Nano-Scale Cordierite Glass-Ceramic from Natural Raw Materials with Different Fluoride Additions

Silicon - Stable cordierite glass-ceramics were prepared from natural kaolin, silica sand and magnesite as raw materials. Furthermore the effect of fluorine additions was tested by addingAlF3 or...     

Universal mitochondrial PCR combined with species-specific dot-blot assay as a source-tracking method of human, bovine, chicken, ovine, and porcine in fecal-contaminated surface water

Mitochondrial (mt) DNA has the potential to be used as an animal-specific genetic marker for source-tracking of fecal contamination in surface waters and groundwaters. In this report, we describe the development of a method to detect in a single assay human, bovine, ovine, porcine and chicken mitochondrial (mt) DNA in water. Consensus nucleic sequences were found between human, bovine, porcine, ovine and chicken mtDNA to design three sets of PCR universal primers. Upon polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with a digoxigenin-labeled nucleotide and the universal primers, species determination was carried out by dot-blotting membranes containing specific oligonucleotides for these five animals. Our method was carried out with three river samples and three wastewater samples, and the results were compared with those obtained by multiple nested PCR with specific primers for these five species. Our results showed that the dot-blot assays were as specific and sensitive as the nested-PCR approach. The proposed method has the advantage that it requires the use of only one PCR per sample and very little amounts of DNA. Finally, it is an alternative to multiplex PCR approach which is less sensitive, and shows the way for the development of DNA arrays for source-tracking of many more animal species in fecal-contaminated water.     

Adaptive critic methods for stochastic systems with input-dependent noise

In this paper, a novel dual heuristic programming (DHP) adaptive-critic-based cautious controller is proposed. The proposed controller avoids the pre-identification training phase of the forward model by taking into consideration model uncertainty when calculating the control law. It is suitable for linear and nonlinear, deterministic and stochastic control systems that are characterized by functional uncertainty. Convergence of the proposed DHP adaptive critic method to the correct value of the cost function is proven by evaluating analytically the correct value of the cost function, which satisfies the Bellman equation, and compares it to that calculated by the proposed method in a simple linear quadratic example. Moreover, the performance of the proposed cautious controller is demonstrated on linear one-dimensional and multidimensional examples.     

Extracting text from scanned Arabic books: a large-scale benchmark dataset and a fine-tuned Faster-R-CNN model

Datasets of documents in Arabic are urgently needed to promote computer vision and natural language processing research that addresses the specifics of the language. Unfortunately, publicly available Arabic datasets are limited in size and restricted to certain document domains. This paper presents the release of BE-Arabic-9K, a dataset of more than 9000 high-quality scanned images from over 700 Arabic books. Among these, 1500 images have been manually segmented into regions and labeled by their functionality. BE-Arabic-9K includes book pages with a wide variety of complex layouts and page contents, making it suitable for various document layout analysis and text recognition research tasks. The paper also presents a page layout segmentation and text extraction baseline model based on fine-tuned Faster R-CNN structure (FFRA). This baseline model yields cross-validation results with an average accuracy of 99.4% and F1 score of 99.1% for text versus non-text block classification on 1500 annotated images of BE-Arabic-9K. These results are remarkably better than those of the state-of-the-art Arabic book page segmentation system ECDP. FFRA also outperforms three other prior systems when tested on a competition benchmark dataset, making it an outstanding baseline model to challenge.

     

Copper molybdate nanoparticles for electrochemical water splitting application

Two different phases of copper molybdate nanoparticles such as Cu₃Mo₂O₉ and Cu₆Mo₅O₁₈ were synthesized through schematic hydrothermal treatment. The obtained product morphology was explored by using surfactants like sodium lauryl sulfate (SDS) and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP). The structural, optical, vibrational and morphological properties were confirmed employing standard characterization techniques. Rectangular nanoflakes of the obtained product were confirmed by employing Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) studies. Selected area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern confirms obtained product crystalline nature. The better morphology controlled sample gives higher 227 mA/g current density at 10 mV/s and small 184 V overpotential. Long duration stability over 16 h was exhibited by Cu₆Mo₅O₁₈ electrode. Hence, Cu₆Mo₅O₁₈ electrode shows better electrochemical activity with stunning low overpotential. It would be suggested that PVP surfactant is quite optimum to produce efficient Cu₆Mo₅O₁₈ catalysts for electrochemical water splitting applications.     

The polarographic and corrosion inhibition performance of some Schiff base compounds derived from 2-amino-3-hydroxypyridine in aqueous media

The polarographic behavior of five Schiff bases compounds (SB) prepared from 2-amino-3-hydroxypyridine was investigated in BR buffer series of pH 2–12. The polarograms of all SB compounds displayed a single irreversible diffusion-controlled 2-electron wave within the whole pH range representing the saturation of the NCH bond. The effect of pH and substituents on electrode reaction have been investigated and discussed. The electrode reaction pathway is found to be H⁺, e, e, H⁺ in which the proton uptake precedes the electron transfer. The studied compounds were used as inhibitors for corrosion of carbon steel (CS) in 1 M HCl solution using potentiodynamic polarization technique. The inhibition was explained in view of the adsorption of SP compounds on the CS surface obeying to Freundlich isotherm. These compounds act as good inhibitors as the inhibition efficiency reached 89.5%. The inhibition efficiency of the studied SBs is found to be a function of substituent group. The order of inhibition efficiency follows the sequence: N(CH3) > p-OCH3 > o-OH > H > p-Cl. This order agrees with the sequence of the negative shift in E_1/2 values of the SB compounds under investigation.     

Fully probabilistic control for uncertain nonlinear stochastic systems

This paper develops a novel probabilistic framework for stochastic nonlinear and uncertain control problems. The proposed framework exploits the Kullback–Leibler divergence to measure the divergence between the distribution of the closed-loop behavior of a dynamical system and a predefined ideal distribution. To facilitate the derivation of the analytic solution of the randomized controllers for nonlinear systems, transformation methods are applied such that the dynamics of the controlled system becomes affine in the state and control input. Additionally, knowledge of uncertainty is taken into consideration in the derivation of the randomized controller. The derived analytic solution of the randomized controller is shown to be obtained from a generalized state-dependent Riccati solution that takes into consideration the state- and control-dependent functional uncertainty of the controlled system. The proposed framework is demonstrated on an inverted pendulum on a cart problem, and the results are obtained.     

Tailoring the structural,optical, dielectric,and electrical properties of PEO/PVA blend using graphene nanoplates for energy storage devices

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Our articles describe the casting process for producing polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/polyethylene oxide (PEO)/graphene nanoplates (GNPTs)...     

Computerized Detection of Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency from Digital Cornea Images

Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD) is an eye disease that can cause corneal opacity and vascularization. In its advanced stage it can lead to a degree of visual impairment. It involves the changing in the semispherical shape of the cornea to a drooping shape to downwards direction. LSCD is hard to be diagnosed at early stages. The color and texture of the cornea surface can provide significant information about the cornea affected by LSCD. Parameters such as shape and texture are very crucial to differentiate normal from LSCD cornea. Although several medical approaches exist, most of them requires complicated procedure and medical devices. Therefore, in this paper, we pursued the development of a LSCD detection technique (LDT) utilizing image processing methods. Early diagnosis of LSCD is very crucial for physicians to arrange for effective treatment. In the proposed technique, we developed a method for LSCD detection utilizing frontal eye images. A dataset of 280 eye images of frontal and lateral LSCD and normal patients were used in this research. First, the cornea region of both frontal and lateral images is segmented, and the geometric features are extracted through the automated active contour model and the spline curve. While the texture features are extracted using the feature selection algorithm. The experimental results exhibited that the combined features of the geometric and texture will exhibit accuracy of 95.95%, sensitivity of 97.91% and specificity of 94.05% with the random forest classifier of n = 40. As a result, this research developed a Limbal stem cell deficiency detection system utilizing features’ fusion using image processing techniques for frontal and lateral digital images of the eyes.     

Effectiveness of Annealing on the Structural,Electrical, and Optical Properties of Erbium(III)-tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato) Films for Possible Use in OLEDs

Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials - In this study, Erbium tris-8-hydroxyquinoline (Erq3) thin films were deposited on a cleaned glass substrate using the thermal...