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To assess the clinical safety of diphtheria antitoxin in patients with probable and confirmed diphtheria infection. This was a single-center, observational study which included patients with probable and/or confirmed diphtheria infection. The skin sensitivity test for diphtheria antitoxin was performed in all the patients. The patients who were insensitive/ had ‘no reaction’ to the skin sensitivity test, medically optimal dose of the DAT (10000 IU/10 mL) was administered intravenously. A total of 203 patients were enrolled in this study, and 200 considered for safety assessments (females, n=104). All patients reported negative skin-sensitivity test. A total of 14 adverse events were reported in six patients (two patients reported three events each while remaining four patients reported two events each) either immediately (75%) or within 5-6 hours (12.5%) of administration of diphtheria antitoxin and therefore, these were considered related to the administration of the drug. These 14 adverse events were non-severe and the patients recovered without sequelae. No further adverse events were observed during the rest of the hospitalization period (4-5 days), after discharge from hospital and during follow-up until 15 days after administration of diphtheria antitoxin. There were no deaths and life-threatening serious adverse events observed. The observations from the present study suggest that diphtheria antitoxin has a favorable safety profile and it can be essentially used in children as well as adults without any harm.

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is the approach of detecting emotions of humans from facial expressions. Emotions are detected automatically by the human brain and hence, many computer aided techn...

Herbal industries are facing challenges while processing the herbal leaves. Herbal leaves are processed using various methods such as convection drying, chemical drying, vacuum drying, microwave drying, etc. The common issues encountered during the time of drying the herbal leaves are lost in phytochemicals, nutrients and colour. Heat pump drying is an important method by which the drying can be made without influencing of environmental condition and by controlling the drying properties without loss in phytochemicals, nutrients and colour. In this proposed work the experimental device, namely closed-loop heat pump dryer is designed and developed for conducting experiments. For this study, Moringa leaves were considered as herbal leaves. The vacuum is introduced in the heat pump dryer and the Moisture Removal Rate (MRR) is calculated under this condition. The experiments were conducted with vacuum pressures of 0.9 & 0.8 bar and the air velocities of 1.1 m/s & 1.4 m/s respectively. In this study, the experiments were conducted under the above-said conditions for several periods with temperature transients. Based on the experimental study it is observed that the moisture removal rate is increased significantly under low pressure with high temperature and velocity.

Micro electrical discharge machining (EDM) can be used to fabricate micro rods and these rods are widely employed for drilling of single, multiple as well as arrays of micro holes. Various application in real life where can be commonly used such as perforated shadow mask, semiconductor device, and micro heat exchanger, etc. In the present investigation, grey relational analysis (GRA) has been proposed to optimize the multi-response performance characteristics (i.e., machining time and tool wear rate) of the process. GRA and Taguchi methodology are applied to optimize fabrication process of micro rods to obtain the better dimensional accuracy with minimum tool wear and machining time using reverse micro EDM (R-µEDM) process, a variant of Micro EDM process. In Micro EDM, tool wear and machining time are directly influence the dimensional accuracy of the micro rods. The dimensional accuracy can be improved by reducing the tool wear and machining time during the fabrication process. The experimental investigation considers voltage, capacitance, and feed rate as input parameters. GRA optimization result shows that voltage of 80 V; feed rate of 10 µm/sec; and capacitance of 1000 pF are found as the optimum process parameters. The voltage contributes 58.28% being highly influenced, followed by capacitance (17.63%) and feed rate (10.63%). Voltage and capacitance having the statistical significance of 95% confidence level on overall performance towards the response parameters for getting the better dimensional accuracy with minimum time duration.

A two-axis gimbaled stabilization system in air vehicles must stabilize the line of sight of the payload toward a target against the external motion induced by air vehicle maneuvering and aerodynamic forces. The target tracking and pointing performances of the air vehicles are largely affected by air vehicle motion decoupling capability. In this work, the [Formula: see text] controller design is carried out for a two-axis gimbal system. The plant model is generated using experimental frequency response data and mathematical formulation of the system. The mixed sensitivity problem is posed and weighting functions are selected so that they not only fulfill all the design goals but also accommodate the modeling uncertainties. The stabilization loop is designed and implemented in digital signal processor-based hardware for only one axis (in azimuth).

We study the geometry of probability distributions with respect to a generalized family of Csiszar f-divergences. A member of this family is the relative $$\alpha $$-entropy which is also a Renyi analog of relative entropy in information theory and known as logarithmic or projective power divergence in statistics. We apply Eguchi’s theory to derive the Fisher information metric and the dual affine connections arising from these generalized divergence functions. This enables us to arrive at a more widely applicable version of the Cramer–Rao inequality, which provides a lower bound for the variance of an estimator for an escort of the underlying parametric probability distribution. We then extend the Amari–Nagaoka’s dually flat structure of the exponential and mixer models to other distributions with respect to the aforementioned generalized metric. We show that these formulations lead us to find unbiased and efficient estimators for the escort model. Finally, we compare our work with prior results on generalized Cramer–Rao inequalities that were derived from non-information-geometric frameworks.

The demand for eco-friendly, low-cost, renewable, and high-strength structural components is now growing day to day. In the present work, SiC, CNTs and glass waste are used as additives in a hybrid pattern with Al2O3. The spark plasma sintering (SPS) is used to fabricate hybrid composites with varying five different weight fractions. Thermal properties (i.e., thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity, and specific heat capacity) were investigated at both elevated and room temperatures. From the results, the maximum thermal conductivity is achieved as 40 W/mK at the initial weight fraction after SPS at a temperature of 1400 °C. The addition of 4% ceramic composites obtained maximum thermal conductivity (33.93 W/mK) at 1500 °C temperature. With the addition of reinforcement particles, the thermal properties of alumina oxide decreased. At elevated temperatures, thermal conductivity is high with the addition of glass, silicon carbide (SiC) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) particles. It decreases with increasing measurement temperature and weight fraction of reinforcement particles. The specific heat capacity increased with increasing temperature at all compositions. The effect of weight fraction on thermal properties was clearly observed with the microstructure.

This paper mainly gives information about a compact 4-element multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna which is useful for IOT applications. Advantages of the proposed antenna is that it can be easily extendable for a large size array. The array consists of 4 elements placed at an angle of 90 degree to the adjacent element. The substrate used in the design is a low loss laminate of FR4 with dielectric constant of 4.4. Based on the results obtained the antenna covers a UWB band of 2.4 GHz–13.0 GHz and the isolations also exceed 20 dB. Return loss, radiation pattern and isolation is plotted. The simulation results show that the proposed antenna can perform well for MIMO devices. The proposed antenna is much suitable for the applications of IOT and RADAR.

This paper summarizes the experimental investigations for augmented dry sliding property of AA 6063/TiC composite. An in situ metal matrix composite has been prepared with AA 6063 alloy for the matrix and TiC for reinforcement particulates. The fabrication of the composites is done by using potassium titanium fluoride (K2TiF6) and powder of graphite as a mixture for reaction along with molten aluminum alloy at 950 °C. The weight fraction of TiC particulates has been varied in the composites C0, C1, C2, and C3 as 0, 3, 6, and 9%, respectively. Various characterization techniques and tests were conducted to observe the morphological properties of the composites. The composites were categorized into three sets. The first set of the composites is as-cast condition. The composites were heat-treated to form two more sets, namely solutionized and solutionized-aged condition sets. The “pin-on-disk” apparatus is used for conducting the tests, wear analysis, and comparative analysis of the wear for the dry sliding condition. The study indicated a significant enhancement of the resistance to wear by composites with the higher fractions of titanium carbide (TiC) particulates and further enhancement with the heat treatment.