Synthesis of N-doped mesoporous carbons under different carbonization temperature and their application in supercapacitors

We have synthesized N-doped mesoporous carbon by the in-suit doping template method under the carbonized temperature of 900?°C. We found that the electrochemical performance of mesoporous carbon was enhanced by N-doping. So, we tried to increase the content of nitrogen to further optimize the electrochemical performance of the mesoporous carbon as electrode materials. During the process of synthesizing mesoporous carbon, the carbonized temperature played an important role in the formation of the carbon structure and its morphology, as well as in determining the content of nitrogen. We attained a considerable electrochemical performance enhancement by changing the carbonized temperature from 900 to 700?°C. We found the content of Nitrogen decreased with the increase of the carbonized temperature and the content of Nitrogen is 6.11% at 700?°C, 5.39% at 800?°C, 3.9% at 900?°C, respectively. The best electrochemical performance was observed in the product carbonized at 700?°C, which exhibited high specific capacitance (245.6 F/g at 0.5 A/g) and good cycle ability (more than 90% of the initial capacitance after 5000 cycles) in 6 M KOH electrolyte.     

Studying the influence of search rule and context shape in filtering impulse noise images with Markov chains

The paper presents an improved context-based denoising method for gray scale images affected by impulse noise. The proposed algorithm is using Markov chains to replace the detected noise with the intensity having the highest number of occurrences in similar contexts. The context of a noisy pixel consists in its neighbor pixels and is searched in a larger but limited surrounding area. We have analyzed different search methods and different context shapes. The experimental results obtained on the test images have shown that the most efficient model applies the search in form of   “*”  of contexts in form of   “+”. Besides the better denoising performance obtained on all the noise levels, the computational time has been also significantly improved with respect to our previous context-based filter which applied full search of full context. We have also compared this improved Markov filter with other denoising techniques existing in the literature, most of them being significantly outperformed.     

Cross-linked polyvinyl amidoxime fiber: a highly selective and recyclable adsorbent of gallium from Bayer liquor

Gallium, a scarce metal produced mainly from Bayer liquor, is widely used in semiconductors. Ion-exchange method is currently considered as the most effective method to recover gallium from Bayer liquor. In this article, fibrous amidoxime adsorbents are introduced to recover gallium from Bayer liquor. In addition, hydrazine cross-linked polyvinyl amidoxime (HPAO) fibers have been prepared. The structure of the as-prepared fibers was ascertained by FTIR, elemental analysis and weight gain rate. The adsorption kinetics, adsorption isotherm and recycling performance were investigated by batch method. Cross-linking duration was studied and it turned out to be an important factor to optimize the adsorption capacity and recycling performance. After 1.5 h cross-linking time, the fiber showed the highest gallium adsorption capacity of 14.83 mg/g in Bayer liquor. After 3 h cross-linking time, the fiber showed the best recycling performance, which retained 82.9% of the initial adsorption ability after four cycles. Adsorption capacity of vanadium was lower than 1 mg/g for all samples. HPAO displayed very fast adsorption kinetics with an equilibrium at 60 min. The EDS results confirmed the low extraction of aluminum and vanadium provided by HPAO fibers. The gallium-loaded fiber could be effectively eluted by acidified thiourea. With proper control of the cross-linking duration by hydrazine, HPAO fiber with high selectivity towards gallium, high adsorption capacity and good recycle performance could be obtained, which is promising for recovering gallium needed for industrial applications.     

Path Representation in Circuit Netlists Using Linear-Sized ZDDs with Optimal Variable Ordering

The efficient representation and manipulation of a large number of paths in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) requires the usage of special data structures that may become of exponential size with respect to the size of the graph. Several methodologies targeting Electronic Design Automation problems such as timing analysis, physical design, verification and testing involve path representation and necessary manipulation. Previous works proposed an encoding using Zero-suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams (ZDDs), which has been shown experimentally to cope well when representing structural or logical paths in VLSI circuits. However, it is well known that the ordering of the variables in a ZDD highly affects its size and, therefore, the efficiency of the methodologies utilizing these data structures. In this work, we show that using a reverse topological order for the ZDD variables bounds the number of nodes in the ZDD representing structural paths to the number of edges in the DAG considered, hence, making the ZDD size linear to the DAG’s size. This result, supported here both theoretically and experimentally, is very important as it can render methodologies with questionable scalability applicable to larger industrial designs. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed variable ordering in one such methodology which utilizes ZDDs to grade the Path Delay Fault coverage of a given test set.     

Robust Encryption

We provide a provable-security treatment of “robust” encryption. Robustness means it is hard to produce a ciphertext that is valid for two different users. Robustness makes explicit a property that has been implicitly assumed in the past. We argue that it is an essential conjunct of anonymous encryption. We show that natural anonymity-preserving ways to achieve it, such as adding recipient identification information before encrypting, fail. We provide transforms that do achieve it, efficiently and provably. We assess the robustness of specific encryption schemes in the literature, providing simple patches for some that lack the property. We explain that robustness of the underlying anonymous IBE scheme is essential for public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) to be consistent (meaning, not have false positives), and our work provides the first generic conversions of anonymous IBE schemes to consistent (and secure) PEKS schemes. Overall, our work enables safer and simpler use of encryption.