Wear of ion-plated aluminium bronze coatings under arduous metal-forming conditions

The wear of aluminium bronze coatings deposited by the ion-plating process using a slug-fed resistively heated evaporator and various discharge intensities has been studied. The coating material was Cu-14Al-4Fe alloy, which is known to have good non-galling properties in sheet metal forming. The wear and galling behaviour of the coatings were studied by a plane-on-cylinder wear test and production-scale tube-collaring experiments. Coatings improved the life of the tools, and enhancement of the deposition discharge further improved the life of the coatings.     

Thalassemia Screening by Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Platform Twitter

Thalassemia syndrome is a genetic blood disorder induced by thereduction of normal hemoglobin production, resulting in a drop in the size ofred blood cells. In severe forms, it can lead to death. This genetic disorderhas posed a major burden on public health wherein patients with severethalassemia need periodic therapy of iron chelation and blood transfusionfor survival. Therefore, controlling thalassemia is extremely important and ismade by promoting screening to the general population, particularly amongthalassemia carriers. Today Twitter is one of the most influential social mediaplatforms for sharing opinions and discussing different topics like people’shealth conditions and major public health affairs. Exploring individuals’sentiments in these tweets helps the research centers to formulate strategies to promote thalassemia screening to the public. An effective Lexiconbased approach has been introduced in this study by highlighting a classifiercalled valence aware dictionary for sentiment reasoning (VADER). In thisstudy applied twitter intelligence tool (TWINT), Natural Language Toolkit(NLTK), and VADER constitute the three main tools. VADER represents agold-standard sentiment lexicon, which is basically tailored to attitudes thatare communicated by using social media. The contribution of this study isto introduce an effective Lexicon-based approach by highlighting a classifiercalled VADER to analyze the sentiment of the general population, particularlyamong thalassemia carriers on the social media platform Twitter. In thisstudy, the results showed that the proposed approach achieved 0.829, 0.816,and 0.818 regarding precision, recall, together with F-score, respectively. Thetweets were crawled using the search keywords, “thalassemia screening,”thalassemia test, “and thalassemia diagnosis”. Finally, results showed thatIndia and Pakistan ranked the highest in mentions in tweets by the public’sconversations on thalassemia screening with 181 and 164 tweets, respectively.     

A novel method for a new electromagnetic-induced ammonia synthesizer

Since the triple bond in a nitrogen molecule is considered to be one of the strongest bond to break, the ammonia synthesis under atmospheric pressure and mild temperature becomes a remarkably challenging problem. In the present research study, a novel method is introduced for electrochemical ammonia synthesis through integrating the reactor with the electromagnetic zero-voltage switching (ZVS) device. The reactor is tested under an induced electromagnetic (EM) field in galvanostatic mode by varying the operating parameters that include temperature, flow rate, and current density. The experimental setup is designed and operated toward performing the electrochemical synthesis. The maximum Faradaic efficiency achieved with EM field is 4.5%, and the ammonia formation rate is found to be 1.21 × 10⁻¹⁰ mol cm⁻² s⁻¹ at an applied constant current of 6.4 mA cm⁻² and EM field of 49 mT. Furthermore, the experiments are extended to include the ammonia synthesis with and without EM field influence on the reaction; in which case, the reduction potential becomes 1.25 V with the presence of EM field, while it is 1.7 V without EM field when the applied current of 6.4 mA cm⁻² is incorporated. This study demonstrates that the electrochemical ammonia synthesis, via nitrogen reduction, can be achieved spontaneously, which is beyond the classical approach for electrochemical ammonia synthesis.     

MIQM: A Multicamera Image Quality Measure

Although several subjective and objective quality assessment methods have been proposed in the literature for images and videos from single cameras, no comparable effort has been devoted to the quality assessment of multicamera images. With the increasing popularity of multiview applications, quality assessment of multicamera images and videos is becoming fundamental to the development of these applications. Image quality is affected by several factors, such as camera configuration, number of cameras, and the calibration process. In order to develop an objective metric specifically designed for multicamera systems, we identified and quantified two types of visual distortions in multicamera images: photometric distortions and geometric distortions. The relative distortion between individual camera scenes is a major factor in determining the overall perceived quality. In this paper, we show that such distortions can be translated into luminance, contrast, spatial motion, and edge-based structure components. We propose three different indices that can quantify these components. We provide examples to demonstrate the correlation among these components and the corresponding indices. Then, we combine these indices into one multicamera image quality measure (MIQM). Results and comparisons with other measures, such as peak signal-to noise ratio, mean structural similarity, and visual information fidelity show that MIQM outperforms other measures in capturing the perceptual fidelity of multicamera images. Finally, we verify the results against subjective evaluation.     

In vitro studies toward noninvasive glucose monitoring with optical coherence tomography

We use optical coherence tomography (OCT) to measure glucose-induced changes in Intralipid and in mouse skin samples in vitro. Mouse skin samples are cultured in a CO2 incubator before measurements are made with different amounts of added glucose concentrations. The results show that the glucose-induced changes in the OCT slope value vary between 20% and 52%/30 mM glucose in different mouse skin samples. This change is much larger than the change in 2% Intralipid (2.1%/30 mM) and in 5% Intralipid (0.86%/30 mM). Hence the results show that OCT has potential to monitor glucose-induced changes in tissues in vitro.