Chemically Resistant,Shapeable, and Conducting Metal‐Organic Gels and Aerogels Built from Dithiooxamidato Ligand

Metal‐organic gels (MOGs) appear as a blooming alternative to well‐known metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs). Porosity of MOGs has a microstructural origin and not strictly crystalline like in MOFs; therefore, gelation may provide porosity to any metal‐organic system, including those with interesting properties but without a porous crystalline structure. The easy and straightforward shaping of MOGs contrasts with the need of binders for MOFs. In this contribution, a series of MOGs based on the assembly of 1D‐coordination polymer nanofibers of formula [M(DTA)]_n (M^II: Ni, Cu, Pd; DTA: dithiooxamidato) are reported, in which properties such as porosity, chemical inertness, mechanical robustness, and stimuli‐responsive electrical conductivity are brought together. The strength of the M? S bond confers an unusual chemical resistance, withstanding exposure to acids, alkalis, and mild oxidizing/reducing chemicals. Supercritical drying of MOGs provides ultralight metal‐organic aerogels (MOAs) with densities as low as 0.03 g cm^?3 and plastic/brittle behavior depending on the nanofiber aspect ratio. Conductivity measurements reveal a semiconducting behavior (10^?12 to 10^?7 S cm^?1 at 298 K) that can be improved by doping (10^?5 S cm^?1). Moreover, it must be stressed that conductivity of MOAs reversibly increases (up to 10^?5 S cm^?1) under the presence of acetic acid.     

Nanoimprint lithography fabrication of waveguide-integrated optical gratings with inexpensive stamps

We demonstrate that a replica grating can be effectively used as an inexpensive stamp for nanoimprint lithography to pattern diffractive optical couplers integrated with planar optical waveguides. Imprinted grating patterns were integrated with silicon oxynitride waveguide films to be used as an evanescent wave sensor in the input grating-coupler configuration. An anti-adhesion layer using an inexpensive, two-step chemical functionalization was developed for the stamps. The stamps were able to withstand imprint temperatures ranging from 140 to 190 °C and high fidelity imprints were obtained. The groove pattern was integrated in waveguide films by etch transfer and light-coupling properties of gratings with 1.2 μm pitch were tested using a λ = 1.55 μm laser. Compared to etched silicon masters, replica optical gratings provide uniform pattern density over their entire surface with no unstructured regions, are inexpensive, and readily available for R&D use.     

Distributed address auto configuration protocol for Manet networks

In heterogeneous network environments, the network connections of a multi-homed device may have significant bandwidth differential. For a multi-homed transmission protocol designed for network failure tolerance, such as SCTP, path selection algorithms for data transmission drastically affect performance. This article studies the effect of path bandwidth differential on the performance of retransmission strategies in multi-homing environments. It identifies that fast retransmission on an alternate path may cause receive buffer blocking when path bandwidth differential is significant and the receive buffer is limited. A theoretical model is proposed for selecting retransmission path during the fast retransmission phase, based on receive buffer and path conditions. From these observations and analysis results, this article proposes that path selection strategies for transmitting new data and retransmitted data should be decoupled. A new path selection scheme is proposed and evaluated through SCTP simulations.     

Optimization of structures under buckling constraints using frame elements

Structural optimization is of increasing interest in a wide variety of application fields. In this article, structural optimization under stress and buckling constraints is investigated. A structure comprised of a set of frame elements is considered. The aim is to obtain the minimal mass structure, by optimizing the number of frame elements and their cross sectional dimensions. A formulation as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem with a tailored objective function is introduced. This cost function is a combination of the structural mass and the sum of the second moments of inertia of each structural element. Moreover, a new algorithm, tailored to the considered problem, is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed approach provides interesting structural mass savings.     

Semantic Information Extraction from Multi-Corpora Using Deep Learning

Information extraction plays a vital role in natural language processing, to extract named entities and events from unstructured data. Due to the exponential data growth in the agricultural sector, extracting significant information has become a challenging task. Though existing deep learning-based techniques have been applied in smart agriculture for crop cultivation, crop disease detection, weed removal, and yield production, still it is difficult to find the semantics between extracted information due to unswerving effects of weather, soil, pest, and fertilizer data. This paper consists of two parts. An initial phase, which proposes a data preprocessing technique for removal of ambiguity in input corpora, and the second phase proposes a novel deep learning-based long short-term memory with rectification in Adam optimizer and multilayer perceptron to find agricultural-based named entity recognition, events, and relations between them. The proposed algorithm has been trained and tested on four input corpora i.e., agriculture, weather, soil, and pest & fertilizers. The experimental results have been compared with existing techniques and it was observed that the proposed algorithm outperforms Weighted-SOM, LSTM+RAO, PLR-DBN, KNN, and Naïve Bayes on standard parameters like accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.     

Electrochemical Investigation of Calcium Substituted Monoclinic Li3V2(PO4)3 Negative Electrode Materials for Sodium- and Potassium-Ion Batteries

Herein, the electrochemical properties and reaction mechanism of Li_3‒2xCa_xV₂(PO₄)₃/C (x = 0, 0.5, 1, and 1.5) as negative electrode materials for sodium-ion/potassium-ion batteries (SIBs/PIBs) are investigated. All samples undergo a mixed contribution of diffusion-controlled and pseudocapacitive-type processes in SIBs and PIBs via Trasatti Differentiation Method, while the latter increases with Ca content increase. Among them, Li₃V₂(PO₄)₃/C exhibits the highest reversible capacity in SIBs and PIBs, while Ca_1.5V₂(PO₄)₃/C shows the best rate performance with a capacity retention of 46% at 20 C in SIBs and 47% at 10 C in PIBs. This study demonstrates that the specific capacity of this type of material in SIBs and PIBs does not increase with the Ca-content as previously observed in lithium-ion system, but the stability and performance at a high C-rate can be improved by replacing Li⁺ with Ca²⁺. This indicates that the insertion of different monovalent cations (Na⁺/K⁺) can strongly influence the redox reaction and structure evolution of the host materials, due to the larger ion size of Na⁺ and K⁺ and their different kinetic properties with respect to Li⁺. Furthermore, the working mechanism of both LVP/C and Ca_1.5V₂(PO₄)₃/C in SIBs are elucidated via in operando synchrotron diffraction and in operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy.     

Polar classification with correspondence analysis for fault isolation

Data collected from operating plants can be mined to extract information related to both normal and fault modes of operation. Correspondence analysis (CA), that decomposes a measure of row–column association, to generate the lower dimensional space has been recently proposed [1] for this task. CA represents the association between samples and variables in terms of angle based measures on a biplot. Thus, toward clearer resolution of the faults, polar clustering and classification procedures are necessary. In this paper, we develop a methodology to mine the operating data and build such clusters. We demonstrate the application of this methodology on data generated from simulations and experiments involving representative systems,for detecting parametric changes and resolving sensor and actuator biases.     

Sensitivity Optimization of MEMS Based Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor for Harsh Environment

Silicon - Silicon carbide piezoresistive pressure sensor is more suitable for harsh environment due to its wide bandgap, corrosion tolerance, excellent chemical inertness, high Young’s...     

Microbiological quality of sausages containing chickpea flour (Cicer arietinum)

English-type fresh skinless pork sausages in which 30% of the protein was replaced by unheated chickpea flour or by chickpea flour heated at 80°C for 1 h were evaluated microbiologically. During storage at 0°C, but not 22°C, incorporation of unheated chickpea flour lowered the microbiological quality of the sausages, but incorporation of chickpea flour previously heated at 80°C for 1 h led to no less of microbiological quality.     

The effect of the absence of Ni,Co, and Ni–Co catalyst pretreatment on catalytic activity for hydrogen production via oxidative steam reforming of ethanol

This article presents a study of the catalytic performance of Ni, Co, and Ni–Co–Mg–Al mixed oxides obtained from hydrotalcite precursors for the oxidative steam reforming of ethanol (OSRE) when no pretreatment (pre-reduction) is accomplished. Two catalysts (a Ni-based monometallic and an equimolar Ni–Co-based catalyst) achieve in situ reduction over shorter time periods compared with the other bimetallic catalysts and also, exhibit the best catalytic activity. On the contrary, the monometallic Co catalyst did not exhibit good catalytic performance, likely because of the existence of resistant spinel phases to soft reduction processes and/or to the re-oxidation of Co. The equimolar presence of Ni and Co generates a synergistic effect evidenced by the increase in the reducibility, basicity, and mobility of electrophilic oxygen species of the solid. The results yield important information for better understanding the catalytic system under study.