Abstract

Bhuj earthquake of 26 January 2001 caused 14,000 casualties. Main reason for such huge casualties is low earthquake awareness and poor construction practices. Based on the technology advancement and knowledge gained after earthquake occurrences, the seismic code is usually revised. Last revision of IS 1893 (Criteria for earthquake resistant design of structures) was done in 2002 after a long gap of about 18 years. Some new clauses were included and some old provisions were updated. Assuming that concerned authorities will take enough steps for code compliance and the structures that are being constructed are earthquake resistant. In this light, what will happen to the safety of precode revision structures? These structures carry major percentage of vulnerable structure stock. Even if we have a very good disaster response system, it is impossible to reduce earthquake damage without considering the safety of precode revision structures. In this regard, a comprehensive study of seismic risk assessment of Gujarat is necessary. As a pilot study, government of Gujarat selected Gandhidham and Adipur cities in Kachchh district. Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) was conducted on 16000 buildings in Gandhidham and Adipur cities. Though, there are varied construction practices, about 26% of buildings were predominantly RCC type and 74% of masonry structure were found. RVS score of these structures reveal that in general buildings are of low quality and further evaluation and strengthening of buildings is recommended. The procedure adopted in this study is threetier method, i.e., Tier 1. Rapid Visual Screening, Tier 2. Preliminary assessment and Tier 3. Detailed assessment

Abstract

Disaster Demand for electricity in urban areas is increasing world over, because electricity is the prime lifeline support. Due to increase in fossil fuel prices coupled with concerns related to global warming, demand for nuclear energy is increasing. Around 30 countries are now using nuclear energy for production of electricity. However, its share in electricity production is varying from country to country. In some countries it is only 3% and in some countries it is around 50%. In light of March 2011 nuclear energy are reviewing the safety of their reactors against natural disasters. In this regard, authors proposed to study the current and projected nuclear energy demand for electricity supply in urban areas of India on one hand and scenario of seismic hazard and risk on the other hand.

Abstract

This paper deals with extraction of fingerprint features directly from gray scale images by the method of ridge trac­ing. While doing so, we make substantial use of contextual information gathered during the tracing process. Narrow bandpass based filtering methods for fingerprint image en­hancement are extremely robust as noisy regions do not af­fect the result of cleaner ones. However, these method often generate artifacts whenever the underlying image does not fit the filter model, which may be due to the presence of noise and singularities. The proposed method allows us to use the contextual information to better handle such noisy regions. Moreover, the various parameters used in the al­gorithm have been made adaptive in order to circumvent human supervision. The experimental results from our al­gorithm have been compared with those from Gabor based filtering and feature extraction, as well as with the origi­nal ridge tracing work from Maio and Maltoni [11]. The results clearly indicate that the proposed approach makes ridge tracing more robust to noise and makes the extracted features more reliable.

Abstract

Pipeline generally extends over long distances traversing through wide variety of different soils, geological conditions and regions with different seismicity. Majority of the past works in the area of pipeline subjected to fault motion is restricted in several ways. There were many analytical models developed in the past for pipeline fault crossing, however, they are of limited usage, for example analytical model developed for pipeline fault crossing can be useful for strike slip fault crossing only. Likewise incorporating the large geometric changes in analytical study is a tricky task; however pipeline subjected to the fault motion itself is a phenomenon of large geometric changes. Especially when pipeline subjected to compression, where in addition to material deformation it also undergoes general as well as local buckling with bending, contradictorily past work mostly assumed that pipeline is under tension. With day by day increasing capacity of computation and advancement in numerical modeling, one can find more facts for pipeline subjected fault motions including cases of pipe under compression as well. In this paper, past work is reviewed for pipeline subjected to large fault motion. A three dimensional FE based numerical model is suggested to carry out pipeline performance of buried pipeline subjected to fault motion. A proposed model includes material nonlinearity, as well as effect of the large geometric changes. For this purpose, three dimensional FE program is developed in MATLAB. Displacement controlled Arc-length technique is implemented to solve the nonlinear behavior. To reduce the computation time of analysis here parallelization tool kit of MATLAB is utilized.

Abstract

Schmitt triggers (ST) are well known and very widely used in the field of communications and signal processing techniques. It is robust, less sensitive to noise and is a building block in analog to digital converters. This work concentrates on all-optical Schmitt trigger for the purpose of using it in the field of optical modulation and signal processing. As the size of ring lasers is small these devices are best to use on a single integrated photonic chip. In this paper various dynamic effects of a binary Schmitt trigger is simulated and discussed. Control on various properties such as size of the ring, gain of SOA of a Schmitt trigger enables one to use it in developing all-optical devices.

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for antenna designers is to design an RFID tag antenna for use on a metallic object. In this paper we present a slotted slim RFID tag antenna for metallic applications. The proposed design contains two coplanar rectangular metallic patches which are electrically connected to ground plane through conducting vias. Inductive slots are introduced on coplanar patches which are used to match tag ICs. The tag antenna was fabricated and tested in an Anechonic Chamber for its read range. Results showed that the read range of the proposed antenna is 1.1 m in absence of metallic object and 1.7 m when antenna was mounted on a 180 cm × 120 cm metallic sheet.

Abstract

The shortage of experimental platforms needed for learning IT systems in a hands-on way is one reason for the lack of quality education in the area of IT. For most students who have access to a PC, their ability to experiment on that machine is limited by the risk of possible irrecoverable damage their experimentation may cause to the equipment. We report the development of a 'Virtual Laboratory for Systems and Software' that teaches the basics of Linux. The goal of this laboratory is to give the students a platform through which they can learn the essentials of linux. The student interacts with a virtual instance of a linux machine through the browser on his machine to learn basic tasks of linux system administration. The student's machine could be running any operating system (not necessarily linux). This obviates the need to have a linux machine on the part of the student. The lab consists of a suite of experiments designed as web applications which are based on IT Workshop courses at undergraduate level in universities.

Abstract

Distributed and concurrent development of virtual labs across multiple institutes and teams presents several challenges, both organizational and technical in nature. We present models for managing the process of virtual lab development, deployment and distribution. Close to twenty labs in computer science and chemical sciences are currently following our model. The architecture is designed to ultimately encourage and support a community ecosystem where teachers or students from any college could contribute to lab development, and a college could choose to subscribe to a set of virtual labs. Our deployment model, yet to be fully implemented, has as its back end a flexible virtualization architecture for running experiments and and a package based distribution model that encourages community participation in the use of virtual labs.

Abstract

We define the class of primal maps using the concepts of mapcode theory and show that a map is primal if and only if it is partial recursive.

Abstract

A set X together with a finite collection of self-maps on X is called a multiple discrete flow. We develop the theory of fair convergence for multiple flows and show how the UNITY programs of Chandy and Misra can be reformulated in terms of this theory.