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We are very happy to announce that from 21st February 2017, Dr.T.Suresh Padmanabhan has joined the team of Elixir Editorial Advisory Board. He/She will carry a special responsibility for dealing with manuscripts based on Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The appointment of Dr.T.Suresh Padmanabhan as member Editorial Advisory Board strengthens the links and will make it easier for prospective authors to establish contact with the journal.

The environmental stable isotopic (oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2)  composition of groundwater  in the crystalline geological formation underlying the Accra Plains of South-east Ghana were studied to obtain information on the recharge process.  The groundwater had an average isotopic value of –3.19‰ ?¹⁸O and –14.36‰ ?²H. The groundwater recharge takes place in fractures with the occurrence of minor evaporation. The groundwater was also affected by the mixing of various rainfall events and or surface runoff. The groundwaters at Valley View University were more depleted than the other groundwaters in the Plains indicating that the groundwater was recharge at the Akwapim Togo Mountains through preferential channels.

Four Trichoderma species with known biocontrol activity (T. harzianum, T. hamantum, T. viride and T. virens) were tested for their efficacy against Cephalosporium acremonium, a causal organism of Black bundle disease in maize. Interactions between the fungi were assessed in vitro to study mutual antagonisms. Among the four bio-agents, T. hamantum proved to be promising which showed maximum inhibition (51.3%) followed by T. virens (45.2%), T. harzianum (44.6%) and T. viride (20.3%). T. hamantum was also found to be hyperparasite on C. acremonium whereas, T. harzianum and T. viride showed mycelial deformation. The volatile toxicants released by all the Trichoderma spp. were inferior in inhibiting the growth of C. acremonium when compared to the control as evident by inverted plate technique. The results of in vivo experiments confirmed the results from the in vitro study and showed that all the four bio-agents significantly reduced the disease incidence of Black bundle disease.

In the world, day to day increases consumption of energy with increase the production rate of automobile. With the current consumption rate if it has been quoted that there will be great shortage of petroleum products in upcoming decades. For this reason research is going on alternative fuels. It is better to develop the engine which can work on bio diesel and one can add methanol in the bio diesel and use the blends of that. For this purpose, it is necessary to check the performance characteristics of the blends with the conventional diesel fuels.In this investigation, rice bran methyl ester was used in four stroke, single cylinder variable compression ratio type diesel engine. Tests were carried out at different injection pressures with various blends of rice bran methyl ester. The results proved that the use of bio diesel (produced from rice bran oil) in compression ignition engine is a viable alternative to diesel.

Adjustment, in a wide sense joins the different techniques utilized for altering the properties of soil to enhance its building execution. An expansive piece of focal India and a bit of south India are secured with dark cotton soils. These have high PI values. Earth soil is generally utilized as a part of the greater part of the development ventures. Mud soils, especially delicate earth soils, have great plastic properties so that expanded dampness brings about their diminished shear quality, compressive quality and volume changes. Far reaching soil represents a genuine danger to overlaying structures because of high swell and psychologist. So we have to balance out those dirts. Lime and bond are the regularly utilized artificially added substances for soil adjustment. These are far reaching. So we require a characteristic added substance for adjustment. In this paper we utilized the eggshell powder and quarry tidy as squanders. The quarry tidy is utilized as a filling material and the eggshell powder is utilized as a fastener. Quarry clean is added to soil at 30% substitution of soil. Eggshell powder was added to the dirt at 5%, 10%, 15%. For the ideal condition The Specimens were cured for 0, 3, 7, 14, and 28 days after which they were tried for unconfined Compressive tests and CBR. In view of results it can be inferred that the eggshell powder can be viably utilized as a fastener as a part of place of lime. The test outcomes so acquired and demonstrated that 10% of eggshell powder gives MDD at OMC. The expansion in CBR is least in dark cotton soils though quarry tidy and ideal measurements of eggshell powder is included under the utilization of enhanced quarry clean and eggshell powder demonstrates obvious results.

The major aim of bringing forth this project is to design a system for Text Dependent Speech Recognition. The speech recognition system contains two main modules, namely “feature extraction” and “feature matching”. In this project, the MFCC (Mel-Frequency Ceptral Co-efficient) is used to simulate the feature extraction module. In MFCC algorithms the Ceptral co-efficients are calculated on the Mel frequency scale where the frequency bands are equally spaced on the Mel scale. For the reduction of amount of data in order to reduce the computation time the VQ (Vector Quantization) is used. VQ is the data compression method based on the principle of block coding. Because of the accuracy of the used algorithms the accuracy of this speech recognition system is high. Using these algorithms we achieve the text dependent speaker identification and speech recognition and thus providing improved efficiency

This paper presents a new algorithm called Firefly Algorithm (FA) to solve the well-known power system economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. FA is a novel nature-inspired algorithm inspired by social behavior of fireflies and the phenomenon of bioluminescent communication between them. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been tested with the standard 6-bus, IEEE-14 bus and IEEE-30 bus system with several heuristic load patterns. The result of the proposed algorithm is compared with the results available in the literature. The numerical result reveals that the proposed algorithm can provide appreciably better solutions within reasonable time.

Some aryl chalcones [E-2-Propen-1-ones] have been synthesized using Fly-ash:water catalyzed solvent free Crossed-Aldol reaction between aryl methyl ketones and aryl aldehydes. The yield of chalcones is more than 60%. The purities of these chalcones are checked by their physical constants and spectral data published literature in earlier. The insect antifeedant activities of chalcones have been studied using 4th instar larvae Achoea Janata L.

A Scientometric study was carried out to measure the global research out put on genus Adansonia. This study is based on publications output on Adansonia during 1945-2013 as indexed by SCI-Expanded databases. It reflected that as many as 257 documents have been published with an average output of 3.77 publications per year that collected 2794 total citations, with an average of 10.87 citations per document, and h-index at 29. A total of 500 authors have contributed to this, and collaborative work of four authors accounted for about 56% of the publications. ‘Document’ category had maximum share (85.6%); the most popular subject category was “plant sciences” (76 articles), and the most common source (journal) was Agroforestry Systems (17 articles). The Universitéd'-Abomey-Calavi, Benin was the lead institute and USA, the leading country in number of publications with 22 and 42 publications, respectively. Madagascar, the home of six endemic species of Adansonia, published only 11 articles. Most of the publications were from non-native, developed countries which can be attributed to the availability of resources and access. Major international collaborations were between the technologically advanced countries and native countries of the species, revealing a symbiotic relationship. Though Adansonia is an economically and ecologically important genus, it has not attracted researchers’ attention so far. Out of nine species, Adansonia digitata has been the most studied species.

The levels of heavy metals (Cr, Cd, Pb, Cu, Co, Ni and Zn) in soil nd plant (cassia occidentalis) of jega town were determined using atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The sample area was divided into five units (JE, JC, JW, JN and JS) using stratified random sampling method. Results revealed significant (p<0.05) difference between the samples in terms of Cr, Pb, Cu, Co, Ni and Zn contents in soil with Cd showing no significance at 5% level of significance. Cr, Cd and Zn levels are of no significance (p>0.05) between the samples. However, high significance different (p<0.05) exists between the samples for the remaining metals. Pearson Product Moment Correlation showed that Pb in plant correlated positively with all other metals in the soil; with higher significance correlation at 1% level of significance between Pb in soil. However, Co and Cr in plant showed significant correlation with Pb and Zn in soil at 5% level of significance. However, results indicated that the area is moderately polluted based on the US EPA standard of heavy metals in soils.