Cationic Rhodium(III)‐Catalyzed Direct C‐2 Carboxamidation of Indoles with Isocyanates via C?H Bond Functionalization

A pentamethylcyclopentadienylrhodium(III)‐catalyzed regioselective synthesis of indole‐2‐carboxamides is described employing N‐pyrimidylindoles and isocyanates as coupling partners via C H functionalization. A wide variety of indole‐2‐carboxamides can be synthesized via this method under relatively mild conditions with broad functional group tolerance. The effect of various directing group on this transformation was also studied, unveiling the pyrimidyl group as an easily installable and removable directing group.

     

Strength of cold-formed lipped channel beams under interaction of local,distortional and lateral torsional buckling

Cold-formed thin-walled lipped channel steel beams may undergo buckling modes such as short half-wavelength local buckling, intermediate half-wavelength distortional buckling and long half-wavelength lateral-torsional buckling or a combination of these before failure. ABAQUS software based on finite element analysis is used to analyse the interaction behaviour of these buckling modes in this study. The finite element model, after calibration with experimental results available in the literature, is used to perform parametric studies, to evaluate the behaviour and strength of such beams under different types of interactions due to variation of material and member properties. The large volume of synthetic data thus generated over a range of failure modes along with the available test results are used to evaluate different equations for calculating the strength of such cold-formed lipped channel beams. Based on the comparison, a method for the design of lipped channel beams failing under the interaction of local, distortional and overall lateral torsional buckling is recommended.     

Two-Symbol FPGA Architecture for Fast Arithmetic Encoding in JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000 is one of the most popular image compression standards offering significant performance advantages over previous image standards. High computational complexity of the JPEG 2000 algorithms makes it necessary to employ methods that overcomes the bottlenecks of the system and hence an efficient solution is imperative. One such crucial algorithms in JPEG 2000 is arithmetic coding and is completely based on bit level operations. In this paper, an efficient hardware implementation of arithmetic coding is proposed which uses efficient pipelining and parallel processing for intermediate blocks. The idea is to provide a two-symbol coding engine, which is efficient in terms of performance, memory and hardware. This architecture is implemented in Verilog hardware definition language and synthesized using Altera field programmable gate array. The only memory unit used in this design is a FIFO (first in first out) of 256 bits to store the CX-D pairs at the input, which is negligible compared to the existing arithmetic coding hardware designs. The simulation and synthesis results show that the operating frequency of the proposed architecture is greater than 100 MHz and it achieves a throughput of 212 Msymbols/sec, which is double the throughput of conventional one-symbol implementation and enables at least 50% throughput increase compared to the existing two-symbol architectures.     

Chemical enhancement of secondary ion emission from Cd ion bombarded Mo, Ti, Al and Cu surfaces

The variation of secondary ion intensity with target current was found to be linear and parabolic for low and medium current densities, respectively. A semi-empirical formula was proposed earlier to correlate these two effects. With further increase of target current density, it is found that the secondary ion yield varies approximately as cube of the primary current density. This enhanced ion emission has been attributed to the chemical enhancement effect caused by reactive ion bombardment. The semi-empirical formula has accordingly been modified in order to take into consideration the above effect. The combinations Cd⁺-Mo, Cd⁺-Ti, Cd⁺-Al and Cd⁺-Cu have been studied and the results are explained in terms of the modified semi-empirical formula. Our observations have further been supported by ion yield versus bombarding energy studies for the combinations: Cd⁺-Mg, Cd⁺-Ti and Cd⁺-Zr.     

An empirical study of predicting software faults with case-based reasoning

The resources allocated for software quality assurance and improvement have not increased with the ever-increasing need for better software quality. A targeted software quality inspection can detect faulty modules and reduce the number of faults occurring during operations. We present a software fault prediction modeling approach with case-based reasoning (CBR), a part of the computational intelligence field focusing on automated reasoning processes. A CBR system functions as a software fault prediction model by quantifying, for a module under development, the expected number of faults based on similar modules that were previously developed. Such a system is composed of a similarity function, the number of nearest neighbor cases used for fault prediction, and a solution algorithm. The selection of a particular similarity function and solution algorithm may affect the performance accuracy of a CBR-based software fault prediction system. This paper presents an empirical study investigating the effects of using three different similarity functions and two different solution algorithms on the prediction accuracy of our CBR system. The influence of varying the number of nearest neighbor cases on the performance accuracy is also explored. Moreover, the benefits of using metric-selection procedures for our CBR system is also evaluated. Case studies of a large legacy telecommunications system are used for our analysis. It is observed that the CBR system using the Mahalanobis distance similarity function and the inverse distance weighted solution algorithm yielded the best fault prediction. In addition, the CBR models have better performance than models based on multiple linear regression. Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar is a professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University and the Director of the Empirical Software Engineering Laboratory. His research interests are in software engineering, software metrics, software reliability and quality engineering, computational intelligence, computer performance evaluation, data mining, and statistical modeling. He has published more than 200 refereed papers in these areas. He has been a principal investigator and project leader in a number of projects with industry, government, and other research-sponsoring agencies. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Reliability Society. He served as the general chair of the 1999 International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE’99), and the general chair of the 2001 International Conference on Engineering of Computer Based Systems. Also, he has served on technical program committees of various international conferences, symposia, and workshops. He has served as North American editor of the Software Quality Journal, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Empirical Software Engineering, Software Quality, and Fuzzy Systems. Naeem Seliya received the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA, in 2001. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include software engineering, computational intelligence, data mining, software measurement, software reliability and quality engineering, software architecture, computer data security, and network intrusion detection. He is a student member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery.     

Fun with photons: selective light induced reactions in solution and in water soluble nano-containers

Two distinct strategies for controlling selectivity, in particular stereoselectivity in photochemical reactions are reviewed. In the first strategy, supramolecular approach using cucurbituril nano-containers in catalytic amounts is employed to control selectivity during photochemical transformations. In the second approach, a generalized methodology for carrying out light-induced transformations in solution at ambient conditions is detailed where axially chiral motifs are employed to enantiospecifically transfer the axial chirality in the reactant to point chirality in the photoproduct(s).     

DDR zeolite membrane reactor for enhanced HI decomposition in IS thermochemical process

The third section of closed loop Iodine Sulphur (IS) thermochemical cycle, dealing with HI_x processing, suffers from low equilibrium decomposition of HI to hydrogen with a conversion value of only ～22% at 700 K. Here, we report a significant enhancement in conversion of HI into hydrogen (up to ～95%) using a zeolite membrane reactor for the first time. The all silica DDR (deca dodecasil rhombohedral) zeolite membrane with dense, interlocked structure was synthesized on the seeded clay alumina substrate by sonication mediated hydrothermal process. The synthesized membranes along with seed crystals were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). Corrosion studies were carried out by exposing the membrane samples to simulated HI decomposition reaction environment (at 450 °C) for different durations of time upto 200 h. The FESEM, EDX and XRD analyses indicated that no significant changes occurred in the morphology, composition and structure of the membranes. Iodine adsorption on to the membrane surface was observed which got increased with the exposure duration as confirmed by secondary ion mass spectrometry studies. A packed bed membrane reactor (PBMR) assembly was fabricated with integration of in-house synthesized zeolite membrane and Pt-alumina catalyst for carrying out HI decomposition studies. The tube side was chosen as reaction zone and the shell side as the permeation zone. The HI decomposition experiments were carried out for different values of temperature and feed flow rates. DDR zeolite based PBMR was found to enhance the single-pass conversion of HI up to ～95%. The results indicate that for achieving optimal performance of PBMR, it should be operated with space velocities of 0.2–0.3 s^?1 and temperature in the range of 650 K–700 K with permeate side vacuum of 0.12 kg/cm². It is believed that the in-house developed zeolite PBMR shall be a potential technology augmentation in making the IS thermochemical cycle energy efficient.     

Addressing challenges in sealing of scalable multifiber module for O2 enrichment using LSCF membranes

Scalable and multifiber modules in oxygen separation face huge challenges due to difficulty in integrating all the necessary components, especially in sealing the fibers in a gas tight module. Here, we report our findings on design and fabrication of a multifiber La_0.6Sr_0.4Co_0.2Fe_0.8O_3–δ (LSCF)-based module, which can be scaled up. The focus is on sealing ceramic-metal interfaces by layering of sealants of varying thermal properties. We have also incorporated the use of dead ended fibers to minimize ceramic-metal interfaces in the hot zones and present a new method for dead ending by flame melting. Pressurizing the air inlet feed from either bore side or shell side is detrimental to the structural integrity of the fibers. A thorough characterization of the fresh and spent fibers is also carried out using X-ray tomography and electron microscopy, which indicates effect of temperature and pressure on the fibers.