The features of meroitic spread in south-central Sudan: remains along the White Nile region

New archaeological discoveries south of Khartoum in south-central Sudan are enhancing our ability to determine the spread of items originating from the Meroitic state 2000 years ago, beyond the political borders of the state. For the first time in a full-length paper, this research aims to increase our knowledge of archaeological sites dating to this period along the very poorly understood White Nile. The conditions of the sites are outlined, archival research was undertaken through an examination of the original excavation notes and records, and the importance of future research is highlighted. The results shed new light on the features of the communities living to the south of the state as well as how they interacted with the Meroitic state. The conclusions suggest that the lack of civil, political, and religious Meroitic constructions are indicative of a lack of political control over the White Nile where the archaeological evidence demonstrates that fisher-hunting activities predominated. However, there were commercial relations between these rural areas, and the Meroitic state was based on the White Nile's need for ivory, wood, animals, slaves, and perishable items such as leather, and on the presence of Meroitic products such as amulets, gold ornaments, iron arrowheads, and pottery.

Development of an android application to compute priority score for road sections

The quality of roads dictates the development of the country as well as the quality of lives of its citizens. To maintain the road sections at the desired level of service, adequate and timely maintenance works are necessary. But maintaining all the road sections every year is not possible for developing countries like India. These works get constrained by limited budget and hence utilization of the budget becomes crucial for the concerned government department. Out of hundreds of road sections, the department can select only a few at a time. But most of the times, the procedure of filtering out these few sections is not scientific and hence gets influenced by some undue external factors. Looking at these problems, the authors perceived an urgent need of an accessible and user-friendly mobile application that does the prioritization process. The works in this paper describes the development of an android based application which considers the four important domains of any road section viz. pavement functional distress, roughness, social importance and pavement structural strength. From the user inputs related to these four domains, the application accordingly computes and displays a priority score, on the basis of which the user can select the road sections for maintenance works. The validation of the application results has been performed and some test results will be added in the full-length paper.

Factors Affecting Faculty Student Rapport- A Study of Private Universities/Institutions in National Capital Region, India

This paper analyses factors impacting faculty-student rapport. The instrument used for this research was professor-student scale by Wilson et al (Georgia Southern University, 2010). 800 students from eight private universities/institutions of NCR, India were the respondents for this research. These private universities/institutions imparted engineering and management education. SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis. Factor analysis showed that all the items of the questionnaire can be categorized among seven (7) components. These seven components were named as student interest and motivation, expertise and problem-solving, personality/attributes of the faculty, open communication, approachability, authenticity and congruence. These components and the extent to which they impact FSR have been explained in the full-length paper. Practical implication of the paper is that faculty should pay due attention to these factors while building rapport with the students in higher education. Paying attention to these would lead to optimum rapport with the students.

Wake and Turbulence Analysis for Wind Turbine Layouts in an Island

There is a big wind energy potential in supplying the power in an island and most of the islands are off-grid. Due to the limited area in island(s), there is need to find appropriate layout / location for wind turbines suited to the local wind conditions. In this paper, we have considered the wind resources data of an island in Trøndelag region of the Northern Norway, situated on the coastal line. The wind resources data of this island have been analysed for wake losses and turbulence on wind turbines for determining appropriate locations of wind turbines in this island. These analyses are very important for understanding the fatigue and mechanical stress on the wind turbines. In this work, semi empirical wake model has been used for wake losses analysis with wind speed and turbine spacings. The Jensen wake model used for the wake loss analysis due to its high degree of accuracy and the Frandsen model for characterizing the turbulent loading. The variations of the losses in the wind energy production of the down-wind turbine relative to the up-wind turbine and, the down-stream turbulence have been analysed for various turbine distances. The special emphasis has been taken for the case of wind turbine spacing, leading to the turbulence conditions for satisfying the IEC 61400-1 conditions to find the wind turbine layout in this island. The energy production of down-wind turbines has been decreased from 2 to 20% due to the lower wind speeds as they are located behind up-wind turbine, resulting in decreasing the overall energy production of the wind farm. Also, the higher wake losses have contributed to the effective turbulence, which has reduced the overall energy production from the wind farm. In this case study, the required distance for wind turbines have been changed to 6 rotor diameters for increasing the energy gain. From the results, it has been estimated that the marginal change in wake losses by moving the down-stream wind turbine by one rotor diameter distance has been in the range of 0.5 to 1% only and it is insignificant. In the full-length paper, the wake effects with wind speed variations and the wind turbine locations will be reported for reducing the wake losses on the down-stream wind turbine. The Frandsen model has been used for analysing turbulence loading on the down-stream wind turbine as per IEC 61400-1 criteria. In larger wind farms, the high turbulence from the up-stream wind turbines increases the fatigues on the turbines of the wind farm. In this work, we have used the effective turbulence criteria at a certain distance between up-stream and down-stream turbines for minimizing the fatigue load level. The sensitivity analysis on wake and turbulence analysis will be reported in the full-length paper. Results from this work will be useful for finding wind farm layouts in an island for utilizing effectively the wind energy resources and electrification using wind power plants.