Physical aging in polymers: Comparison of two ways of determining narayanaswamy's parameter

In this work, we have investigated by differential scanning calorimetry the enthalpy relaxation of two poly[methyl(α-n-alkyl)acrylates] in which it is possible to change the length of the two alkyl chains. In particular, we have evaluated the Narayanaswamy parameter, which controls relative contribution of temperature and of structure to the relaxation times, by two methods: Grenet's method (GM) and the peak-shift method (PSM). The data obtained show that both methods lead to equivalent results. Nevertheless, PSM requires fewer experiments than GM, and PSM appears to be more practical. The results obtained on the two acrylates show that the parameter x increases with the lateral chain length, that is to say, that the temperature effects increase as the length of the alkyl chain is increased.     

Synthetic Peroxides Promote Apoptosis of Cancer Cells by Inhibiting P-Glycoprotein ABCB5

This article discloses a new horizon for the application of peroxides in medical chemistry. Stable cyclic peroxides are demonstrated to have cytotoxic activity against cancer cells; in addition a mechanism of cytotoxic action is proposed. Synthetic bridged 1,2,4,5-tetraoxanes and ozonides were effective against HepG2 cancer cells and some ozonides selectively targeted liver cancer cells (the selectivity indexes for compounds 11 b and 12 a are 8 and 5, respectively). In some cases, tetraoxanes and ozonides were more selective than paclitaxel, artemisinin, and artesunic acid. Annexin V flow-cytometry analysis revealed that the active ozonides 22 a and 23 a induced cell death of HepG2 by apoptosis. Further study showed that compounds 22 a and 23 a exhibited a strong inhibitory effect on P-glycoprotein (P-gp/ABCB5)-overexpressing HepG2 cancer cells. ABCB5 is a key player in the multidrug-resistant phenotype of liver cancer. Peroxides failed to demonstrate a direct correlation between oxidative potential and their biological activity. To our knowledge this is the first time that peroxide diastereoisomers have been found to show stereospecific antimalarial action against the chloroquine-sensitive 3D7 strain of Plasmodium falciparum. Stereoisomeric ozonide 12 b is 11 times more active than stereoisomeric ozonide 12 a (IC₅₀=5.81 vs 65.18 μm ). Current findings mean that ozonides merit further investigation as potential therapeutic agents for drug-resistant hepatocellular carcinoma.     

Determinants of energy demand in the French service sector: A decomposition analysis

This paper analyzes the changes in the energy consumption of the service sector in France over the period 1995–2006, using the logarithmic mean Divisia index I (LMDI I) decomposition method. The analysis is carried out at various disaggregation levels to highlight the specifics of each sub-sector and end-use according to their respective determinants. The results show that in this period the economic growth of the service sector was the main factor that led to the increase in total energy consumption. Structure, productivity, substitution and intensity effects restricted this growth, but with limited effect. By analyzing each end-use, this paper enables a more precise understanding of the impact of these factors. The activity effect was the main determinant of the increase in energy consumption for all end-uses except for air conditioning, for which the equipment rate effect was the main factor. Structural changes in the service sector primarily impacted energy consumption for space heating and cooking. Improvements in productivity limited the growth of energy consumption for all end-uses except for cooking. Finally, energy efficiency improvements mainly affected space-heating energy use.     

An end‐to‐end alternative to TCP PEPs: Initial Spreading,a TCP fast start‐up mechanism

While Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) solutions have long been undisputed to solve the inherent satellite problems, the improvement of the regular end‐to‐end TCP congestion avoidance algorithms and the recent emphasis on the PEPs drawbacks have opened the question of the PEPs sustainability. Nevertheless, with a vast majority of Internet connections shorter than ten segments, TCP PEPs continue to be required to counter the poor efficiency of the end‐to‐end TCP start‐up mechanisms. To reduce the PEPs dependency, designing a new fast start‐up TCP mechanism is therefore a major concern. But, while enlarging the Initial Window (IW) up to ten segments is, without any doubt, the fastest solution to deal with a short‐lived connection in an uncongested network, numerous researchers are concerned about the impact of the large initial burst on an already congested network. Based on traffic observations and real experiments, Initial Spreading has been designed to remove those concerns whatever the load and type of networks. It offers performance similar to a large IW in uncongested network and outperforms existing end‐to‐end solutions in congested networks. In this paper, we show that Initial Spreading, taking care of the satellite specificities, is an efficient end‐to‐end alternative to the TCP PEPs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Morphological and adhesive properties of polypyrrole films synthesized by sonoelectrochemical technique

This paper presents electrochemical synthesis of polypyrrole films under high frequency sonication. The films are characterized in terms of adhesion and surface morphology. Comparison to classical electrosynthesized polypyrrole films is made. In particular, the use of high frequency sonication (500 kHz) during electrodeposition of polypyrrole on Si was reported for the first time. Chronocoulometry was used for polymer films electrosynthesis on Si substrates. Influence of polymer thickness on the rugosity, morphology and adhesion force properties was studied. Scanning Electron Microscopy and mechanical probe profiling showed that sonication led to less rough and more homogeneous surface structure. Adhesion force properties of polypyrrole films were also studied by means of force–distance curves obtained by atomic force microscopy. For polymer films obtained in the absence of sonication, adhesion forces decreases with increase in polymer thickness. On the contrary, for polymer films obtained under sonication, the adhesion of the films decreased when the polymer thickness decreased.     

Alumina foam catalyst supports for industrial steam reforming processes

The manufacture and the characterisation of alumina foams as alternative catalysts supports for industrial steam reforming processes are presented here. The possibility of use of alumina foams as catalysts supports in such processes is evaluated by studying their resistance toward mechanical and chemical stresses. The alumina foams produced are characterised owing to their processing parameters (slurry infiltration, sintering temperature, template pore size). Their ability to work in hydrothermal atmosphere is assessed by characterising the evolution of microstructures and mechanical strengths upon aging. Thermodynamic studies of the stability of alumina in industrial steam reforming working conditions are performed and correlated to the experiments to demonstrate the stability of such a system.     

Back-end soft and hard defect monitoring using a single test chip

The objective of this paper is to present a mixed test structure designed to characterize yield losses due to hard defect and back-end process variation (PV) at die and wafer level. A brief overview of the structure, designed using a ST-Microelectronics’ 130 nm technology, is given. This structure is based on a SRAM memory array for detecting hard defects. Moreover each memory cell can be configured in the Ring Oscillator (RO) mode for back-end PV characterization. The structure is tested in both modes (SRAM, RO) using a single test flow. The test data analysis method is presented and applied to experimental results to confirm the ability of the structure to monitor PV and defect density.     

Reliability indicator for layered composites with strongly non-linear behaviour

This paper set out a method to determine safety factors when designing composite laminate with strongly non-linear behaviour. The failure probability is used to assess the laminate reliability.     

A Bayesian approach to object detection using probabilistic appearance-based models

In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian approach, inspired by probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) (Tipping and Bishop in J Royal Stat Soc Ser B 61(3):611–622, 1999), to detect objects in complex scenes using appearance-based models. The originality of the proposed framework is to explicitly take into account general forms of the underlying distributions, both for the in-eigenspace distribution and for the observation model. The approach combines linear data reduction techniques (to preserve computational efficiency), non-linear constraints on the in-eigenspace distribution (to model complex variabilities) and non-linear (robust) observation models (to cope with clutter, outliers and occlusions). The resulting statistical representation generalises most existing PCA-based models (Tipping and Bishop in J Royal Stat Soc Ser B 61(3):611–622, 1999; Black and Jepson in Int J Comput Vis 26(1):63–84, 1998; Moghaddam and Pentland in IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Machine Intell 19(7):696–710, 1997) and leads to the definition of a new family of non-linear probabilistic detectors. The performance of the approach is assessed using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis on several representative databases, showing a major improvement in detection performances with respect to the standard methods that have been the references up to now.This revised version was published online in November 2004 with corrections to the section numbers.