The significance of carbon nanotubes on styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) and SBR modified mortar

A New approach is introduced to incorporate multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) in cementitious materials. The MWCNTs are dispersed in styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) matrix before mixing the matrix with cement. Surfactants have been successfully applied to enhance the dispersion and functionalization of MWCNTs in SBR. The significance of using this MWCNTs–SBR nanocomposite on the mechanical characteristics including compressive and tensile strengths and microstructural features of latex modified mortar (LMM) were examined. Subsequently, the significance of the functionalized MWCNTs on surface chemistry, microstructure and thermal stability of SBR were characterized. MWCNTs were found to be a useful additive for enhancing the mechanical response and thermal stability of SBR. MWCNTs–SBR nanocomposite was observed to be able to bridge micro-cracks in the LMM which helped enhancing its mechanical properties. The ability of MWCNTs to enhance the mechanical response of SBR polymer matrix might be attributed to chemical bond that functionalized MWCNTs can establish with the SBR polymer matrix. The enhanced MWCNTs–SBR nanocomposite gave rise to improved microstructural features of the LMM. Microstructural investigations showed MWCNTs were well dispersed in and bonded to the SBR matrix.     

Innovative Hetero-Associative Memory Encoder (HAMTE) for Palmprint Template Protection

Many types of research focus on utilizing Palmprint recognition in user identification and authentication. The Palmprint is one of biometric authentication (something you are) invariable during a person’s life and needs careful protection during enrollment into different biometric authentication systems. Accuracy and irreversibility are critical requirements for securing the Palmprint template during enrollment and verification. This paper proposes an innovative HAMTE neural network model that contains Hetero-Associative Memory for Palmprint template translation and projection using matrix multiplication and dot product multiplication. A HAMTE-Siamese network is constructed, which accepts two Palmprint templates and predicts whether these two templates belong to the same user or different users. The HAMTE is generated for each user during the enrollment phase, which is responsible for generating a secure template for the enrolled user. The proposed network secures the person’s Palmprint template by translating it into an irreversible template (different features space). It can be stored safely in a trusted/untrusted third-party authentication system that protects the original person’s template from being stolen. Experimental results are conducted on the CASIA database, where the proposed network achieved accuracy close to the original accuracy for the unprotected Palmprint templates. The recognition accuracy deviated by around 3%, and the equal error rate (EER) by approximately 0.02 compared to the original data, with appropriate performance (approximately 13 ms) while preserving the irreversibility property of the secure template. Moreover, the brute-force attack has been analyzed under the new Palmprint protection scheme.     

ERP: a literature survey

Most of organizations have a “functional structure,” which is composed of various functional units. In some cases, each functional unit works towards their own goals and objectives, rather than the organizational goals. This is further aggravated because information flow is restricted by functions, and even when other functional units want to take a systemic view, they do not have the needed information to do so. These are the issues addressed by “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP) software solutions providing a common and consistent system to capture information organization-wide, with minimum redundancy. Today, many organizations acquire and implement ERP to improve their operational performance and create strategic value; however, they fail to achieve these objective due to lack of knowledge and better understanding of ERP and its lifecycle. Although, so far, hundreds of research article are published separately focusing on ERP and various issues related to its lifecycle and management, there is no survey and overview of the article published in different top-tier journals. We believe that a survey of the articles related to ERP provides better understanding of ERP and attempts to create an information bank of the published articles these in turn, contribute to improving the performance of an enterprise in terms of achieving its strategic value creation goals. In this study, we attempt to summarize our survey and review of the articles related to ERP.     

Synthesis of Polystyrene/Hydrophobic SiO2 Composite Particles via Oil‐in‐Water Pickering Emulsion Polymerization

The aim of this work is to present a facile Pickering emulsion polymerization method for the synthesis of submicron polystyrene/SiO₂ core/shell composite particles. The commercial hydrophobic SiO₂ nanoparticles were used as stabilizing agent for creating a stable oil‐in‐water emulsion. Although the adsorption of hydrophobic SiO₂ nanoparticles in the emulsion system was unfavorable in terms of thermodynamics, by ultrasound treatment, self‐assembly of hydrophobic SiO₂ nanoparticles effectively stabilized oil‐in‐water Pickering emulsions during polymerization. Using 3 wt.% SiO₂ nanoparticles (based on styrene monomer) and 1:10 volume ratio of styrene monomer:water, the composite particles having average size of 790 nm and relatively narrow particles distribution were produced. With decreasing the volume ratio, smaller composite particles were created. Results from scanning electron microscope revealed that SiO₂ nanoparticles were located exclusively at the surface of the polystyrene latex particles. The SiO₂ content, determined by thermogravimetric analysis, was 12.6 wt.% in the composite particles. The route reported here may be used for the preparation of other composite nanostructures. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 59:E195–E199, 2019. © 2018 Society of Plastics Engineers     

A cleaner enzymatic approach for producing non-phthalate plasticiser to replace toxic-based phthalates

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Dioctyl phthalate (DOP) is industrially commonly used as a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plasticiser. As DOP does not form a chemical link with PVC, it...     

Effect of Succinonitrile on Electrical,Structural and Thermal Properties of PVA-Based Polymer Electrolyte for Magnesium Battery

This paper report the synthesis and properties of a series of composite polymer electrolytes formed by dispersion of a non-ionic organic plastic material SN （succinonitrile） into poly（vinyl alcohol） complexed with magnesium acid salt. SEM （scanning electron microscope） images of different SN concentrations of films revealed that large open pore structure were also frequently present, when SN content increase up to 7.5 wt%. The addition of SN greatly enhances ionic conductivities of the electrolytes which is due to the high polarity and diffusivity of SN. The Mg2~ （magnesium ion） ion conduction is confirmed from impedance spectroscopy and transport number measurements. The highest conducting sample in the plasticized system was used to fabricate Mg （magnesium） battery with configuration Mg/SPE/TiO2. The discharge capacity of the fabricated battery was 17.5 mAh/gm.     

Prediction of the Groundwater Rebound Process in a Backfilled Open Cut Mine Using an Artificial Neural Network

A neural network model was used to predict the groundwater rebound process after cessation of dewatering at a restored open cut coal site in the East Midlands area of the UK. Time (days after dewatering), water table levels in the aquifer and the backfilled site, hydraulic conductivity of the aquifer and backfilled site, and precipitation were used as input. The output of the network was the water table height, until the water table reached its equilibrium position. A feed-forward artificial neural network that uses batch gradient descent with a momentum-learning algorithm and 6-1-6-1 arrangement was found capable of predicting the groundwater rebound process. Predicted values were very close to the monitored results. The correlation coefficient values were 0.98221 for the training set, and 0.99329, 0.99499, 0.98667, 0.98289, and 0.97141 during the testing stage for the five monitoring points, showing that the model prediction was satisfactory.     

A Mobility Solution for Hazardous Areas Based on 6LoWPAN

In a critical environment, e.g. in a factory where an employee faces hazardous conditions, monitoring the health status of the employee is important. Thus, continuous connectivity of the employee to the network is the main concern of such networks. In this paper, we have proposed a decentralized approach for mobility management of mobile nodes in hazardous areas like factory. The proposed mobility structure for hazardous areas, called MSHA, organizes static nodes as a tree for an efficient routing, automatic addressing, and handling movement of mobile nodes. MSHA is capable of handling multiple failures of static nodes which disconnect a mobile node from the network. MSHA is highly scalable regarding the number of mobile nodes and the size of the covered monitoring area. The proposed scheme is evaluated based on different factors. The results reveal the superiority of MSHA compared with the previous works. The promising analytical results manifest the performance (about 20%) of MSHA specifically in reducing packet loss and hand-off delay caused by the failure of the static nodes. The performance does not degrade with increasing the number of mobile nodes.