Effect of filler size on thermophysical and electrical behavior of nanocomposites based on expanded graphite nanoparticles filled in low‐density polyethylene matrix

Various aspects of electrical and thermophysical properties of nanocomposites based on low‐density polyethylene matrix filled with nanostructuralized expanded graphite (EG) and standard, microsized graphite are presented in this article. A periodical method developed in the laboratory was used to measure simultaneously thermal conductivity, specific heat, and diffusivity of composites at room temperature. The effect of micro‐ and nanosized fillers on the final thermophysical and electrical behavior is investigated. It was found that the electrical conductivity of composites strongly depends not only on the filler content but also on the filler size. When the microsized graphite was used, the percolation concentration of the filler was found to be 15 vol%, whereas the percolation concentration of the filler in nanocomposites filled with EG of large sizes was significantly lower. Similarly, it was shown that the graphite significantly improves the thermophysical behavior of composites filled with micro‐ and nanofiller sizes. The thermal conductivity measured values were also compared with some theoretical models for the prediction of the thermal conductivity. POLYM. COMPOS., 2012. © 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Numerical modeling of ZnSnO/CZTS based solar cells

Numerical simulation has been performed to improve the performance of Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) solar cells by replacing CdS with Zn1–xSnxO buffer layer. The influences of thickness, donor concentration and defect density of buffer layers on the performance of CZTS solar cells were investigated. It has been found that Zn1–xSnxO buffer layer for Sn content of 0.20 is better for CZTS solar cell. A higher efficiency can be achieved with thinner buffer layer. The optimized solar cell demonstrated a maximum power conversion efficiency of 13%.     

Polymer aqueous solutions as quenching media. II. Ethylene oxide–propylene oxide copolymers

The cooling power of aqueous solutions of ethylene oxide-propylene oxide copolymers are studied with a silver standard sample by using two apparatuses quench with injection and quench with agitation. For temperature T>400°C, the viscosity plays the predominant role; for T<400°C, the cooling is controlled by the polymer precipitation and the cooling rate decreases by lowering the cloud point of the polymer solution. This work demonstrates the possibility of adjusting the cooling curves by taking into account the thermodynamical properties of the polymer.     

Determination of water activities and osmotic and activity coefficients of the system NaCl–BaCl2–H2O at 298.15 K

The water activities of the mixed aqueous electrolyte NaCl–BaCl₂(aq) are measured at total molalities from 0.25 mol kg⁻¹ to about saturation for different ionic strength fractions (y) of NaCl with y=0.33,0.50,0.67. The results allow the deduction of osmotic coefficients. The experimental results are compared with the predictions of the Zdanovskii, Stokes, and Robinson (ZSR), Kusik and Meissner (KM), Robinson and Stokes (RS), Lietzke and Stoughton (LSII), Reilly, Wood, and Robinson (RWR), and Pitzer models. From these measurements, the Pitzer mixing ionic parameters are determined and used to predict the solute activity coefficients in the mixture. The excess Gibbs energy is also determined.     

Radial invariant of 2D and 3D Racah moments

In this paper, we introduce new sets of 2D and 3D rotation, scaling and translation invariants based on orthogonal radial Racah moments. We also provide theoretical mathematics to derive them. Thus, this work proposes in the first case a new 2D radial Racah moments based on polar representation of an object by one-dimensional orthogonal discrete Racah polynomials on non-uniform lattice, and a circular function. In the second case, we present new 3D radial Racah moments using a spherical representation of volumetric image by one-dimensional orthogonal discrete Racah polynomials and a spherical function. Further 2D and 3D invariants are extracted from the proposed 2D and 3D radial Racah moments respectively will appear in the third case. To validate the proposed approach, we have resolved three problems. The 2D/ 3D image reconstruction, the invariance of 2D/3D rotation, scaling and translation, and the pattern recognition. The result of experiments show that the Racah moments have done better than the Krawtchouk moments, with and without noise. Simultaneously, the mentioned reconstruction converges rapidly to the original image using 2D and 3D radial Racah moments, and the test 2D/3D images are clearly recognized from a set of images that are available in COIL-20 database for 2D image, and PSB database for 3D image.     

Robust H∞ filtering for 2D continuous systems with finite frequency specifications

This paper investigates the design problem of robust H_∞ filtering for uncertain two-dimensional (2D) continuous systems described by Roesser model with polytopic uncertainties and frequency domain specifications. Our aim is to design a new filter guaranteeing an H_∞ performance level in specific finite frequency (FF) domains. Using the well-known generalised Kalman Yakubovich Popov lemma and homogeneous polynomially parameter-dependent matrices of arbitrary degrees, sufficient conditions for the existence of H_∞ filters for different FF ranges are proposed and then unified in terms of solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Illustrative examples are provided to show the usefulness and potential of the proposed results.     

Thermodynamic properties of two ternary systems {yCsCl+(1−y)LiCl}(aq) and {yCsCl+(1−y)NaCl}(aq) at temperature 298.15 K

Thermodynamic properties of the mixed aqueous electrolyte systems of the lithium and cesium chlorides and sodium and cesium chlorides have been studied by the hygrometric method at 298.15 K. The water activities of these systems were measured at total molalities from 0.3 mol kg⁻¹ to saturation for different ionic strength fractions y of CsCl for the systems CsCl–LiCl(aq) and CsCl–NaCl(aq) with y=0.33, 0.50 and 0.67. The results allow the deduction of osmotic coefficients. The experimental results are compared with calculations made using the Zdanovskii–Stokes–Robinson (ZSR), Kusik and Meissner (KM), Robinson and Stokes (RS), Lietzke and Stoughton (LSII), Reilly, Wood and Robinson (RWR) rules, and the Pitzer model. From these measurements, the Pitzer mixing ionic parameters are determined and used to obtain the solute activity coefficients of the mixture for different ionic strength fractions y.     

Semantic indexing of Arabic texts for information retrieval system

As part of information retrieval systems (IRS) and in the context of the use of ontologies for documents and queries indexing, we propose and evaluate in this paper the contribution of this approach applied to Arabic texts. To do this we indexed a corpus of Arabic text using Arabic WordNet. The disambiguation of words was performed by applying the Lesk algorithm. The results obtained by our experiment allowed us to deduct the contribution of this approach in IRS for Arabic texts.