One-Pot,Three-Component Synthesis of 2,3-Dihydro-4(1H)-Quinazolinones Catalyzed by Perchlorated Zirconia (HClO<Subscript>4</Subscript>/ZrO<Subscript>2</Subscript>) Nanoparticles as a Solid Acid Catalyst

Mono and disubstituted 2,3-dihydroquinazolin-4(1H)-ones were obtained in good yields via a one-pot, three component reaction of isatoic anhydride and aromatic aldehydes with ammonium acetate or primary amines in the presence of perchlorated zirconia (HClO₄/ZrO₂) nano particles as an efficient solid acid catalyst under solvent-free conditions. Simple workup and reusability of the catalyst are advantages of this method.     

Phase evolution in mechanical alloying and spark plasma sintering of AlxCoCrCuFeNi HEAs

ABSTRACT

Al_xCoCrCuFeNi high-entropy alloys were synthesised through mechanical alloying and spark plasma sintering. Different alloys were produced by varying the aluminium content (x?=?0.5, 1.5, 2.5 and 4). The influences of the milling duration on the evolution of microstructure, constituent phases and morphology were studied. Increasing milling time resulted in grain refinement and higher solid solution homogenisation characterised by a high internal strain. As a consequence of aluminium addition, the microstructure of materials evolved from face centered cubic (FCC) and body centered cubic (BCC) phases to FCC, BCC and ordered BCC phases. Both mechanical alloying and SPS conditions as well as aluminium content led to grain refinement and variations of mechanical properties. In particular, hardness increased with increasing aluminium content. The aluminium percentage and the evolution of consequent phases are responsible for the microstructural stability at high temperatures. In addition, with Al content increase, the further synergy of strength and ductility along with a more pronounced strain hardening was obtained.     

AMBO: All Members-Based Optimizer for Solving Optimization Problems

There are many optimization problems in different branches of science that should be solved using an appropriate methodology. Population-based optimization algorithms are one of the most efficient approaches to solve this type of problems. In this paper, a new optimization algorithm called All Members-Based Optimizer (AMBO) is introduced to solve various optimization problems. The main idea in designing the proposed AMBO algorithm is to use more information from the population members of the algorithm instead of just a few specific members (such as best member and worst member) to update the population matrix. Therefore, in AMBO, any member of the population can play a role in updating the population matrix. The theory of AMBO is described and then mathematically modeled for implementation on optimization problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on a set of twenty-three standard objective functions, which belong to three different categories: unimodal, high-dimensional multimodal, and fixed-dimensional multimodal functions. In order to analyze and compare the optimization results for the mentioned objective functions obtained by AMBO, eight other well-known algorithms have been also implemented. The optimization results demonstrate the ability of AMBO to solve various optimization problems. Also, comparison and analysis of the results show that AMBO is superior and more competitive than the other mentioned algorithms in providing suitable solution.     

Synergistic effect of micro- and nano-TiO2 on hydrophobic,mechanical, and electrical properties of hybrid polyurethane composites

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - One of the ways to improve the performance of ceramic insulators in polluted climates is to use polymer coatings reinforced with ceramic...     

Enhanced Tacit Secrets: System-assigned passwords you can’t write down,but don’t need to

International Journal of Information Security - We explore the feasibility of Tacit Secrets: system-assigned passwords that you can remember, but cannot write down or otherwise communicate. We...     

Optical Imaging Approaches to Monitor Static and Dynamic Cell‐on‐Chip Platforms: A Tutorial Review

Miniaturized laboratories on chip platforms play an important role in handling life sciences studies. The platforms may contain static or dynamic biological cells. Examples are a fixed medium of an organ‐on‐a‐chip and individual cells moving in a microfluidic channel, respectively. Due to feasibility of control or investigation and ethical implications of live targets, both static and dynamic cell‐on‐chip platforms promise various applications in biology. To extract necessary information from the experiments, the demand for direct monitoring is rapidly increasing. Among different microscopy methods, optical imaging is a straightforward choice. Considering light interaction with biological agents, imaging signals may be generated as a result of scattering or emission effects from a sample. Thus, optical imaging techniques could be categorized into scattering‐based and emission‐based techniques. In this review, various optical imaging approaches used in monitoring static and dynamic platforms are introduced along with their optical systems, advantages, challenges, and applications. This review may help biologists to find a suitable imaging technique for different cell‐on‐chip studies and might also be useful for the people who are going to develop optical imaging systems in life sciences studies.     

Design of a new low-phase-noise millimetre-wave quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator

This paper presents a new circuit topology of millimetre-wave quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) using an improved Colpitts oscillator without tail bias. By employing an extra capacitance between the drain and source terminations of the transistors and optimising circuit values, a low-power and low-phase-noise (PN) oscillator is designed. For generating the output signals with 90° phase difference, a self-injection coupling network between two identical cores is used. The proposed QVCO dissipates no extra dc power for coupling, since there is no dc-path to ground for the coupled transistors and no extra noise is added to circuit. The best figure-of-merit is ?188.5, the power consumption is 14.98–15.45 mW, in a standard 180-nm CMOS technology, for 58.2 GHz center frequency from 59.3 to 59.6 GHz. The PN is ?104.86 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset.