Zn–Al–CO<Subscript>3</Subscript> layered double hydroxides prepared from a waste of hot-dip galvanizing process

Hot-dip galvanizing process is used worldwide to protect the steel or iron pieces from corrosion. This process is a large generator of waste, considered one of the so-called dirty industries. One of the important wastes, in terms of quantity, is zinc ash that contains a mixture of metallic zinc and zinc oxide with a total content of zinc between 70 and 90%. The aim of this study is the preparation and characterization of a series of Zn _R –Al–CO₃ (R?=?2–4) layered double hydroxides (LDH) by using as zinc precursor the zinc chloride obtained after hydrochloric acid leaching of fine-grained zinc ash. Results presented herein clearly demonstrated that characteristics of the synthesized samples are close to those of similar materials synthesized starting from analytical grade reagents. At the same time, it was observed that impurities existent in the zinc chloride solution prepared by zinc ash leaching (Pb, Fe, Ca), are found at traces in the synthesized LDH materials; therefore, they have no significant influence on the obtained LDH structure and properties. By this approach, several important benefits may be simultaneously achieved: (1) preventing the pollution associated with hot-dip galvanizing process wastes, (2) obtaining of valuable products with minimized costs, keeping in mind that LDH have multiple utilizations at industrial scale, (3) saving energy and material costs, and (4) increase of product competitiveness with respect to the circular economy.     

Algorithmically independent sequences

Two objects are independent if they do not affect each other. Independence is well-understood in classical information theory, but less in algorithmic information theory. Working in the framework of algorithmic information theory, the paper proposes two types of independence for arbitrary infinite binary sequences and studies their properties. Our two proposed notions of independence have some of the intuitive properties that one naturally expects. For example, for every sequence x, the set of sequences that are independent with x has measure one. For both notions of independence we investigate to what extent pairs of independent sequences, can be effectively constructed via Turing reductions (from one or more input sequences). In this respect, we prove several impossibility results. For example, it is shown that there is no effective way of producing from an arbitrary sequence with positive constructive Hausdorff dimension two sequences that are independent (even in the weaker type of independence) and have super-logarithmic complexity. Finally, a few conjectures and open questions are discussed.     

The influence of controllable task-lighting on productivity: a field study in a factory

This study examines whether or not a controllable task-lighting system that allows people to select high lighting levels will enhance productivity under real working conditions. For a period of 16 months a study was carried out in a luminaire factory in Finland in which such a task-lighting system was installed above 10 individual workstations. The illuminances selected by the users were recorded and productivity was monitored. Enhancing productivity can be relevant in industrial processes. The increase of productivity for the test group was +4.5% compared to a reference group, and statistically significant. The mechanism for this increase can be improved visual performance, biological effects of light, or psychological effects. Different dimming speeds were used to see whether the subjects' choices were based on illuminance or on the response of the control system. Decreasing the dimming speed of the system decreased the illuminance chosen by 13%. However, at slower dimming speeds the subjects took 55% longer to reach a given level, which suggests that they were aiming to set the lighting to their preferred level and not just pushing the button for a certain time.     

Adaptive domain decomposition for the bound method: Application to the incompressible Navier-Stokes and Energy equations in three space dimensions

Large-scale numerical simulations of the flow and associated transport phenomena governed by the Navier-Stokes and Energy equations are routinely calculated in engineering practice. Nevertheless, the uncertainty due to spatial discretization limits the confidence of practitioners in numerical solutions. An approach to provide information about the accuracy of the quantity of interest is proposed here-in. The novel a posteriori error estimation technique - the bound method - is based on relaxing Lagrange multipliers that enforces continuity between sub-domains. The method provides fast, efficient, asymptotic but reliable lower and upper bounds to the output of underlying partial differential equations (PDEs). Herein, we highlight the method when applied to outputs of the steady incompressible Navier-Stokes and Energy equations. The bound method in this paper follows the directly equilibrated hybrid-flux approach for the flux calculation between sub-domains and uses the Crouzeix-Raviart () approximation spaces. To improve the effectiveness of the bound method, an adaptive sub-domain refinement strategy leading to sharper bounds is adopted. A convective heat transfer problem in a series of electronic chip devices is investigated. The novelty of this paper is to present bounds using adaptive domain decomposition for outputs associated to a complex three-dimensional field solution of the Navier-Stokes and Energy equations.     

Text-independent writer identification and verification using textural and allographic features

The identification of a person on the basis of scanned images of handwriting is a useful biometric modality with application in forensic and historic document analysis and constitutes an exemplary study area within the research field of behavioral biometrics. We developed new and very effective techniques for automatic writer identification and verification that use probability distribution functions (PDFs) extracted from the handwriting images to characterize writer individuality. A defining property of our methods is that they are designed to be independent of the textual content of the handwritten samples. Our methods operate at two levels of analysis: the texture level and the character-shape (allograph) level. At the texture level, we use contour-based joint directional PDFs that encode orientation and curvature information to give an intimate characterization of individual handwriting style. In our analysis at the allograph level, the writer is considered to be characterized by a stochastic pattern generator of ink-trace fragments, or graphemes. The PDF of these simple shapes in a given handwriting sample is characteristic for the writer and is computed using a common shape codebook obtained by grapheme clustering. Combining multiple features (directional, grapheme, and run-length PDFs) yields increased writer identification and verification performance. The proposed methods are applicable to free-style handwriting (both cursive and isolated) and have practical feasibility, under the assumption that a few text lines of handwritten material are available in order to obtain reliable probability estimates     

SafeMesh: A wireless mesh network routing protocol for incident area communications

Reliable broadband communication is becoming increasingly important during disaster recovery and emergency response operations. In situations where infrastructure-based communication is not available or has been disrupted, an Incident Area Network needs to be dynamically deployed, i.e. a temporary network that provides communication services for efficient crisis management at an incident site. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with self-healing and self-configuring capabilities. These features, combined with the ability to provide wireless broadband connectivity at a comparably low cost, make WMNs a promising technology for incident management communications. This paper specifically focuses on hybrid WMNs, which allow both mobile client devices as well as dedicated infrastructure nodes to form the network and provide routing and forwarding functionality. Hybrid WMNs are the most generic and most flexible type of mesh networks and are ideally suited to meet the requirements of incident area communications. However, current wireless mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols do not perform well in hybrid WMN, and are not able to establish stable and high throughput communication paths. One of the key reasons for this is their inability to exploit the typical high degree of heterogeneity in hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh, the routing protocol presented in this paper, addresses the limitations of current mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols in the context of hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh is based on the well-known AODV routing protocol, and implements a number of modifications and extensions that significantly improve its performance in hybrid WMNs. This is demonstrated via an extensive set of simulation results. We further show the practicality of the protocol through a prototype implementation and provide performance results obtained from a small-scale testbed deployment.     

Performing word sense disambiguation at the border between unsupervised and knowledge-based techniques

This paper aims to fully present a new word sense disambiguation method that has been introduced in Hristea and Popescu (Fundam Inform 91(3–4):547–562, 2009) and so far tested in the case of adjectives (Hristea and Popescu in Fundam Inform 91(3–4):547–562, 2009) and verbs (Hristea in Int Rev Comput Softw 4(1):58–67, 2009). We hereby extend the method to the case of nouns and draw conclusions regarding its performance with respect to all these parts of speech. The method lies at the border between unsupervised and knowledge-based techniques. It performs unsupervised word sense disambiguation based on an underlying Naïve Bayes model, while using WordNet as knowledge source for feature selection. The performance of the method is compared to that of previous approaches that rely on completely different feature sets. Test results for all involved parts of speech show that feature selection using a knowledge source of type WordNet is more effective in disambiguation than local type features (like part-of-speech tags) are.     

Parallel Programming of Multi-processor SoC: A HW–SW Interface Perspective

For the design of classic computers the parallel programming concept is used to abstract HW/SW interfaces during high level specification of application software. The software is then adapted to existing multiprocessor platforms using a low level software layer that implements the programming model. Unlike classic computers, the design of heterogeneous MPSoC includes also building the processors and other kind of hardware components required to execute the software. In this case, the programming model hides both hardware and software refinements. This paper deals with parallel programming models to abstract both hardware and software interfaces in the case of heterogeneous MPSoC design. Different abstraction levels will be needed. For the long term, the use of higher level programming models will open new vistas for optimization and architecture exploration like CPU/RTOS tradeoffs.     

Interoperable digital rights management based on the MPEG Extensible Middleware

This paper describes an interoperable Digital Rights Management architecture promoted by the MPEG standardization group in its new standard known as MPEG-M or MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM). The goal of this standard is to promote the packaging and reusability of MPEG technologies, and for this it specifies a software middleware platform and a complete set of APIs and protocols. These APIs allow uniformly handling digital content and developing generic multimedia applications, through a set of modules communicated with standard protocols. The MXM standard provides the necessary mechanisms to digitally manage the rights over Intellectual Property, the tools to protect the media and the means to grant the rights enforcement, besides a rich set of libraries to reproduce the content.     

Programming dynamic reconfigurable systems

International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer - DR-BIP is an extension of the BIP component framework intended for programming reconfigurable systems encompassing various aspects...