Global Trends of Research Productivity in Natural Fibre Reinforced Composites: Comprehensive Scientometric Analysis

The research on natural-fiber-reinforced composites (NFRC) has been evolving rapidly with many academic publications in recent decades for their potential applications in automotive, textiles, furniture, healthcare, biofuel sectors, and so on. Hence, an attempt is made to provide an overview of NFRC literature by employing novel scientometric and network analysis tools to examine 1143 articles extracted from Scopus database between 2010 and 2022. The novelty in the manuscript that is scientometric and network analysis of different disciplines and, tracking the latest developments would pull of great interest for plenty of much researcher and scholar because today’s some scientific output just focuses on interest, effort, and attention of policy-makers. Results obtained through this work describe the real impact of the research published till date and its usage; it also gives directions for new researchers who wish to perform research on NFRC

Permeability properties of lightweight self-consolidating concrete made with coconut shell aggregate

Liquid substance intrusion into concrete is one of the issues that gradually damage its phys- ical and structural integrity. The permeability properties of lightweight self-consolidating concrete containing coconut shell aggregate was investigated in this study. A partial replace- ment of crushed rock (granite) with coconut shell from 0 to 100% in step of 25% was considered for the mixtures. Rice husk ash (RHA) and Silica fume (SF) were considered for developing binary and ternary blended self-consolidating concrete with total powder content of 450 kg/m3 and 550 kg/m3. The testing of concrete involved the saturated water absorption, sorptivity and chloride ingress, which were used to examine the permeability properties of the concrete developed. The laboratory investigations showed encouraging results with better performance up to 75% replacement of crushed granite with coconut shell aggregate

Impact Resistance and Strength Development of Fly Ash Based Self-compacting Concrete

The development of self-compacting concrete using alternative materials is expanding in recent years due to the technical and economic benefits of the mixture. This study focuses on the structural and compositional behavior of sodium hydroxide (NaOH)-activated fly ash based self-compacting concrete (SCC). Fly ash was partially replaced with Ordinary Portland Cement from 0–30%. The tests performed on concrete samples include workability, strength, microstructural, and impact resistance. The results showed that activated fly ash reduces the heat of the hydration process of the concrete mixture but enhances pozzolanic reactions, which led to increased strength properties. The addition of activated fly ash modifies the mineralogy of the concrete, as evident in strength characteristics. The best performance of the activated fly ash based SCC, in terms of strength, was found at 10–15% substitutions, which can somewhat reduce the cost of production of SCC and strength improvement advantage

Sulphate resistance of lightweight aggregate concrete comprising sieved palm oil fuel ash as fine aggregate replacement

Oil palm shell (OPS) and palm oil fuel ash (POFA) disposal from palm oil industry causes environmental pollution. The present research investigates the compressive strength and sulphate resistance of oil palm shell lightweight aggregate concrete containing palm oil fuel ash as partial fine aggregate replacement. Sieved POFA was used as partial fine aggregate replacement from 0% up to 20% by weight of sand. Water cured specimens were tested to determine compressive strength and durability towards sulphate attack. Use of 10% POFA slightly enhances concrete strength and durability against sulphate attack via pozzolanic reaction from the fraction of fine ash present

Development and assessment of cement and concrete made of the burning of quinary by-product

The aim of this study is to evaluate the usability of new cement (NC) made by the burning of quinary by-product to make commercial binders. Chemical analysis of the by-products and NC as well as X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis of NC, fineness, density, consistency, and setting time of NC paste, and slump in addition to compressive strength (CS) and splitting tensile strength (STS) of NC concrete (NCC) were conducted. The results suggested that chemical composition of by-products is suitable to make NC binder. The NC contains Ca3SiO5, Ca2SiO5, Ca3Al2O6, and Ca3Al2FeO10. The particles passing through the 200 um Sieve were 56% compared with 52% for Portland cement (PC). The density of the of NC was similar to that of PC. The NC needed 48% more water than PC for normal consistency. The initial and final setting-time of NC was 105 min and 225 min respectively which is much higher than that of PC (15 and 45 min). The slump, compressive strength and splitting tensile strength were slightly lower for concrete containing NC compared with that pf PC concrete. Although the CS and STS of NCC are the lowest, the rate of the CS and STS gain of NCC is greater than that of PCC. It was concluded that NC is a viable alternative to PC for the production of greener concrete

COVLIAS 3.0: cloud-based quantized hybrid UNet3+ deep learning for COVID-19 lesion detection in lung computed tomography

Background and noveltyWhen RT-PCR is ineffective in early diagnosis and understanding of COVID-19 severity, Computed Tomography (CT) scans are needed for COVID diagnosis, especially in patients having high ground-glass opacities, consolidations, and crazy paving. Radiologists find the manual method for lesion detection in CT very challenging and tedious. Previously solo deep learning (SDL) was tried but they had low to moderate-level performance. This study presents two new cloud-based quantized deep learning UNet3+ hybrid (HDL) models, which incorporated full-scale skip connections to enhance and improve the detections.MethodologyAnnotations from expert radiologists were used to train one SDL (UNet3+), and two HDL models, namely, VGG-UNet3+ and ResNet-UNet3+. For accuracy, 5-fold cross-validation protocols, training on 3,500 CT scans, and testing on unseen 500 CT scans were adopted in the cloud framework. Two kinds of loss functions were used: Dice Similarity (DS) and binary cross-entropy (BCE). Performance was evaluated using (i) Area error, (ii) DS, (iii) Jaccard Index, (iii) Bland–Altman, and (iv) Correlation plots.ResultsAmong the two HDL models, ResNet-UNet3+ was superior to UNet3+ by 17 and 10% for Dice and BCE loss. The models were further compressed using quantization showing a percentage size reduction of 66.76, 36.64, and 46.23%, respectively, for UNet3+, VGG-UNet3+, and ResNet-UNet3+. Its stability and reliability were proved by statistical tests such as the Mann–Whitney, Paired t-Test, Wilcoxon test, and Friedman test all of which had a p < 0.001.ConclusionFull-scale skip connections of UNet3+ with VGG and ResNet in HDL framework proved the hypothesis showing powerful results improving the detection accuracy of COVID-19

STUDY ON NEED FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS – A CASE STUDY OF COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING- GUINDY, CHENNAI

Sustainability has become the key word of developing world and it’s evident in many issues, the growing economy is facing nowadays. Sustainability is the need of the hour for Indian economy to support our future generation with a cleaner, safer environment. Legal framework implemented by governing bodies such as Pollution control board is also supporting the implementation of sustainable development by new enforcements introduced then and there, but it is questionable about the effectiveness of this frameworks. Most of the enforcements are focusing to imply the sustainability in industries or equivalent organizations but not putting thrust on all polluting bodies, educational institutions are one among them. Recent growth in educational scenario in India had increased the number of educational institutions to a large extent, also increased the effect on environment by their activities. Growth of educational sector and the number of institutions catering various fields of education is needed for India but the growth should be optimized in a way such that it’s sustainable and eco friendly. Various methods are developed recently to find out the exact problems associated with the environment, Geograpchial Information System (GIS) is one among them taking a big leap in the recent years in the area of environmental problem identification. This paper provides the details of the environmental impacts of educational institutions with case studies and also suggests a sustainable framework to make them environmental friendly by the use of (GIS)

STUDY ON NEED FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, AN ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE - A CASE STUDY OF COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING - GUINDY, CHENNAI

Sustainability has become the key word of developing world and it¿s evident in many issues, the growing economy is facing nowadays. Sustainability is the need of the hour for Indian economy to support our future generation with a cleaner, safer environment. Legal framework implemented by governing bodies such as Pollution control board is also supporting the implementation of sustainable development by new enforcements introduced then and there, but it is questionable about the effectiveness of this frameworks. Most of the enforcements are focusing to imply the sustainability in industries or equivalent organizations but not putting thrust on all polluting bodies, educational institutions are one among them. Recent growth in educational scenario in India had increased the number of educational institutions to a large extent, also increased the effect on environment by their activities. Growth of educational sector and the number of institutions catering various fields of education is needed for India but the growth should be optimized in a way such that it¿s sustainable and eco friendly. Various methods are developed recently to find out the exact problems associated with the environment, Geograpchial Information System (GIS) is one among them taking a big leap in the recent years in the area of environmental problem identification. This paper provides the details of the environmental impacts of educational institutions with case studies and also suggests a sustainable framework to make them environmental friendly by the use of (GIS)