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Kilkari is an outbound service that makes weekly, stage-based, prerecorded calls about reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health directly to families’ mobile phones, starting from the second trimester of pregnancy and until the child is 1 year old. Since its initiation in 2012–2013, Kilkari has scaled to 13 states across India. In this analysis article, we explored the subscriber’s journey from entry to programme to engagement with calls. Data sources included call data records and household survey data from the 2015 National Family Health Survey. In 2018, of the 13.6 million records received by MOTECH, the technology platform that powers Kilkari, 9.5 million (~70%) were rejected and 4.1 million new subscribers were created. Overall, 21% of pregnant women across 13 states were covered by the programme in 2018, with West Bengal and Himachal Pradesh reaching a coverage of over 50%. Among new subscriptions in 2018, 63% were subscribed during pregnancy and 37% after childbirth. Of these, over 80% were ever reached by Kilkari calls and 39% retained in the programme. The main causes for deactivation of subscribers from the system were low listenership and calls going unanswered for six continuous weeks. Globally, Kilkari is the largest maternal mobile messaging programme of its kind in terms of number of subscribers but the coverage among pregnant women remains low. While call reach appears to be on the higher side, subscriber retention is low; this highlights broader challenges with providing mobile health services at scale across India.

There has been exponential growth in the numbers of ‘digital development’ programmes seeking to leverage technology to solve systemic challenges. However, despite promising results and a shift from pilots to scale-ups, many have failed to realise their full potential. This paper reflects on lessons learnt from scaling and transitioning one of the largest mobile health programmes in the world to the Indian government. The complementary suite of services was designed by BBC Media Action to strengthen families’ reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health behaviours. Mobile Academy was a training course to refresh frontline health workers’ (FLHWs) knowledge and improve their interpersonal communication skills. Mobile Kunji was a job aid to support FLHWs’ interactions with families. Kilkari delivered weekly audio information to families’ phones to reinforce FLHWs’ counselling. As of April 2019, when Mobile Academy and Kilkari were transitioned to the government, 206 000 FLHWs had graduated and Kilkari had reached 10 million subscribers. Lessons learnt include the following: (1) private sector business models are challenging in low-resource settings; (2) you may pilot ‘apples’ but scale ‘oranges’; (3) trade-offs are required between ideal solution design and affordability; (4) programme components should be reassessed before scaling; (5) operational viability at scale is a prerequisite for sustainability; (6) consider the true cost of open-source software; (7) taking informed consent in low-resource settings is challenging; (8) big data offer promise, but social norms and SIM change constrain use; (9) successful government engagements require significant capacity; (10) define governance structures and roadmaps up front.

Evolution of technology has always been endeavored with making daily life simple. With a fast paced life everybody today is harnessing the benefits of technology except some parts of the society. One of them is the visually impaired who have to rely on others for travelling and other activities. This paper aims at providing one such theoretical model which incorporates the latest technologies to provide efficient and smart electronic aid to the blind. We have used IR sensors along with ultrasonic range finder circuit for hurdle detection. Bluetooth module which along with GPS technology and an Android application for blind, will provide voice assistance to desired location and in panic situations will send SMS alert to registered mobile numbers The basic objective of the system is to provide a convenient and easy navigation aid for unsighted which helps in artificial vision by providing information about the environmental scenario of static and dynamic objects around them.

Products other than biofuels are produced in biofuel plants. For example, corn ethanol plants produce distillers’ grains and solubles. Soybean crushing plants produce soy meal and soy oil, which is used for biodiesel production. Electricity is generated in sugarcane ethanol plants both for internal consumption and export to the electric grid. Future cellulosic ethanol plants could be designed to co-produce electricity with ethanol. It is important to take co-products into account in the life-cycle analysis of biofuels and several methods are available to do so. Although the International Standard Organization’s ISO 14040 advocates the system boundary expansion method (also known as the “displacement method” or the “substitution method”) for life-cycle analyses, application of the method has been limited because of the difficulty in identifying and quantifying potential products to be displaced by biofuel co-products. As a result, some LCA studies and policy-making processes have considered alternative methods. In this paper, we examine the available methods to deal with biofuel co-products, explore the strengths and weaknesses of each method, and present biofuel LCA results with different co-product methods within the U.S. context.

This paper presents projections of motor vehicles, oil demand, and carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) emissions for India through the year 2040. The populations of highway vehicles and two-wheelers are projected under three different scenarios on the basis of economic growth and average household size in India. The results show that by 2040, the number of highway vehicles in India would be 206-309 million. The oil demand projections for the Indian transportation sector are based on a set of nine scenarios arising out of three vehicle-growth and three fuel-economy scenarios. The combined effects of vehicle-growth and fuel-economy scenarios, together with the change in annual vehicle usage, result in a projected demand in 2040 by the transportation sector in India of 404-719 million metric tons (8.5-15.1 million barrels per day). The corresponding annual CO{sub 2} emissions are projected to be 1.2-2.2 billion metric tons.

Displacement of conventional animal feed components – corn, soybean meal and urea – by distillers’ co-products has been revisited. We developed the distillers’ co-products displacement ratios at different levels: the feedlot level, the US market level and the composite US and export market level, in order to provide a relevant estimate for ethanol plant operators, stakeholders and decision makers. As expected, corn is still the single largest component in the conventional beef cattle diet to be displaced by distillers’ co-products, followed by soybean meal. On average, 1 kg of wet distillers’ grains could displace 1.313 kg of corn and urea together, when it is used as a substitute in the diet of beef cattle; for distillers’ dried grain with solubles, 1.271 kg of corn and urea can be displaced per kg of distillers’ dried grain with solubles fed to beef cattle. Uncertainties about the consistency of reported data, export market and emerging new co-products are discussed. In addition, the use of distillers’ ...

Natural fibers are emerging as low cost, lightweight and apparently environmentally superior alternatives to glass fibers in composites. We review select comparative life cycle assessment studies of natural fiber and glass fiber composites, and identify key drivers of their relative environmental performance. Natural fiber composites are likely to be environmentally superior to glass fiber composites in most cases for the following reasons: (1) natural fiber production has lower environmental impacts compared to glass fiber production; (2) natural fiber composites have higher fiber content for equivalent performance, reducing more polluting base polymer content; (3) the light-weight natural fiber composites improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions in the use phase of the component, especially in auto applications; and (4) end of life incineration of natural fibers results in recovered energy and carbon credits.

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel algorithm for retrieval of information from noisy intercepted traffic. The design considerations for HF protocol along with its simulation are elaborated. The main contribution of our research work is proposal for novel method for recovery information from a partially decoded noisy bit stream for HF protocols. Statistical properties of language such as unigram, bigram, trigram frequency have been exploited for design of cost function. Also, histogram analysis along with mean and variance statistics of language are extracted and used for design of another cost function. In our proposed analysis algorithm these cost functions are used for automatic analysis of recorded baseband protocols. The algorithm for automatic estimation of non-standard parameters such as baud rate, data format is proposed. The results and analysis of proposed algorithms are discussed for simulated HF protocol recordings.

The primary objective of this project was to develop a hydrogen production technology for gasification applications based on a circulating fluid-bed reactor and an attrition resistant iron catalyst. The work towards achieving this objective consisted of three key activities: • Development of an iron-based catalyst suitable for a circulating fluid-bed reactor • Design, construction, and operation of a bench-scale circulating fluid-bed reactor system for hydrogen production • Techno-economic analysis of the steam-iron and the pressure swing adsorption hydrogen production processes. This report describes the work completed in each of these activities during this project. The catalyst development and testing program prepared and iron-based catalysts using different support and promoters to identify catalysts that had sufficient activity for cyclic reduction with syngas and steam oxidation and attrition resistance to enable use in a circulating fluid-bed reactor system. The best performing catalyst from this catalyst development program was produced by a commercial catalyst toll manufacturer to support the bench-scale testing activities. The reactor testing systems used during material development evaluated catalysts in a single fluid-bed reactor by cycling between reduction with syngas and oxidation with steam. The prototype SIP reactor system (PSRS) consisted of two circulating fluid-bed reactors with the iron catalystmore » being transferred between the two reactors. This design enabled demonstration of the technical feasibility of the combination of the circulating fluid-bed reactor system and the iron-based catalyst for commercial hydrogen production. The specific activities associated with this bench-scale circulating fluid-bed reactor systems that were completed in this project included design, construction, commissioning, and operation. The experimental portion of this project focused on technical demonstration of the performance of an iron-based catalyst and a circulating fluid-bed reactor system for hydrogen production. Although a technology can be technically feasible, successful commercial deployment also requires that a technology offer an economic advantage over existing commercial technologies. To effective estimate the economics of this steam-iron process, a techno-economic analysis of this steam iron process and a commercial pressure swing adsorption process were completed. The results from this analysis described in this report show the economic potential of the steam iron process for integration with a gasification plant for coproduction of hydrogen and electricity.« less

We assessed current water consumption during liquid fuel production, evaluating major steps of fuel lifecycle for five fuel pathways: bioethanol from corn, bioethanol from cellulosic feedstocks, gasoline from U.S. conventional crude obtained from onshore wells, gasoline from Saudi Arabian crude, and gasoline from Canadian oil sands. Our analysis revealed that the amount of irrigation water used to grow biofuel feedstocks varies significantly from one region to another and that water consumption for biofuel production varies with processing technology. In oil exploration and production, water consumption depends on the source and location of crude, the recovery technology, and the amount of produced water re-injected for oil recovery. Our results also indicate that crop irrigation is the most important factor determining water consumption in the production of corn ethanol. Nearly 70% of U.S. corn used for ethanol is produced in regions where 10-17 liters of water are consumed to produce one liter of ethanol. Ethanol production plants are less water intensive and there is a downward trend in water consumption. Water requirements for switchgrass ethanol production vary from 1.9 to 9.8 liters for each liter of ethanol produced. We found that water is consumed at a rate of 2.8-6.6 liters for each liter of gasoline produced for more than 90% of crude oil obtained from conventional onshore sources in the U.S. and more than half of crude oil imported from Saudi Arabia. For more than 55% of crude oil from Canadian oil sands, about 5.2 liters of water are consumed for each liter of gasoline produced. Our analysis highlighted the vital importance of water management during the feedstock production and conversion stage of the fuel lifecycle.

The production of energy feedstocks and fuels requires substantial water input. Not only do biofuel feedstocks like corn, switchgrass, and agricultural residues need water for growth and conversion to ethanol, but petroleum feedstocks like crude oil and oil sands also require large volumes of water for drilling, extraction, and conversion into petroleum products. Moreover, in many cases, crude oil production is increasingly water dependent. Competing uses strain available water resources and raise the specter of resource depletion and environmental degradation. Water management has become a key feature of existing projects and a potential issue in new ones. This report examines the growing issue of water use in energy production by characterizing current consumptive water use in liquid fuel production. As used throughout this report, 'consumptive water use' is the sum total of water input less water output that is recycled and reused for the process. The estimate applies to surface and groundwater sources for irrigation but does not include precipitation. Water requirements are evaluated for five fuel pathways: bioethanol from corn, ethanol from cellulosic feedstocks, gasoline from Canadian oil sands, Saudi Arabian crude, and U.S. conventional crude from onshore wells. Regional variations and historic trends are noted, as are opportunitiesmore » to reduce water use.« less