A study on melt recycling of bio-based polypropylene/thermoplastic starch compound

The compulsion to use bioplastics has increased significantly today. One of the important aspects of plastics is their recyclability. Therefore, the important question of this research is that although bio-based compounds containing starch are sensitive to thermal-mechanical recycling processes, are such products thermally recyclable? To answer the question, polypropylene (PP)/thermoplastic starch (TPS) compound granules were extruded up to five times, and in the other part, single-extruded granules were blended at different ratios with virgin granules by extrusion. In order to characterize these samples, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, rotational disc rheometry, tensile properties, and appearance evaluation were used. The results showed that it is possible to recycle PP/TPS granules up to four times repetition of the extrusion operation and the fifth repetition also showed slight changes. There was also a blend of single-extruded granules with virgin material up to a 50:50% composition without significant variation.     

An efficient and noise resistive selective image encryption scheme for gray images based on chaotic maps and DNA complementary rules

A novel image encryption algorithm in streaming mode is proposed which exhaustively employs an entire set of DNA complementary rules alongwith one dimensional chaotic maps. The proposed algorithm is highly efficient due to encrypting the subset of digital image which contains 92.125 % of information. DNA addition operation is carried out on this MSB part. The core idea of the proposed scheme is to scramble the whole image by means of piecewise linear chaotic map (PWLCM) followed by decomposition of image into most significant bits (MSB) and least significant bits (LSB). The logistic sequence is XORed with the decoded MSB and LSB parts separately and finally these two parts are combined to get the ciphered image. The parameters for PWLCM, logistic map and selection of different DNA rules for encoding and decoding of both parts of an image are derived from 128-bit MD5 hash of the plain image. Simulated experimental results in terms of quantitative and qualitative ways prove the encryption quality. Efficiency and robustness against different noises make the proposed cipher a good candidate for real time applications.     

A Comparative Study of Non-traditional Methods for Vehicle Crashworthiness and NVH Optimization

In this paper, metamodeling and five well-known metaheuristic optimization algorithms were used to reduce the weight and improve crash and NVH attributes of a vehicle simultaneously. A high-fidelity full vehicle model is used to analyze peak acceleration, intrusion and component’s internal-energy under Full-Frontal, Offset-Frontal, and Side crash scenarios as well as vehicle natural frequencies. The radial basis functions method is used to approximate the structural responses. A nonlinear surrogate-based mass minimization was formulated and solved by five different optimization algorithms under crash-vibration constraints. The performance of these algorithms is investigated and discussed.     

Robust Input Covariance Constraint Control for Uncertain Polytopic Systems

In this paper, the robust input covariance constraint (ICC) control problem with polytopic uncertainty is solved using convex optimization with linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach. The ICC control problem is an optimal control problem that optimizes the output performance subjected to multiple constraints on the input covariance matrices. This control problem has significant practical implications when hard constraints need to be satisfied on control actuators. The contribution of this paper is the characterization of the control synthesis LMIs used to solve the robust ICC control problem for polytopic uncertain systems. Both continuous‐ and discrete‐time systems are considered. Parameter‐dependent and independent Lyapunov functions have been used for robust ICC controller synthesis. Numerical design examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Scale effects in nano-channel liquid flows

Force-driven liquid argon flows both in nanoscale periodic domains and in gold nano-channels are simulated using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics to investigate the scale and wall force field effects. We examined variations in liquid density, viscosity, velocity profile, slip length, shear stress and mass flow rate in different sized periodic domains and nano-channels at a fixed thermodynamic state. In the absence of walls, liquid argon obeys Newton’s law of viscosity with the desired absolute viscosity in domains as small as 4 molecular diameters in height. Results prove that deviations from continuum solution are solely due to wall effects. Simulations in nano-channels with heights varying from 3.26 to 36 nm exhibit parabolic velocity profiles with constant slip length modeled by Navier-type slip boundary condition. Both channel averaged density and “apparent viscosity” decrease with reduced channel height, which has competing effects in determination of the mass flow rate. Density layering and wall force field induce deviations from Newton’s law of viscosity in the near-wall region, while constant “apparent viscosity” with the deformation rate from a parabolic velocity profile successfully predicts shear stress in the bulk flow region.