Self-assembly and crystallization behavior of a double-crystalline polyethylene-block-poly(ethylene oxide) diblock copolymer

The self-assembly and crystallization behavior of a well-defined low molecular weight polyethylene-block-poly(ethylene oxide) (PE-b-PEO) diblock copolymer was studied. The number-average degrees of polymerization for the PE and PEO blocks were 29 and 20, respectively. The molecular weight distribution was 1.04 as determined by size-exclusion chromatography. The PE-b-PEO sample exhibited two melting points at 28.7 and 97.4 °C for the PEO and the PE crystals, respectively. The crystallization of the PE blocks was unconfined, while the crystallization of the PEO blocks was confined between pre-existing PE crystalline lamellae, as demonstrated by simultaneous small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD) studies. In the fully crystalline state, both PE and PEO blocks formed extended-chain crystals with PE chains tilted ∼22° from the lamellar normal and PEO chains parallel to the lamellar normal, as evidenced by two-dimensional WAXD study of shear-oriented samples. Regardless of hydrogen bonding among hydroxyl chain ends in the PEO blocks, interdigitated, single-crystalline layer morphology was observed for both PE and PEO crystals. The partial crystalline morphology, where the PE crystallizes and the PEO is amorphous, had the same overall d-spacing as the fully crystalline morphology. A double-amorphous PEO layer sandwiched between neighboring PE crystalline layers was deduced based on a chain conformation study using Fourier transform infrared. The confined crystallization kinetics for PEO blocks was investigated by differential scanning calorimetry, which could be explained by a heterogeneous nucleation mechanism. The slower crystallization rate in the PEO-block than the same molecular weight homopolymer was attributed to the effects of nanoconfinement and PEO chains tethered to the PE crystals.     

Manipulating the microstructure and rheology in polymer‐organoclay composites

A series of nanocomposites prepared by melt‐blending of cloisite‐based organoclays with poly(ethylene‐vinylacetate) (EVA) and neutralized poly (ethylene‐methacrylic acid) (EMA) copolymers were investigated via DSC, small‐angle X‐ray scattering (SAXS), and rheological techniques. SAXS results indicated partial clay exfoliation in all samples. In both EMA and EVA systems, the nominal melting temperature T_m and bulk crystallinity are not significantly affected by the presence of organoclays, suggesting that clay particles are predominantly confined in the amorphous phase. In rheological measurements (above T_m), the EVA‐clay system demonstrated a solid‐like rheological behavior under the small‐strain oscillatory shear, yet it was able to yield and flow under a steady shear, which is the characteristic of physical crosslinking. In contrast, the EMA‐clay system exhibited a melt‐like rheological behavior, where the influence of organoclay on the thermorheological behavior of the EMA composite was quite minimal. We propose that the carbonyl groups of vinylacetate in EVA interact with the clay surface, resulting in a strong physically crosslinking like interaction in the melt. On the other hand, the interaction between EMA and clay is weak because of repulsion between carboxyl anions and negatively charged clay surface.     

Deformation behaviour during cold drawing of nanocomposites based on single wall carbon nanotubes and poly(ether ester) copolymers

Relationships between the macroscopic deformation behaviour and microstructure of a pure (PBT-b-PTMO) block copolymer and a polymer nanocomposite (PBT-b-PTMO + 0.2 wt% SWCNT) were investigated by simultaneous small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS and WAXS) during tensile deformation using synchrotron radiation. The Young's modulus was found to be 15% higher for the nanocomposite than for the pure block copolymer as well as the yield strength, while the elongation-to-break was less than a half. This different behaviour can be explained by taking into account the different structural features revealed by SAXS and WAXS and thus considering that SWCNT act as anchors in the nanocomposite, sharing the applied stress with the PBT crystals and partially preventing the flexible, non-crystallisable PTMO chains to elongate.     

Acceleration or retardation to crystallization if liquid-liquid phase separation occurs: Studies on a polyolefin blend by SAXS/WAXD, DSC and TEM

Blends of statistical copolymers containing ethylene/hexene (PEH) and ethylene/butene (PEB) exhibited the behavior of upper critical solution temperature (UCST). The interplay between the early and intermediate stage liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) and crystallization of the PEH/PEB 50/50 blend was studied by time-resolved simultaneous small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD) techniques. Samples were treated by two different quench procedures: in single quench, the sample was directly quenched from 160 °C to isothermal crystallization temperature of 114 °C; while in double quench, the sample was firstly quenched to 130 °C for 20 min annealing, where LLPS occurred, and then to 114 °C. It was found that in the early stage of crystallization, the integrated values of Iq² and crystallinity, X_c, in the double quench procedure were consistently higher than those in the single quench procedure, which could be attributed to accelerated nucleation induced by enhanced concentration fluctuations and interfacial tension. In the late stage of crystallization, some morphological parameters were found to crossover and then reverse, which could be explained by retardation of lamellar growth due to phase separation formed during the double quench procedure. This phenomenon was also confirmed by DSC measurements in blends of different compositions at varying isothermal crystallization temperatures. The crystal lamellar thickness determined by SAXS showed a good agreement with TEM observation. Results indicated that the early stage LLPS in the PEH/PEB blend prior to crystallization indeed dictated the resulting lamellar structures, including the average size of lamellar stack and the stack distribution. There seemed to be little variation of lamellar thickness and long period between the two quenching procedures (i.e., single quench versus double quench).     

A New Geometric Subproblem to Extend Solvability of Inverse Kinematics Based on Screw Theory for 6R Robot Manipulators

Geometric inverse kinematics procedures that divide the whole problem into several subproblems with known solutions, and make use of screw motion operators have been developed in the past for 6R robot manipulators. These geometric procedures are widely used because the solutions of the subproblems are geometrically meaningful and numerically stable. Nonetheless, the existing subproblems limit the types of 6R robot structural configurations for which the inverse kinematics can be solved. This work presents the solution of a novel geometric subproblem that solves the joint angles of a general anthropomorphic arm. Using this new subproblem, an inverse kinematics procedure is derived which is applicable to a wider range of 6R robot manipulators. The inverse kinematics of a closed curve were carried out, in both simulations and experiments, to validate computational cost and realizability of the proposed approach. Multiple 6R robot manipulators with different structural configurations were used to validate the generality of the method. The results are compared with those of other methods in the screw theory framework. The obtained results show that our approach is the most general and the most efficient.

     

A high-throughput and high-capacity IPv6 routing lookup system

With the growing number of routing entries, IP routing lookup has become the major performance bottleneck in backbone routers. In this paper, a complete hardware-based routing lookup system is proposed to achieve high-throughput and high-capacity for IPv6. The proposed system is a cache-centric, hash-based architecture that contains a routing lookup application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and a memory set. A hash function is used to reduce lookup time for the routing table and ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) effectively resolves the collision problem. The gate count of the ASIC, excluding the binary content addressable memory (BCAM), is about 5306 gates, using an in-house 0.18 μm CMOS single-poly six-metal standard cell library. The results of post-layout simulations show that the ASIC operates in 3.6 ns so that the routing lookup system approaches 260 Mega lookups per second (Mlps), which is sufficient for 100 Gbps networks. The memory density is good, with each routing entry requiring only 64 bits. Moreover, the routing table only needs 10.24 KB on-chip BCAM, 20.04 KB off-chip TCAM and 29.29 MB DRAM for 3.6 M routing entries in the proposed system.     

Implementing a diffusion model optimized by a hybrid evolutionary algorithm to forecast notebook shipments

Taiwan computer firms need to forecast trends in notebook shipments. The Bass diffusion model has been successfully applied to describe the empirical adoption curve for many new products and technological innovations. In order to improve the parameter estimates, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm, which couples genetic algorithms (GAs) with particle swarm optimization (PSO), is proposed. This hybrid approach can produce more accurate estimates of the parameters for the Bass diffusion model. In addition, the price index plays an important role in the notebook market. Thus, the modified diffusion model is proposed to investigate the forecasting performance for notebook shipments. The results illustrate that a hybrid approach outperforms other methods such as nonlinear algorithm, GA and PSO in terms of mean absolute percentage error.     

A H-QoS-demand personalized home physiological monitoring system over a wireless multi-hop relay network for mobile home healthcare applications

For the elderly and chronic patients with cardiovascular disease who live alone, it is necessary to constantly monitor their physiological parameters, especially the electrocardiogram (ECG), to effectively prevent and control their health condition and even to provide urgent treatment or care while an emergency such as the abnormal variation of heart rate (HR) occurs. In this paper, a wireless in-home physiological monitoring system, based on multi-hop relay communications, which can ubiquitously and continuously monitor the patient's ECG at any time or any place at home without space limit and the “dead spot” due to the extended communication coverage by multi-hop wireless connectivity, is proposed. The system consists of a mobile-care device, which is responsible for capturing and wirelessly sending the patient's ECG data, a wireless multi-hop relay network (WMHRN) that is in charge of relaying the data sent by the former, and a residential gateway (RG), which is responsible for gathering and uploading the received ECG data to the remote care server through the Internet to carry out the patient's health condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. However, in order to assure that the ECG data can be effectively and timely forwarded, from the mobile-care device to the RG through the WMHRN, to meet the healthcare quality of service (H-QoS) demand for reliable and real-time end-to-end ECG transmission, the analysis of WMHRN latency in data-forwarding stage and the deployment consideration of wireless relay nodes are investigated in detail in this work. Moreover, an emergency alert service using short message service (SMS), based on the detection of abnormal variation of HR, is also used in the RG to further enhance the healthcare service quality. A prototype of this system has been developed and implemented. Finally, the experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed system.     

A Fuzzy Ontological Knowledge Document Clustering Methodology

This correspondence presents a novel hierarchical clustering approach for knowledge document self-organization, particularly for patent analysis. Current keyword-based methodologies for document content management tend to be inconsistent and ineffective when partial meanings of the technical content are used for cluster analysis. Thus, a new methodology to automatically interpret and cluster knowledge documents using an ontology schema is presented. Moreover, a fuzzy logic control approach is used to match suitable document cluster(s) for given patents based on their derived ontological semantic webs. Finally, three case studies are used to test the approach. The first test case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for chemical and mechanical polishing retrieved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The second test case analyzed and clustered 100 patent news articles retrieved from online Web sites. The third case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for radio-frequency identification retrieved from WIPO. The results show that the fuzzy ontology-based document clustering approach outperforms the K-means approach in precision, recall, F-measure, and Shannon's entropy.     

Img2Logo: Generating Golden Ratio Logos from Images

Logos are one of the most important graphic design forms that use an abstracted shape to clearly represent the spirit of a community. Among various styles of abstraction, a particular golden-ratio design is frequently employed by designers to create a concise and regular logo. In this context, designers utilize a set of circular arcs with golden ratios (i.e., all arcs are taken from circles whose radii form a geometric series based on the golden ratio) as the design elements to manually approximate a target shape. This error-prone process requires a large amount of time and effort, posing a significant challenge for design space exploration. In this work, we present a novel computational framework that can automatically generate golden ratio logo abstractions from an input image. Our framework is based on a set of carefully identified design principles and a constrained optimization formulation respecting these principles. We also propose a progressive approach that can efficiently solve the optimization problem, resulting in a sequence of abstractions that approximate the input at decreasing levels of detail. We evaluate our work by testing on images with different formats including real photos, clip arts, and line drawings. We also extensively validate the key components and compare our results with manual results by designers to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Moreover, our framework can largely benefit design space exploration via easy specification of design parameters such as abstraction levels, golden circle sizes, etc.