Electron‐Induced Reactive Processing of Poly(propylene)/Ethylene–Octene Copolymer Blends: A Novel Route to Prepare Thermoplastic Vulcanizates

TPVs are prepared by dynamic vulcanization in which crosslinking of an elastomeric polymer takes place during its melt mixing with a thermoplastic polymer under high‐shear conditions. 30:70 wt% blends of PP and ethylene–octene copolymer are vulcanized using electron‐induced reactive processing (EIReP) employing a range of absorbed doses (25, 50, and 100 kGy) while keeping the electron energy and treatment time fixed. The structure/property relationships of the prepared samples are studied using various characterization techniques such as DMA, DSC, SEM, and melt rheology. The results suggest that EIReP offers a novel route to prepare TPVs without any chemical crosslinking and coupling agents.

     

Distillation studies in rotating packed bed with split packing

Rotating packed bed (RPB) with split packing has been developed recently to overcome the limitation of negligible tangential slip velocity between vapor and packing obtained with single rotating packing element of conventional RPB design. This work evaluates the performance of this contactor for separation of binary mixture methanol–ethanol by distillation. Experiments were carried out at total reflux condition. The height equivalent of a theoretical plate (HETP) of 2.9 cm was obtained at F-factor = 0.6 (m/s) (kg/m³)^0.5 and rotor speed of 1100 rpm. Comparison with distillation studies reported for this system in the literature indicated that the mass transfer performance of this rotor design was superior to that of conventional RPB. Analysis of the experimental data also suggested that the rotor speed influenced the overall volumetric mass transfer coefficient to a greater degree in this design.     

Protein-templated gold nanoclusters: size dependent inversion of fluorescence emission in the presence of molecular oxygen

Gold nanoclusters are promising candidates as biological markers without having toxic effects like fluorescent quantum dots. Herein, bovine serum albumin (BSA) protein stabilized gold nanoclusters of two different sizes emitting at 410 and 645 nm have been synthesized. These nanoclusters have been shown to interact with molecular oxygen differentially. Spectroscopic and chemical evidences show that dioxygen molecule gets adsorbed at two different orientations on the nanoclusters. The orientation motifs have been hypothesized to be superoxo and peroxo types on the smaller and the larger gold nanoclusters, respectively. Due to the difference in attachments, the oxygen molecule shows opposite changes in fluorescence intensity for the nanoclusters. The fluorescence intensity of the blue emitting nanocluster shows a profuse enhancement whereas the red emitting species shows quenching of emission. Superoxo type adsorption of the oxygen molecule on the blue emitting gold nanoclusters induce formation of singlet oxygen that in turn enhances the fluorescence intensity of the species. This could be verified by oxidation of diaminobenzidine (DAB) by singlet oxygen. Enhancement in fluorescence intensity of the blue emitting gold nanoclusters with an increase in concentration of molecular oxygen may enable them to be good candidates in bioimaging and detection.     

Lattice Boltzmann simulation of heat conduction problems in non‐isothermally heated enclosures

A numerical study following the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is performed to solve transient heat conduction problems with and without volumetric heat generation/absorption in 2D and 3D Cartesian geometries. Uniform lattices are considered for both geometries. To validate the correctness of LBM, a finite difference method (FDM) is also used to solve the 2D problem without heat generation/absorption and results are compared with that of LBM. For both 2D and 3D geometries one of the walls is heated and cooled with a sinusoidal function and the rest of the walls are cooled isothermally. Effects of amplitude of the sinusoidal function and volumetric heat generation/absorption on temperature profiles are analyzed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res; Published online in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/htj ). DOI 10.1002/htj.20406     

Structural and optical properties of glancing angle deposited TiO2 nanowires array

TiO2 nanowires (NWs) have been synthesized by glancing angle deposition technique using e-beam evaporator. The average length 490 nm and diameter 80 nm of NWs were examined by field emission-scanning electron microscopy. Transmission electron microscopy emphasized that the NWs were widely dispersed at the top. X-ray diffraction has been carried out on the TiO2 thin film (TF) and NW array. A small blue shift of 0.03 eV was observed in Photoluminescence (PL) main band emission for TiO2 NW as compared to TiO2 TF. The high temperature annealing at 980 degrees C partially removed the oxygen vacancy from the sample, which was investigated by PL and optical absorption measurements.     

Modeling of cross flow ultrafiltration of stevia extract in a rectangular cell

Prediction of ultrafiltration performance during clarification of pre-treated stevia extract by cross flow ultrafiltration in a rectangular cell is presented in this work. The steady state performance is modeled by using classical film theory. The transient state behaviour is quantified by using a model available in literature. In the model, higher molecular weight solutes are clubbed in one gel-forming component and Stevioside is assumed to be other component. In the process of modeling, the gel characteristics are estimated. Both total recycle and batch concentration mode of operations are modeled. The model results are in good agreement with the experimental data.     

Improving performance of TCP over mobile wireless networks

Mobile IP is a network layer protocol for handling mobility of hosts in the Internet. However, mobile IP handoff causes degradation of TCP performance. Hence, there is a need for improving performance of TCP over mobile IP in wireless mobile networks. We propose an approach which handles losses due to both wireless link errors and host mobility. To handle losses due to host mobility, a method for seamless handoff is proposed. Empirical results show that the scheme provides substantial improvement of performance.

Novel intelligent automation method for out-of-plane fiber-laser alignment in the presence of initial nonplanar misalignments: three-point approach

A novel and cost-effective method is developed for the roll alignment automation for out-of-plane coupling between a laser and an angled facet single-mode fiber. The method is based on an approximated closed-form analytical formula for the functional dependence of out-of-plane laser-fiber coupling efficiency on relative rotational angle between fiber and laser. In this method, only three measurements are needed to locate maximum optical power coupling position in the presence of initial fiber-laser relative rotational angular misalignments. This intelligent searching method can easily be incorporated into any conventional fiber-optic alignment optimization algorithms and is sufficiently general for alignment automation of even more complicated out-of-plane fiber-optic alignment in the presence of initial nonplanar misalignments.     

Investigation of structural dependence of host erbium-doped triangular-lattice PCF on lasing properties and design of high performance laser

A detailed study is presented on the lasing properties of an erbium-doped photonic crystal fiber (PCF) laser. The effects of the host PCF’s structure and laser parameters on continuous-wave laser emission are analyzed by considering the confinement and overlap of pump and signal fields in the gain medium for varying values of pitch, hole diameter, and doping radius. For analysis, we used a finite-difference mode-calculation algorithm devised with standard population and propagation rate-equation solver. Our analysis, applied to an experimentally realized PCF laser, reproduces the observed/reported data, thereby showing the efficacy of our analysis. Finally, a fiber geometry to realize a laser with threshold as low as 6?mW using a short fiber length of 0.52?m is prescribed. The aim of the design is to greatly reduce splice loss with standard single-mode SM28/G.652 fiber while maintaining the optimum performance. These results are new in PCF laser research and should be useful in realizing high performance PCF-based laser devices.