Analysis of a system having super-priority, priority and ordinary units with arbitrary distributions

This paper deals with the analysis of a three non-identical unit cold standby system model. A single repairman is available to repair a failed unit. The priority in respect of operation and repair is being given to the units in order. All failure and repair time distributions are assumed to be general having different p.d.f.'s. Several measures of system effectiveness are obtained by using a regenerative point technique.     

ENHANCED HYDROCARBON EXTRACTION FROM CALOTROPIS PROCERA - A PETROCROP

With fast disappearing petroleum reserves renewable resources like biomass are of great significance. Petrocrop, Calotropis procera is a wild shrub and does not compete with food and fodder crops for land. This paper presents an investigation on enhancement of hydrocarbon extraction from Calotropis procera. An extraction yield of 8% has been obtained with toluene, as solvent. Increase in extraction to 11.5% has been achieved by modification of design of conventional “Soxhlet extractor”. Further enhancement in extraction has been achieved by pre-treatment of the biomass with alkali or acid. Pre-treatment results in extractive or hydrolytic breakdown of plant structure and hence exposes hyrocarbons to solvent attack. Alkali pretreatment of ground biomass resulted in much higher extraction. So it was studied in further detail with more alkalies of varying strength. An enhancement from 8% to 18% has been achieved by pre-treatment with IN sodium hydroxide.     

Performance Enhancement of GAA Multi-Gate Nanowire with Asymmetric Hetero-Dielectric Oxide

Silicon - In this paper, a Multi-gate asymmetric hetero-dielectric oxide gate all around nanowire MOSFET device (MG-AHD–GAA-NW) is proposed for the low power standby, memory and sensor...     

Supporting collaborative software development over GitHub

GitHub is a web‐based, distributed Software Configuration Management (SCM) system build over Git, which enables developers to host shared repositories over the Internet and access them from any location, at any time. It helps developers to effectively orchestrate their activities over shared codebases by capturing direct conflicts arising because of concurrent editing on the same shared artifact. However, SCM systems have limited support for capturing inconsistencies arising because of indirect conflicts which arise because of software dependency relationships that exist between related artifacts, and lead to the introduction of syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in codebases. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative software development (CSD) tool named, Collaboration Over GitHub (COG), that provides real‐time information about arising direct and indirect conflicts among collaborative developers, working over GitHub, through a collection of workspace awareness widgets. These widgets provide people‐centric information about direct and indirect collaborators over GitHub. Resource‐centric information about current and conflicting activities of real‐time collaborators is captured and propagated to others, based on the dependency relationships between software artifacts being manipulated by them. COG uses dependency graphs to store and process dependency relationship information which is required to ascertain information about indirect conflicts. Notably, the most important novel contribution of COG is that it not only captures indirect conflicts that lead to the introduction of syntactic inconsistencies but also changes that lead to semantic inconsistencies in the codebase. It also does so at finer levels of granularity, with changes to individual method's body being traced, thereby capturing statement‐level conflicts as well. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ferroelectric and magnetic properties of Nd-doped Bi4 ? xFeTi3O12 nanoparticles prepared through the egg-white method

Multiferroic behavior of Bi_{4 − x}Nd_xFeTi₃O₁₂ (0.0 ≤ × ≤ 0.25, × = 0.05) ceramic nanoparticles prepared through the egg-white method was investigated. The dielectric properties of the samples show normal behavior and are explained in the light of space charge polarization. Room temperature polarization-electric field (P-E) curves show that the samples are not saturated with maximum remanence polarization, P_r = 0.110 μC/cm², and a relatively low coercive field, E_c = of 7.918 kV/cm, at an applied field of 1 kV/cm was observed for 5% Nd doping. The room temperature M-H hysteresis curve shows that the samples exhibit intrinsic antiferromagnetism with a weak ferromagnetism. These properties entitle the grown nanoparticles of BNFT as one of the few multiferroic materials that exhibit decent magnetization and electric polarization.     

Conducive 3D porous mesh of poly(ε-caprolactone) made via emulsion electrospinning

Use of Poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) as 3D porous scaffold, fibers and matrices has proved importance of this polymer in applications for tissue engineering besides others. Here we present an approach to generate uneven surfaced meshes of PCL via emulsion electrospinning with minimal use of organic solvent. Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) was used as template polymer providing stability and alignment to PCL phase during electrospinning of oil-in-water emulsion of PCL. The emulsion properties including particle size, inter-particle distance and viscosity depended on the concentrations of PCL and PVA. Higher PVA content led to formation of smaller oil phase particles resulting into higher viscosity of the emulsion while a higher PCL content led to the formation of larger oil phase particles and correspondingly lower viscosity of the emulsion. A correlation between particle size of emulsion and diameter of the fibers obtained after electrospinning was found. The composite meshes of PCL-PVA obtained via emulsion electrospinning were washed with water to generate uneven surface on the meshes which was found to be highly favorable for cell growth in comparison to a uniform mesh of PCL made via solution electrospinning.     

Delivery of molecules to cancer cells using liposomes from bacterial cultures

Liposomes have a variety of applications as model systems to study enclosed biological membranes, as delivery vehicles for a variety of drugs and as micro- and nano-reactors, amongst others. However, preparation of liposomes requires use of expensive raw material (synthetic lipids) from specialized commercial suppliers, and ability to make reproducible preparations remains a specialized art till date. In this work, we prepared liposomes using natural lipids extracted from the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli), which are extremely economical compared to the synthetic lipids. We demonstrate robust procedures for convenient and reproducible preparations of 200-300 nm diameter liposomes from bacterial cells. We also show a potential application of these bacterial liposomes in delivery of aqueous molecules to cancer cells. We show not only intracellular uptake, but also biodegradation of the liposomes inside cancer cells. Our economical liposomes promise to serve as excellent model systems for studies on encapsulation of molecules inside soft materials with desired efficiencies. Additionally, they certainly show a strong potential to be tools for research in diverse areas ranging from drug delivery applications to sub-micron reaction engineering for carrying out and understanding the mechanisms of chemical reactions in small enclosed volumes.     

Efficiency enhancement of organic light emitting diode via surface energy transfer between exciton and surface plasmon

Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) with surface plasmon (SP) enhanced emission have been fabricated. Gold nanoclusters (GNCs) deposited using thermal evaporation technique has been used for localization of surface plasmons. Size of GNCs and distance of GNCs from the emissive layer have been optimized using steady state and time resolved photoluminescence (PL) results. 3.2 Times enhancement in PL intensity and 2.8 times enhancement in electroluminescence intensity of OLED have been obtained when GNCs of size 9.3 nm has been introduced at a distance of 5 nm from emissive layer. Distance dependence of energy transfer efficiency between exciton and SPs was found to be of 1/R⁴ type, which is typically the dependence for dipole-surface energy transfer.