Safety and reliability are primary concerns in launch vehicle performance due to the involved costs and risk. Pressure vessels are one of the significant subsystems of launch vehicles. In order to have minimal weight, high strength material viz. maraging steel M250 grade is used in realizing the pressure vessel casing hardware. Despite the best efforts in design methodology, quality evaluation in production and effective structural integrity assessment is still a farfetched goal. The evolution of such a system requires, first, identification of an appropriate technique and next its adoption to meet the challenges posed by advanced materials like maraging steels. In fact, a quick survey of the available Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) techniques suggests Acoustic Emission (AE) as an effective structural integrity assessment tool capable of identifying any impending failure or degradation at an earlier stage. Experience shows that the longitudinal welds in the pressure vessels are quite vulnerable to failure due to the fact that they experience the maximum stress (i.e. hoop stress). Loading welded tensile samples are quite synonymous to the hoop stress experienced by longitudinal welds. An attempt is made to compare the Acoustic Emission data acquired during tensile deformation of maraging steel welded specimens. A total of 16 welded specimen’s with known defects were studied for their tensile behaviour is in connection with Acoustic Emission data. The lowest failure load was 70.5 kN and the highest being 84.8 kN. AE activity graphs viz. cumulative AE activity, hit rate, energy rate, count rate, AE amplitude history, AE count history, AE energy history, amplitude-count correlation and hit amplitude distribution have been investigated and salient features with respect to the data have been critically studied and relevant correlations are arrived at.

Drought is regarded as one of the environmental constraints threatening agriculture worldwide. Melatonin is a pleiotropic molecule prevalent in plants capable of promoting plant endogenous resilience to many environmental challenges including drought. Banana is an important staple food consumed in developing countries especially in Africa. In this research, we studied the role of melatonin in the growth of bananas subjected to drought under the Egyptian semi-arid conditions. To achieve this objective, a field experiment on banana (Musa spp., cv. Williams) mother plants and first ratoon was conducted on a private farm for two seasons - 2019 and 2020. Three irrigation treatments, 100, 90 and 80% irrigation water requirements (IWR) were used in conjunction with four concentrations of melatonin as a foliar spray (0 μmol, 40 μmol, 60 μmol, and 80 μmol) to determine the effect of both treatments on banana plant performance under drought. The results showed that there was a substantial difference between treatments, with the foliar application of melatonin at 80 μmol concentration improving most of the yield attributes, relative water content, total chlorophyll and proline with water deficit. However, the foliar application of the molecule lowered the biochemical characteristics mostly at 80% IWR under the Egyptian semi-arid conditions. Overall, there was a concentration-dependent response with regards to IWR for the two seasons 2019 and 2020.

The paper presents general information on LTCC materials, manufacturing processes and properties of fired modules. A Multichip Module package has been the main application of Low Temperature Cofired Ceramic (LTCC) technology. Recently, this technology is also used for production of sensors, actuators and microsystems. The research and development on the LTCC sensors and microsystems carried out in the Laboratory of Thick Film Microsystems at Wroclaw University of Technology are presented. LTCC microfluidic system is described in detail. Moreover, a short information is given on other LTCC applications .

In the dumps of metallurgical enterprises of Kazakhstan about 700 million tons of waste products are generated annually, and are polluting the atmosphere and the soil. The concentration of valuable components in waste products are no lower than in natural resources. The reserves of coal in the Ekibastuz basin are estimated to be more than a billion tons, and almost half of this is made up of ash. Every year, up to 30 million tons of ash-cinder waste is generated, which presents a serious threat to nature. Gallium and germanium concentrations in dumps are approximately 200 grams per ton, which is comparable to the content in coal before processing. The current research aims at creating a unit to obtain hydrogen-enriched water gas from Ekibastuz coal, with the production of zinc, gallium and germanium sublimates, copper-containing cast iron, slag wool and cast stone, through the joint processing of zinc-rich slag and ash-cinder wastes from thermal power plants. To achieve this, we used previous methods of extreme energy saving and a new method, the smelt layer with inversion phase. Experimental results from the “reactor inversion phase – rotary kiln” (RIPh) unit, which processed zinc-germanium contained slag, showed the potential to extract germanium from zinc sublimates, to reduce iron to the form of cupreous cast iron, and to obtain combustible gases and smelt suitable for slag-wool production. Calculations performed on the joint processing of Ekibastuz coal and zinc-rich slag using the proposed unit “reactor of inversion phase – rotary kiln – gas generator” showed it can obtain hydrogen-enriched water gas, along with the extraction of valuable components of primary raw material.