Introducing four different branch structures in PET by reactive processing––A rheological investigation

Chain extension/branching by reactive processing is a well-known method to enhance the rheological properties of polymers. In this study, pyromellitic dianhydride, poly(glycolic acid), triglycidyl isocyanurate, and bisphenol A diglycidyl ether were used as chain extender/branching agents to produce branched Polyethylene terephthalate (PETs) with four different molecular structures. According to the linear rheological characterizations, the storage modulus and complex viscosity of modified PET samples enhanced significantly after branching. The shear viscosities of modified PET show a pronounced shear-thinning behavior and a remarkable increase at low frequencies, which can be an indication of the existence of long-chain branches (LCBs) in the molecular structure of polymer and broadening the molecular weight distribution. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis were used to investigate the effect of branching agents on the chemical structure and thermal properties of PET, respectively. DSC results show that higher amounts of LCBs lead to lower melting and crystallization temperatures.     

A multi-criteria context-sensitive approach for social image collection summarization

Recent increase in the number of digital photos in the content sharing and social networking websites has created an endless demand for techniques to analyze, navigate, and summarize these images. In this paper, we focus on image collection summarization. Earlier methods in image collection summarization consider representativeness and diversity criteria while recent ones also consider other criteria such as image quality, aesthetic or appeal. In this paper, we propose a multi-criteria context-sensitive approach for social image collection summarization. In the proposed method, two different sets of features are combined while each one looks at different criteria for image collection summarization: social attractiveness features and semantic features. The first feature set considers different aspects that make an image appealing such as image quality, aesthetic, and emotion to create attractiveness score for input images while the second one covers semantic content of images and assigns semantic score to them. We use social network infrastructure to identify attractiveness features and domain ontology for extracting ontology features. The final summarization is provided by integrating the attractiveness and semantic features of input images. The experimental results on a collection of human generated summaries on a set of Flickr images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image collection summarization approach.     

Correction to: Buckling of magneto-electro-hygro-thermal piezoelectric nanoplates system embedded in a visco-Pasternak medium based on nonlocal theory

Microsystem Technologies - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. Farzad Ebrahimi was not listed among the authors.     

Magneto-electro-elastic analysis of piezoelectric–flexoelectric nanobeams rested on silica aerogel foundation

This article explores that the study on bending of magneto-electric-elastic nanobeams relies on nonlocal elasticity theory. The Vlasov’s model foundation utilizes the silica aerogel foundation. The guiding expressions of nonlocal nanobeams in the considered framework are used extensively and where parabolic third-order beam theory is achieved after using Hamilton’s principle. Parametric work is introduced to scrutinize the influence of the magneto-electro-mechanical loadings, nonlocal parameter, and aspect ratio on the deflection characteristics of nanobeams. It is noticed that the boundary conditions, nonlocal parameter, and beam geometrical parameters have significant effects on dimensionless deflection of nanoscale beams.