Production of Butanol (C4H9OH) from Barley Straw

The energy requirements of the world has accelerated search for new fuels or new sources of fuel. Ethanol or butanol production from lignocellulosic biomass is one example of this. As lignin constrains the access of cellulose or hemicellulose to enzymes for their hydrolysis, it is necessary to remove the lignin. Various pretreatment methods are used before going for the hydrolysis of cellulose present in biomass followed by hydrolysis. In this work, barley straw is chosen as the lignocellulosic biomass and production of butanol has been carried out using steam explosion and acid hydrolysis followed by fermentation. The maximum amount of sugar (37.51 mg/ml of hydrozylate solution) was produced after the hydrolysis by HNO3 with 0.5 mol/ltr concentration. The maximum amount of butanol (3.046mg/ml) was also found by hydrolyzing with 0.5 mol/ltr of HNO3 after the fermentation of hydrozylat

Distributed Deblurring of Large Images of Wide Field-Of-View

Image deblurring is an economic way to reduce certain degradations (blur and noise) in acquired images. Thus, it has become essential tool in high resolution imaging in many applications, e.g., astronomy, microscopy or computational photography. In applications such as astronomy and satellite imaging, the size of acquired images can be extremely large (up to gigapixels) covering wide field-of-view suffering from shift-variant blur. Most of the existing image deblurring techniques are designed and implemented to work efficiently on centralized computing system having multiple processors and a shared memory. Thus, the largest image that can be handle is limited by the size of the physical memory available on the system. In this paper, we propose a distributed nonblind image deblurring algorithm in which several connected processing nodes (with reasonable computational resources) process simultaneously different portions of a large image while maintaining certain coherency among them to finally obtain a single crisp image. Unlike the existing centralized techniques, image deblurring in distributed fashion raises several issues. To tackle these issues, we consider certain approximations that trade-offs between the quality of deblurred image and the computational resources required to achieve it. The experimental results show that our algorithm produces the similar quality of images as the existing centralized techniques while allowing distribution, and thus being cost effective for extremely large images.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. on Image Processin

Estimation of RNA/DNA ratio in two north-Indian natural populations of mahseer (Tor tor) and its relationship with growth and hydrobiology

Samples of Tor tor were collected from Bari Reservoir of Udaipur and Narmada River at Hoshangabad (India), in the months of July and November 2005, respectively. Twenty-five samples were collected from each location. Bari Reservoir samples ranged from 17.0 to 24.5 cm in total length and from 75 to 155 g in weight, while Narmada samples ranged from 20.0 to 42.0 cm in length and 90 to 425 g in weight. The nucleic acid content in body muscle of Tor tor and the RNA/DNA ratio were estimated. The age of fishes was estimated by the scale study method and specimens were classified into four age groups. RNA/DNA ratio showed significant linear increase with increase in weight and age till the age of three years after which, the growth rate reduced. The 1-2 year group was the only one common between the two water bodies and a comparison of RNA/DNA ratios showed higher growth rate in Bari Reservoir. The gross primary productivity was also higher in Bari Reservoir being 551 mg cmˉ³ dˉ¹ compared to 404 mg cmˉ³ dˉ¹ observed for Narmada River. The condition factor (K) was found to be higher (1.21) in the fish from the Bari Reservoir compared to those of Narmada River (1.14). The growth rate was higher in females compared to males in >100 g specimens

Analysis of rainfall data for storage and irrigation planning in humid south-eastern plain of Rajasthan in India

A study was carried out to analyze the rainfall data for storage and irrigation planning under humid south-eastern region of Rajasthan using a time series record for 32-year (1980-2011) periods. It was observed that most of the years under observation were having adequate rainfall for all round the year crop production provided the water were collected during the rainy season. The area received 921.5 mm annual rainfall out of which 92% occurred during southwest monsoon (June-September) season. Of the total study period of 32 years, 19% were drought years, 66% were normal years and the remaining 15% were the abnormal years. The annual rainfall during the period showed negative trend (-6.955 mm/year). It showed decreasing trend (-7.782 mm/year) during the month of August and positive trends with 0.864, 3.909 and 1.192 mm/year, respectively, during month of June, July and September. The analysis generally showed that water deficit appeared during the period of November up till May and rain water was excess during the period of June up till September. During these months, rain water can be stored with the help of rainfall harvesting system. If only 50% of total rain water is collected, it forms approximately 44.16 lacs litres of water on a unit hectare basis of land. This rainfall water will be adequate for all rounds the year crop production with conservation of rain water and judicious use of rain water resources