Magnetite‐loaded calcium‐alginate (MLCA) particles as potential sorbent for removal of Ni(II) from aqueous solution

This work is focused on the removal of Ni(II) from aqueous solutions by sorption onto newly developed magnetite‐loaded calcium alginate particles. The uptake of Ni(II) by these magnetite particles, with their mean geometrical diameter 84 and 508 μm, is best described by the Freundlich isotherm and the constants K_F and 1/n were found to be 3.491 mg g^?1, 0.731 and 0.793 mg g^?1 and 0.907, respectively. The mean sorption energy, as determined by Dubinin‐Radushkevich isotherm for 508‐ and 84‐μm sized particles was evaluated to be 8.9 and 8.0 kJ mol^?1, respectively, thus, suggesting the ion‐exchange mechanism for uptake process. Of the various kinetic models proposed, the kinetic Ni(II)‐uptake data were best interpreted by “Simple Elovich” and “Power function” as suggested by their higher regression values. The almost linear nature of plots of log(% sorption) versus log(time) was indicative of intraparticle diffusion. The values of intraparticle diffusion coefficients K_id were found to be 63.49 × 10^?2 and 94.35 × 10^?2 mg l^?1 min^0.5. The intraparticle diffusion was also confirmed by Bangham equation. Finally, various thermodynamic parameters were evaluated. The negative ΔG° indicated spontaneous nature of uptake process while positive ΔH° value suggested exothermic nature of the sorption process. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

Blends of polypropylene and ethylene octene comonomer with conducting fillers: Influence of state of dispersion of conducting fillers on electrical conductivity

Blends of polypropylene/ethylene octene comonomer (PP/EOC) with conducting fillers viz., carbon black (CB) and multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWNT) were prepared using melt mixing technique with varying filler concentration and blend compositions. Thermo gravimetric analysis studies indicated that presence of filler enhanced the thermal stability of PP/EOC blends. Morphological analysis revealed the formation of matrix‐dispersed droplet and co‐continuous type of morphology depending on the blend compositions. Significant reduction in droplet size and finer ligament thickness in co‐continuous structure were observed in the blends with filler due to compatibilization action. Fillers were found to be aggregated in the EOC phase irrespective of blends compositions and could be related to the affinity of the fillers toward EOC phase. The electrical conductivity of PP/EOC blends with CB and MWNT was found to be highest for 80/20 composition and decreased as EOC content increased. The percolation threshold of CB was between 10 and 15 wt% for the 80/20 and 70/30 blends whereas it was 15–20 wt% for blends with EOC content higher than 30 wt%. The percolation threshold was 2–3 wt% MWNT for PP/EOC blends. This was attributed to the aggregated filler network preferentially in the EOC phase. The melt‐rheological behavior of PP/EOC blends was significantly influenced in presence of both the fillers. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2009. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers     

An overview on oxyfuel coal combustion—State of the art research and technology development

Oxyfuel combustion is seen as one of the major options for CO₂ capture for future clean coal technologies. The paper provides an overview on research activities and technology development through a fundamental research underpinning the Australia/Japan Oxyfuel Feasibility Project. Studies on oxyfuel combustion on a pilot-scale furnace and a laboratory scale drop tube furnace are presented and compared with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions. The research has made several contributions to current knowledge, including; comprehensive assessment on oxyfuel combustion in a pilot-scale oxyfuel furnace, modifying the design criterion for an oxy retrofit by matching heat transfer, a new 4-grey gas model which accurately predicts emissivity of the gases in oxy-fired furnaces has been developed for furnace modelling, the first measurements of coal reactivity comparisons in air and oxyfuel at laboratory and pilot-scale; and predictions of observed delays in flame ignition in oxy-firing.     

Multi-resolution approach to human activity recognition in video sequence based on combination of complex wavelet transform,Local Binary Pattern and Zernike moment

Human activity recognition is a challenging problem of computer vision and it has different emerging applications. The task of recognizing human activities from video sequence exhibits more challenges because of its highly variable nature and requirement of real time processing of data. This paper proposes a combination of features in a multiresolution framework for human activity recognition. We exploit multiresolution analysis through Daubechies complex wavelet transform (DCxWT). We combine Local binary pattern (LBP) with Zernike moment (ZM) at multiple resolutions of Daubechies complex wavelet decomposition. First, LBP coefficients of DCxWT coefficients of image frames are computed to extract texture features of image, then ZM of these LBP coefficients are computed to extract the shape feature from texture feature for construction of final feature vector. The Multi-class support vector machine classifier is used for classifying the recognized human activities. The proposed method has been tested on various standard publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method works well for multiview human activities as well as performs better than some of the other state-of-the-art methods in terms of different quantitative performance measures.

     

Drug and ion releasing tetracalcium phosphate based dual action cement for regenerative treatment of infected bone defects

Calcium phosphate cements (CPCs) are ideally suited for the local delivery of antibiotics in infected bone defects as they have multiple binding sites for loading various drugs. CPCs can also be substituted with ions such as Ag⁺, Zn²⁺, Mg²⁺, Sr²⁺, etc., to exhibit extended broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity. Strontium (Sr) in particular is known to enhance the new bone formation and decrease bone resorption. The current work aims to develop a dual action tetracalcium phosphate (TTCP) based cement which releases both the Sr²⁺ ion and ornidazole antibiotic drug for the treatment of bone infections. The TTCP with Sr²⁺ ion substitution was prepared by the solid state reaction method and it was used to form ornidazole loaded CPC. The ornidazole loaded cement prepared using 8?at% Sr substituted TTCP (8SCPC-O) showed complete hydroxyapatite (HA) formation in phosphate buffered solution at the end of 1 week. Fine needle-shaped HA crystals were observed in 8SCPC-O cement. In vitro drug release studies showed an accelerated ornidazole release from the 8SCPC-O sample when compared to samples without Sr substitution. Ornidazole releasing cements were found to be biocompatible with skeletal myoblast (L6) cells. Antibacterial activity of ornidazole releasing cement was evident from day 1 onwards against E. coli. The above results suggest 8SCPC-O as a good candidate for treating local bone infections.     

Evaluation of orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelets for video steganography

ABSTRACT

In recent years, information security over the internet has gained enormous immersion due to a technological escalation in communication via digital media. Nowadays, videos are the most common form of media over the internet, and they have gained the attention of video steganography research community for the security of the communication. This paper implemented video steganography using a widely-known transform technique, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) which consists of different orthogonal and biorthogonal filters used for the decomposition of a frame/image. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative evaluation for orthogonal and biorthogonal DWT filters with different matrices such as MSE, PSNR. The performance of the different filters has been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to investigate the best among them. Also, the best of orthogonal and biorthogonal filters have been further evaluated with other metrics such as SSIM, BER and histogram analysis. Further, the embedding algorithm has been compared with the existing video steganography techniques. The experimental results illustrate that bior 6.8 (biorthogonal filter) outperforms the other orthogonal and biorthogonal filters in terms of visual distortion.     

Climate Change Impact Assessment on Blue and Green Water by Coupling of Representative CMIP5 Climate Models with Physical Based Hydrological Model

Water Resources Management - Climatic changes have altered hydrological and climatic parameters worldwide, and climate projections suggest that such alterations will continue. In order to maintain...     

A novel hybrid hypervolume indicator and reference vector adaptation strategies based evolutionary algorithm for many-objective optimization

Engineering with Computers - A novel hybrid many-objective evolutionary algorithm called Reference Vector Guided Evolutionary Algorithm based on hypervolume indicator (H-RVEA) is proposed in this...     

Magnetic Zinc Ferrite–Alginic Biopolymer Composite: As an Alternative Adsorbent for the Removal of Dyes in Single and Ternary Dye System

Recently, magnetic bio-composites as adsorbent are widely being explored in waste water treatment because of their exceptional properties like high adsorption capacity, selectivity and cost-effective nature. In the present study, a novel recyclable magnetic composite containing magnetic zinc ferrite and alginate in alginic form (ZnFN–Alg) was developed. Various techniques like Fourier Transform-Infra Red, X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscope with energy dispersive spectra, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller, thermo gravimetric-differential thermal analysis and Point Zero Charge (pH_zpc) were used to characterize the surface morphology of magnetic composite. The magnetic composite was used as adsorbent to remove congo red, crystal violet and brilliant green dyes in single and ternary systems. The kinetic studies data was best fitted to Lagergren pseudo second order whereas mechanism of adsorption was described by intra particle diffusion model in single as well as ternary systems. The adsorption equilibrium data was best fitted to Langmuir isotherm among various adsorption isotherm models. Thermodynamic studies confirmed that the adsorption process was spontaneous in nature. The regeneration ability of ZnFN–Alg composite was studied individually in single and ternary dye systems for seven cycles and showed significant results. It was concluded that magnetic ZnFN–Alg can serve as suitable alternative for the removal of dyes in single and ternary systems.     

Microstructure,Thermal, Thermo-mechanical and Fracture Analyses of Hybrid AA2024-SiC Alloy Composites

This research work aims to investigate the inter-correlation between microstructure, thermal (thermal conductivity, thermo-gravimetric analysis), thermo-mechanical (dynamic mechanical analysis) and fracture characteristics of hybrid AA2024-SiC alloy composites fabricated via semi-automatic stir-casting process, as per standard industrial practice. Silicon Carbide (SiC) particulates of varying amount (0–6 wt%; @ step of 2%) were used to reinforce master batch of AA2024 wrought alloy, Silicon Nitride (Si3N4) and graphite particulates. The thermal conductivity and storage-modulus magnitudes of alloy composites have shown diminishing trend with hard SiC reinforcing phase, while material stability, viscous modulus, damping factor and fracture toughness have shown significant improvement. Uniform dispersion and better interfacial adhesion between matrix–reinforcement were observed from metallographic examination. The XRD analysis identified the different phases of the hybrid alloy composites. The trends in variations of physical, mechanical and tribological properties were supported by microstructure analysis, thermal analysis, thermo-mechanical analysis and fracture analysis.