Fabrication and mechanical evaluation of hydroxyapatite/oxide nano-composite materials

In the current study, the semiconducting metal oxides such as nano-ZnO and SiO₂ powders were prepared via sol–gel technique and conducted on nano-hydroxyapatite (nHA) which was synthesized by chemical precipitation. The properties of fabricated nano-structured composites containing different ratios of HA, ZnO and SiO₂ were examined using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) techniques. The effect of the variation of ratios between the three components on mechanical, microstructure and in-vitro properties was assessed to explore the possibility of enhancing these properties. The results proved that the mechanical properties exhibited an increment with increasing the ZnO content at the extent of HA. In-vitro study proved the formation and nucleation of apatite onto the surface of the fabricated composites after one week of immersion. It is concluded that HA composites containing SiO₂ or SiO₂/ZnO content had a suitable mechanical properties and ability to form apatite particles onto the composite surface. Based on bioactivity behavior, Si-HA is more bioactive than pure hydroxyapatite and nano-arrangements will provide an interface for better bone formation. Therefore, these nano-composites will be promising as bone substitutes especially in load bearing sites.     

Application of myrrh extract as an eco-friendly dye and antimicrobial agent on wool and silk fabrics part 2: antimicrobial activity and fastness property

ABSTRACT

We investigate the dyeing and antimicrobial properties of myrrh (Commiphora molmol) extracts on wool and silk fabrics, the use of eco-friendly materials such as sumac (Rhus coriaria), manjakani (Quercus infectoria), alum, and ferrous sulfate as mordants. The mordanting methods were optimized.

The best conditions of dyeing process were discussed in the first part of this study. Dyed fabrics were assessed for color strength (K/S), color fastness, and antimicrobial activity. Non-mordanted dyed wool and silk showed color fastness of grade 4–5. Dyed fabrics showed good antimicrobial activity, which was enhanced by mordanting.     

High‐accuracy hierarchical parallel technique for hidden Markov model‐based 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation

Scientific applications represent a dominant sector of compute‐intensive applications. Using massively parallel processing systems increases the feasibility to automate such applications because of the cooperation among multiple processors to perform the designated task. This paper proposes a parallel hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithm for 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation using two approaches. In the first approach, a hierarchical/multilevel parallel technique is used to achieve high performance for the running algorithm. This approach can speed up the computation process up to 7.8× compared with a serial run. The second approach is orthogonal to the first and tries to help in obtaining a minimum error for 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation using multiple processes with different randomization paths for cooperative fast minimum error convergence. This approach achieves minimum error level for HMM training not achievable by the serial HMM training on a single node. Then both approaches are combined to achieve both high accuracy and high performance simultaneously. For 768 processing nodes of a Blue Gene system, the combined approach, which uses both methods cooperatively, can achieve high‐accuracy HMM parameters with 98% of the error level and 2.6× speedup compared with the pure accuracy‐oriented approach alone. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fluorinated ?-caprolactone: Synthesis and ring-opening polymerization of new α-fluoro-?-caprolactone monomer

Fluorinated polyester was synthesized from a novel α-fluoro-?-caprolactone monomer (α-FCL). The monomer was synthesized from commercially available cyclohexene oxide in three steps. Baeyer-Villiger reaction using 3-chloroperoxybenzoic acid of the corresponding 2-fluorocyclohexanone resulted in formation of two isomeric lactones α-and-?-fluoro-?-caprolactones in 1:1.2 molar ratio, respectively. Poly(α-fluoro-?-caprolactone) was synthesized by bulk ring-opening polymerization of α-fluoro-?-caprolactone monomer (α-FCL) catalyzed by stannous octanoate, Sn(Oct)₂ at 120 °C for 6 h. Relationships between reaction time, polymer yield, and molecular weight were established. The ring-opening polymerization of ?-fluoro-?-caprolactone (?-FCL) produce geminal fluorohydrin, which is not stable and it is subsequently dehydrofluorinated to give the corresponding aldehyde. Copolymerization of α-FCL with ?-caprolactone (?-CL) in various feed ratios was also investigated. Detail microstructure analyses of the copolymers were accomplished from ¹H, ¹³C and 2-D NMR data. Presence of fluorine atoms is expected to regulate the chemical and physical properties of the polyester.     

Interference-free energy efficient scheduling in wireless ad hoc networks

This paper studies the problem of interference-free broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks. In particular, we are interested in asymmetric power assignments so that the induced broadcast communication graph is both, energy efficient and has a short collision-free broadcast schedule. We consider both random and deterministic node layouts and develop four different broadcast schemes with provable performance guarantees on three optimization objectives simultaneously: total energy consumption, network lifetime and collision-free schedule length. We also show extensive numerical results which support our findings.     

Performance of ultrasonic – Treated nano-zeolites employed in the preparation of dimethyl ether

Catalytic dehydration of methanol to dimethyl ether was carried out over nano-zeolites and their modified samples via ultrasonic technique. Parent H-Beta and Parent H-Mordenite zeolites are used as synthesized and after sonication. H-Mordenite sonicated for 20 and 120 min whereas H-Beta sonicated for 20 min only. The reaction temperature was varied between 100 and 225 °C at three different contact times. The different catalyst samples were characterized using: XRD, FTIR, TEM, SEM and NH₃-TPD techniques. The results revealed that sonication of parent zeolite samples affects on the unit cell dimensions and their crystal size. FTIR-spectroscopic analysis indicated that sonication may decrease the pore opening and cause framework structure defects. TEM and SEM micrographs showed that sonication broke-up and re-ordered zeolite crystals with longer time resulted in a different morphology relative to parents and also change the particle size. Sonicated samples have a good performance in methanol dehydration with complete conversion and complete selectivity to dimethyl ether at lower temperature relative to the corresponding parent zeolites. TPD results indicated that the concentration of strong acid sites decreased in sonicated H-Mordenite samples leading to an increase of their catalytic activity and the selectivity to DME. On the other hand, ultrasonic treatment of H-Beta sample decreased its catalytic activity.     

A Filter Bank Based Approach for Rotation Invariant Fingerprint Recognition

This paper presents a systematic approach for image-based fingerprint recognition. The proposed method first enhances an input fingerprint image using a contextual filtering based method in the frequency domain. Complex filters are used for the detection of the core point, and a region of interest (ROI) of a predefined size centered at the detected core point is extracted. The resulting ROI is rotated based on the angle of the detected core point to ensure rotation invariance. Subsequently, the proposed system extracts the average absolute deviation (AAD) from the outputs of a Gabor filter bank. To reduce the dimensionality of the extracted features whilst generating more discriminatory representation, this paper compares the unsupervised Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the supervised Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) methods for dimensionality reduction. User-specific thresholding schemes are investigated to improve the verification performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through extensive experimentation on the FVC2002 set_a public database, in both identification and verification scenarios.