Effects of acid leaching treatment of soda-lime silicate glass on crack initiation and fracture

Water or acid soaking surface treatments have been shown to increase the mechanical strength of soda-lime silicate (SLS) glasses. This increase in strength has traditionally been attributed to effects related to residual stress or changes in fracture resistance. In this work, we report experimental data that cannot be explained based on the existing knowledge of glass surface mechanics. In dry environments, annealed and acid-leached SLS surfaces have comparable crack initiation stress and fracture stress as measured by Hertzian indentation and biaxial bending tests, respectively. Yet, in the presence of humidity, acid-leached surfaces have higher failure stress than the annealed surfaces. This apparent enhancement in the crack resistance of the acid-leached surface of SLS glass in humid environments supports the hypothesis that acid-leached surface chemistry can lower the transport kinetics of molecular water to critical flaws.     

Envelopes with microplastics generated from recycled plastic bags for crude oil sorption

Oil spill accidents in marine environments and the lack of disposal of post-consumer plastic are environmental problems worldwide. This study presents a sustainable alternative for both issues through envelopes filled with microplastics (MPs) from recycled bags for the sorption of spilled crude oil. Through particle size analysis by three different sieves (4, 9, and 20 mesh), different MP sizes were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET), density, contact angle (CA), and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). According to their sizes, the MPs were distributed in envelopes and submitted to crude oil sorption capacity and efficiency evaluation. Three MP particle sizes were obtained (from the largest to the smallest, according to the sieve mesh, MP4, MP9, and MP20). SEM images of samples exhibited irregular and porous surfaces, and MP4 had the smallest pore size (8.6 μm). BET showed that MP4 had the highest surface area (0.074 m²/g). The CA > 90° exposed that all samples were hydrophobic. FTIR spectrum demonstrated that the samples from the recycled bags were made of high density polyethylene (HDPE). The MP4 envelopes also had the best crude oil sorption results in capacity and efficiency (1.73 g/g and 68%, respectively), being a promising recycled sorbent in crude oil spillage applications.     

Learning to rank academic experts in the DBLP dataset

Expert finding is an information retrieval task that is concerned with the search for the most knowledgeable people with respect to a specific topic, and the search is based on documents that describe people's activities. The task involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people who are sorted by their level of expertise with respect to the user query. Despite recent interest in the area, the current state‐of‐the‐art techniques lack in principled approaches for optimally combining different sources of evidence. This article proposes two frameworks for combining multiple estimators of expertise. These estimators are derived from textual contents, from graph‐structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts and from profile information about the experts. More specifically, this article explores the use of supervised learning to rank methods, as well as rank aggregation approaches, for combining all of the estimators of expertise. Several supervised learning algorithms, which are representative of the pointwise, pairwise and listwise approaches, were tested, and various state‐of‐the‐art data fusion techniques were also explored for the rank aggregation framework. Experiments that were performed on a dataset of academic publications from the Computer Science domain attest the adequacy of the proposed approaches.     

Matrix-free aerostructural optimization of aircraft wings

In structural optimization subject to failure constraints, computing the gradients of a large number of functions with respect to a large number of design variables may not be computationally practical. Often, the number of constraints in these optimization problems is reduced using constraint aggregation at the expense of a higher mass of the optimal structural design. This work presents results of structural and coupled aerodynamic and structural design optimization of aircraft wings using a novel matrix-free augmented Lagrangian optimizer. By using a matrix-free optimizer, the computation of the full constraint Jacobian at each iteration is replaced by the computation of a small number of Jacobian-vector products. The low cost of the Jacobian-vector products allows optimization problems with thousands of failure constraints to be solved directly, mitigating the effects of constraint aggregation. The results indicate that the matrix-free optimizer reduces the computational work of solving the optimization problem by an order of magnitude compared to a traditional sequential quadratic programming optimizer. Furthermore, the use of a matrix-free optimizer makes the solution of large multidisciplinary design problems, in which gradient information must be obtained through iterative methods, computationally tractable.     

A Strategy of Density-Based Partitioning for Scalability Problem in Network Self-management

A density-based partitioning strategy is proposed for large domain networks in order to deal with the scalability issue found in autonomic networks considering, as a scenario, the autonomic Quality of Service （QoS） management context. The approach adopted focus as on obtaining dense network partitions having more paths for a given vertices set in the domain. It is demonstrated that dense partitions improve autonomic processing scalability, for instance, reducing routing process complexity. The solution looks for a significant trade-off between partition autonomic algorithm execution time and path selection quality in large domains. Simulation scenarios for path selection execution time are presented and discussed. Authors argue that autonomic networks may benefit from the dense partition approach proposed by achieving scalable, efficient and near real-time support for autonomic management systems.     

Generative face alignment through 2.5D active appearance models

This work addresses the matching of a 3D deformable face model to 2D images through a 2.5D Active Appearance Models (AAM). We propose a 2.5D AAM that combines a 3D metric Point Distribution Model (PDM) and a 2D appearance model whose control points are defined by a full perspective projection of the PDM. The advantage is that, assuming a calibrated camera, 3D metric shapes can be retrieved from single view images. Two model fitting algorithms and their computational efficient approximations are proposed: the Simultaneous Forwards Additive (SFA) and the Normalization Forwards Additive (NFA), both based on the Lucas–Kanade framework. The SFA algorithm searches for shape and appearance parameters simultaneously whereas the NFA projects out the appearance from the error image and searches only for the shape parameters. SFA is therefore more accurate. Robust solutions for the SFA and NFA are also proposed in order to take into account the self-occlusion or partial occlusion of the face. Several performance evaluations for the SFA, NFA and theirs efficient approximations were performed. The experiments include evaluating the frequency of converge, the fitting performance in unseen data and the tracking performance in the FGNET Talking Face sequence. All results show that the 2.5D AAM can outperform both the 2D + 3D combined models and the 2D standard methods. The robust extensions to occlusion were tested on a synthetic sequence showing that the model can deal efficiently with large head rotation.     

Biofidelic child head FE model to simulate real world trauma

Biomechanics of human head has been widely studied since several decades. At a mechanical level, the use of engineering allowed investigating injury mechanisms developing numerical models of adult head. For children, the problem is more difficult and evaluating child injury mechanisms using data obtained from scaling adult injury criteria does not account for differences in morphology and structure between adults and children. During growth, child head undergoes different modifications in morphology and structure. The present paper compares the anthropometry and numerical simulations of a child head model based on medical CT scans to a child head model developed by scaling an adult head model using the method proposed by Mertz [H.J. Mertz, A procedure for normalizing impact response data, SAE paper 840884, 1984]. These analysis point out significant differences showing that scaling down an adult head to obtain a child head does not appear relevant. Biofidelic and specific child geometry is needed to investigate child injury mechanisms.     

A backstepping controller for path‐tracking of an underactuated autonomous airship

In this paper we propose a nonlinear control approach for the path‐tracking of an autonomous underactuated airship. A backstepping controller is designed from the airship nonlinear dynamic model including wind disturbances, and further enhanced to consider actuators saturation. Control implementation issues related to airship underactuation are also addressed, namely control allocation and an attitude reference shaping to obtain a faster error correction with smoother input requests. The results obtained demonstrate the capacity of an underactuated unmanned airship to execute a realistic mission including vertical take‐off and landing, stabilization and path‐tracking, in the presence of wind disturbances, with a single robust control law. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Proteomics identification of differentially expressed proteins in the muscle of dysferlin myopathy patients

The muscular dystrophies are a large and heterogeneous group of neuromuscular disorders that can be classified according to the mode of inheritance, the clinical phenotype and the molecular defect. To better understand the pathological mechanisms of dysferlin myopathy we compared the protein-expression pattern in the muscle biopsies of six patients with this disease with six patients with limb girdle muscular dystrophy 2A, five with facioscapulohumeral dystrophy and six normal control subjects. To investigate differences in the expression levels of skeletal muscle proteins we used 2-DE and MS. Western blot or immunohistochemistry confirmed relevant results. The study showed specific increase expression of proteins involved in fast-to-slow fiber type conversion (ankyrin repeat protein 2), type I predominance (phosphorylated forms of slow troponin T), sarcomere stabilization (actinin-associated LIM protein), protein ubiquitination (TRIM 72) and skeletal muscle differentiation (Rho-GDP-dissociation inhibitor ly-GDI) in dysferlin myopathy. As anticipated, we also found differential expression of proteins common to all the muscular dystrophies studied. This comparative proteomic analysis suggests that in dysferlin myopathy (i) the type I fiber predominance is an active process of fiber type conversion rather than a selective loss of type II fibers and (ii) the dysregulation of proteins involved in muscle differentiation further confirms the role of dysferlin in this process.