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Composites of carbonaceous materials and the spinel metal oxides have been profoundly analyzed due to their recognized properties, including high capacity, better stability, and good cycle life. The facile synthesis of the binary composite of NiCo2O4-rGO has been done by dextrose-assisted combustion method at temperatures ranging from 300 to 500 °C in a furnace. X-ray diffraction technique has been employed to analyze properties like the crystalline nature and the cubic lattice structure of the samples. The reduction in the restacking of graphene sheets and the agglomeration of NiCo2O4 particles in the composite has been confirmed by Fourier Electron Scanning Electron Microscopy. The Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy analysis has been done to confirm the presence of all elements and to find the elemental wt% in the composite. The strengthening of bonds between the elements present in the composite compared to their counterparts is evident from the Fourier Transform Spectroscopy. The Thermogravimetric Analysis confirms the stability of the synthesized composite to withstand higher temperatures. The electrochemical study unveils the specific capacity equal to 400 F g−1 at a 10-mV s−1 scan rate of the synthesized composite. Further, the composite material shows a promising charge–discharge rate and a lower equivalent resistance value affirming that the synthesized composite exhibits good electrochemical activities and can be utilized in energy-storing devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased public awareness about the environmental and social impact of the businesses has led to the integration of sustainability into the core business activities. The banking sector, being one of the major drivers of the economy, is also focusing on social and environmental performance along with generating financial returns. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the sustainability performance of Indian banks using grey relational analysis (GRA). This study uses three criteria to evaluate the bank’s sustainability performance, which include economic, environmental, and social. Grey relational grades are obtained for ranking the banks according to their sustainability performance. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that this study is the first attempt to evaluate the sustainability performance of Indian banks using the GRA methodology. This study has practical implications for the Indian banking industry, which could encourage managers to formulate policies and strategies for adopting environmental and social parameters in their operations to improve their overall performance. The study results could also influence investors to invest in banks seeking sustainability in their operations as the country progresses towards sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socially Responsible Indices allow investors to invest in those companies which are deemed to be socially responsible. These indices comprise those constituent companies screened and assessed for environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. This paper analyses the weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) for socially responsible investment indices in India. The authors used the daily closing price of two indices, Carbonex and Greenex, from June 3, 2013, to December 31, 2022. This study conducted Augmented Dickey Fuller, normality, and autocorrelation tests to analyse the randomness of prices and test whether the future price can be predicted using the past price. The weak form theory of the efficient market hypothesis is violated if the returns are not random and dependent on past returns, thereby enabling investors to gain abnormal returns by extrapolating the past data. The research results suggest that the theory of weak form of efficient market hypothesis is valid for Carbonex and Greenex, which are the socially responsible indices of India. It implies that the future movement of returns for socially responsible investment indices in India cannot be predicted from past prices. Therefore, the opportunity to gain abnormal returns is not possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research work incorporates the synthesis of pure polyaniline and ternary nanocomposite by in situ chemical oxidation polymerization. XRD study proclaims the formation of NiCo2O4/rGO/PANI with both broader polyaniline and sharp NiCo2O4/rGO peaks. Infrared spectroscopy of NiCo2O4/rGO/PANI shows the presence of all vibrational bands that are present in pure polyaniline with some additional bands of spinel metal oxide. The particle size from the FESEM micrograph using ImageJ software affirms the formation of a synthesized composite in the nanometer range. The electrochemical testing (CV, GCD, and EIS) of the NiCo2O4/rGO/PANI nanocomposite affirms that the ternary composite exhibits higher electrochemical activities than pure polyaniline owing to the frequent movement of electrons at the interface of electrode–electrolyte, greater porosity, and multiple redox reactions. Higher doping of NiCo2O4/rGO (≥ 10%) in PANI also degrades the properties of pure PANI rather than increasing it due to the high agglomeration of rGO molecules with the PANI matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is widely used for producing high quality imaging of Earth surface due to its capability of image acquisition in all-weather conditions. However, one limitation of SAR image is that image textures and fine details are usually contaminated with multiplicative granular noise named as speckle noise. This paper presents a speckle reduction technique for SAR images based on statistical modelling of detail band shearlet coefficients (SC) in homomorphic environment. Modelling of SC corresponding to noiseless SAR image are carried out as Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution while speckle noise SC are modelled as Gaussian distribution. These SC are segmented as heterogeneous, strongly heterogeneous and homogeneous regions depending upon the local statistics of images. Then maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation is employed over SC that belong to homogenous and heterogenous region category. The performance of proposed method is compared with seven other methods based on objective and subjective quality measures. PSNR and SSIM metrics are used for objective assessment of synthetic images and ENL metric is used for real SAR images. Subjective assessment is carried out by visualizing denoised images obtained from various methods. The comparative result analysis shows that for the proposed method, higher values of PSNR i.e. 26.08 dB, 25.39 dB and 23.82 dB and SSIM i.e. 0.81, 0.69 and 0.61 are obtained for Barbara image at noise variances 0.04, 0.1 and 0.15, respectively as compared to other methods. For other images also results obtained for proposed method are at higher side. Also, ENL for real SAR images show highest average value of 125.91 79.05. Hence, the proposed method signifies its potential in comparison to other seven existing image denoising methods in terms of speckle denoising and edge preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nickel-rich layered oxides, such as LiNi0.8Mn0.1Co0.1O2 (NMC 811), are considered as one of the most promising candidates for the next-generation cathode because of their high energy densities and relatively low cost. However, the poor first Coulombic efficiency of NMC 811 leads to around a 15% capacity loss in the first cycle at a cut-off voltage of 4.4 V. Moreover, the structure degradation during cycling results in capacity fading and safety concerns, due to potential oxygen loss after charging. Here, with aluminum substitution for manganese through a developed continuous co-precipitation approach, the electrochemical performance of NMC 811 cathodes has been greatly enhanced. Among different Al% substituted samples, LiNi0.8Mn0.06Co0.1Al0.04O2 cathodes reduced by 50% the first capacity loss of pristine NMC 811(18.0 vs 35.9 mAh g-1) and improved the capacity retention from 81.4 to 96.4% after 60 cycles at 0.5C in the voltage range of 2.8-4.4 V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]