Nickel sulphide inclusions in glass: an example of microcracking induced by a volumetric expanding phase change

Microcracking about inclusions of nickel sulphide in soda-lime glass has been studied. These cracks are nucleated by the volumetric expansion that accompanies the- phase transformation in nickel sulphide. The-phase is metastable and, upon transformation to the-phase, is accompanied by a volumetric expansion of about 4%. A simple generalized fracture mechanical analysis of the cracking about such inclusions is developed. Firstly, crack initiation about an inclusion is considered; this is then extended to consider inclusions within a thermally tempered plate. The critical dimensions of the inclusion to initiate microcracking in an annealed specimen and to cause spontaneous fracture of a tempered plate are predicted. Observations of nickel sulphide inclusions in annealed and tempered specimens support the predictions. The implications of this work with regard to the addition of fine dispersions of zirconia to ceramics are pointed out.     

Separation of platinum and palladium from chloride solution by solvent extraction using Alamine 300

The separation of platinum and palladium from chloride solution by solvent extraction, using Alamine 300 as an extractant, has been studied. The effect of different parameters such as the concentration of HCl in the feed solution, NaCl concentration, extractant concentration, and platinum and palladium concentrations in the feed solution has been evaluated. Stripping behavior was also studied using different stripping agents, such as sodium thiocyanate and thiourea. Using a saturated solution of sodium chloride at a pH 1.5, platinum was selectively extracted as the major component, along with minor amounts of palladium. By adding a saturated solution of NaCl to the aqueous phase, palladium extraction could be decreased. Additionally, with the use of 0.5 M HCl in place of NaCl, both metals were studied. Selective stripping of platinum accomplished using sodium thiocyanate, and the selective removal palladium was achieved with sodium thiosulfate. This process can achieve a 99.9% purity of platinum even in very dilute solution.     

Efficient Structure Selection of Polynomial Nonlinear Systems Using Evolutionary Programming

A new method of structure selection or which terms to include into a nonlinear autoregressive moving average with eXogenous inputs (NARMAX) model, based on Evolutionary Programming (EP) has been proposed. The algorithm uses a strategy similar to Elitism where the single best chromosome in a generation is retained and passed to the next. In addition to minimizing the Mean Square Error (MSE), the method introduces an internal term penalty (ITP) function to reject spurious terms under the effects of significant noise. By following an adaptive mutation rate and restricting this to vary within 50%, faster convergence is achieved. To further improve the convergence, a pruning strategy is followed where any insignificant terms are removed from the model by assigning them with a time-to-live parameter. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated considering several examples of nonlinear systems including nonlinear wave force models and has been found to be satisfactory.     

Highly Tuneable Photochromic Sodalites for Dosimetry,Security Marking and Imaging

Photochromic sodalites are considered for a plethora of possible applications, such as UV indexing and X-ray imaging, but for many of these the materials are yet to be optimized. UV indexing can be improved through incremental adjustment of the activation energy of coloration from 300 to 410 nm through replacement of sulfur with selenium. By combining this and other methods of tuning presented in the literature, the excitation threshold and photochromism color can be tuned independently of one another. The range of possible absorption maxima is expanded to 420–680 nm, or almost the entire visible spectrum. Mixing low-cost and easy-to-synthesize sodalites further broadens the possible range of colors and facilitates development of a unique sodalite mix capable of quantifying the doses of two types of UV radiation simultaneously. Finally, the response to X-rays of these highly tuned sodalites is investigated, and it is found that they can be sensitized to produce clear, high-contrast X-ray images at significantly lower doses of radiation than those required by classic photochromic sodalite, Na₈(AlSiO₄)₆(Cl,S)₂.     

A heterogeneous fault diagnosis approach to enhance performance of connected vehicles

Evolution of wireless access technology, availability of smart sensors, and reduction in the size of the set up of the communication system have engrossed many researchers toward vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-access-point communication in a vehicular environment facilitates the deployment of VANET for many different purposes. The success of any application implemented in a VANET relies on timely and accurate data dissemination across the nodes of the network. Implementation of any application is not going to be fruitful if the communication unit transmits incorrect sensor data due to the presence of a fault. This article focuses on the automatic detection of hard and soft faults for vehicular sensors and the classification of faults into permanent, intermittent, and transient faults using cloud-based VANET. For the cloud service, ThingSpeak cloud is used. At the RSU of the VANET, hard fault detection is performed, and for this purpose, a time-out strategy is proposed. The observation center, after receiving sensor status data over a vehicular cloud, does soft failure detection. The soft fault is identified by utilizing a comparative-based technique during soft fault diagnosis. Soft faults are categorized using two machine learning algorithms: Support vector machine and logistic regression. The effectiveness of the suggested work is assessed using performance metrics like fault detection accuracy, false alarm rate, false positive rate, precision, accuracy, recall, and F1 score.     

Effect of learning parameters on the performance of U-Net Model in segmentation of Brain tumor

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Automatic brain tumor segmentation using several image processing techniques supports early diagnosis and provides useful information for treatment planning....     

Prioritized Energy Efficient Task Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Computing Using Whale Optimization Algorithm

Wireless Personal Communications - Task Scheduling is one of the important aspects in Cloud Computing. The Primary Objective of the task scheduling is to effectively map tasks on to the...     

Optical,chemical bonding and electrochemical properties of vanadium pentoxide/reduced graphene oxide nanocomposite for supercapacitor electrode material

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Nanostructured V2O5/rGO nanocomposites were prepared by chemical reduction method process with different concentrations of V2O5 content to...     

Study of Linearity Performance of Graded Channel Gate Stacks Double Gate MOSFET with Respect to High-K Oxide Thickness

In this paper a double gate MOSFET having non uniform channel doping with gate stack structure is explored to study the linearity analysis. The extractions     

Multi-track water diplomacy: current and potential future cooperation over the Brahmaputra River Basin

This article analyzes key factors affecting transboundary water cooperation in the Brahmaputra River basin at multiple scales. The analysis of multi-track diplomacy reaffirms the potential of actor-inclusive approaches, arguing for a need to go beyond purely focusing on formal legal norms and consider the possibilities of cultural norms of informal processes of cooperation. Various ‘windows of opportunity’ exist in the current phase of the Brahmaputra basin’s development, leading to exploration of a Zone of Possible Effective Cooperation, arising from the effort to scale up multi-track initiatives as well as broader geo-political-economic changes happening across and beyond the basin.