Electrical conductivity of concrete containing silica fume

The influence of silica fume on concrete properties represents an important technical research. In general, silica fume tends to improve both mechanical characteristics and durability of concrete. Thus the electrical properties of concrete containing silica fume can be studied to clarify its physical performance during hydration. The electrical conductivity of neat cement, mortar and concrete pastes was measured during setting and hardening. The ordinary Portland cement was partially replaced by different amounts of silica fume by weight. The changes in the electrical conductivity were reported during setting and hardening after gauging with water. The results of this study showed that the electrical conductivity can be used as an indication for the setting characteristics as well as the structural changes of the hardened pastes made with and without silica fume.     

Dielectric relaxation of monoesters based poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) copolymer

A series of alkyl-grafted copolymers based on styrene-maleic anhydride (SMA) copolymers were synthesized by esterification of SMA with several long chain normal aliphatic alcohols. The prepared copolymers were characterized by FT-IR and ¹H NMR and DSC. The dielectric behavior of these copolymers was investigated in the frequency 20–10⁵ Hz and temperature −40 to 180 °C ranges. Two relaxation processes were observed, α, and β-relaxation. The former is associated with the glass-rubber transition and is characterized by the Vogel–Fulcher–Tammann temperature dependence and the latter relaxation is related to the local motion of the ester side groups attached to the polymer backbone. The apparent activation energy for the β-relaxation was found to depend significantly on the alkyl chain length. The dielectric analysis of the β-relaxation process detected is discussed.     

Study of Crystallization Kinetics in Glasses along the Diopside–Ca-Tschermak Join

We report on the thermal stability and crystallization kinetics of the glasses in the diopside (CaMgSi₂O₆)–Ca-Tschermak (CaAl₂SiO₆) system. Four glasses with compositions corresponding to different diopside/Ca-Tschermak ratio were studied. Structural investigations on the glasses have been made by employing Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Activation energies for structural relaxation and viscous flow have been calculated using the data obtained from differential thermal analysis. The existence of glass-in-glass phase separation was observed in all the glasses. Kinetic fragility of the glasses along with other thermal parameters have also been calculated. Nonisothermal crystallization kinetic studies have been employed to study the mechanism of crystallization in all the four glasses. The Avrami parameter for the glass powders is ∼2, indicating the existence of intermediate mechanism of crystallization. Crystallization sequence in the glasses has been followed by X-ray diffraction analysis, scanning electron microscopy, and FTIR.     

Organotin polymers. VII. Copolymerization of triphenyltin methacrylate with some acrylic and methacrylic acid esters

The monomer reactivity ratios for the copolymerization of triphenyltin methacrylate with methyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and butyl acrylate have been found to be r₁ = 2.58, r₂ = 0.66, r₁ = 2.37, r₂ = 0.43, and r₁ = 1.27, r_0.39 = 0.39, respectively. also, the copolymerization parameters of triphenyltin methacrylate with methyl methacrylate and butyl methacrylate were as follows: r₁ = 0.94, r₂ = 0.99, and r₁ = 0.68, r₂ = 0.83, respectively. Copolymerization reactions were carried out in solution at 70°C using 1 mol % AIBN, and the copolymer compositions were determined by tin analysis. The sequence distribution of the alternating diad fractions for the systems studied were calculated at various feed compositions. The structure of the triphenyltin methacrylate monomer as well as its azeotropic copolymer with butyl methacrylate were investigated by IR spectroscopy.     

Spectrophotormetric Determination of Quinolinium Acid Esters with 2, 4-Dinitrophenylhydrazine

Carbonyl compound. react with 2, 4-dinitrophtnylhydrazin. to form the corresponding hydrsiones. These hydrazones in the prrsence of lN NaOH give a reddish brown color which can be utilized for colorimatric analysis. This method is used for the spectrophoto-metric determination of quinolinium-6-carboxy-l-metliyl- iodide. Furthermota 2. 4-dinitrophenylhydrazine is utilized to kinetic measurements of the rate of hydrolysie of the quinolinium acid esters.     

Human Action Recognition in Videos Using Kinematic Features and Multiple Instance Learning

We propose a set of kinematic features that are derived from the optical flow for human action recognition in videos. The set of kinematic features includes divergence, vorticity, symmetric and antisymmetric flow fields, second and third principal invariants of flow gradient and rate of strain tensor, and third principal invariant of rate of rotation tensor. Each kinematic feature, when computed from the optical flow of a sequence of images, gives rise to a spatiotemporal pattern. It is then assumed that the representative dynamics of the optical flow are captured by these spatiotemporal patterns in the form of dominant kinematic trends or kinematic modes. These kinematic modes are computed by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the spatiotemporal volumes of the kinematic features. For classification, we propose the use of multiple instance learning (MIL) in which each action video is represented by a bag of kinematic modes. Each video is then embedded into a kinematic-mode-based feature space and the coordinates of the video in that space are used for classification using the nearest neighbor algorithm. The qualitative and quantitative results are reported on the benchmark data sets.     

Robust adaptive fuzzy logic power system stabilizer

This paper introduces a robust adaptive fuzzy controller as a power system stabilizer (RFPSS) used to damp inter-area modes of oscillation following disturbances in power systems. In contrast to the IEEE standard multi-band power system stabilizer (MB-PSS), robust adaptive fuzzy-based stabilizers are more efficient because they cope with oscillations at different operating points. The proposed controller adopts a dynamic inversion approach. Since feedback linearization is practically imperfect, components that ensure robust and adaptive performance are included in the control law to compensate for modelling errors and achieve acceptable tracking errors. Two fuzzy systems are implemented. The first system models the nominal values of the system’s nonlinearities. The second system is an adaptive one that compensates for modelling errors. A feedback linearization-based control law is implemented using the identified model. The gains of the controller are tuned via a particle swarm optimization routine to ensure system stability and minimum sum of the squares of the speed deviations. A bench-mark problem of a 4-machine 2-area power system is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller and to show its superiority over other conventional stabilizers used in the literature.     

Optimized SVD-based robust watermarking in the fractional Fourier domain

Digital watermarking is one of the most effective methods for protecting multimedia from different kind of threats. It has been used for many purposes, like copyright protection, ownership identification, tamper detection, etc. Many watermarking applications require embedding techniques that provide robustness against common watermarking attacks, like compression, noise, filtering, etc. In this paper, an optimized robust watermarking method is proposed using Fractional Fourier Transform and Singular Value Decomposition. The approach provides a secure way for watermarking through the embedding parameters that are required for the watermark extraction. It is a block-based method, where each watermark bit is embedded in its corresponding image block. First, the transform is applied to each block, and then the singular values are evaluated through which the embedding modification is performed. The optimum fractional powers, of the transform, and the embedding strength factor are evaluated through a Meta-heuristic optimization to optimize the watermark imperceptibility and robustness. The Artificial Bee Colony is used as the Meta-heuristic optimization method. A fitness function is employed, at the optimization process, through which the maximum achievable robustness can be provided without degrading the watermarking quality below a predetermined quality threshold Qth. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a comparison with recent watermarking techniques in terms of the watermarking performance. The watermarking quality and robustness are evaluated for different quality threshold values. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a better quality compared to that of other existing watermarking methods. On the other hand, the robustness is examined against the most common applied attacks. It is noticed that the proposed method can achieve a higher robustness degree when decreasing the quality threshold value.