Characterization of Structural Noise Patterns and Echo Separation in the Time-Frequency Plane for Austenitic Stainless Steels

The aim of this study is to characterize the structural noise for a better flaw detection in heterogeneous materials (steels, weld, composites...) using ultrasonic waves. For this purpose, the continuous wavelet transform is applied to ultrasonic A-scan signals acquired using an ultrasonic non destructive testing (NDT) device. The time-scale representation provided, which highlights the temporal evolution of the spectral content of the A-scan signals, is relevant but can lead to misinterpretation. The problem is to identify if each pattern from the wavelet representation is due to the structural noise or the flaw. To solve this problem, a detection technique based on statistical significance testing in the time-scale plane is used. Information about the structural noise signals is injected into the decision process using an autoregressive model, which seems relevant according to the spectral content of the signal. The approach is tested on experimental signals, obtained by ultrasonic NDT of metallic materials (austenitic stainless steel) then on a weld in this steel and indeed enables to distinguish the components of the signal as flaw echoes, which differ from the structural noise.     

A new nanostructured material based on fluorophosphate incorporated into a zinc–aluminium layered double hydroxide by ion exchange

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs), also called anionic clays, consist of cationic brucite-like layers and exchangeable interlayer anions. These hydrotalcite-like compounds, with Zn and Al in the layers and chloride in the interlayer space, were prepared following the coprecipitation method at constant pH. The effect of pH, aging time and anion concentration on the intercalation of fluorophosphate \((\hbox {PO}_{3}\hbox {F}^{2-}\), FP) in the [Zn–Al] LDH was investigated. The best crystalline material, with high exchange extent, was obtained by carrying out the exchange at 25\({^{\circ }}\hbox {C}\) in a 0.03 M FP solution at pH 7 with at least 42 h of aging time. A mechanism for the FP intercalation was confirmed by X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy and thermogravimetry (TG) analyses (TG and DTG curves).     

Metamodel-based inverse method for parameter identification: elastic–plastic damage model

This article proposed a metamodel-based inverse method for material parameter identification and applies it to elastic–plastic damage model parameter identification. An elastic–plastic damage model is presented and implemented in numerical simulation. The metamodel-based inverse method is proposed in order to overcome the disadvantage in computational cost of the inverse method. In the metamodel-based inverse method, a Kriging metamodel is constructed based on the experimental design in order to model the relationship between material parameters and the objective function values in the inverse problem, and then the optimization procedure is executed by the use of a metamodel. The applications of the presented material model and proposed parameter identification method in the standard A 2017-T4 tensile test prove that the presented elastic–plastic damage model is adequate to describe the material's mechanical behaviour and that the proposed metamodel-based inverse method not only enhances the efficiency of parameter identification but also gives reliable results.     

Controlled precipitation for enhanced dissolution rate of flurbiprofen: development of rapidly disintegrating tablets

Objective: The aim of this work was to investigate the potential of controlled precipitation of flurbiprofen on solid surface, in the presence or absence of hydrophilic polymers, as a tool for enhanced dissolution rate of the drug. The work was extended to develop rapidly disintegrated tablets.

Significance: This strategy provides simple technique for dissolution enhancement of slowly dissolving drugs with high scaling up potential.

Methods: Aerosil was dispersed in ethanolic solution of flurbiprofen in the presence and absence of hydrophilic polymers. Acidified water was added as antisolvent to produce controlled precipitation. The resultant particles were centrifuged and dried at ambient temperature before monitoring the dissolution pattern. The particles were also subjected to FTIR spectroscopic, X-ray diffraction and thermal analyses.

Results: The FTIR spectroscopy excluded any interaction between flurbiprofen and excipients. The thermal analysis reflected possible change in the crystalline structure and or crystal size of the drug after controlled precipitation in the presence of hydrophilic polymers. This was further confirmed by X-ray diffraction. The modulation in the crystalline structure and size was associated with a significant enhancement in the dissolution rate of flurbiprofen. Optimum formulations were successfully formulated as rapidly disintegrating tablet with subsequent fast dissolution.

Conclusions: Precipitation on a large solid surface area is a promising strategy for enhanced dissolution rate with the presence of hydrophilic polymers during precipitation process improving the efficiency.     

Determination of antioxidant activity of surface‐treated PET films coated with rosemary and clove extracts

Commercial PET films were surface treated and subsequently coated with either rosemary (RME) or clove (CE) extracts. Surface treatments involved (1) corona treatment, (2) chemical modification, and (3) plasma treatment. Radical scavenging activity (RSA) of both pure plant extracts and coated film extracts were determined using the 1,1‐diphenyl‐2‐picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) method. RME‐coated films showed a % RSA of 25.6%, 22.4%, and 24.1% for plasma, chemical modification, and corona treatment, respectively, at an extract concentration of 1402 ppm, respectively, while pure RME showed a %RSA of 16.0%. Respective %RSA values for CE were 25.0% for plasma, 25.2% for chemically modified, and 25.2% for corona‐treated films at 1402 ppm, while pure CE showed a %RSA of 47.6%. Thiobarbituric acid (TBA) test, performed on ground fish muscle wrapped in all types of employed films, showed a remarkable decrease in the degree of fish oxidation ranging between 50.0 and 80.0% after 6 days of storage. Contact angle measurements confirmed that surface chemically modified films had the highest adhesion strength followed by corona and plasma‐treated films. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) data also supported contact angle measurements. Finally, the oxygen permeability of surface‐treated films did not differ from untreated films indicating that surface treatment did not affect film barrier properties.     

Structural,morphological and optoelectronic properties of porous silicon combined alumina coating film deposited by PLD

Pulsed laser deposition of Al₂O₃ onto porous silicon (PS) is shown to provide excellent passivation of multi-crystalline silicon surfaces intended for solar cells applications. Surface passivation and reflectivity are investigated before and after the deposition of various nominal thicknesses of Al₂O₃ ranging from isolated nanoparticles to ~80 nm-thick films. The level of surface passivation is determined by techniques based on photoconductance and FTIR. As a result, the effective minority carrier lifetime increase from 1 to 130 μs at a minority carrier density (Δn) of 1?×?10¹³ cm^?3. However, passivation scheme provide a significant decrease in the reflectivity; it’s reduced from 28% to about 5% after Al₂O₃/PS coating.     

A phase-field model for brittle fracture of anisotropic materials

In the present work, a phase field damage model is developed to address the numerical simulation of brittle fracture. This model successfully captures some important aspects of crack propagation, including crack branching and bifurcation. In addition, the proposed phase field model has been developed in the general framework of anisotropic elasticity. It can thus be used for the simulation of brittle fracture in polycrystalline materials, for which crack propagation is impacted by crystallographic orientation because of the anisotropic character of stiffness properties.     

COVID-19 Infected Lung Computed Tomography Segmentation and Supervised Classification Approach

The purpose of this research is the segmentation of lungs computed tomography (CT) scan for the diagnosis of COVID-19 by using machine learning methods. Our dataset contains data from patients who are prone to the epidemic. It contains three types of lungs CT images (Normal, Pneumonia, and COVID-19) collected from two different sources; the first one is the Radiology Department of Nishtar Hospital Multan and Civil Hospital Bahawalpur, Pakistan, and the second one is a publicly free available medical imaging database known as Radiopaedia. For the preprocessing, a novel fuzzy c-mean automated region-growing segmentation approach is deployed to take an automated region of interest (ROIs) and acquire 52 hybrid statistical features for each ROIs. Also, 12 optimized statistical features are selected via the chi-square feature reduction technique. For the classification, five machine learning classifiers named as deep learning J4, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, random forest, and naive Bayes are deployed to optimize the hybrid statistical features dataset. It is observed that the deep learning J4 has promising results (sensitivity and specificity: 0.987; accuracy: 98.67%) among all the deployed classifiers. As a complementary study, a statistical work is devoted to the use of a new statistical model to fit the main datasets of COVID-19 collected in Pakistan.     

Fabrication of Worm-Like Mesoporous Silica Monoliths as an Efficient Sorbent for Thorium Ions from Nitrate Media

Radiochemistry - Mesostructured silica monoliths were synthesized using a simple reproducible strategy of an instant direct templating with nonionic Brij-35 copolymer surfactant and C12 alkane...     

Super Compact UWB Monopole Antenna for Small IoT Devices

This article introduces a novel, ultrawideband (UWB) planar monopole antenna printed on Roger RT/5880 substrate in a compact size for small Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The total electrical dimensions of the proposed compact UWB antenna are 0.19 λ_o × 0.215 λ_o × 0.0196 λ_o with the overall physical sizes of 15 mm × 17 mm × 1.548 mm at the lower resonance frequency of 3.8 GHz. The planar monopole antenna is fed through the linearly tapered microstrip line on a partially structured ground plane to achieve optimum impedance matching for UWB operation. The proposed compact UWB antenna has an operation bandwidth of 9.53 GHz from 3.026 GHz up to 12.556 GHz at −10 dB return loss with a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of about 122%. The numerically computed and experimentally measured results agree well in between. A detailed time-domain analysis is additionally accomplished to verify the radiation efficiency of the proposed antenna design for the ultra-wideband signal propagation. The fabricated prototype of a compact UWB antenna exhibits an omnidirectional radiation pattern with the low peak measured gain required of 2.55 dBi at 10 GHz and promising radiation efficiency of 90%. The proposed compact planar antenna has technical potential to be utilized in UWB and IoT applications.