1,060 research outputs found
Determination of Quantum Capacitance of Niobium Nitrides Nb2N and Nb4N3 for Supercapacitor Applications
Get PDFThe density of states and quantum capacitance of pure and doped Nb2N and Nb4N3 singlelayer and multi-layer bulk structures are investigated using density functional theory calculations. The calculated value of quantum capacitance is quite high for pristine Nb2N and decent for Nb4N3 structures. However for cobalt-doped unpolarized structures, significant increase in quantum capacitance at Fermi level is observed in the case of Nb4N3 as compared to minor increase in case of Nb2N. These results show that pristine and doped Nb2N and Nb4N3 can be preferred over graphene
as the electrode material for supercapacitors. The spin and temperature dependences of quantum capacitance for these structures are also investigate
Edible Packaging: Mechanical Properties and Testing Methods
No full textTraditionally people use food packaging materials from nonrenewable sources such as plastics obtained from petroleum. The traditional food packaging materials play a significant role in the total plastics consumption of the world. They are nonbiodegradable, cause environmental pollution, and large carbon adds to water footprint in their manufacturing process. Subsequently, this leads to a heavy dependence on nonrenewable resources. Reducing the amount of nonrenewable material by biodegradable and renewable sources of packaging holds the potential to improve waste disposal and decrease the cost of packaging and overall product. The need for alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics is more than ever. The current trend in food packaging calls for the utilization of natural, “environment-friendly” materials, which also have some additional functional properties wherever possible and with some cost benefit. Biodegradable packaging is a very good alternative packaging and a specialized type of biodegradable packaging, that is, the “edible packaging,” is a very good alternative as they also have some other benefits like enhancing shelf life, maintaining the freshness of foods, and can be eaten along with the food without altering the original organoleptic characteristics of the food. The two main considerations with the use of edible packaging can be understood from its name itself, which are firstly “edible,” it means the package is an integral part of the food and may or may not be consumed together with the product and hence should have all the necessary properties. At present, 12 types of edible films are approved by FDA and commercially used, which are made up of materials like polysaccharides, lipids, cellulose, chitosan, starch (potato, corn, wheat, rice), hemicellulose, hydrocolloids like gums (guar, pectin) and alginates, and plant and animal proteins. Secondly, the material chosen should have all the properties to protect the food from the outer environment, provide a good barrier against light, water vapor, other gases, and also have the required mechanical strength to protect the food against damages incurred during storage, transportation, and handling
Story of the Story-Teller: A Conversation with Ramendra Kumar
Get PDFRamendra Kumar (Ramen) is an award-winning writer, storyteller and inspirational speaker with 42 books to his name. Ramen’s writings have been published by many of the leading publishers in the county and translated into 30 languages. They have found a place in several textbooks and anthologies. He has written across all genres ranging from picture books to adult fiction, satire, poetry, travelogues, biographies and on issues related to parenting and relationships. He has been invited to literary festivals held in Denmark, Greece, Sharjah, Sri Lanka as well Indian events including the prestigious Jaipur Litfest to conduct storytelling sessions and creative writing workshops. He has also been empanelled by Pearson India Education Services as well as several schools to conduct workshops. He was nominated as a Jury Member for the Best Children’s Author Category of The Times of India’s ‘Women AutHer’ Awards 2020. Many of his stories have been showcased by popular audio streaming, apps both within and outside the country, such as Spotify, Gaatha, Talking Stories Radio – London et al.
An Engineer & an MBA, Ramen was serving as the General Manager (Corporate Communications), SAIL, Rourkela Steel Plant, when he took Voluntary Retirement to pursue his passion, in August 2020. To know more about the writer, you can visit his website www.ramendra.in & his page on Wikipedia. Dr. Sagar Kumar Sharma interviews the author and unfolds the pages of his life.
 
Interview with Lakshmi Raj Sharma, Author of The Tailor’s Needle
Get PDFInterview with Indian writer Lakshmi Raj Sharma, author of 'The Tailor's needle
The Effect of Modifications of Activated Carbon Materials on the Capacitive Performance: Surface, Microstructure, and Wettability
Get PDFIn this review, the efforts done by different research groups to enhance the performance of the electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs), regarding the effect of the modification of activated carbon structures on the electrochemical properties, are summarized. Activated carbon materials with various porous textures, surface chemistry, and microstructure have been synthesized using several different techniques by different researchers. Micro-, meso-, and macroporous textures can be obtained through the activation/carbonization process using various activating agents. The surface chemistry of activated carbon materials can be modified via: (i) the carbonization of heteroatom-enriched compounds, (ii) post-treatment of carbon materials with reactive heteroatom sources, and (iii) activated carbon combined both with metal oxide materials dan conducting polymers to obtain composites. Intending to improve the EDLCs performance, the introduction of heteroatoms into an activated carbon matrix and composited activated carbon with either metal oxide materials or conducting polymers introduced a pseudo-capacitance effect, which is an additional contribution to the dominant double-layer capacitance. Such tricks offer high capacitance due to the presence of both electrical double layer charge storage mechanism and faradic charge transfer. The surface modification by attaching suitable heteroatoms such as phosphorus species increases the cell operating voltage, thereby improving the cell performance. To establish a detailed understanding of how one can modify the activated carbon structure regarding its porous textures, the surface chemistry, the wettability, and microstructure enable to enhance the performance of the EDLCs is discussed here in detail. This review discusses the basic key parameters which are considered to evaluate the performance of EDLCs such as cell capacitance, operating voltage, equivalent series resistance, power density, and energy density, and how these are affected by the modification of the activated carbon framework
Ultrasonic modulated rice bran protein concentrate: Induced effects on morphological, functional, rheological, and thermal characteristics
No full textThe effect of low frequency (20 kHz) ultrasonication at varying amplitude (20%, 30%, 40% for 30 min) on the morphological, functional, rheological, and thermal characteristics of rice bran protein concentrate (RBPC) from three different rice varieties: Pusa Basmati- 1509, 1121 and Sugandha were undertaken for the study. Scanning Electron Microscopy images showed that sonication treatment changed the microstructure of RBPC as some pores appeared on the smooth particles surface and more disordered structures compared to the untreated sample. Sonication treatment decreased mean particle size, D[4,3] from 89.77 μm (untreated) to 64.34 μm (20% amplitude), and increased surface hydrophobicity significantly (p < 0.05), from 1.34 ± 0.0080 (untreated) to 1.65 ± 0.0081 (20% amplitude) of 1121 RBPC variety. The FTIR analysis showed that sonication treatment altered RPBC secondary structure as β sheets, and random coils increased while reducing α-helix and β-turns. Sonication treatment at a lower amplitude of 20% made RBPCs brighter in color as lightness, redness, and yellowness values increased. The results showed that sonication treatment has improved the foaming capacity (FC), foaming stability (FS), and oil binding capacity (OBC) of all RBPC varieties. The FC increased significantly from 34.10 ± 0.27 (untreated) to 50.13 ± 0.98 (30% amplitude), FS (60 min) from 21.19 ± 0.63 (untreated) to 44.20 ± 0.26 (30% amplitude), and OBC from 1.42 ± 0.05 (untreated) to 1.61 ± 0.01 (30% amplitude) of 1509 RBPC variety, respectively (p < 0.05). Furthermore, water binding capacity and emulsion activity were reduced for all RBPC varieties after sonication, while solubility and digestibility improved for the 1121 variety, whereas reduced for the 1509 and Sugandha RBPC varieties. Frequency sweep analysis showed that sonication treatment reduced both the storage modulus and loss modulus of RBPC dispersions. Moreover, protein gel linkages transformed from non-covalent to covalently cross-link with increasing % amplitude for the 1121 RBPC variety. Ultrasonication at a lower 20% amplitude, first decreased the denaturation temperature (Tp) of 1121 RBPC variety from 72.5 °C to 63 °C, then increased it to 77.3 °C at higher 40% amplitude. In conclusion, under the conditions investigated in this study, sonication treatment has the potential to modify the foaming and oil-binding properties of RBPCs
The Federal Approach to FiscalDecentralisation: Conceptual Contours for Policy Makers
Get PDFChanchal Kumar Sharma,in his paper demonstrates that in order for fiscal decentralisation to be effective, it must be approached federally. A federal approach is not a decentralised approach but a dynamically balanced approach; one that constantly keeps on adjusting the contrasting forces of centralisation and decentralisation to create a system that can ensure good governance in accordance with the rapidly changing global and local scenario. According to the author, the good governance of the present time has to be federally flexible and dynamically decentralised and institutions of fiscal federalism are crucial for achieving such a dynamic equilibrium. Fiscal decentralisation cannot be detached from the broader principles of fiscal federalism if it is to be successful, irrespective of the fact of whether it is being carried out in a federal or non-federal country. He argues that too much decentralisation or an overly strong central federal government precludes the survival of a constitutional federal state.Federalism; Fiscal Decentralization; centralization
The Federal Approach to FiscalDecentralisation: Conceptual Contours for Policy Makers
Get PDFChanchal Kumar Sharma,in his paper demonstrates that in order for fiscal decentralisation to be effective, it must be approached federally. A federal approach is not a decentralised approach but a dynamically balanced approach; one that constantly
keeps on adjusting the contrasting forces of centralisation and
decentralisation to create a system that can ensure good governance in
accordance with the rapidly changing global and local scenario.
According to the author, the good governance of the present time has to
be federally flexible and dynamically decentralised and institutions of
fiscal federalism are crucial for achieving such a dynamic equilibrium.
Fiscal decentralisation cannot be detached from the broader principles
of fiscal federalism if it is to be successful, irrespective of the fact of
whether it is being carried out in a federal or non-federal country. He
argues that too much decentralisation or an overly strong central federal
government precludes the survival of a constitutional federal state
TCAD device modelling and simulation of wide bandgap power semiconductors
Get PDFTechnology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) is essential for devices technology development, including wide bandgap power semiconductors. However. most TCAD tools were originally developed for silicon and their performance and accuracy for wide band gap semiconductors is contentious. This chapter will deal with TCAD device modelling of wide band gap power semiconductors. In particular, modelling and simulating 3C- and 4H- Silicon Carbide (SiC), Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Diamond devices are examined. The challenges associated with modelling the material and device physics are analysed in detail. It also includes convergence issues and accuracy of predicted performance. Modelling and simulating defects, traps and the effect of these traps on the characteristics are also discussed. Keywords: TCAD, modelling and simulation, Silicon Carbide, Gallium Nitride, Diamond, Physics modelling, material parameters. <br/
Anomaly-Based DNN Model for Intrusion Detection in IoT and Model Explanation: Explainable Artificial Intelligence
No full textIoT has gained immense popularity recently with advancements in technologies and big data. IoT network is dynamically increasing with the addition of devices, and the big data is generated within the network, making the network vulnerable to attacks. Thus, network security is essential, and an intrusion detection system is needed. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning-based model for detecting intrusions or attacks in IoT networks. We constructed a DNN model, applied a filter method for feature reduction, and tuned the model with different parameters. We also compared the performance of DNN with other machine learning techniques in terms of accuracy, and the proposed DNN model with weight decay of 0.0001 and dropout rate of 0.01 achieved an accuracy of 0.993, and the reduced loss on the NSL-KDD dataset having five classes. DL models are a black box and hard to understand, so we explained the model predictions using LIME.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Cyber Securit
- …
