Solution copolymerization of methyl methacrylate and alkyl methacrylates in a continuous stirred tank reactor(CSTR)

Continuous solution copolymerization of methyl methacrylate with ethyl methacrylate or n-butyl methacrylate was carried out in a continuous stirred tank reactor. Solvent and initiator used were toluene and benzoyl peroxide, respectively. Reaction volume was 1.2 litters, residence time 3 hours and polymerization temperature 80°C. The copolymerization conversions were analyzed by UV spectrophotometry and confirmed by measuring the solid weights of copolymers obtained after evaporating solvent. The copolymerization of methyl methacrylate and alkyl methacrylates followed the second order kinetics. The simulated conversions and copolymerization rates were compared with the experimental results. The average time to reach dynamic steady-state was three and half times of the residence time.     

Synthesis of nanodispersed oxides of vanadium, titanium, molybdenum, and tungsten on mesoporous silica using atomic layer deposition

The advantages of the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method for preparation of tungsten, vanadium, titanium, and molybdenum oxide catalyst supported on mesoporous silica are discussed, with emphasis on the importance of synthesis conditions on dispersion, structure and activity of the resulting materials. A suite of complementary techniques such as DRS-UV/Vis, BET, ¹H-NMR, XRD, and TEM were used to study the structural properties of the supported metal oxides, and probe reactions such as 2-butanol dehydration and ethanol partial oxidation were used to demonstrate the potential advantages of the ALD-prepared catalysts. Specifically, highly dispersed oxides of titanium, molybdenum, and tungsten oxide on mesoporous silica were synthesized using the ALD method. It is also demonstrated that attainment of high dispersions of vanadium oxide on mesoporous silica requires the presence of at least a single layer of titanium oxide due to the well-known poor interaction between vanadia and silica. The highly dispersed catalysts prepared here by ALD methods exhibited superior catalytic performance relative to those prepared using conventional incipient wetness impregnation.     

Page segmentation using minimum homogeneity algorithm and adaptive mathematical morphology

Document layout analysis or page segmentation is the task of decomposing document images into many different regions such as texts, images, separators, and tables. It is still a challenging problem due to the variety of document layouts. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid method, which includes three main stages to deal with this problem. In the first stage, the text and non-text elements are classified by using minimum homogeneity algorithm. This method is the combination of connected component analysis and multilevel homogeneity structure. Then, in the second stage, a new homogeneity structure is combined with an adaptive mathematical morphology in the text document to get a set of text regions. Besides, on the non-text document, further classification of non-text elements is applied to get separator regions, table regions, image regions, etc. The final stage, in refinement region and noise detection process, all regions both in the text document and non-text document are refined to eliminate noises and get the geometric layout of each region. The proposed method has been tested with the dataset of ICDAR2009 page segmentation competition and many other databases with different languages. The results of these tests showed that our proposed method achieves a higher accuracy compared to other methods. This proves the effectiveness and superiority of our method.     

Touch‐screen panel integrated into 12.1‐in. a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD

Abstract— A touch‐screen‐panel (TSP) embedded 12.1‐in. LCD employing a standard existing a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD process has been successfully developed. Compared with conventional external touch‐screen panels, which use additional components to detect touch events, the new internal TSP exhibits a clearer image and improved touch feeling, as well as increased sensing speed using discrete sensing lines to enable higher‐speed sensing functions including handwriting. The new internal digital switching TSP can be fabricated with low cost because it does not require any additional process steps compared to a standard a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD.     

Human tracking and silhouette extraction for human–robot interaction systems

In this study, we propose a new integrated computer vision system designed to track multiple human beings and extract their silhouette with a pan-tilt stereo camera, so that it can assist in gesture and gait recognition in the field of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). The proposed system consists of three modules: detection, tracking and silhouette extraction. These modules are robust to camera movements, and they work interactively in near real-time. Detection was performed by camera ego-motion compensation and disparity segmentation. For tracking, we present an efficient mean shift-based tracking method in which the tracking objects are characterized as disparity weighted color histograms. The silhouette was obtained by two-step segmentation. A trimap was estimated in advance and then effectively incorporated into the graph-cut framework for fine segmentation. The proposed system was evaluated with respect to ground truth data, and it was shown to detect and track multiple people very well and also produce high-quality silhouettes.

Application of maximum entropy principle for reliability-based design optimization

The maximum entropy principle (MEP) is used to generate a natural probability distribution among the many possible that have the same moment conditions. The MEP can accommodate higher order moment information and therefore facilitate a higher quality PDF model. The performance of the MEP for PDF estimation is studied by using more than four moments. For the case with four moments, the results are compared with those by the Pearson system. It is observed that as accommodating higher order moment, the estimated PDF converges to the original one. A sensitivity analysis formulation of the failure probability based on the MEP is derived for reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) and the accuracy is compared with that by finite difference method (FDM). Two RBDO examples including a realistic three-dimensional wing design are solved by using the derived sensitivity formula and the MEP-based moment method. The results are compared with other methods such as TR-SQP, FAMM + Pearson system, FFMM + Pearson system in terms of accuracy and efficiency. It is also shown that an improvement in the accuracy by including more moment terms can increase numerical efficiency of optimization for the three-dimensional wing design. The moment method equipped with the MEP is found flexible and well adoptable for reliability analysis and design.     

Effects of morphologies of (Cd+Te) powders on the properties of sintered CdS/CdTe solar cells

Polycrystalline CdS/CdTe solar cells have been prepared by coating and sintering a CdS slurry and a (Cd+Te) slurry. CdS layers were first formed on borosilicate glass substrates at 600°C in nitrogen and then CdTe layers were formed on the sintered CdS layers at 625°C in nitrogen. The (Cd+Te) slurry contained (Cd+Te) powders mixed in a ball mill for 12–220 h instead of more expensive CdTe powders. The shape of cadmium particles changed from spherical to plate-like and the diameter of the plate-shaped particles became smaller as the ball-milling time increased. In addition, a compound CdTe started to form during a long milling time. The sintered CdTe layers were more compact as the diameter of plate-shaped cadmium particles decreased. However, cracks developed in the sintered CdTe layer when the diameter was small ( 2 m). The efficiency of sintered CdS/CdTe solar cells increased with decreasing particle diameter and then decreased with further decrease in particle diameter. The highest efficiency of 12.1% was achieved using a mixture of (Cd+Te) powders which had plate-shaped cadmium particles with a diameter of 5 m. The results suggest that high-efficiency sintered CdS/CdTe solar cells can be fabricated by using CdTe slurry from the mixture of (Cd+Te) powders with an inexpensive ball-milling process.     

Network Intrusion Detection in Internet of Blended Environment Using Ensemble of Heterogeneous Autoencoders (E-HAE)

Contemporary attackers, mainly motivated by financial gain, consistently devise sophisticated penetration techniques to access important information or data. The growing use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the contemporary convergence environment to connect to corporate networks and cloud-based applications only worsens this situation, as it facilitates multiple new attack vectors to emerge effortlessly. As such, existing intrusion detection systems suffer from performance degradation mainly because of insufficient considerations and poorly modeled detection systems. To address this problem, we designed a blended threat detection approach, considering the possible impact and dimensionality of new attack surfaces due to the aforementioned convergence. We collectively refer to the convergence of different technology sectors as the internet of blended environment. The proposed approach encompasses an ensemble of heterogeneous probabilistic autoencoders that leverage the corresponding advantages of a convolutional variational autoencoder and long short-term memory variational autoencoder. An extensive experimental analysis conducted on the TON_IoT dataset demonstrated 96.02% detection accuracy. Furthermore, performance of the proposed approach was compared with various single model (autoencoder)-based network intrusion detection approaches: autoencoder, variational autoencoder, convolutional variational autoencoder, and long short-term memory variational autoencoder. The proposed model outperformed all compared models, demonstrating F1-score improvements of 4.99%, 2.25%, 1.92%, and 3.69%, respectively.     

Nanopore Sensing in Aqueous Two‐Phase System: Simultaneous Enhancement of Signal and Translocation Time via Conformal Coating

Nanofluidic resistive pulse sensing (RPS) has been extensively used to measure the size, concentration, and surface charge of nanoparticles in electrically conducting solutions. Although various methods have been explored for improving detection performances, intrinsic problems including the extremely low particle‐to‐pore volume ratio (<0.01%) and fast nanoparticle translocation (10–1000 µs) still induce difficulties in detection, such as low signal magnitudes and short translocation times. Herein, we present an aqueous two‐phase system (ATPS) in a nanofluidic RPS for amplifying translocation signals and decreasing translocation speeds simultaneously. Two immiscible aqueous liquids build a liquid‐liquid interface inside nanopores. As particles translocate from a high‐affinity liquid phase into a lower‐affinity one, the high‐affinity liquid forms a conformal coating on the particles, which increases the effective particle size and amplifies the current‐blockage signal. The translocation time is also increased, as the ATPS interface impedes the particle translocation. For 20 nm particles, 7.92‐fold and 5.82‐fold enhancements of signal magnitude and translocation time can be achieved. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to improve nanofluidic RPS by treating an interface of solution reservoirs for manipulating target particles rather than nanopores. This direct particle manipulation allows us to solve the two intrinsic problems all at once.