[en] This project on heat transfer coefficients in metal permanent mold casting has been conducted in three areas. They are the theoretical study at the University of Michigan, the experimental investigation of squeeze casting at CMI-Tech Center (Now Hayes-Lemmerz Technical Center) and the experimental investigation of low pressure permanent mold casting at Amcast Automotive

[en] Irradiated fuel rods are transferred under-water from Reactor Building (RB) to Spent Fuel Storage Building (SFSB) for further processing. Fuel transfer buggy is used for transferring irradiated fuel rods from Fuel Discharge Port (FDP) to SFSB. A cutting saw is used for bisecting the fuel assembly under-water. Both the equipments are vital and majority of the components of these are difficult to access. Downtime of these equipments directly affects the reactor operation. Based on the operating experience and feed back, modification and design up-gradation have been done on these equipments resulting in improved performance and availability. This paper describes some of these modification and up-gradation on these equipments. (author)

[en] Rectosigmoid carcinoma is a common malignant pathology which requires multimodality approach of management. The treatment depends on the stage of cancer during detection, ranging from surgery, loco regional radiotherapy and even systemic chemotherapy in the presence of distant metastatic disease. FDG PET-CT is very important in the staging of colorectal malignancies as it can detect rare distant metastatic disease which might not be possible with conventional regional radiological imaging modalities

[en] Stage III locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (LA NSCLC) comprises the most heterogeneous group of patients, accounts for one-third of patients with lung cancer, and is unresectable at presentation. Multiple treatment approaches have evolved over the past few decades focusing on timing of chemoradiation (concurrent vs. sequential) and sequencing of therapy (induction vs. consolidation). Concurrent chemoradiation (CCRT) emerged as the standard of care for the majority of the patients worldwide. Despite improvements in median and overall survival (OS) using the concurrent approach, the rate of distant failure remains high. Consolidation with chemotherapy or targeted agents, adding more radiation dose, or induction chemotherapy did not improve OS. With continued research on defining optimal radiation doses and schedules and integrating novel systemic agents, immunotherapy consolidation has renewed optimism. Synergistic use of radiation and immunotherapy can prevent micrometastatic disease and reduce local failure and may have an abscopal effect in addition to survival benefits. The PACIFIC study reported an absolute progression-free survival benefit of 11.2 months with durvalumab consolidation after standard CCRT compared with placebo. The OS data with durvalumab consolidation are encouraging. Durvalumab is the only approved immunotherapy for unresectable stage III LA NSCLC. Improved survival confirms the definitive role of durvalumab as an effective adjuvant therapy after CCRT with no new safety signals. However, the potential mechanisms driving interaction between immunotherapy and chemoradiotherapy require definitive investigation. These mechanisms may help define the timing of immunotherapy initiation as neoadjuvant, adjuvant, or consolidation and maintenance therapy after progression.

Funding

AstraZeneca Pharma India Limited.

[en] Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), as a tool, is successfully being applied in different application fields involving fluid flow problems mainly because of the versatile nature of the equations involved to accommodate domain specific phenomena. Application of CFD in atmospheric flow and pollutant dispersion problems has been the focus of professionals in the field of environment and risk, the reasons being the availability of more specific input data in addition to the high end computational resources in the recent times. Atmospheric flow field at a given site is generally driven by the large scale weather system, within which local scale site specific flow field is embedded due to the local topographic effects and also due to the non-homogeneity of the surface conditions. The Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, such as MM5, are ideally suited for predicting 3-dimensional flow field conditions over a regional scale or meso-scale range; however, it may give poor forecast for local flow conditions due to the coarse resolution of the model. On the contrary, CFD based models are well suited for generating local scale flow fields, using locally measured data, however, they lack information about the large scale flow field in which the local scale flow field is embedded. Thus, it was felt that proper coupling of the two may give more realistic flow filed simulation as well as pollutant dispersion for the site under consideration. Moreover, the NWP model being predictive, coupling of the NWP with CFD based local scale model could be a very effective tool for analyzing the consequences of accidental releases in advance and can help in emergency preparedness of the industry under consideration. This paper discusses an effort made to generate an interface between a CFD based dispersion model (Fluidyn-PANEPR) and a meso-scale meteorological model (MM5) to cater to the problems of the kind as discussed above. The NWP model MM5 takes initial and boundary conditions data from the global weather forecast model and generates weather forecast over a regional scale at finer resolution as compared to global weather forecast model. Subsequently, the weather forecast generated by the MM5 is passed on to the CFD based model PANEPR to generate very high resolution 3-dimensional flow field over an equal or smaller region by considering local topography, buildings etc. The flow field thus generated is used for the estimation of pollutant dispersion. Local observations of wind and temperature profiles as measured by SODAR/RASS equipments are also considered while processing the wind field. Since the interface between CFD based model PANEPR and NWP model MM5 was developed as a part of emergency preparedness for Indian Nuclear Power Plants, a radiological dose assessment module is also attached with the PANEPR model for the radiological forecast in case of any accidental release from the Nuclear Power Plant. The paper will describe the methodology used in our approach along with the results obtained in a case study. (authors)

[en] The electron impact ionization of multi-charged positive ions has been investigated in a binary encounter approximation which includes the effect of dipole interaction. Based on the geometry of the collision of electron with the target ions the model has been modified to provide a simple analytical expression for the ionization cross section. The modified expression has been used to calculate cross sections for single ionization of doubly and triply charged ions of noble gas atoms. The calculated cross sections are found to agree well with the available experimental measurements, especially in the higher energy region were hard collisions are expected to dominate. Comparison with experiment also shows that inclusion of inner shell contribution should further improve our results with respect to the measured values. (author)