Pakistan’s economy is largely driven by agriculture, and wheat, mostly, stands out as its second most produced crop every year. On the other hand, the average consumption of wheat is steadily increasing as well, due to which its exports are not proportionally growing, thereby, threatening the country’s economy in the years to come. This work focuses on developing an accurate wheat production forecasting model using the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which are considered to be highly accurate for time series prediction. A data pre-processing smoothing mechanism, in conjunction with the LSTM based model, is used to further improve the prediction accuracy. A comparison of the proposed mechanism with a few existing models in literature is also given. The results verify that the proposed model achieves better performance in terms of forecasting, and reveal that while the wheat production will gradually increase in the next ten years, the production to consumption ratio will continue to fall and pose threats to the overall economy. Our proposed framework, therefore, may be used as guidelines for wheat production in particular, and is amenable to other crops as well, leading to sustainable agriculture development in general.
An innovative concept of water-based Cu–Al2O3 hybrid nanofluid has been employed to investigate the behavior of flow and heat transfer inside a rectangular channel whose permeable walls experiences dilation or contraction in height. The transformed set of ordinary differential equations is then solved by a well-known Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg algorithm. The analysis also includes three different shapes of copper nanocomposites, namely, platelet, cylinder and brick- shaped. The impact of various embedded parameters on the flow and heat transfer distributions have been demonstrated through the graphs. All the flow properties, temperature profile and rate of heat transfer at the walls are greatly influenced by the presence of copper nanoparticles. Furthermore, it was observed that the platelet shaped nanocomposites provide a better heat transfer ability as compared to the other shapes of nanoparticles.
A series of previously conducted experiments pertaining to various chemicals and drugs uncover a natural linkage between the molecular structures and the bio-medical and pharmacological characteristics. The forgotten topological index computed for the molecular structures of various chemical compounds and drugs has proven significant in medical and pharmaceutical fields by predicting biological features of new chemical compounds and drugs. A topological index can be considered as the transformation of chemical structure into a real number. Dendrimers are highly-branched star-shaped macromolecules with nanometer-scale dimensions. Dendrimers are defined by three components: a central core, an interior dendritic structure (the branches), and an exterior surface with functional surface groups. In this paper, we determine forgotten topological indices of poly(propyl) ether imine, porphyrin, and zinc–porphyrin dendrimers.
Stabilized un-doped Zinc Telluride (ZnTe) thin films were grown on glass substrates under vacuum using a closed space sublimation (CSS) technique. A dilute copper nitrate solution (0.1/100 mL) was prepared for copper doping, known as an ion exchange process, in the matrix of the ZnTe thin film. The reproducible polycrystalline cubic structure of undoped and the Cu doped ZnTe thin films with preferred orientation (111) was confirmed by X-rays diffraction (XRD) technique. Lattice parameter analyses verified the expansion of unit cell volume after incorporation of Cu species into ZnTe thin films samples. The micrographs of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to measure the variation in crystal sizes of samples. The energy dispersive X-rays were used to validate the elemental composition of undoped and Cu-doped ZnTe thin films. The bandgap energy 2.24 eV of the ZnTe thin film decreased after doping Cu to 2.20 eV and may be due to the introduction of acceptors states near to valance band. Optical studies showed that refractive index was measured from 2.18 to 3.24, whereas thicknesses varied between 220 nm to 320 nm for un-doped and Cu doped ZnTe thin film, respectively, using the Swanepoel model. The oxidation states of Zn+2, Te+2, and Cu+1 through high resolution X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses was observed. The resistivity of thin films changed from ~107 Ω·cm or undoped ZnTe to ~1 Ω·cm for Cu-doped ZnTe thin film, whereas p-type carrier concentration increased from 4 × 109 cm−2 to 1.4 × 1011 cm−2, respectively. These results predicted that Cu-doped ZnTe thin film can be used as an ideal, efficient, and stable intermediate layer between metallic and absorber back contact for the heterojunction thin film solar cell technology.
To improve the internal quantum efficiency of green light-emitting diodes, we present the numerical design and analysis of bandgap-engineered W-shaped quantum well. The numerical results suggest significant improvement in the internal quantum efficiency of the proposed W-LED. The improvement is associated with significantly improved hole confinement due to the localization of indium in the active region, leading to improved radiative recombination rate. In addition, the proposed device shows reduced defect-assisted Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) recombination rate as well as Auger recombination rate. Moreover, the efficiency rolloff in the proposed device is associated with increased built-in electromechanical field.
6 January 2024 in Case Studies in Thermal Engineering