Monitoring the curing processes of epoxy oligomers with partially substituted polyethoxymetallosiloxanes by IR spectroscopy and thermomechanical analysis

In this work, the curing of «ED-20» epoxy resin with partially siloxy-substituted aluminum, iron, and zirconium siloxanes that we obtained previously was studied. The initial content of a metallosiloxane in the compositions was 5–50 wt% with respect to the resin. In all the cases, thermal curing was used to obtain a series of samples in the form of solid homogeneous materials. The fact of the epoxy ring opening in the resin was confirmed by IR spectroscopy. The catalytic properties of the metal atom in a metallosiloxane were found to affect the curing process. The samples demonstrate rather a high resistance to thermooxidative destruction, and in most cases, their glass transition temperatures are lower than those obtained upon standard curing of «ED-20» resin with triethylenetetramine. Partially siloxy-substituted metalloalkoxysiloxanes can be efficient agents for curing and formation of a hybrid material based on epoxy resins.     

Characterization of minocycline loaded chitosan/polyethylene glycol/glycerol blend films as antibacterial wound dressings

Wound care has been a challenging subject for medical teams and researchers. Bacterial infections are one of the most serious complications in injured skins that often affect healing process. Antibacterial wound dressings can be used to facilitate wound healing process. The purpose of this study is to fabricate chitosan (Chito)/polyethylene glycol (PEG) antibacterial wound dressing doped with minocycline, and to evaluate the influence of composition ratio on the blending properties of the films. To improve the mechanical properties of these films, we examined various amounts of glycerol as a plasticizer. Moreover, we investigated morphological and mechanical aspects, water uptake, degradation, water vapor transmission and wettability properties of the films prepared with various ratios of Chito/PEG/Gly. Assessment of mechanical properties revealed that film containing 80:20 ratio Chito/PEG with 40 PHR Gly content exhibits the highest ultimate tensile strength and elongation at break (9.74 MPa and 45.73% respectively). Furthermore, results demonstrated that upon increasing PEG and Gly contents, degradability and hydrophilicity of the films increased whereas water uptake decreased. Water vapor transmission rate of the films was close to the range of 530–1200 g/m²d, indicating that the as formed films are possible candidates for dressing low exudate wounds or burns. Minocycline loaded films exhibited a biphasic drug release profile and it was more effective on gram-positive bacteria than on gram-negative bacteria. The polymeric film with the highest amount of loaded drug (2%) exhibited insignificant cytotoxicity (88%) against normal fibroblast cell line.     

Friction aided deep drawing using newly developed blank-holder divided into eight segments

A new process on friction aided deep drawing has been developed in which a metal blank-holder divided into eight fan-shaped segments is used instead of an elastomer ring used in the Maslennikov process. This blank holding device consists of four drawing segments and four small wedges, which can move radially in- and out-wards under a certain blank-holding pressure. The drawing process can be efficiently performed using an assistant punch, which partially supports the deformation of the blank as well as improving the shape and dimensional accuracy of the drawn cup. Deep drawing experiments have been done using soft aluminum sheets of 0.5 and 1.0 mm in thickness to understand the main features of the proposed drawing process. Theoretical analyses based on the energy and slab methods have also been conducted to study the effect of main process parameters on the minimum blank holding pressure required for the onset of deformation, and to obtain the other optimum working conditions. The possibility of the new process has been confirmed by producing deep and successful cups with a drawing ratio of 4.0, although the number of drawing operations is still high.     

Poly(N-methylaniline) coatings on stainless steel by electropolymerization

Poly(N-methylaniline) (PNMA) coatings have been electropolymerized on 304 stainless steel alloy by potentiodynamic, galvanostatic and potentiostatic synthesis techniques from aqueous solutions of 0.1 M N-methylaniline (NMA) and 0.3 M oxalic acid. Characterization of PNMA coatings was carried out by cyclic voltammetry, UV-Vis and FTIR spectroscopy techniques. Corrosion behavior of PNMA coated stainless steel electrodes was investigated using linear anodic potentiodynamic polarization, Tafel test, chronoamperometry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) techniques in 0.5 M aqueous HCl solutions. Corrosion test results showed that PNMA coatings possessed protection to uncoated stainless steel against corrosion.     

Infrared thermography for inspecting the adhesion integrity of plastic welded joints

This work aim at developing a non-destructive tool for the evaluation of bonded plastic joints. The paper examines infrared thermographic transmission and reflection mode imaging and validates the feasibility of the thermal NDT approach for this application. Results demonstrate good estimation performance for adhesion integrity, uniformity and bond strength using a transmission mode application of infrared thermography. In addition, results from a pulsed infrared thermographic application using a modified dynamic infrared tomography scheme show good performance for estimating adhesion layer thickness mapping and detecting delaminations.     

Studying the needed effort for identifying duplicate issues

Many recent software engineering papers have examined duplicate issue reports. Thus far, duplicate reports have been considered a hindrance to developers and a drain on their resources. As a result, prior research in this area focuses on proposing automated approaches to accurately identify duplicate reports. However, there exists no studies that attempt to quantify the actual effort that is spent on identifying duplicate issue reports. In this paper, we empirically examine the effort that is needed for manually identifying duplicate reports in four open source projects, i.e., Firefox, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla and Eclipse-Platform. Our results show that: (i) More than 50 % of the duplicate reports are identified within half a day. Most of the duplicate reports are identified without any discussion and with the involvement of very few people; (ii) A classification model built using a set of factors that are extracted from duplicate issue reports classifies duplicates according to the effort that is needed to identify them with a precision of 0.60 to 0.77, a recall of 0.23 to 0.96, and an ROC area of 0.68 to 0.80; and (iii) Factors that capture the developer awareness of the duplicate issue’s peers (i.e., other duplicates of that issue) and textual similarity of a new report to prior reports are the most influential factors in our models. Our findings highlight the need for effort-aware evaluation of approaches that identify duplicate issue reports, since the identification of a considerable amount of duplicate reports (over 50 %) appear to be a relatively trivial task for developers. To better assist developers, research on identifying duplicate issue reports should put greater emphasis on assisting developers in identifying effort-consuming duplicate issues.     

An empirical study of integration activities in distributions of open source software

Reuse of software components, either closed or open source, is considered to be one of the most important best practices in software engineering, since it reduces development cost and improves software quality. However, since reused components are (by definition) generic, they need to be customized and integrated into a specific system before they can be useful. Since this integration is system-specific, the integration effort is non-negligible and increases maintenance costs, especially if more than one component needs to be integrated. This paper performs an empirical study of multi-component integration in the context of three successful open source distributions (Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD). Such distributions integrate thousands of open source components with an operating system kernel to deliver a coherent software product to millions of users worldwide. We empirically identified seven major integration activities performed by the maintainers of these distributions, documented how these activities are being performed by the maintainers, then evaluated and refined the identified activities with input from six maintainers of the three studied distributions. The documented activities provide a common vocabulary for component integration in open source distributions and outline a roadmap for future research on software integration.     

A General Robust MPC Design for the State‐Space Model: Application to Paper Machine Process

Applying model predictive control (MPC) in some cases such as complicated process dynamics and/or rapid sampling leads us to poorly numerically conditioned solutions and heavy computational load. Furthermore, there is always mismatch in a model that describes a real process. Therefore, in this paper in order to prevail over the mentioned difficulties, we design a robust MPC using the Laguerre orthonormal basis in order to speed up the convergence at the same time with lower computation adding an extra parameter “a” in MPC. In addition, the Kalman state estimator is included in the prediction model and accordingly the MPC design is related to the Kalman estimator parameters as well as the error of estimations which helps the controller react faster against unmeasured disturbances. Tuning the parameters of the Kalman estimator as well as MPC is another achievement of this paper which guarantees the robustness of the system against the model mismatch and measurement noise. The sensitivity function at low frequency is minimized to tune the MPC parameters since the lower the magnitude of the sensitivity function at low frequency the better command tracking and disturbance rejection results. The integral absolute error (IAE) and peak of the sensitivity are used as constraints in optimization procedure to ensure the stability and robustness of the controlled process. The performance of the controller is examined via the controlling level of a Tank and paper machine processes.     

Modelling Fine-Grained Access Control Policies in Grids

This paper presents an abstract specification of an enforcement mechanism of usage control for Grids, and verifies formally that such mechanism enforces UCON policies. Our technique is based on KAOS, a goal-oriented requirements engineering methodology with a formal LTL-based language and semantics. KAOS is used in a bottom-up form. We abstract the specification of the enforcement mechanism from current implementations of usage control for Grids. The result of this process is agent and operation models that describe the main components and operations of the enforcement mechanism. KAOS is used in top-down form by applying goal-refinement in order to refine UCON policies. The result of this process is a goal-refinement tree, which shows how a goal (policy) can be decomposed into sub-goals. Verification that a policy can be enforced is then equivalent to prove that a goal can be implemented by the enforcement mechanism represented by the agent and operation models.