Radiation-induced wood plastic composites under combinations of monomers

Radiation-induced wood plastic composites (WPC) were prepared from five varieties of Bangladeshi timbers, using seven different types of monomers. The mixtures of double and triple monomers were investigated along with the single-monomer system for the preparation of composites. Among the three systems, single-monomer process showed the highest polymer loading with butylmethacrylate (BMA). Tensile strength (TS) property, represented as T_f = TS_wpc/TS_wood was determined. Highest T_f values were achieved with the soft wood. The effects of dose and dose rate, monomer concentration, and swelling agent were also studied. Suitable total dose was found to be 3 Mrad at 0.8 Mrad/h, and methanol exhibited the best swelling ability for the woods at a ratio of 1 : 9 v/v in all the monomer investigated.     

Thermoelectric properties of SbNCa3 and BiNCa3 for thermoelectric devices and alternative energy applications

Thermoelectric properties of two antiperovskites SbNCa₃ and BiNCa₃ are calculated using first principles calculations. High values of Seebeck coefficients are observed for these materials. Electrical and thermal conductivities are also calculated. Increase in thermal conductivity and decrease in electrical conductivity are found with increasing temperature. The maximum values of thermal conductivity are 92×10¹⁴  W/m K s and 88×10¹⁴  W/m K s for SbNCa₃ and BiNCa₃ respectively at a temperature of 900 K. The peak values of 5×10²⁰/Ω m s and 5.2×10²⁰/Ω m s are achieved for n-type SbNCa₃ and BiNCa₃ respectively at a temperature of 300 K. Figure of merit is achieved for these materials at room temperature which shows that these materials can be useful for thermoelectric devices and alternative energy sources.     

Towards a distributed multi-agent framework for shared resources scheduling

Nowadays, manufacturers have to share some of their resources with partners due to the competitive economic environment. The management of the availability periods of shared resources causes a problem because it is achieved by the scheduling systems, which assume a local environment where all resources are on the same site. Therefore, distributed scheduling with shared resources is an important research topic. In this communication, we introduce the architecture and behaviour of DSCEP framework (Distributed, Supervisor, Customer, Environment, and Producer) under shared resources situation with disturbances. We are using a simple example of manufacturing system to illustrate the ability of DSCEP framework to solve the shared resources scheduling problem in complex systems.     

Networked event-triggered control: an introduction and research trends

A physical system can be studied as either continuous time or discrete-time system depending upon the control objectives. Discrete-time control systems can be further classified into two categories based on the sampling: (1) time-triggered control systems and (2) event-triggered control systems. Time-triggered systems sample states and calculate controls at every sampling instant in a periodic fashion, even in cases when states and calculated control do not change much. This indicates unnecessary and useless data transmission and computation efforts of a time-triggered system, thus inefficiency. For networked systems, the transmission of measurement and control signals, thus, cause unnecessary network traffic. Event-triggered systems, on the other hand, have potential to reduce the communication burden in addition to reducing the computation of control signals. This paper provides an up-to-date survey on the event-triggered methods for control systems and highlights the potential research directions.     

Micellar association in simultaneous presence of organic salts/additives

Viscosity measurements under Newtonian flow conditions had been performed on cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) aqueous solutions in the combined presence of sodium salts of aromatic acids (sodium salicylate, NaSal; sodium benzoate, NaBen; sodium anthranilate, NaAn) and organic additives (1-hexanol, C₆OH; n-hexylamine, C₆NH₂) at 30°C. On addition of C₆OH or C₆NH₂, the viscosity of 25 mM CTAB solution remained nearly constant without salt as well as with a lower salt concentration. This is due to low CTAB concentration which is not sufficient to produce structural changes in this concentration range of salts. However, as the salt concentration was increased further, the effect of C₆OH/C₆NH₂ addition was different with different salts: The viscosity first increased; then a decrease was observed with the former while with C₆NH₂ a decrease followed by constancy appeared in plots of relative viscosities (η _r ) vs. organic additive concentrations. At further higher salt concentration, the magnitude of η _r was much higher. The viscosity increase is explained in terms of micellar growth and the decrease in terms of swollen micelle formation (due to interior solubilization of organic additive) or micellar disintegration (due to formation of water + additive pseudophase).     

Asymmetric Sharpless epoxidation of 13S‐hydroxy‐ 9Z, 11E‐octadecadienoic acid (13S‐HODE)

The asymmetric Sharpless epoxidation of methyl 13S‐hydroxy‐9Z, 11E‐octadeca‐dienoate (13S‐HODE, 1 ) with tert‐butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP) catalysed by titanium tetraisopropoxide {Ti(ⁱOPr)₄} in the presence of L(+)‐diisopropyl tartrate (L‐DIPT) gave methyl 13S‐hydroxy‐11S, 12S‐epoxy‐9Z‐octadecenoate 2 (erythro isomer) in 84% diastereomeric excess (de). The epoxidation of 1 with TBHP catalysed by Ti(ⁱOPr)₄ in the presence of D(‐)‐DIPT yielded methyl 13S‐hydroxy‐11RR12R‐epoxy‐9Z‐octadecenoate (threo isomer) 3 in 76% de.     

Interpretation of way-finding healthcare symbols by a multicultural population: Navigation signage design for global health

The interpretation of way-finding symbols for healthcare facilities in a multicultural community was assessed in a cross-sectional study. One hundred participants recruited from Al Ain city in the United Arab Emirates were asked to interpret 28 healthcare symbols developed at Hablamos Juntos (such as vaccinations and laboratory) as well as 18 general-purpose symbols (such as elevators and restrooms). The mean age was 27.6 years (16–55 years) of whom 84 (84%) were females. Healthcare symbols were more difficult to comprehend than general-purpose signs. Symbols referring to abstract concepts were the most misinterpreted including oncology, diabetes education, outpatient clinic, interpretive services, pharmacy, internal medicine, registration, social services, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and infectious diseases. Interpretation rates varied across cultural backgrounds and increased with higher education and younger age. Signage within healthcare facilities should be tested among older persons, those with limited literacy and across a wide range of cultures.     

Internal structure of coalitions in competitive and altruistic graphical coalitional games

This paper introduces a certain graphical coalitional game where the internal topology of the coalition depends on a prescribed communication graph structure among the agents. The game Value Function is required to satisfy four Axioms of Value. These axioms make it possible to provide a refined study of coalition structures on graphs by defining a formal graphical game and by assigning a Positional Advantage, based on the Shapley value, to each agent in a coalition based on its connectivity properties within the graph. Using the Axioms of Value the graphical coalitional game can be shown to satisfy properties such as convexity, fairness, cohesiveness, and full cooperativeness. Three measures of the contributions of agents to a coalition are introduced: marginal contribution, competitive contribution, and altruistic contribution. The mathematical framework given here is used to establish results regarding the dependence of these three types of contributions on the graph topology, and changes in these contributions due to changes in graph topology. Based on these different contributions, three online sequential decision games are defined on top of the graphical coalitional game, and the stable graphs under each of these sequential decision games are studied. It is shown that the stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the marginal contribution are any connected graph. The stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the competitive contribution are the complete graph. The stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the altruistic contribution are any tree.     

Photochemical oxidation of fatty acid esters with and without chlorophyll

1. It has been confirmed that the principal products formed in the oxidation of methyl oleate by oxygen under a variety of conditions are predominantlytrans hydroperoxides. However no inversion of the double bond occurs in unoxidized oleate. Hence the conversion ofcis totrans double bonds and peroxide formation occur together in the same molecules.
2. The autoxidation of methyl linoleate at low temperature yields predominantlycis,trans conjugated hydroperoxides. Autoxidation at 25°C., oxidation catalyzed by visible light, or ultraviolet light and copper soap catalyzed oxidation at temperatures appreciably above 0°C., lead to the formation primarily oftrans,trans conjugated hydroperoxides. The inversion of the second double bond in this case appears to be independent of the peroxide-forming reactions.
3. The photochlorophyll oxidation of methyl linoleate leads to the formation of some unconjugated hydroperoxides, some of which containtrans double bonds.
4. Under all of the conditions employed in the present investigation, the oxidation of methyl oleate and linoleate led primarily to the formation of monomeric peroxides which retained most of the unsaturation of the parent compound.

     

Painting-91: a large scale database for computational painting categorization

Computer analysis of visual art, especially paintings, is an interesting cross-disciplinary research domain. Most of the research in the analysis of paintings involve medium to small range datasets with own specific settings. Interestingly, significant progress has been made in the field of object and scene recognition lately. A key factor in this success is the introduction and availability of benchmark datasets for evaluation. Surprisingly, such a benchmark setup is still missing in the area of computational painting categorization. In this work, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The dataset consists of paintings from 91 different painters. We further show three applications of our dataset namely: artist categorization, style classification and saliency detection. We investigate how local and global features popular in image classification perform for the tasks of artist and style categorization. For both categorization tasks, our experimental results suggest that combining multiple features significantly improves the final performance. We show that state-of-the-art computer vision methods can correctly classify 50 % of unseen paintings to its painter in a large dataset and correctly attribute its artistic style in over 60 % of the cases. Additionally, we explore the task of saliency detection on paintings and show experimental findings using state-of-the-art saliency estimation algorithms.