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Table of contents for the month of October 2022

Table of contents for the month of September 2022

This research deals with Low Cycle Fatigue (LCF) tests for three types of polymers, polyvinylchloride (PVC), polyoxymethy (POM), and polyamide (PA). The tensile test results showed that advantage cannot be taken from u y ratio and strain hardening coefficient (n) to estimate polymers behaviour under LCF test. There was a similarity in polymers behaviour with metals in the aspect of total strain, elastic strain and plastic strain curves with total cyclic number (2N). Fatigue strength exponent (b) and fatigue ductility exponent (c) for the polymers recorded values within metals limits. POM polymer showed less softening and greater transition life (NT). PA polymer exhibits sensitivity to external stress concentration in terms of reduction of transition life (NT). Softening behaviour of PA polymer increases with lower value of the notch radius.

The corrosion behavior of stainless steel (SS) type 304 in 1 M HCl and at different temperatures (25 oC - 55 oC) in presence of different concentrations of heterocyclic organic compounds was studied using chemical (weight loss) and electrochemical (potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy) techniques. The polarization curves reveal that these investigated compounds act as mixed type inhibitors. Adsorption of these inhibitors on SS surface was found to obey the Langmuir adsorption isotherm. Results show that the rate of corrosion of SS increased with increasing temperature over the range (25 oC - 55 oC) both in the presence and the inhibitors and in their absence and decreases with increasing inhibitor concentration. This indicates that these compounds were assumed to occur via physical adsorption on the steel surface. Activation energies in the presence and absence of these investigated compounds were obtained by measuring the temperature dependence of the corrosion current. The reactivity of these compounds was analyzed through theoretical calculations based on semiempirical theory to explain the different efficiency of these compounds as corrosion inhibitors.

The paper highlights the weaknesses of the Indian Management Education System. After an in-depth study of the system, the issues that have been surfaced are- over production of management graduates, recklessness in meeting the quality requirements, lack of research facilities, student interface and attention to specialization specific niche concepts. It has also been found that in majority of B-Schools, Entrepreneurship stands no meaning and they follow poor admission procedures. This is an indicative of the fact that inclusive growth is still a dream for India and will remain for a long time to come. However, an immense potential for radical change can help fructify the suggested model- “MERT”, which is holistic and modern in approach and lively in practice. It shall try to uplift the Management Education System by bringing about an initiative for inclusive growth of the industry. The acronym MERT stands for Management Education Reform Triangle.

This study adopted a cross sectional descriptive research design to define and measure strategic communication in the Ugandan health sector organizations. The study contends that strategic communication is a center piece in making or breaking organizations and thus must be well managed. And that, to manage strategic communication effectively, it must be measured effectively. An analytical survey design with mixed methods was used in this study. The quantitative data were collected in two phases. In phase one a sample of 170 organizations was used to test and refine the designed measurement model. In phase two a sample of 223 organizations in the same population was used to confirm the validity and reliability of the refined instrument. Qualitative data were collected to compliment the quantitative data. The findings of the study revealed that strategic communication is defined as cognitive awareness and emotional attachment to the purpose for communication. The study contributes to literature by providing a valid and reliable tool for assessing level of strategic communication in organizations.

The toxic Microcystis flos-aquae strain was isolated from the local freshwater blooms and batch culture characteristics were observed in the modified J-medium. The isolation of toxic species was carried out by serial dilution and solid-agar plate adopting plate transfer method. Among the four culture media evaluated, modified Parker’s J-media was found most suitable for batch culturing of Microcystis flos-aquae strains. The use of Na2S and Na2SO3 in solid and liquid medium was found effective in reducing the contamination in culture and for providing better growth conditions as required for Microcystis flos-aquae specifically. The culture of isolated Microcystis flos-aquae showed the typical batch culture characteristics and the specific growth rate was in range of 0.02-0.40 d-1. The 14 days old batch culture of isolate was used to estimate the toxic components, and besides several other variants, the microcystin RR (MC-RR) was dominantly present (0.16 % of its dry weight biomass) as confirmed by LC-PDA/MS. Thus it was observed in this study that the strain M. flos-aquae was responsible for the MC-RR contents in the local ponds of northern India.

Module is an important structure in successfully implementing the complex software system in computer software engineering. Borrowing the module thought in brain functional memory network modeling we put forward the brain memory complex network model from neuron and cortex level. The results of bi-modular network model in brain memory show that it is reasonable to explain the structure and function of the brain memory. We also highlight some of the technical challenges and key questions to be addressed by future developments in this rapidly moving field.

Graphene oxide (GO) is an amazing nanostructured material with a wide range of possible technological applications, including its use as filler for thermoplastic polymers or thermosetting resins. A combination of graphene-related substances with other systems often leads to promising nanocomposite materials with unique mechanical, chemical, and physical properties. In this work, we study morphology and elastic properties of a composite consisting of polystyrene (PS) and graphene oxide (GO). We prepared several composite films of this nature with a varying polystyrene concentration on a fixed amount of graphene oxide. The morphology of the composites was observed by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The SEM image shows the higher the concentration in polystyrene, the more compact structure of graphene oxide and polystyrene are observed. The mechanical properties of the composite films were analyzed using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). It is found that the Young’s elastic modulus of the composite film changes drastically from the value of its pure constituent solutions though it shows a rather weak dependence on the polystyrene concentration for the values considered.

The human body has the privilege of possessing features that are unique and exclusive to each individual. This exclusivity and unique characteristic has led to the field of biometrics and its application in ensuring security in various fields. Today, the technology has emerged as a reliable and effective method for establishing the identity of a person and controlling access to both physical and spaces, more importantly in the wake of heightened concern about security and rapid advancements in communication and mobility in our environments. Meanwhile, experimental studies have shown that a biometric system that uses a single biometric trait for recognition has this propensity to contend with challenges related to non-universality of trait, spoof attacks, large intra-class variability, and noisy data. Besides, no single biometric trait can meet all the requirements of every possible application. Therefore, it is believed that some of the limitations imposed by unimodal biometric systems can be overcome and much higher accuracy achieved by integrating the evidence of multiple biometric traits for establishing identity. However, the time and computational complexity of combining the evidences from different traits during application processes remains an overt concept that attracts research attention. In this research work, a multilevel decision threshold authentication mechanism is presented for efficient multimodal biometric system. This kind of level-based strategy allows data fusion at three different levels to gradually improve the performance of any biometric authentication system.