Conceptual Design, and Fluid-Structural Interaction Based Investigations on Highly Maneuverable Unmanned Amphibious Vehicle for Ravage Removal Applications at Various Oceanic Working Environments

Nowadays Unmanned Amphibious Vehicles [UAVs] are employed in many applications such as oceanic research, deep sea exploration, mapping, naval surveillance, and disaster monitoring and fisheries protection. The use of UAVs in military and other applications has steadily increased over the few years. On the other hand, there has been a tremendous increase in ocean exploitation. Though technologies are increasing incrementally, nature is exploited adversely. Advancement in ocean transportation, shipping, sewage wastes filled the ocean with tonnes and tonnes of debris and oil wastes. This ravage fills affect the complete marine ecosystem. This in turn makes the ocean toxic. Advancements have been made in recent years to clean up the oil spills. The noted projects such as Sea bin, super high-tech sponges etc. All these innovations are the static one which cannot move along the waves of the ocean. The static form of these inventions could not be used to clean to the larger extent. Therefore, this study aims to build an UAV which is a movable one, can detect the debris and clean those by incorporating existing cleaning techniques. Since the UAV has to sub merge under the water to some extent, it should be designed in such a way by considering both the hydro-dynamical and hydro structural aspects of it. The unique point in the paper covers the flexible cum efficient design of the UAV. The design of the tropical bird is chosen for the efficient model of the UAV. With the few known parameters of this species, the UAV has been designed to achieve the maximum efficiency. The tropical bird chosen has the higher rate of climb, which is the desired requirement for this study. The propeller is uniquely designed based on aerodynamic cum hydrodynamic data so as to balance both the effects. With the design data estimated using analytical formulae, the UAV has been constructed. Following the design, the complete analyses on aerodynamic, aero-structural, hydrodynamic and hydro structural computations are completed. Finally, the employment techniques such as ravage removal mechanism, integrated rotor for the selected application will be integrated. CATIA and ANSYS Workbench are the major tools involved in these comparative investigations, in which modelling of UAV is computed in CATIA and fluid pressure, structural deformations, stresses on UAV are computed through ANSYS Workbench.

MOULT RECORDS FOR TROPICAL BIRD SPECIES TRAPPED IN ANGOLA

Between 21and 27 July 2015, a total of 43 birds of 15 species were caught with mist nets at Kissikina, Malange, Angola. Thirty-two of those, of 11 different species, were moulting primaries and their moult was recorded. In this note we present the data collected hoping to add some information on the moult patterns of these species in this part of the world.

Creating benchmark measurements of tropical forest bird communities in large plots

An understanding of how tropical bird communities might respond to climate change and other types of environmental stressors seems particularly urgent, yet we still lack, except for a few sites, even snapshot inventories of avian richness and abundances across most of the tropics. Such benchmark measurements of tropical bird species richness and abundances could provide opportunities for future repeat surveys and, therefore, strong insight into degrees and pace of change in community organization over time. The challenges of creating a network of benchmarked sites include high variation in detectability among species, general rarity of many species that creates hurdles for use of modern bird counting methods aimed at controlling for variation in detectability, and lack of a standardized protocol to create repeatable inventories. We argue that reasonably complete inventories of tropical bird communities require use of multiple survey techniques to provide internal calibrations of abundance estimates and require multiple visits to improve completeness of richness inventories. We suggest that a network of large (50–100 ha) plots scattered across the tropics can also provide insights into geographic variation in and drivers of avian community structure analogous to insights provided by the Smithsonian Center for Tropical Forest Science Forest Global Earth Observatory network of forest dynamics plots. Perhaps most importantly, large plots provide opportunities for use of multiple survey techniques to estimate abundances while also using some exactly repeatable survey techniques that can greatly improve abilities to quantify change over time. We provide guidance on establishment of and survey methods for large tropical bird plots as well as important recommendations for collection and archiving of metadata to safeguard the long-term utility of valuable benchmark data.