Synthesis of tetrazole from α, β—Unsaturated carbonyl fatty acid

Methyl 4-oxo-trans-2-octadecenoate (II), when treated with excess hydrazoic acid in the presence of BF₃-etherate, produced 66% methyl 5-aza-nonadec-trans-2-enoate (4,5-d)-tetrazole (III), 10% methyl 5-aza-nonadec-4-oxo-trans-2-enoate (IV) and 7% pentadecamide (V). Individual products were characterized by spectral and elemental methods.     

Shape optimization of a micromixer with staggered herringbone groove

Shape optimization of a staggered herringbone groove micromixer using three-dimensional Navier-Stokes analysis has been carried out. The analysis of the degree of mixing is performed by the calculation of spatial data statistics. The calculation of the variance of the mass fraction at various nodes on a plane in the channel is used to quantify mixing. A numerical optimization technique is applied to optimize the shape of the grooves on a single wall of the channel. Two design variables, namely, the ratio of the groove depth to channel height ratio and the angle of the groove, are selected for optimization. A mixing index is used as the objective function. The results of the optimization show that the mixing is very sensitive to the shape of the groove which can be used in controlling the mixing in microdevices. The mixing is affected by the depth of the groove much more than the angle of the groove.     

Effects of hygrothermally decomposed polyurethane on the curing and mechanical properties of carbon black‐filled epoxidized natural rubber vulcanizates

Hygrothermally decomposed polyurethane (HD‐PUR) was mixed up to 20 phr in epoxidized natural rubber (with 50 mol % epoxidation; ENR50) recipes, and the curing and mechanical behaviors were studied. Mechanical testing of the ENR50/HD‐PUR vulcanizates determined the tensile, tear, compression‐set, hardness, abrasion, hysteresis, and resilience properties. No significant changes were observed in the tensile properties with the incorporation of HD‐PUR. The ENR50 compounds showed an increase in compression set with increasing HD‐PUR content. Rubbers cured by a semi‐efficient vulcanization system gave the best overall performance. A further improvement in curing and mechanical properties was achieved by the carbon black grade N330 being replaced with a more active grade (N375). © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 84: 2265–2276, 2002     

Graft Copolymerization of Acrylamide onto Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch (OPEFB) Fiber

Grafting of acrylamide (AAm) onto oil palm empty fruits bunch fiber using hydrogen peroxide as initiator and methyl acrylate as comonomer was investigated. The amount of comonomer needed to make grafting of acrylamide possible was determined. The percentage of poly(acrylamide) and the comonomer in the final graft copolymer was estimated by elemental analysis. Results obtained indicated that methyl acrylate facilitated the incorporation of acrylamide monomer onto OPEFB. The reactivity ratios for both monomers were determined by using Fineman–Ross plot. The effects of reaction temperature and period as well as amount of the initiator, solvent, monomer and comonomer on the percentage of grafting at fixed amount of comonomer (11 mmol) were studied. Maximum percentage of grafting was achieved when the amount of initiator and solvent 3.98×10⁻³ mol and 50 mL respectively. The optimum reaction temperature was 50 ^○C and the reaction period was 90 min. Highest percentage of grafting was 232% when 25.6 mmol of acrylamide was used under these optimum conditions. The presence of functional group in the grafted polymer is characterized by infrared spectroscopy and the surface morphology is observed by scanning electron microscopy. Thermoanalytic investigation on OPEFB and OPEFB-g-PAAM were carried out to evaluate the thermal stability and respective activation energy of the materials.     

Urea-N uptake by dasheen (Colocasia esculenta L. Schott) in relation to the fertilizer placement method

Urea has become the most important N carrier in many parts of the world and its reaction when added to soil is unique in many ways. Two field experiments were therefore undertaken using¹⁵N to investigate the uptake efficiency of the added urea-¹⁵N which was banded in Experiment I and broadcast in Experiment II. In both experiments the uptake efficiencies were not affected by N-rate and cropping system (Exp. I) or crop residue management (Exp. II) and averaged 17.4 and 16.9% respectively. These low values were supported by evidences of high losses; high pH increases following urea application (volatilization), downward movement of N (leaching), and cycles of waterlogged and well drained conditions in the soil (de-nitrification). Evidence of leaching at least down to 30 cm in the profile was observed in the first experiment where urea was banded but not in experiment II where it was broadcast. The proportion of N in the crop that was derived from added urea (%Ndff) was 57.7% and 36.4% in experiments I and II respectively, suggesting that band application resulted in a higher proportion of the added N in the root zone compared to that for broadcast application. The results indicate the need to investigate other management strategies, such as higher application frequencies and placement closer to the root zone, in order to improve the uptake efficiency of added urea-N in upland rainfed dasheen.     

KHATT: An open Arabic offline handwritten text database

A comprehensive Arabic handwritten text database is an essential resource for Arabic handwritten text recognition research. This is especially true due to the lack of such database for Arabic handwritten text. In this paper, we report our comprehensive Arabic offline Handwritten Text database (KHATT) consisting of 1000 handwritten forms written by 1000 distinct writers from different countries. The forms were scanned at 200, 300, and 600 dpi resolutions. The database contains 2000 randomly selected paragraphs from 46 sources, 2000 minimal text paragraph covering all the shapes of Arabic characters, and optionally written paragraphs on open subjects. The 2000 random text paragraphs consist of 9327 lines. The database forms were randomly divided into 70%, 15%, and 15% sets for training, testing, and verification, respectively. This enables researchers to use the database and compare their results. A formal verification procedure is implemented to align the handwritten text with its ground truth at the form, paragraph and line levels. The verified ground truth database contains meta-data describing the written text at the page, paragraph, and line levels in text and XML formats. Tools to extract paragraphs from pages and segment paragraphs into lines are developed. In addition we are presenting our experimental results on the database using two classifiers, viz. Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and our novel syntactic classifier.     

UV‐radiation–induced preirradiation grafting of methyl methacrylate onto lignocellulose fiber in an aqueous medium and characterization

The preirradiation method of grafting has been established by ultraviolet radiation. Methyl methacrylate (MMA) was grafted onto jute fiber in an aqueous medium. The variation of graft weight with UV‐radiation time, monomer concentration, and reaction time was investigated. The conversion of monomer into homopolymer and graft copolymer was evaluated. The graft weight passes through a maximum value (～ 122%) with UV‐radiation time. The optimum value of the monomer concentration was evaluated for maximum degree of grafting. Graft copolymerization of MMA onto lignocellulose fiber significantly increases the elongation at break (～ 65%) compared to that of the “as‐received” sample. However, a linear decrease on breaking load was observed with the increase of graft weight. The estimation of degree of grafting was achieved using an IR technique by correlating band intensities with the degree of grafting. Considering the water‐absorption property, the grafted sample showed a maximum up to 61% decrease in hydrophilicity compared to that of the as‐received sample. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 91: 1667–1675, 2004     

Polyurethane composites based on oil palm empty fruit bunches: Effect of isocyanate/hydroxyl ratio and chemical modification of empty fruit bunches with toluene diisocyanate and hexamethylene diisocyanate on mechanical properties

This study focuses on the effect of isocyanate (NCO)/hydroxyl (OH) group ratios and chemical modification of oil palm empty fruit bunches (EFBs) with toluene diisocyanate (TDI) and hexamethylene diisocyanate (HMDI) on the mechanical properties of EFB–polyurethane (PU) composites. The tensile, flexural, and impact properties are affected by the NCO/OH ratios. The tensile strengths, flexural strengths, and toughness increase as the NCO/OH increases; however, the modulus decreases. The reduction in the modulus is attributable to the increased flexibility of the PU linkages. Chemical modification of the EFBs increases the tensile strength, flexural strength, and toughness; however, the modulus is lowered as the percentage of treated EFB is increased. Impact strength results show that the strength increases as the NCO/OH ratio is increased. At NCO/OH ratios of 1.0 and 1.1, the composites with HMDI‐treated fibers exhibit higher impact strength than those with TDI‐treated and untreated fibers, respectively. This may be due to the longer and more flexible chain length of HMDI as compared to TDI, which enables the composites to absorb more energy before failure. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2007     

Multimedia framework to support eHealth applications

Limited bandwidth resources lead to a number of challenges especially for eHealth applications, which are communicated over IP and wireless networks. These multimedia services include high-resolution videos and have very large file sizes that require a high level of compression to overcome this limitation. Therefore, there is an acute demand for the research community to provide an efficient multimedia framework to encode medical videos with high quality specifically under the conditions of an error-prone environment. Both an affordable delivery framework and effective coding techniques are extremely desirable for the delivery of high-quality eHealth video applications for transmission over heterogeneous networks and devices. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a multimedia framework to support eHealth applications, which has an improved coding scheme that uses an SVC-scalable extension of MPEC-4 AVC/H.264. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of the PSNR-Y gain and reduces the picture quality degradation caused by artifacts and distortions, compared to the existing scheme.     

Consistency of randomized and finite sized decision tree ensembles

Regression via classification (RvC) is a method in which a regression problem is converted into a classification problem. A discretization process is used to covert continuous target value to classes. The discretized data can be used with classifiers as a classification problem. In this paper, we use a discretization method, Extreme Randomized Discretization, in which bin boundaries are created randomly to create ensembles. We present an ensemble method for RvC problems. We show theoretically for a set of problems that if the number of bins is three, the proposed ensembles for RvC perform better than RvC with the equal-width discretization method. We use these results to show that infinite-sized ensembles, consisting of finite-sized decision trees, created by a pure randomized method (split points are created randomly), are not consistent. We also theoretically show, using a set of regression problems, that the performance of these ensembles is dependent on the size of member decision trees.