Kinetics of swelling of cotton fibers in aqueous ethylenediamine solutions using moisture regain data

Kinetic studies of swelling of cotton cellulose with 75% (w/w) EDA solution have been carried out. Three rates of the reaction were observed in the temperature range 10–35°C: first, the very fast rate (k₁) lasting for about 10 s; second, the extremely slow rate (k₂) lasting for 30–50 s; and third, once again a fast rate (k₃), k₁ being faster than k₃. k₁ was attributed to the swelling action of EDA–monohydrate in amorphous regions of cellulose; k₂ was assigned to the penetration of swelling species into crystallities accompanied by breakage of H bonds in these regions; and k₃ was assigned to the opening up of the crystallites. Activation energy values confirmed this trend. At higher temperatures (35–55°C), the middle rate k₂ merged with k₃, giving only two rates, k₁ and k₂₊₃, as the higher temperatures brought about simultaneous diffusion of swelling agent into, and decrystallization of, the crystalline portions of cellulose. EDA solution of 65% (w/w) concentration gave only two rates: the initial fast rate assigned to the swelling of the amorphous portion, followed by a slow one, operating in mesomorphous regions of cellulose, without any appreciable decrystallization. This was atributed to the important fact, viz., the absence of EDA–monohydrates in the solution.     

Ameliorating effect of silica addition in the anode-catalyst layer of the membrane electrode assemblies for polymer electrolyte fuel cells

Incorporation of silica particles through a sol-gel process into the anode-catalyst layer with a sol-gel modified Nafion-silica composite membrane renders easy retention of back-diffused water from the cathode to anode through the composite membrane electrolyte, increases the catalyst-layer wettability and improves the performance of the Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell (PEFC) while operating under relative humidity (RH) values ranging between 18% and 100% with gaseous hydrogen and oxygen reactants at atmospheric pressure. A peak power density of 300 mW cm⁻² is achieved at a load current-density value of 1200 mA cm⁻² for the PEFC employing a sol-gel modified Nafion-silica composite membrane and operating at 18% RH. Under similar operating conditions, the PEFC with a Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) comprising Nafion-silica composite membrane with silica in the anode-catalyst layer delivers a peak power density of 375 mW cm⁻². By comparison, the PEFC employing commercial Nafion membrane fails to deliver satisfactory performance at 18% RH due to the limited availability of water at its anode, acerbated electro-osmotic drag of water from anode to cathode and insufficient water back diffusion from cathode to anode causing the MEA to dehydrate.     

An International Collaborative Study on Trypsin Inhibitor Assay for Legumes,Cereals, and Related Products

For determining trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA) in soy products, the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) Method Ba 12-75 has been used. It measures differences in absorbance at 410 nm of bovine trypsin activity toward a synthetic substrate (Nα-benzoyl-DL-arginine-p-nitroanilide) in the absence and presence of an inhibitor. Recently, a significantly improved method was developed (JAOCS, 2019, 96:635–645), featuring 5 mL of total assay volume, enzyme-last sequence, and single inhibitor level in duplicate. It is proposed as the AOCS Method Ba 12a-2020. As a part of the AOCS method approval process, a collaborative study involving 12 international laboratories was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The study involved measuring TIA in 10 selected test samples plus a blind duplicate. They included soybeans, pulses, cereals, and their processed products (flours, concentrates, and isolates). After rigorous statistical treatment of the data, only three outliers were removed from the data of two samples. Repeatability relative standard deviations (RSDr) for the 11 samples ranged from 0.99% to 5.52%. Reproducibility RSD (RSD_R) ranged from 7.07% to 22.92%, with seven samples having RSD_R around 10% or less. The remaining four samples had very low TIA, and their RSD_R values ranged from 13.34% to 22.92%. The study has demonstrated reliable performance of the proposed AOCS method. Several collaborators carried out additional experiments addressing some aspects of the method, leading to further refinements. The proposed method is undergoing evaluation by the AOCS Uniform Methods Committee for adoption as an Official Method for measuring TIA in various legume and grain products.     

Comparative wear performance of titanium based coatings for automotive applications using exhaust gas recirculation

This paper reports tribological characterization of titanium based coatings ion bonded on steel balls for automotive applications using exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). It is well known that lubricating oil drawn from EGR operated engine is contaminated with soot and higher amounts of wear debris compared to non-EGR operated engine. In this study, steel balls coated with TiN, TiAlN and TiCN are investigated in both fresh lubricating oil and EGR stressed oil for a comparative assessment of their wear characteristics in two mediums. Normal load was applied on the samples, tested against a rotating cast iron disk, simulating ring-liner interaction. In each experiment, about one quarter of disk was dipped in the oil (a) to ensure the presence of a thin oil film on the disk-ball interface during the experiment, and (b) to avoid exposure of the worn surface to atmospheric air. The results reveal that the wear rates of the coatings based on the change in the scar diameters of the samples, tested in EGR oil was 2-4 times higher than that of fresh lubricating oil. It was found that despite lowest hardness, TiN coated samples showed smaller scar diameters than TiAlN and TiCN coated samples in both lubricating oil environments. A simple geometric model was used to calculate the thickness of the coating removed as a function of the test duration. Results show that TiN coatings last for 120 min in fresh oil as compared to 30 min in the EGR oil under normal loading, whereas TiAlN and TiCN coating last for 60 and 30 min respectively in fresh oil and wear out in 15 min in EGR oil.     

Direction prediction for avoiding occlusion in visual surveillance

Occurrence of occlusion while providing visual surveillance leads to anarchy as the track of the subject under motion may be lost. This often results into the failure of the surveillance system. The approach of predicting motion of moving subjects and hence the chances of their mutual occlusion gives an upper hand to surveillance system to take in-time necessary action towards mitigation of loss of track during dynamic occlusion. Direction of motion of a moving subject plays a major role while studying its motion. Direction along with the velocity of a subject in a 3D plane completely describes the motion of any subject. This article proposes a model‘-based approach for direction prediction of a moving subject in a 3D global plane as acquired in a 2D camera plane. The proposed approach uses the eight discrete directions of motion as proposed in and models different directions. The proposed direction prediction method is experimentally verified with six different classifiers, i.e. regression analysis, simple logistic regression, MLP, k-NN, SVM and Bays classifier over existing as well as self-acquired databases. The initial simulation results are motivating as the overall accuracies achieved through different classifiers are of the range of 87–94 \(\%\), which advocates the suitability of the said approach.     

(Approximate) Uncertain Skylines

Given a set of points with uncertain locations, we consider the problem of computing the probability of each point lying on the skyline, that is, the probability that it is not dominated by any other input point. If each point’s uncertainty is described as a probability distribution over a discrete set of locations, we improve the best known exact solution. We also suggest why we believe our solution might be optimal. Next, we describe simple, near-linear time approximation algorithms for computing the probability of each point lying on the skyline. In addition, some of our methods can be adapted to construct data structures that can efficiently determine the probability of a query point lying on the skyline.     

Real-Time Global Illumination for VR Applications

Real-time global illumination in VR systems enhances scene realism by incorporating soft shadows, reflections of objects in the scene, and color bleeding. The Virtual Light Field (VLF) method enables real-time global illumination rendering in VR. The VLF has been integrated with the Extreme VR system for real-time GPU-based rendering in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment.     

Attack Resilient and Efficient Protocol based on Greedy Perimeter Coordinator Routing—Mobility Awareness for Preventing the Attack in the VANET

Wireless Personal Communications - A Greedy Perimeter Coordinator Routing and Mobility Awareness (GPCR-MA) vehicular routing is a widely accepted routing protocol for VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc...     

Change point detection for compositional multivariate data

Change point detection algorithms have numerous applications in areas of medical condition monitoring, fault detection in industrial processes, human activity analysis, climate change detection, and speech recognition. We consider the problem of change point detection on compositional multivariate data (each sample is a probability mass function), which is a practically important sub-class of general multivariate data. While the problem of change-point detection is well studied in univariate setting, and there are few viable implementations for a general multivariate data, the existing methods do not perform well on compositional data. In this paper, we propose a parametric approach for change point detection in compositional data. Moreover, using simple transformations on data, we extend our approach to handle any general multivariate data. Experimentally, we show that our method performs significantly better on compositional data and is competitive on general data compared to the available state of the art implementations.