Effects of flash annealing and external magnetic field on magnetic properties of relatively high Nd content (37% by weight) NdFeB alloy

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Post modifications such as alloying element addition and/or heat treatment are applied to improve the magnetic properties of NdFeB permanent...     

Investigation of the effect of light on the electrical parameters of Si/TiO2 heterojunctions produced by anodic oxidation on p-type Si wafer

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Fabrication of heterojunctions of Si combined with TiO2 oxide-based semiconductors is an alternative method to produce cost effective...     

Content authentication and tampering detection of Arabic text: an approach based on zero-watermarking and natural language processing

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Due to the rapid increase in exchange of text information via internet network, the security and the reliability of the digital content has become a major...     

Intelligent Approach for Clustering Mutations’ Nature of COVID-19 Genome

In December 2019, a group of people in Wuhan city of Hubei province of China were found to be affected by an infection called dark etiology pneumonia. The outbreak of this pneumonia infection was declared a deadly disease by the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention on January 9, 2020, named Novel Coronavirus 2019 (nCoV-2019). This nCoV-2019 is now known as COVID-19. There is a big list of infections of this coronavirus which is present in the form of a big family. This virus can cause several diseases that usually develop with a serious problem. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2019-nCoV has been placed as the modern generation of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses, so COVID-19 can repeatedly change its internal genome structure to extend its existence. Understanding and accurately predicting the mutational properties of the genome structure of COVID-19 can form a good leadership role in preventing and fighting against coronavirus. In this research paper, an analytical approach has been presented which is based on the k-means cluster technique of machine learning to find the clusters over the mutational properties of the COVID-19 viruses’ complete genome. This method would be able to act as a promising tool to monitor and track pathogenic infections in their stable and local genetics/hereditary varieties. This paper identifies five main clusters of mutations with as best in most cases in the coronavirus that could help scientists and researchers develop disease control vaccines for the transformation of coronaviruses.     

Performance of ground clay brick in ASR-affected concrete: Effects on expansion, mechanical properties and ASR gel chemistry

The effects of ground clay brick (GCB) on alkali-silica reaction (ASR) expansion as well as on mechanical properties of ASR-affected concrete are investigated. Crushed red clay brick originated from demolished masonry was ground in a laboratory ball mill and replaced for portland cement at levels of 15% and 25% by weight in concrete mixes produced with alkali reactive sand. ASR expansion, compressive strength, flexural strength, and modulus of elasticity of the concrete mixes were evaluated. Effect of GCB on ASR gel chemistry was also studied on Pyrex glass-paste specimens using SEM/EDS (scanning electron microscope equipped with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy). The results indicate that GCB effectively reduces ASR expansion in concrete: associated cracking and loss on mechanical properties are also significantly reduced. SEM study suggests that GCB alters alkali silica gel chemistry thus resulting in a less expansive product.     

Donor-acceptor polymer electrochromes with cyan color: Effect of alkyl chain length on doping processes

A new series of donor-acceptor-donor (D-A-D) type compounds consisting of dialkyl substituted 3,4-propylenedioxythiophene and benzothiadiazole units were synthesized and polymerized chemically and electrochemically to investigate the effect of alkyl chain length on the doping process of the conjugated polymers. It was found that the alkyl chain length plays a key role on both doping processes and the solubility of the polymer. It is also noteworthy that this new series of D-A-D electrochromes transmits or reflects the cyan color of the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) color space in the neutral state which can be switched to transmissive grey when oxidized.     

Determination of benzalkonium chloride preservative in pharmaceutical formulation of eye and ear drops using new potentiometric sensors

A novel approach for determination of low concentrations of the preservative, benzalkonium chloride (BCCl), in pharmaceutical formulation constitutes is presented. New chemically modified carbon paste electrodes (CMCPEs) are developed. The first is based on an ion-association of BCCl with phosphomolybdic acid (PMA) as the ion-exchanger (BC–PM) dissolved in the mixed plasticizers dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and dioctyl sebacate (DOS) encoded sensor A. In the other electrode, encoded sensor B, the plasticizers DBP and dioctyl phthalate (DOP) are more suitable solvent mediators for the paste. These electrodes exhibit a Nernstian slope of 58.2 ± 0.6 and 62.3 ± 0.7 mV/decade in concentration range 1.3 × 10^? 7–1.7 × 10^? 4 M and 2.5 × 10^? 7–1.7 × 10^? 4 M with the limit of detection of 1.0 × 10^? 7 M and 1.6 × 10^? 7 for sensors A and B, respectively. The sensors have short and stable response time 5–8 s, good reproducibility and can be used in pH range of 5.7–8.6. The present electrodes show good discrimination of BCCl from several inorganic, organic ions and some common drug excipients. These characteristics of the electrodes make them useful in successful determination of BCCl in its pharmaceutical preparations (eye and ear drops) and aqueous solutions. The results obtained were satisfactory with excellent percentage recovery comparable and sometimes better than those obtained by other routine methods for the assay.     

Fast parallel prefix logic circuits for n2n round-robin arbitration

An n2n round-robin arbiter (RRA) searches its n inputs for a 1, starting from the highest-priority input. It picks the first 1 and outputs its index in one-hot encoding. RRA aims to be fair to its inputs and maintains fairness by simply rotating the input priorities, i.e., the last arbitrated input becomes the lowest-priority input. Arbiters are used to multiplex the usage of shared resources among requestors as well as in dispatch logic where the purpose is load balancing among multiple resources. Today, arbiters have hundreds of ports and usually need to run at very high clock speeds. This article presents a new gate-level RRA circuit called Thermo Coded-Parallel Prefix Arbiter (TC-PPA) that scales to any number of requestors. It uses parallel prefix network topologies (borrowed from fast carry lookahead adders) to generate a thermometer-coded pointer, thus greatly reducing critical path. Code generators were written not only for TC-PPA but also for the 5 highly competitive circuits in the literature (9 including their variants), and a rich set of timing/area results were obtained using a standard-cell based logic synthesis flow with a novel iterative strategy based on binary search. Synthesis runs include results with wire-load and without. Results show that for 54 or more ports (except 256) TC-PPA offers the best timing (lowest latency) as well as competitive area. Contributions also include transaction-level simulations that show when pipelining is used to boost clock rate, latency and input FIFO sizes are adversely affected, and hence pipelining cannot be indiscriminately exploited to trim clock period.