Glass‐fiber‐reinforced wood/plastic composites

The usage of wood‐plastic composites (WPCs) is rapidly growing because of their many advantages. However, they still suffer from lack of strength and toughness, which can be improved by adding a small amount of glass fiber reinforcement (GFR). Tensile tests of high‐density polyethylene WPC specimens with varying amounts of wood fiber content and 5% of GFR were carried out. Significant improvements in properties were observed. J. VINYL ADDIT. TECHNOL., 2008. © 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers.     

The role of apoptosis in the modulation of colon carcinogenesis by dietary fat and by the organoselenium compound 1,4-phenylenebis(methylene)selenocyanate

Studies in laboratory animals have demonstrated that dietary supplements of organoselenium, 1,4-phenylenebis(methylene)selenocyanate (p-XSC) inhibit colon carcinogenesis. Diverse chemopreventive agents and clinically used anticancer drugs have been shown to induce apoptosis in colonic tumors. Inducing apoptosis is a key mechanism for the effectiveness of some chemopreventive agents; however, failure of apoptosis is now believed to contribute to the development of human cancer. In this study, we determined the number of apoptotic bodies in the colon tumors of rats fed a low-fat (LF) or a high-fat (HF) diet with or without p-XSC treatment. At 5 weeks of age, male F344 rats were divided into four groups, which were then maintained on one of the following diets: LF, 5% corn oil; HF, 23.5% corn oil; and LF and HF supplemented with 20 ppm p-XSC. In addition, the LF or HF diet with p-XSC supplements was administered either during the initiation stage or postinitiation. At 7 weeks of age, all rats except those intended for vehicle (normal saline) treatment were given 15 mg/kg of body weight of azoxymethane once weekly for 2 weeks. The animals were sacrificed 38 weeks after carcinogen treatment, and their colonic tumors were examined for appearance of apoptosis. The LF diet significantly increased the percentage of apoptosis as compared to the HF diet; the percentage of apoptosis in LF and HF diets were 12.4 and 2.9. The colon tumors that were present in the groups fed p-XSC together with a LF or a HF diet after carcinogen administration (postinitiation period) had a higher number of apoptotic bodies than those that were present in the animals fed p-XSC before carcinogen treatment (initiation period). The extent of apoptosis was weak when p-XSC was given with a HF diet (4.4%) during the initiation phase, but it was high significant when p-XSC was administered with LF diet (25.2%). Taken together, our data suggest that administration of LF diet supplemented with p-XSC increases apoptosis as compared to a HF diet alone.     

Effects of Inhibition of Carotenoids on the Lipids Synthesis by Micrococcus colpogenes

Effect of glucose concentration and the inhibition of carotenoids on the lipids synthesis by Micrococcus colpogenes were studied. It was observed that the maximum lipid production was obtained when 2 % glucose was used as carbon source. The inhibition of carotenoids with diphenylaminc (25 mg/L) showed 37 % increase in the lipid synthesis.     

Adaptive synchronization of master–slave systems with mixed neutral and discrete time‐delays and nonlinear perturbations

This paper investigates the delay‐dependent adaptive synchronization problem of the master and slave structure of linear systems with both constant neutral and time‐varying discrete time‐delays and nonlinear perturbations based on the Barbalat lemma and matching conditions. An adaption law which includes the master‐slave parameters is obtained by using the Lyapunov functional method and inequality techniques to synchronize the master‐slave systems without the knowledge of upper bounds of perturbation terms. Particularly, it is shown that the synchronization speed can be controlled by adjusting the update gain of the synchronization signal. A numerical example has been given to show the effectiveness of the method. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Energy-efficient clustering in mobile ad-hoc networks using multi-objective particle swarm optimization

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is dynamic in nature and is composed of wirelessly connected nodes that perform hop-by-hop routing without the help of any fixed infrastructure. One of the important requirements of a MANET is the efficiency of energy, which increases the lifetime of the network. Several techniques have been proposed by researchers to achieve this goal and one of them is clustering in MANETs that can help in providing an energy-efficient solution. Clustering involves the selection of cluster-heads (CHs) for each cluster and fewer CHs result in greater energy efficiency as these nodes drain more power than noncluster-heads. In the literature, several techniques are available for clustering by using optimization and evolutionary techniques that provide a single solution at a time. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective solution by using multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm to optimize the number of clusters in an ad hoc network as well as energy dissipation in nodes in order to provide an energy-efficient solution and reduce the network traffic. In the proposed solution, inter-cluster and intra-cluster traffic is managed by the cluster-heads. The proposed algorithm takes into consideration the degree of nodes, transmission power, and battery power consumption of the mobile nodes. The main advantage of this method is that it provides a set of solutions at a time. These solutions are achieved through optimal Pareto front. We compare the results of the proposed approach with two other well-known clustering techniques; WCA and CLPSO-based clustering by using different performance metrics. We perform extensive simulations to show that the proposed approach is an effective approach for clustering in mobile ad hoc networks environment and performs better than the other two approaches.     

Mesoporous SBA-15@n-Pr-THAM-ZrO organic–inorganic hybrid: as a highly efficient reusable nanocatalyst for the synthesis of polyhydroquinolines and 2,3-dihydroquinazolin-4 (1h)-ones

Journal of Porous Materials - In this work, tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane-Zirconium complex supported on modified SBA-15 (SBA-15@n-Pr-THMAM-ZrO) prepared as a novel mesoporous catalyst. The...     

Proactive task migration with a self-adjusting migration threshold for dynamic thermal management of multi-core processors

Request for more computation power steadily forces designers to provide more powerful processors using more number of cores on a single chip. The increasing complexity of processors leads to higher integration density, power density, and temperature. For avoiding thermal emergencies, various dynamic thermal management techniques have been presented. In this paper, we present a novel online self-adjusting temperature threshold schema for dynamic thermal management to minimize both average and peak temperature with very low performance overhead. Our proposed algorithm adjusts migration threshold according to workload and hardware platforms. The experimental results indicate that our technique can significantly decrease the average and peak temperature compared to Linux standard scheduler, and two well-known thermal management techniques: PDTM and TAS.     

A localization algorithm for large scale mobile wireless sensor networks: a learning approach

Localization is a crucial problem in wireless sensor networks and most of the localization algorithms given in the literature are non-adaptive and designed for fixed sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a learning based localization algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks. By this technique, mobility in the network will be discovered by two crucial methods in the beacons: position and distance checks methods. These two methods help to have accurate localization and constrain communication just when it is necessary. The proposed method localizes the nodes based on connectivity information (hop count), which doesn’t need extra hardware and is cost efficient. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is scalable with a small set of beacons in large scale network with a high density of nodes. The given algorithm is fast and free from a pre-deployment requirement. The simulation results show the high performance of the proposed algorithm.     

Design of a Commercial Hybrid VTOL UAV System

For the last four decades Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used for military operations that include tracking, surveillance, active engagement with weapons and airborne data acquisition. UAVs are also in demand commercially due to their advantages in comparison to manned vehicles. These advantages include lower manufacturing and operating costs, flexibility in configuration depending on customer request and not risking the pilot on demanding missions. Even though civilian UAVs currently constitute 3 % of the UAV market, it is estimated that their numbers will reach up to 10 % of the UAV market within the next 5 years. Most of the civilian UAV applications require UAVs that are capable of doing a wide range of different and complementary operations within a composite mission. These operations include taking off and landing from limited runway space, while traversing the operation region in considerable cruise speed for mobile tracking applications. This is in addition to being able traverse in low cruise speeds or being able to hover for stationary measurement and tracking. All of these complementary and but different operational capabilities point to a hybrid unmanned vehicle concept, namely the Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) UAVs. In addition, the desired UAV system needs to be cost-efficient while providing easy payload conversion for different civilian applications. In this paper, we review the preliminary design process of such a capable civilian UAV system, namely the TURAC VTOL UAV. TURAC UAV is aimed to have both vertical take-off and landing and Conventional Take-off and Landing (CTOL) capability. TURAC interchangeable payload pod and detachable wing (with potential different size variants) provides capability to perform different mission types, including long endurance and high cruise speed operations. In addition, the TURAC concept is to have two different variants. The TURAC A variant is an eco-friendly and low-noise fully electrical platform which includes 2 tilt electric motors in the front, and a fixed electric motor and ducted fan in the rear, where as the TURAC B variant is envisioned to use high energy density fuel cells for extended hovering time. In this paper, we provide the TURAC UAV’s iterative design and trade-off studies which also include detailed aerodynamic and structural configuration analysis. For the aerodynamic analysis, an in-house software including graphical user interface has been developed to calculate the aerodynamic forces and moments by using the Vortex Lattice Method (VLM). Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies are performed to determine the aerodynamic effects for various configurations For structural analysis, a Finite Element Model (FEM) of the TURAC has been prepared and its modal analysis is carried out. Maximum displacements and maximal principal stresses are calculated and used for streamlining a weight efficient fuselage design. Prototypes have been built to show success of the design at both hover and forward flight regime. In this paper, we also provide the flight management and autopilot architecture of the TURAC. The testing of the controller performance has been initiated with the prototype of TURAC. Current work focuses on the building of the full fight test prototype of the TURAC UAV and aerodynamic modeling of the transition flight.