Effect of oxygen partial pressure on the microstructural and physical properties on nanocrystalline tin oxide films grown by plasma oxidation after thermal deposition from pure Sn targets

In this work, microstructural and physical properties were studied in the tin oxide films deposited by thermal evaporation of Sn films on stainless steel substrates followed by in situ D.C. plasma oxidation at 200 °C substrate temperature. The surface properties were studied by scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy and four-point probe electrical resistivity. The typical calculated grain size of the films deposited by thermal evaporation was between 28 nm and 66 nm and the texture structure was found to be dependent on the thermal deposition pressure. A cassiterite structure of SnO₂ was produced by D.C. plasma oxidation with the main diffraction peaks of the (101), (200), (211), (310) and (221) planes at the 25% and 50% O₂ partial pressure conditions. However, at 12.5% O₂ partial pressure oxidation conditions, amorphous tin oxide structure and crystalline SnO phases were detected. Increasing thermal deposition pressure resulted in preferential texture formation at (211) and (310) planes. The surface structure investigation of the produced films by SEM and AFM studies showed large SnO₂ islands with approximately 1.0 μm and 1.5 μm sized nodules, and they are called as grape-like structures. The grape-like grains possess nano grains, which are between 20 nm and 30 nm in diameter calculated by Scherer's formula. The grape-like grains were seen to be separated by large cavities and the size of these cavities and nano grains was seen to be larger when the O₂ partial pressure is increased. The four-point probe resistivity of the films, grown at different oxidation temperatures, decreased with the increase in oxygen partial pressure. The values of resistivity for SnO₂ phase were measured as low as 10⁻⁵ Ω-cm and observed to decrease with increasing thermal deposition pressure and oxygen partial pressure.     

Investigation of breakage behavior of different mineralogical and morphological characteristic pumices

The objective of this study is to analyze dry grinding behavior of four different pumices in terms of Bond grindability value, selection and breakage parameters values. For this purpose, firstly, Bond grindability test were made for four pumices. Then, eight different mono-size fractions for each of pumices were carried out between 1.7 and 0.106 mm formed by a \({\surd 2}\) sieve series, and ground batch wise in a laboratory ball mill for determination of breakage parameters. Finally, S _i and B _i,j equations were determined from the size distributions at different grinding times, and the model parameters (S _i , a _T , α, γ, β and \({\phi_{j}}\)) were compared for four different pumice samples.     

The Impacts of Heat Treatment on Lap Joint Shear Strength of Black Pine Wood

This study was conducted to determine the impacts of heat treatment on lap shear strength, density, and mass loss of black pine wood. In the study, black pine wood boards bonded with polyurethane were subjected to temperatures of 160, 180, and 200°C for durations of 2 and 6 hours. Specimens having two layers were prepared from untreated and treated wood for mechanical testing of bond lines. Data were analyzed using variance analysis and Tukey's test to determine the impacts of changes in density and mass of heat-treated black pine wood on lap shear strength. The results indicated that the lap shear strength of black pine wood decreased as the intensity of heat treatment increased. The results also indicated that the minimum and maximum percentage decreases of lap shear strength were approximately 27% for 160°C and 2 hours and 78% for 200°C and 6 hours.     

Effects of structural parameters on compressibility and soiling properties of machine woven carpets

Compressibility performance of the machine woven carpet after a static or dynamic loading expresses the texture deformation tendency of the carpet. This study is an experimental attempt to investigate the effects of pile height and pile density on compressibility and soiling property by dynamic loading, prolonged heavy static loading, compression recovery and artificial soiling tests. In this study, a total of 12 carpet samples with three different pile heights and four different pile densities were tested. As a result of this study, it was seen that higher pile density provides a lower thickness loss and so a lower level of texture deformation. On the other hand, pile height has a preventing effect for texture deformation for static loading and compression recovery tests whereas there is no considerable effect on dynamic loading test. There is no considerable difference between the soiling properties of the samples.     

Ensemble learning of diffractive optical networks

A plethora of research advances have emerged in the fields of optics and photonics that benefit from harnessing the power of machine learning.Specifically,there has been a revival of interest in optical computing hardware due to its potential advantages for machine learning tasks in terms of parallelization,power efficiency and computation speed.Diffractive deep neural networks(D²NNs)form such an optical computing framework that benefits from deep learning-based design of successive diffractive layers to all-optically process information as the input light diffracts through these passive layers.D²NNs have demonstrated success in various tasks,including object classification,the spectral encoding of information,optical pulse shaping and imaging.Here,we substantially improve the inference performance of diffractive optical networks using feature engineering and ensemble learning.After independently training 1252 D²NNs that were diversely engineered with a variety of passive input filters,we applied a pruning algorithm to select an optimized ensemble of D²NNs that collectively improved the image classification accuracy.Through this pruning,we numerically demonstrated that ensembles of N=14 and N=30 D²NNs achieve blind testing accuracies of 61.14±0.23%and 62.13±0.05%,respectively,on the classification of GFAR-10 test images,providing an inference improvennent of>16%compared to the average performance of the individual D²NNs within each ensemble.These results constitute the highest inference accuracies achieved to date by any diffractive optical neural network design on the same dataset and might provide a significant leap to extend the application space of diffractive optical image classification and machine vision systems.     

A study of digital image analysis on the acrylamide derivative monomers induced apoptosis in rat cerebrum

Nowadays, apoptosis is mostly evaluated visually in histological studies. By using the quantitative digital image analysis, this study aimed to investigate the effect of acrylamide‐based monomers (acrylamide [AAm], methacrylamide [MAAm], N‐isopropylacrylamide [NIPAm]) on the cerebrum tissues in rats, which are the most common water‐soluble monomers in the production of polymeric hydrogels used as biomaterials. The Wistar albino rats weighing ~220–240 g were divided into control and three test groups. The control group received 1 mL of saline, and the test groups received 1 mL of aqueous 50 mg/kg/day intramuscular injection of AAm, MAAm, and NIPAm, respectively. At the end of the experiments, brain tissues of all rats euthanized by intramuscular injection of sodium pentobarbital were removed. Terminal deoxynucleotide transferase dUTP nick and labeling (TUNEL) method was applied to brain tissue sections. The monomers have been shown to cause apoptosis due to oxidative stress in cerebrum tissue. Based on apoptosis by tunneling method, quantitative digital image analysis of cell fragments was performed with Olympus cellSens Dimension 1.15 software, and the number, total count area, selected area, average area, and ROI% values of the fragments were found. In addition, the total area and ROI% values of the fragments increased linearly with increasing the molar mass of monomers from the digital image analysis data. Quantitative digital image analysis can facilitate the monitoring of apoptosis caused by the oxidative stress of monomers used in the production of the biomaterials.     

A quality assessment of public water fountains and relation to human health: a case study from Yozgat,Turkey

Public fountains are very common and everyday people appreciate the benefits a water fountain can bring. However, consumption of public fountain water in some country has decreased because of growing concerns that constituents in fountain water may have adverse effects on health. A few studies have examined the safety of public fountains, proposing only limited evidence of fountain‐related health issues in Turkey. Most of these public fountains are sourced from natural springs in Turkey. In this study, a 177 fountain water and 32 rock samples were analysed for source and quality of water. The geology of the region has the direct impact on the quality of the public fountain water. The results indicate that the level of some elements exceeded the limit values determined by WHO and US.EPA. The most striking high values were observed for iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), aluminum (Al), arsenic (As) and bromine (Br) concentrations.     

HANDS: a multimodal dataset for modeling toward human grasp intent inference in prosthetic hands

Intelligent Service Robotics - Upper limb and hand functionality is critical to many activities of daily living, and the amputation of one can lead to significant functionality loss for...     

Antimicrobial Activity of Ozone against Pathogenic Oral Microorganisms on Different Denture Base Resins

ABSTRACT

The present study aimed to evaluate the antimicrobial effect of gaseous ozone against specific oral pathogens on denture base resins. 1080 round samples were prepared (10mm-diameter, 2mm-thickness). Candida albicans, Streptococcus mutans, Streptococcus gordonii, and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, polyamide-Deflex, heat-cured polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA)-QC-20, and cold-cured-PMMA-Meliodent. The doses and durations: 25, 50 and 100µg/ml, 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes. For Cell viability (CV) MTT was used. 100µg/ml was most effective dose for C. albicans, S .gordonii, and A. actinomycetemcomitans were in heat-cured-PMMA and polyamide for S.mutans. For polyamide, lowest CV was 43% in S.mutans and A.actinomycetemcomitans. CV of heat-cure and cold-cure PMMA were 31% and 32% in S.gordonii, respectively. CV was similar for all resins and durations in S.mutans and A.actinomycetemcomitans and for polyamide for C.albicans and for heat-cure PMMA for S.gordonii. 30-min ozone application killed 80% of all microorganisms in all resins except for C.albicans in polyamide (65% cell death) and cold-cure PMMA (57% cell death). Optimal dose/duration combination was 100 µg/ml-10 min. Gaseous ozone can be considered as an effective cleansing agent for denture base resins.