Non-Isothermal crystallization of isotactic polypropylene in dotriacontane. I: Effects of dilution,cooling rate,and nucleating agent addition on overall crystallization kinetics

The overall non-isothermal crystallization kinetics for nucleated and non-nucleated isotactic polypropylene (iPP) in dotriacontane systems was investigated. Adipic acid was used as the nucleating agent. Crystallization peak temperature was determined via differential scanning calorimetry as a function of the experimentally controlled variables iPP concentration, cooling rate, and nucleating agent concentration. The influence of these variables on crystallization mechanism and spherulitic structure as implied by the Ozawa and Ziabicki analyses was determined. The non-isothermal crystallization kinetics presented here are the first for iPP-diluent systems with and without nucleating agent.     

Polydispersity effect on transient flow behavior of polystyrene solution

Summary The transient flow behavior of the binary blend of monodisperse polystyrene fractions is measured by a flow birefringence method. Both of the shear stress and first normal stress difference are obtained simultaneously in time by using a PMFB technique. The entanglements of the polymer chains significantly affect the rheological property of the binary blend in flow region. Especially, the entanglements of the high molecular weight fractions with themselves is proven to be the main source to the growth of first normal stress differences.     

Preparation of ketoprofen‐loaded high‐molecular‐weight poly(vinyl alcohol) gels

High‐molecular‐weight atactic poly(vinyl alcohol) (a‐PVA) gels loaded with (R,S)‐2‐(3‐benzoylphenyl)propionic acid (ketoprofen) were prepared from 5, 6, 7, and 8 g/dL solutions of a‐PVA with a number‐average degree of polymerization of 4000 in an ethylene glycol/water mixture with an aging method to identify the effect of the initial polymer concentration on the swelling behavior, morphology, and thermal properties of a‐PVA gels. Then, the release behavior of ketoprofen from a‐PVA gels was investigated. As the polymer concentration decreased, the ability for network formation decreased, and the degree of swelling of the a‐PVA gels increased. In addition, the enthalpy increased with an increase in the a‐PVA concentration, but the melting temperatures of the gels prepared at different initial polymer concentrations were the same; this indicated that tighter gel networks would be formed by a higher polymer chain density. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2007     

Permanent jet formation in beds of particulate solids

The simple criterion proposed by Chandnani and Epstein (1984, 1986) for stable spouting, d_or/d_p ≤ 25.4, is shown to give a good separation between gas-solid systems which form permanent jets and those that bubble, for a wide range of experimental data reported in the literature. The criterion is suggested as a necessary but not sufficient condition for permanent jet formation in fluidized, spout-fluid and spouted beds.     

Estimation of rheological parameters using velocity measurements

In the present investigation, we develop a method for estimating rheological parameters of viscoelastic fluids using velocity measurement in a square straight channel. It is believed that a somewhat complicated patterns of secondary flows due to the non-zero second normal stress difference are more useful than the simple viscometric flows traditionally adopted in the determination of rheological parameters. The inverse problem of determining the rheological parameters from a set of velocity measurements is solved using a conjugate gradient method. When applied to a general constitutive equation encompassing the UCM model, the Oldroyd-B model and the PTT model, the present method is found to yield a reasonably accurate estimation of five rheological parameters simultaneously even with noisy velocity measurements.     

Flood Inundation Modelling for Mid‐Lower Brisbane Estuary

This study utilizes a two‐dimensional hydrodynamic model to calibrate and validate an inundation model for the Brisbane River estuary in Queensland, Australia. The bathymetry data used in the hydraulic model are derived from one arc second (1 s) shuttle radar topography mission digital elevation model, and the two‐dimensional hydraulic model is parameterized using the generated bathymetry with four open boundaries with water level observations and roughness coefficients. The calibration performance is evaluated by comparing the simulated results with the digitized records during the January 2013 flood event (a low magnitude event) at three gauging stations. The calibrated model is validated with water level data and available discharge data during the January 2011 flood (a large magnitude event) at four gauging stations located along the Brisbane River. Different performance indices are applied to demonstrate that the developed model performs well during calibration and validation. A sensitivity analysis is presented to assess the influence of riverbed elevation changes on the model because the main uncertainty of the model is the bathymetry data. The proposed model with the shuttle radar topography mission digital elevation model‐derived riverbed elevation for the Brisbane estuary is able to predict the flood inundation extent at an accuracy of 66.9% which is higher than or comparable with the accuracies of the existing studies. However, it is expected that the accuracy will increase if some improved bathymetry data become available in the future. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rubber‐toughened polypropylene nanocomposite: Effect of polyethylene octene copolymer on mechanical properties and phase morphology

Rubber‐toughened polypropylene (PP)/org‐Montmorillonite (org‐MMT) nanocomposite with polyethylene octene (POE) copolymer were compounded in a twin‐screw extruder at 230°C and injection‐molded. The POE used had 25 wt % 1‐octene content and the weight fraction of POE in the blend was varied in the range of 0–20 wt %. X‐ray diffraction analysis (XRD) revealed that an intercalation org‐MMT silicate layer structure was formed in rubber‐toughened polypropylene nanocomposites (RTPPNC). Izod impact measurements indicated that the addition of POE led to a significant improvement in the impact strength of the RTPPNC, from 6.2 kJ/m² in untoughened PP nanocomposites to 17.8 kJ/m² in RTPPNC containing 20 wt % POE. This shows that the POE elastomer was very effective in converting brittle PP nanocomposites into tough nanocomposites. However, the Young's modulus, tensile strength, flexural modulus, and flexural strength of the blends decreased with respect to the PP nanocomposites, as the weight fraction of POE was increased to 20 wt %. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used for the investigation of the phase morphology and rubber particles size. SEM study revealed a two‐phase morphology where POE, as droplets was dispersed finely and uniformly in the PP matrix. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 99: 3441–3450, 2006     

Tactile display with tangential and normal skin displacement for robot-assisted surgery

This paper proposes a tactile display providing both shear and normal feedback to the fingertip for generating three-axis tactile feedback during teleoperation of a surgical robot. The display is composed of five balloons actuated by controlling the pneumatic pressure. The implemented display is 18?mm?×?18?mm?×?15?mm. This size is suitable for mounting the display onto the master controls of a surgical robot. The maximum normal and shear displacements are 2 and 1.3?mm, respectively. The proposed tactile display may provide perceivable stimuli to a human finger pad in all five directions: normal, distal, proximal, radial, and ulnar. This paper also reports on the results of psychophysical measurement of the minimum perceivable movement of the developed tactile display for each of the five directions.     

Surface reconstruction techniques: a review

Surface reconstruction means that retrieve the data by scanning an object using a device such as laser scanner and construct it using the computer to gain back the soft copy of data on that particular object. It is a reverse process and is very useful especially when that particular object original data is missing without doing any backup. Hence, by doing so, the data can be recollected and can be stored for future purposes. The type of data can be in the form of structure or unstructured points. The accuracy of the reconstructed result should be concerned because if the result is incorrect, hence it will not exactly same like the original shape of the object. Therefore, suitable methods should be chosen based on the data used. Soft computing methods also have been used in the reconstruction field. This papers highlights the previous researches and methods that has been used in the surface reconstruction field.     

Object Bank: An Object-Level Image Representation for High-Level Visual Recognition

It is a remarkable fact that images are related to objects constituting them. In this paper, we propose to represent images by using objects appearing in them. We introduce the novel concept of object bank (OB), a high-level image representation encoding object appearance and spatial location information in images. OB represents an image based on its response to a large number of pre-trained object detectors, or ‘object filters’, blind to the testing dataset and visual recognition task. Our OB representation demonstrates promising potential in high level image recognition tasks. It significantly outperforms traditional low level image representations in image classification on various benchmark image datasets by using simple, off-the-shelf classification algorithms such as linear SVM and logistic regression. In this paper, we analyze OB in detail, explaining our design choice of OB for achieving its best potential on different types of datasets. We demonstrate that object bank is a high level representation, from which we can easily discover semantic information of unknown images. We provide guidelines for effectively applying OB to high level image recognition tasks where it could be easily compressed for efficient computation in practice and is very robust to various classifiers.