Modification of nylon 6 with organochlorosilanes. II. Physical properties

The physical properties of nylon 6 yarn treated with dimethyldichlorosilane (DMCS) and vinylmethyldichlorosilane (VMCS) in nitrogen atmosphere or air in the presence and absence of an amine have been compared with those of ether-extracted parent yarn. Treatment with DMCS in nitrogen resulted in marginal improvement in breaking stress, considerable increase in breaking elongation, and elastic behavior, whereas initial modulus was decreased. A decrease in density, birefringence, and moisture regain with increase in per cent weight gain was observed. Mechanical damping was decreased considerably up to an optimum weight gain after which it was increased. Thermal properties were also determined, and results are discussed in relation to mechanical properties. The results indicate that the overall thermal stability has decreased in the chemically treated yarns. Treatment with organochlorosilanes in the presence of air results in a chain-scission reaction and a decrease in mechanical properties.     

COMPLEX DYNAMIC BEHAVIOR IN THE CASE OF CO—NO—O2—H2O REACTION SYSTEM ON Pt/γAl2O3 CATALYST

Self-sustained, isothermal oscillations in outlet species concentrations were observed under certain steady inlet conditions in the case of the CO—NO—O₂—H₂O reaction system on Pt/γAl₂O₃ catalyst in a fixed-bed tubuiar reactor. The oscillations were mostly aperiodic, and for fixed inlet concentrations of the other species, they occurred in a rather narrow window of inlet oxygen concentrations near the stoichiometric point. The amplitude and frequency of these oscillations were affected by temperature and by the inlet concenlrations of CO and NO. Systemalic experiments, conducted to understand the cause of these oscillations, revealed that the catalyst aging procedure and the presence of water vapor induced the complex dynamic behavior observed in the CO—NO—O₂—H₂O system. The oscillations are explained qualitatively in terms of the competition among the various reactants for adsorption and subsequent reaction on the catalyst surface.     

Substrate-inhibited enzyme reaction in a tubular reactor with axial dispersion

For a fixed set of physico-chemical parameters, an isothermal substrate-inhibited enzyme reaction in a tubular reactor with axial dispersion can give rise to multiple steady states. Criteria previously developed for non-isothermal reactions are applied to this case to develop analytic conditions which ensure uniqueness of steady states. The criteria compare well with values obtained from exact numerical calculations.     

Deterministic extractors for small-space sources

We give polynomial-time, deterministic randomness extractors for sources generated in small space, where we model space s sources on ${\{0,1\}}^n$ as sources generated by width $2^s$ branching programs. Specifically, there is a constant $\eta >0$ such that for any $\zeta >n^{?\eta }$, our algorithm extracts $m=(\delta ?\zeta )n$ bits that are exponentially close to uniform (in variation distance) from space s sources with min-entropy δn, where $s=\Omega ({\zeta }^{3}n)$. Previously, nothing was known for $\delta ?1/2$, even for space 0. Our results are obtained by a reduction to the class of total-entropy independent sources. This model generalizes both the well-studied models of independent sources and symbol-fixing sources. These sources consist of a set of r independent smaller sources over ${\{0,1\}}^{?}$, where the total min-entropy over all the smaller sources is k. We give deterministic extractors for such sources when k is as small as $\mathsf{polylog}(r)$, for small enough ?.     

Pyramid coding based rate control for constant bit rate video streaming

In this paper, a novel pyramid coding based rate control scheme is proposed for video streaming applications constrained by a constant channel bandwidth. To achieve the target bit rate with the best quality, the initial quantization parameter (QP) is determined by the average spatio-temporal complexity of the sequence, its resolution and the target bit rate. Simple linear estimation models are then used to predict the number of bits that would be necessary to encode a frame for a given complexity and QP. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed rate control scheme significantly outperforms the existing rate control scheme in the Joint Model (JM) reference software in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and consistent perceptual visual quality while achieving the target bit rate. Finally, the proposed scheme is validated through experimental evaluation over a miniature test-bed.

     

The hardness of the Expected Decision Depth problem

Given a function f over n binary variables, and an ordering of the n variables, we consider the Expected Decision Depth problem. Namely, what is the expected number of bits that need to be observed until the value of the function is determined, when bits of the input are observed according to the given order. Our main finding is that this problem is (essentially) #P-complete. Moreover, the hardness holds even when the function f is represented as a decision tree.     

Detecting localized homogeneous anomalies over spatio-temporal data

The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth in availability of data having spatio-temporal characteristics. Given the scale and richness of such data, finding spatio-temporal patterns that demonstrate significantly different behavior from their neighbors could be of interest for various application scenarios such as—weather modeling, analyzing spread of disease outbreaks, monitoring traffic congestions, and so on. In this paper, we propose an automated approach of exploring and discovering such anomalous patterns irrespective of the underlying domain from which the data is recovered. Our approach differs significantly from traditional methods of spatial outlier detection, and employs two phases—(i) discovering homogeneous regions, and (ii) evaluating these regions as anomalies based on their statistical difference from a generalized neighborhood. We evaluate the quality of our approach and distinguish it from existing techniques via an extensive experimental evaluation.     

Dispersion of photoelastic constants in doped KDP crystals

The photoelastic behaviour ofkdp crystals with additives like borax,adp, nickel phosphate, manganese phosphate and sodium dihydrogen orthophosphate has been studied as a variable birefringent compensator. The dispersion of the stress birefringence with wavelength was studied for a single orientation.