to modify the binder metal cobalt by partial or complete substitution of nickel. Specimens were prepared using the standard liquid-phase sintering process and were tested for sintered porosity, mechanical properties, corrosion resistance, and microstructural parameters. Results confirm the findings of earlier workers regarding grain refinement and improvement of mechanical properties upon the addition of small amounts (<2 wt%) of Cr₃C₂. Modification of the binder phase improves indentation fracture toughness and corrosion resistance. Addition of Cr₃C₂ independent of the binder type improves corrosion resistance.     

Fault tolerant multiple event detection in a wireless sensor network

With an increasing acceptance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the health of individual sensor is becoming critical in identifying important events in the region of interest. One of the key challenges in detecting event in a WSN is how to detect it accurately transmitting minimum information providing sufficient details about the event. At the same time, it is also important to devise a strategy to handle multiple events occurring simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a Polynomial-based scheme that addresses these problems of Event Region Detection (PERD) by having a aggregation tree of sensor nodes. We employ a data aggregation scheme, TREG (proposed in our earlier work) to perform function approximation of the event using a multivariate polynomial regression. Only coefficients of the polynomial (P$P$) are passed instead of aggregated data. PERD includes two components: event recognition and event report with boundary detection. This can be performed for multiple simultaneously occurring events. We also identify faulty sensor(s) using the aggregation tree. Performing further mathematical operations on the calculated P$P$ can identify the maximum (max) and minimum (min) values of the sensed attribute and their locations. Therefore, if any sensor reports a data value outside the [min, max] range, it can be identified as a faulty sensor. Since PERD is implemented over a polynomial tree on a WSN in a distributed manner, it is easily scalable and computation overhead is marginal. Results reveal that event(s) can be detected by PERD with error in detection remaining almost constant achieving a percentage error within a threshold of 10%$10\%$ with increase in communication range. Results also show that a faulty sensor can be detected with an average accuracy of 94%$94\%$ and it increases with increase in node density.     

NodeWiz: Fault-tolerant grid information service

Large scale grid computing systems may provide multitudinous services, from different providers, whose quality of service will vary. Moreover, services are deployed and undeployed in the grid with no central coordination. Thus, to find out the most suitable service to fulfill their needs, or to find the most suitable set of resources on which to deploy their services, grid users must resort to a Grid Information Service (GIS). This service allows users to submit rich queries that are normally composed of multiple attributes and range operations. The ability to efficiently execute complex searches in a scalable and reliable way is a key challenge for current GIS designs. Scalability issues are normally dealt with by using peer-to-peer technologies. However, the more reliable peer-to-peer approaches do not cater for rich queries in a natural way. On the other hand, approaches that can easily support these rich queries are less robust in the presence of failures. In this paper we present the design of NodeWiz, a GIS that allows multi-attribute range queries to be performed efficiently in a distributed manner, while maintaining load balance and resilience to failures.     

ENROUTE: An Entropy Aware Routing Scheme for Information-Centric Networks (ICN)

With the exponential growth of end users and web data, the internet is undergoing the change of paradigm from a user-centric model to a content-centric one, popularly known as information-centric networks (ICN). Current ICN research evolves around three key-issues namely (i) content request searching, (ii) content routing, and (iii) in-network caching scheme to deliver the requested content to the end user. This would improve the user experience to obtain requested content because it lowers the download delay and provides higher throughput. Existing researches have mainly focused on on-path congestion or expected delivery time of a content to determine the optimized path towards custodian. However, it ignores the cumulative effect of the link-state parameters and the state of the cache, and consequently it leads to degrade the delay performance. In order to overcome this shortfall, we consider both the congestion of a link and the state of on-path caches to determine the best possible routes. We introduce a generic term entropy to quantify the effects of link congestion and state of on-path caches. Thereafter, we develop a novel entropy dependent algorithm namely ENROUTE for searching of content request triggered by any user, routing of this content, and caching for the delivery this requested content to the user. The entropy value of an intra-domain node indicates how many popular contents are already cached in the node, which, in turn, signifies the degree of enrichment of that node with the popular contents. On the other hand, the entropy for a link indicates how much the link is congested with the traversal of contents. In order to have reduced delay, we enhance the entropy of caches in nodes, and also use path with low entropy for downloading contents. We evaluate the performance of our proposed ENROUTE algorithm against state-of-the-art schemes for various network parameters and observe an improvement of 29–52% in delay, 12–39% in hit rate, and 4–39% in throughput.

     

Reliable before-fabrication forecasting of MEMS piezoresistive pressure sensor: mathematical modelling and numerical simulation

Microsystem Technologies - Micro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based piezoresistive pressure sensors have significant importance in several pressure sensor devices in real world, i.e., aviation, IoT...     

Taming the killer in the kitchen: mitigating household air pollution from solid-fuel cookstoves through building design

In this study, we attempt to mitigate household air pollution (HAP) through improved kitchen design. Field surveys were conducted in ten kitchens of rural western India, which were then modelled and simulated for dynamic indoor airflow network analysis. The simulated results were statistically clustered using principal component analysis and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, to construct a cumulative built environment parameter called ‘Built Factor’ for each kitchen, and subsequently a derivative matrix was developed. Categorization of better performing kitchens from this derivative matrix enabled in deriving the built parameter thresholds for a ‘better’ kitchen design. This derived kitchen showed 60 % reduction in PM2.5 peak concentration during cooking hours. The evaluation described here is essentially a “proof of concept”, that effective building design can be an alternative way to reduce HAP without the introduction of chimneys, improved cookstoves or shifting to cleaner fuel.     

All‐Organic Dual Spin Valves with Well‐Resolved Four Resistive‐States

The formation of all‐organic dual spin valves (DSVs) with three organic spin‐selective layers, that is, spin‐injection, spin‐detection, and an additional spin‐filtering layer at the intermediate, is reported. As spin‐selective layers, manganese‐ and cobalt phthalocyanines, which are well‐known single‐molecule magnets, are used in their immobilized forms, so that all‐organic DSVs can be prefabricated for characterization. The three spin‐selective layers have provided four configurations with at most two spin‐flip interfaces enforcing spin‐flipping at the two nonmagnetic organic spacer layers, for which copper phthalocyanine is used. Since a couple of the four configurations have exhibited similar resistivities, the degeneracy in the resistive‐states is broken through asymmetric spin‐injection and spin‐detection layers and also through asymmetric thickness of the nonmagnetic spacer layers. When both the spin‐flip interfaces are made operative independently, a 2‐bit logic with four distinct resistive states can be achieved.