This is CSTEP's annual report for the year 2009-10.

Keeping in view India’s recent international commitment to expand the share of renewable electricity to 40%

Policy brief regarding nuclear power

The J–V equation of a solar cell is implicit and requires iterative calculation to determine the fill factor and the maximum power point. Here an explicit model for J–V characteristic is proposed which is applicable to a large variety of solar cell. This model allows an easy estimation of fill factor from four simple measurements of the bias points corresponding toVoc, Jsc, and any two voltage values lying between 0 and Voc, where Voc is the open circuit voltage and Jsc is the short circuit current density.

The article explores the effects that India's climate policy will have in the context of the country's existing development problems India is expected to face severe challenges as a result of climate change and these will disproportionately affect the poor and the most vulnerable The country's current climate policies nevertheless adopt an approach that seems unlikely to improve conditions for the poor, unless it shifts from a top-down, growth-oriented strategy towards prioritizing access to basic goods and services as a primary policy goal.

In the current study, using first-principles simulations, we present a case for a novel composition: Na10GeP2S12 (NGPS), for application in room-temperature Na-S batteries.Solid electrolytes can enable safer and high-energy density batteries than liquid electrolytes .Sodium solid electrolytes can help in reducing the shuttling effect , which causes capacity loss in the newly emerging room-temperature Na-S batteries.

Ensuring the long-term usability of engineering informatics (EI) artifacts is a challenge, particularly for products with longer lifecycles than the computing hardware and software used for their design and manufacture.Addressing this challenge requires characterizing the nature of EI, defining metrics for EI sustainability, and developing methods for long-term EI curation.In this paper we highlight various issues related to long-term archival of EI and describe the work towards methods and metrics for sustaining EI We propose an approach to enhance the Open Archival Information System (OAI

This paper introduces a framework to examine the relative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different information and communications technologies to deliver a range of social services, using a case example of rural Bangladesh. It focuses particularly on major sectors such as agriculture, education, disaster response and healthcare. A Community based radio broadcasting (CR) appears as the dominant option among the considered ICTs. Human intervention has been found to be crucial in both low (20%) and medium-high (60%) literacy populations.

The annotation of a document involves the embedding of data such as a textual note, a symbol or structured data in an original document at a specific location.The scope of annotations has been considerably enlarged by the latest developments in digital technologies allowing the manipulation of 3D geometry through a simple web browser and the combination of geometrical information with more complex semantic structures.The goal of this special issue is to explore a number of these particular challenges of the application of annotation in design and product engineering.

The evolution of materials; their synthesis, shaping, and performance; and the engineering of artifacts and systems to meet societal demands are inextricably interwoven. In this article, we describe an evolving scenario of the relationship between materials and engineering that provides a framework for the articles that explore various facets of this theme in this special issue of MRS Bulletin.