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Management of excess water from the pavements and road surfaces, due to rainfall, is not only important for the safety of the traffic but also important for the long life of the road structures. Drainage inlets improperly designed or constructed may lead to an unsafe depth of stormwater on the road surfaces leading to hydroplaning, which may cause the skidding of the vehicles and an increased number of road accidents. As such, the hydraulic behaviour of the most common road drainage inlets was investigated using lab-scale models and the findings are reported in this paper. A rainfall-runoff simulator was used to produce rain of various intensities on the lab-scale roadside drainage system. The main intention was to study the effect of rainfall on the commonly used circular, rectangular, and grated inlets. Rainfall intensity, inflow, water depth on the model road surface, and outflow rates through the inlets were monitored. Experimental results indicated that open rectangular inlets are the best compared to circular and grated inlets, with regards to quickly releasing water from the road surface to the roadside drains. Based on the lab-scale model study, the grated and circular inlets held 64 % and 28% more runoff depth (respectively) on the road surface, compared to that the rectangular inlet. For the same rainfall intensity, a rectangular roadside inlet was found to cause less stagnant water on the road surface.

Communication is the foremost and basic necessity of a person. The ability to speak without any problem is a boon; nevertheless, woefully we have often seen people around us who are the victim of speech or hearing impairments. Thus, the ‘Sign Language’ (SL) appears as an alternate standard language that is globally understood and adopted by the deaf community. Though SL is a communication tool, but in practice, we still see most of the normal people do not understand the SL properly; thus, it is again a problem in communication between a speech/hearing impaired and normal persons. In this regard, many research attempts have been made to resolve this problem via wearable technology and other different paradigms of computational solutions. However, almost all of them focused on English or western languages, which provide a trivial resolution for the people of the Indian subcontinent. Thus, in this paper, we propose a solution to address this issue by employing Kinect Motion Sensor for detecting the signs (in SL) through hand movements and gestures and translating them in Urdu/Hindi language, which is readable and audible to normal persons. The proposed system is developed on a feature-based model; hence, we stored signs in a dictionary/training set for the development of the baseline system; however, the users can customize the system by adding their sign patterns in the future.

Indentation cracking behaviour and hardness of (100), (110) and (111) surfaces of single crystals of MgO have been studied using a Vickers diamond pyramidal indenter and a 0.4 mm diameter tungsten carbide spherical indenter. Also, the plastically deformed zone around the indentations has been investigated with the technique of cathodoluminescence. It is shown that the crystal orientation has a very marked influence on the indentation cracking patterns. In the case of the Vickers indentations on (100) and (110) surfaces, radial cracks, four and two in number respectively, form for indenter loads as low as 50 gf. On the other hand, no such cracking is observed when indentations are made on a (111) surface even for indenter loads of up to 0.5 kgf. These differences have been explained in terms of the material flow and dislocation interactions on the various slip systems. The hardness is also found to be dependent upon both the indenter geometry and the indenter crystallographic plane. The Vickers hardness of all three crystal planes decreases with increasing indenter load in the load range of 0.025 to 1 kgf, whereas the Meyer's hardness (for the spherical indenter) increases with increasing load in the range of 0.5 to 13 kgf for the (111) and (110) surfaces, but shows a monotonic decrease with increasing load for the (100) surface. It has been suggested that this is related to the indentation cracking. The cathodoluminescence studies in the scanning electron microscope have been shown to be very successful in revealing the distribution of dislocations around the indentations. This information has been valuable in the interpretation of the cracking patterns. Finally it is concluded that the cathodoluminescence technique is a sensitive and non-destructive one for detecting contact-induced plasticity and cracking of ceramics.