Disorder in cellulosic fibers

Ruland's concept of an isotropic disorder function is applied to estimate the disorder parameter and the degree of crystallinity in a few cellulosic fibers: two cottons, native ramie, and a high-tenacity rayon. The results indicate an increase in disorder without any change in crystallinity on mercerization of native celluloses. On hydrolysis, with or without a pretreatment of mercerization, the samples exhibit a higher crystallinity, disorder remaining the same as for native celluloses. A ball-milled sample of “amorphous” cellulose is still found to be fairly crystalline with the lowest disorder. On being wetted in water and oven-dried, a distorted form of cellulose II with higher crystallinity and disorder was obtained. The polynosic fiber, Tufcel, has low values for the degree of crystallinity, disorder parameter, as well as crystallite dimension. A strong dependence of the degree of crystallinity on the crystallite size, particularly the lateral, is observed.     

Directional filter bank-based segmentation for improved evaluation of nondestructive evaluation images

This paper introduces a directional filter bank (DFB) for segmentation of NDE images containing directional information. The DFB is used to split an image into a desired number of sub-band images with each sub-band image containing features belonging only to a given angular range. The DFB is a two-channel decomposition employing the Quincunx sampling matrix and the diamond half band filter pair. The DFB is also designed to incorporate the property of perfect reconstruction or alias free reconstruction. Applications of the DFB towards segmenting C-scan images of fiber-reinforced composites, magnetic flux leakage (MFL) images of seamless tubes, IR images of solar cell panels and optical images for the computation of area coverage in a shot-peening process are discussed.     

Microstructure evolution during batch annealing

Design of industrial annealing cycles requires recrystallization and grain growth studies, which are typically carried out under isothermal laboratory condition. The kinetics coefficients of these phase transformations are obtained from such studies, which are subsequently used in designing the industrial nonisothermal cycles using the additivity principles. However, the strong heating rate effects on the grain growth kinetics necessitate such kinetics studies using industrial thermal profiles. In the present work, the hot and cold spot cycles of an industrial batch annealing cycle for AIK grade steel have been simulated in a programmable laboratory furnace. Subsequently, the effect of annealing temperature, soaking time, and heating rate on the microstructural features, such as grain size distribution, grain shape anisotropy, and grain orientation, have been investigated through extensive quantitative microscopy. The implications of these results on the design of industrial batch annealing cycles have been discussed.     

Gaming Social Capital: Exploring Civic Value in Multiplayer Video Games

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming‐related community construct that is shown to be a positive antecedent in predicting both face‐to‐face social capital and civic participation.     

Controllability results for damped second-order impulsive neutral integrodifferential systems with nonlocal conditions

In this paper, we establish a set of sufficient conditions for the controllability of damped second-order impulsive neutral integrodifferential systems with nonlocal initial conditions in Banach spaces. The approach used is the Sadovskii fixed point theorem combined with a noncompact condition on the cosine family of operators. An example is presented to illustrate the result.     

Energy and Trust Management Framework for MANET using Clustering Algorithm

In General, Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) has limited energy resources, and it cannot recharge itself. This research goal focuses on building a power management scheme that saves energy in the MANET. Due to power instability, there is a chance that cluster heads fail and function incorrectly in cluster-based routing. As a result, instability occurs with the cluster heads while collecting data and communicating with others effectively. This work focuses on detecting the unstable cluster heads, which are replaced by other nodes implementing the envisaged self-configurable cluster mechanism. A self-configurable cluster mechanism with a k-means protocol approach is proposed to designate cluster heads effectively. The proposed k-means procedure is based on periodic irregular cluster head rotations or altering the number of clusters. We also propose a trust management mechanism in this research to detect and avoid MANET vulnerabilities. Because of the continuously changing topology and limited resources (power, bandwidth, computing), the trust management algorithm should only use local data. Consequently, compared to traditional protocols, the proposed approach with the k-means procedure and its experimental results show lower power usage and provide an optimal system for trust management.

     

Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) Synchronization and Peak Average Power Ratio (PAPR) Minimization for Energy Efficient Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) for 5G Wireless Communication

Wireless Personal Communications - In the recent past, the Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) plays significant role in mobile technology for energy efficient wireless 5G communication. The Non...     

Secure Key Management Based Mobile Authentication in Cloud

Authentication is important to the security of user data in a mobile cloud environment. Because of the server’s user credentials, it is subject to attacks. To maintain data authentication, a novel authentication mechanism is proposed. It consists of three independent phases: Registration, login, and authentication and key agreement. The user registers with the Registration Center (RC) by producing a secret number that isn’t stored in the phone, which protects against privileged insider attacks. The user and server generate a nonce for dynamic user identity and agree on a session secret key for safe communication. The passwords are not stored on the computer or provided in plain text, they are resistant to replay, guessing, and stolen verification attacks. The suggested protocol uses a one-way hash function and XOR operations, with the client having remote access to a large number of servers over a secure communication channel. Concentrates on HMAC and SHA3 for Collision Free Hashing and to overcome length extension attacks. HMACs are substantially less affected by collisions than their underlying hashing algorithms alone. So adding an HMAC to an MD5 or SHA hash would make it substantially more difficult to break via a rainbow table.     

Laser-treated austenitic steel and nickel alloy for human implants

The recent research in biocompatible materials has been useful in replacing and supporting the fractured natural human bones/joints. Under some condition, negative reaction like release of ions from the bare metal toward the human body fluid leads to corrosion. In this proposed research paper, the biocompatibility of the laser surface-modified austenitic stainless steel (SS316L) and nickel-based superalloy (Inconel 718) was studied. The investigation on laser-modified surfaces is evaluated through electrochemical polarization analysis using simulated body fluid (SBF). The samples subjected to electrochemical polarization analysis were characterized by optical image analysis, SEM, EDS, and XRD analysis. It was inferred that laser surface-modified materials provided enhanced corrosion resistance and bare nickel alloy is more susceptible to corrosion by SBF.     

Location and Sizing of Defects in Coated Metallic Pipes Using Limited View Scattered Data in Frequency Domain

The inverse problem of reconstructing the location and size of defects in a coated metallic pipe from single frequency limited view electromagnetic scattered field is considered. Specifically, the paper addresses the problem of assessing shape changes in the shadow region entailed by limited view data in 2D by operating in an intermediate size parameter (ka) range. The inverse scattering problem is formulated as a non-linear optimization problem solved through genetic algorithm that seeks to minimize in the least-squared sense the difference between measured data and simulated data through iterations of the solution to a forward problem. The hybrid finite element boundary integral formulations were used to solve the forward problem of coated metallic pipe with defects. The proposed inversion methodology was applied for shadow region shape change assessment to determine whether a metal pipe is coated or not, and to reconstruct the location and size of corrosion-like defect, over a range of size parameters. The study is carried out using transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarized fields. To understand the effect of coating on backscattered fields, parametric studies are conducted using numerical data. A range for size parameter \(2.0\le ka\le 4\) was found to produce the highest contrast between defect free pipe and coated metallic pipes with defects in the deep shadow region. The experiments are carried out using vector network analyzer in an anechoic chamber. The inversion results obtained using measured data were found be in good agreement with inversion results obtained using synthetic data. Estimated extent of corrosion in deep shadow region of a coated metallic pipe was found to be within 9 % of actual extent of corrosion.