Interconversion of light olefins—aromatics over zeolite catalysts

Improved yield in light olefins and aromatics from methanol conversion was observed on Zn and Mn loaded ZSM-5 zeolite—asbestos catalysts. The best results in terms of conversion into hydrocarbons were obtained with a Zn content not exceeding 0.6% wt/wt. The light olefins/aromatics ratio in the products varied with the Mn content in the catalyst, the cumulative light olefinic and aromatic production being kept constant at a high value.     

Smart places: Multi-agent based smart mobile virtual community management system

Now-a-days advances in mobile device technology aim to build complex computational systems providing a maximum level of flexibility, decentralization, simplest form of interactivity, and ease of use. Recently, the launch of the agent-oriented platform JaCaMo and its Android client based platform JaCa-Android have provided an appropriate level of abstraction to build smart mobile client server systems providing these attributes. By using these platforms, we have developed a multi-agent based Smart Mobile Virtual Community Management System (SMVCMS) that makes it possible to provide a decentralized and open management of virtual communities. This paper addresses the design and architecture of our multi-agent server and client application. It elaborates different features of our system; such as how a participant in virtual communities is supported by a Jason agent that encapsulates the logic and the control of the participation in a virtual community (such as publishing posts, notifying members, making recommendations for the user, etc.). It also discusses how the set of CArtAgOartifacts provides the basic functionalities and operations giving access to the functionalities for knowledge exchange in virtual communities, and personal agents onAndroid exploit these artifacts to execute their tasks while achieving their individual and collective goals. We have employed SMVCMS in the context of Smart Cities and found that the system fulfills the desired goals, such as decentralization of community management, personalized automatic management and discovery of communities, autonomy of agents and flexibility so that any agent can create its own community with the maximum level of ease.     

Copolymerization of butyl acrylate with styrene in presence on ZnCl2

Summary Copolymers of butyl acrylate-styrene were prepared in presence of ZnCl₂. The formation of a complex was determined by infrared spectroscopy. The copolymers were characterized by IR, NMR and by solubility. The study of their structure as a function of the initial monomer composition and the analysis of UV spectra showing varying intensity of the carbonyl peaks confirmed the presence of an alternating copolymer. The reactivity ratios of the two monomers were determined and found to be 0.1 for both butyl acrylate and styrene.     

The vmf90 program for the numerical resolution of the Vlasov equation for mean-field systems

The numerical resolution of the Vlasov equation provides complementary information with respect to analytical studies and forms an important research tool in domains such as plasma physics. The study of mean-field models for systems with long-range interactions is another field in which the Vlasov equation plays an important role. We present the vmf90 program that performs numerical simulations of the Vlasov equation for this class of mean-field models with the semi-Lagrangian method.     

Local Mutual Information for Dissimilarity-Based Image Segmentation

Connective segmentation based on the definition of a dissimilarity measure on pairs of adjacent pixels is an appealing framework to develop new hierarchical segmentation methods. Usually, the dissimilarity is fully determined by the intensity values of the considered pair of adjacent pixels, so that it is independent of the values of the other image pixels. In this paper, we explore dissimilarity measures depending on the overall image content encapsulated in its local mutual information and show its invariance to information preserving transforms. This is investigated in the framework of the connective segmentation and constrained connectivity paradigms and leads to the concept of dependent connectivities. An efficient probability estimator based on depth functions is proposed to handle multi-dimensional images. Experiments conducted on hyper-spectral and multi-angular remote sensing images highlight the robustness of the proposed approach.     

Conditional Toggle Mappings: Principles and Applications

We study a class of mathematical morphology filters to operate conditionally according to a set of pixels marked by a binary mask. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a general framework for several applications including edge enhancement and image denoising, when it is affected by salt-and-pepper noise. We achieve this goal by revisiting shock filters based on erosions and dilations and extending their definition to take into account the prior definition of a mask of pixels that should not be altered. New definitions for conditional erosions and dilations leading to the concept of conditional toggle mapping. We also investigate algebraic properties as well as the convergence of the associate shock filter. Experiments show how the selection of appropriate methods to generate the masks lead to either edge enhancement or salt-and-pepper denoising. A quantitative evaluation of the results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Additionally, we analyse the application of conditional toggle mapping in remote sensing as pre-filtering for hierarchical segmentation.     

Phase Appearance or Disappearance in Two-Phase Flows

This paper is devoted to the treatment of specific numerical problems which appear when phase appearance or disappearance occurs in models of two-phase flows. Such models have crucial importance in many industrial areas such as nuclear power plant safety studies. In this paper, two outstanding problems are identified: first, the loss of hyperbolicity of the system when a phase appears or disappears and second, the lack of positivity of standard shock capturing schemes such as the Roe scheme. After an asymptotic study of the model, this paper proposes a first step towards the design of accurate and robust numerical methods adapted to the simulation of phase appearance or disappearance. Polynomial solvers are developed to avoid the use of eigenvectors which are needed in usual shock capturing schemes, and a method based on an adaptive numerical diffusion is designed to treat the positivity problems. An alternate method, based on the use of the hyperbolic tangent function instead of a polynomial, is also considered. Numerical results are presented which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solutions.     

A global NDVI and EVI reference data set for land-surface phenology using 13 years of daily SPOT-VEGETATION observations

Time series of vegetation indices (VIs) obtained by remote sensing are widely used to study phenology on regional and global scales. The aim of the study is to design a method and to produce a reference data set describing the seasonal and inter-annual variability of the land-surface phenology on a global scale. Specific constraints are inherent in the design of such a global reference data set: (1) the high diversity of vegetation types and the heterogeneous conditions of observation, (2) a near-daily resolution is needed to follow the rapid changes in phenology, (3) the time series used to depict the baseline vegetation cycle must be long enough to be representative of the current vegetation dynamic and encompass anomalies, and (4) a spatial resolution consistent with a land-cover-specific analysis should be privileged. This study focuses on the SPOT (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre)-VEGETATION sensor and its 13-year time series of reflectance values. Five steps addressing the noise and the missing data in the reflectance time series were selected to process the daily multispectral reflectance observations. The final product provides, for every pixel, three profiles for 52 × 7-day periods: a mean, a median, and a standard deviation profile. The mean and median profiles represent the reference seasonal pattern for variation of the vegetation at a specific location whereas the standard deviation profile expresses the inter-annual variability of VIs. A quality flag at the pixel level demonstrated that the reference data set can be considered as a reliable representation of the vegetation phenology in most parts of the Earth.     

Use of Functional (Meth)acrylic Cross‐Linked Polymer Microparticles as Toughening Agents for Epoxy/Diamine Thermosets

(Meth)acrylic cross‐linked polymer microparticles (CPM, also named microgels) were used as toughening agent for an epoxy/amine network. CPM were mainly based on butyl acrylate and consequently they were rubbery at ambient temperature. Various types of reactive groups were introduced onto the CPM: epoxy, carboxy (meth)acrylic double bonds, and epoxy + acrylic double bonds, carboxyl + methacrylic double bonds. Non functional microparticles were also used. Before any reaction, most of the CPM were soluble in the thermoset precursors. Nevertheless, the CPM functionality strongly influenced their initial miscibility in the epoxy‐amine monomers and their final dispersion in the cross‐linked matrix, as well as the mechanical properties of the network. Non‐functional CPM did not lead to a high increase of fracture toughness because of the low adhesion between microparticles and epoxy matrix. However, fracture toughness was increased with reactive CPM because of better adhesion between the microparticles and the matrix. The best toughness was obtained with microparticles containing two types of reactive groups, allowing at the same time cross‐linking reactions between CPM and chemical bonding between CPM and the epoxy matrix. In this case, fracture toughness can be greatly improved, up to 3‐times if the chemical composition of the microparticles was wisely chosen, without significantly reducing the thermal properties.

Viscoelastic properties of toughened DGEBA/MCDEA networks.