Buckypapers of 4,4′-oxydianiline-modified polyvinylchloride and functional nano-filler obtained by resin infusion method

This study provides information on the fabrication and characterization of polyvinylchloride (PVC) buckypaper composite using resin infusion method. PVC modified with 4,4′-oxydianiline (ODA) was infiltrated through buckypapers made of purified multi-walled carbon nanotubes (P-MWCNTs) and functionalized MWCNTs (F-MWCNTs). The increases in P-MWCNT and F-MWCNT contents were investigated on the physical properties of BP-PVC-ODA/PEG (polyethylene glycol)/P-MWCNT and BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/F-MWCNT buckypaper composites. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy was used for the functional group confirmation which proved the PVC modification and functionality of MWCNTs. The scanning electron micrographs of BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/F-MWCNT showed that intercalation of cross-linked polymer with nanotube produced a polymer-coated F-MWCNT mesh. The maximum degradation temperature (T _max) of functional composite BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/F-MWCNT 0.05 (484 °C) was higher than that of non-functional BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/P-MWCNT 0.05 (473 °C). The glass transition temperature (T _g) of BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/F-MWCNT 0.05 was 225 °C, while BP-PVC-ODA/PEG/F-MWCNT 0.03 yielded a lower T _g of 214 °C. Tensile strength of the functional buckypaper was also found to increase to 37.3 MPa with filler loading. According to X-ray diffraction, the amorphous character of buckypaper showed a trend towards crystal formation with filler loading. P-MWCNT-based buckypaper showed an electrical conductivity up to 4.12 × 10^?1 S/cm; lower than the electrical conductivity of functional buckypaper (1.98 S/cm). The results demonstrated that the resin infusion technique was a successful method to achieve high performance buckypapers compared with F-MWCNTs.     

Localization of Static Passive RFID Tags with Mobile Reader in Two Dimensional Tag Matrix

Wireless Personal Communications - Tag localization in passive UHF RFID has become increasingly important, since the RFID system was introduced. Primarily the localization techniques in RFID are...     

Parent–Daughter Confusion Component: A New Approach for the Construction of Nonlinear Confusion Component

The nonlinear confusion component is one of an integral part of any modern block cipher. This nonlinear confusion component is used to hides the relationship between the ciphertext and the key. The primary objective of this article is to formulate a new mechanism for the construction this confusion component. Usually substitution box (S-box) is used to achieve this kind of characteristics in block ciphers. We have utilized deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences for the construction of new S-boxes with optimized cryptographic characteristics. The projected technique fundamentally optimized the DNA sequences along with traditional confusion component to generate a completely new S-box. The obtained S-boxes have the same cryptographic strength as a parent S-box have.

     

Novel Genetic Dysregulations and Oxidative Damage in Fusarium graminearum Induced by Plant Defense Eliciting Psychrophilic Bacillus atrophaeus TS1

This study elaborates inter-kingdom signaling mechanisms, presenting a sustainable and eco-friendly approach to combat biotic as well as abiotic stress in wheat. Fusarium graminearum is a devastating pathogen causing head and seedling blight in wheat, leading to huge yield and economic losses. Psychrophilic Bacillus atrophaeus strain TS1 was found as a potential biocontrol agent for suppression of F. graminearum under low temperature by carrying out extensive biochemical and molecular studies in comparison with a temperate biocontrol model strain Bacillus amyloliquefaciens FZB42 at 15 and 25 °C. TS1 was able to produce hydrolytic extracellular enzymes as well as antimicrobial lipopeptides, i.e., surfactin, bacillomycin, and fengycin, efficiently at low temperatures. The Bacillus strain-induced oxidative cellular damage, ultrastructural deformities, and novel genetic dysregulations in the fungal pathogen as the bacterial treatment at low temperature were able to downregulate the expression of newly predicted novel fungal genes potentially belonging to necrosis inducing protein families (fgHCE and fgNPP1). The wheat pot experiments conducted at 15 and 25 °C revealed the potential of TS1 to elicit sudden induction of plant defense, namely, H₂O₂ and callose enhanced activity of plant defense-related enzymes and induced over-expression of defense-related genes which accumulatively lead to the suppression of F. graminearum and decreased diseased leaf area.     

miRNAs in Regulation of Tumor Microenvironment,Chemotherapy Resistance,Immunotherapy Modulation and miRNA Therapeutics in Cancer

miRNAs are 20–22 long nucleotide non-coding ribonucleic acid molecules critical to the modulation of molecular pathways. Immune evasion and the establishment of a suitable tumor microenvironment are two major contributors that support tumor invasion and metastasis. Tumorigenic miRNAs support these two hallmarks by desensitizing important tumor-sensitive regulatory cells such as dendritic cells, M1 macrophages, and T helper cells towards tumors while supporting infiltration and proliferation of immune cells like Treg cells, tumor-associated M2 macrophages that promote self-tolerance and chronic inflammation. miRNAs have a significant role in enhancing the efficacies of immunotherapy treatments like checkpoint blockade therapy, adoptive T cell therapy, and oncolytic virotherapy in cancer. A clear understanding of the role of miRNA can help scientists to formulate better-targeted treatment modalities. miRNA therapeutics have emerged as diverse class of nucleic acid-based molecules that can suppress oncogenic miRNAs and promote the expression of tumor suppressor miRNAs.     

Morphological Approach for Nonlinear Flow and Heat Transfer in Complex Bio-Composite Material

ABSTRACT

The bio-based materials have experienced in recent years a relevant evolution in construction and for many building applications. Despite the efforts to develop new solutions to achieve the objectives of numerical characterizations, a few researches in this area have been carried out using a heterogeneous wood-cement composite. This study is based on a constructive approach using the finite volume method in order to generate a numerical model capable of reproducing the equivalent transfer properties of a wood-cement composite. The challenge is to understand, design, and control this multiphase inhomogeneous structure and predict transfers and flows within the community in order to achieve an optimal functionality. Experimental measurements and microscopic characterization using X-ray microtomography were performed to compare and demonstrate the method validation. The comparative results demonstrate a less than 10% deviation between the measurements and the simulations of the equivalent thermal properties. Thus, thermal conductivity and permeability, under different medium configurations, were characterized. Therefore, it was observed that these properties depend strongly on the porosity and the pore distribution in the continuous phase. Moreover, these two parameters are highly dependent on cement percentages in the structure.     

Identification of important citations by exploiting research articles’ metadata and cue-terms from content

Citations play a pivotal role in indicating various aspects of scientific literature. Quantitative citation analysis approaches have been used over the decades to measure the impact factor of journals, to rank researchers or institutions, to discover evolving research topics etc. Researchers doubted the pure quantitative citation analysis approaches and argued that all citations are not equally important; citation reasons must be considered while counting. In the recent past, researchers have focused on identifying important citation reasons by classifying them into important and non-important classes rather than individually classifying each reason. Most of contemporary citation classification techniques either rely on full content of articles, or they are dominated by content based features. However, most of the time content is not freely available as various journal publishers do not provide open access to articles. This paper presents a binary citation classification scheme, which is dominated by metadata based parameters. The study demonstrates the significance of metadata and content based parameters in varying scenarios. The experiments are performed on two annotated data sets, which are evaluated by employing SVM, KLR, Random Forest machine learning classifiers. The results are compared with the contemporary study that has performed similar classification employing rich list of content-based features. The results of comparisons revealed that the proposed model has attained improved value of precision (i.e., 0.68) just by relying on freely available metadata. We claim that the proposed approach can serve as the best alternative in the scenarios wherein content in unavailable.

     

Comprehensive evaluation of h-index and its extensions in the domain of mathematics

Scientometrics - Until the late 90’s, conventional bibliometric indices such as, publication count, citation count, and number of co-authors have extensively been employed by the scientific...