Structurally bound stabilizers: Melt grafting of UV stabilizers onto polypropylene,polyethylene, and polystyrene

Monomeric ultraviolet stabilizers, 2-hydroxy-4-methacryloyloxy benzophenone and 2-hydroxy-4-acryloyloxy benzophenone were synthesized by a modified process. These reactive UV stabilizers were grafted onto the backbone of polypropylene (PP), low-density polyethylene (LDPE), and polystyrene (PS) by melt processing in the mixer of Brabender Plasticorder. An infrared spectroscopic method was standardized for the quantitative determination of the extent grafting of these additives on the polymer backbone. Grafting of both the additives occurred in the order PS > LDPE > PP. Methacryloxy derivative of benzophenone was found to be more reactive towards the polymers studied than the acryloxy derivative.     

Structural,morphological and opto-electric properties of Y2−xYbxO3 (x = 0.0, 0.04, 0.08, 0.12) nanopowders for laser host ceramic material applications

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Rare Earth substituted Sesquioxides compounds, specially Yttria (Y2O3) are essential ceramic materials for solid-state lasers,...     

Inhibitors of Human Divalent Metal Transporters DMT1 (SLC11A2) and ZIP8 (SLC39A8) from a GDB-17 Fragment Library

Solute carrier proteins (SLCs) are membrane proteins controlling fluxes across biological membranes and represent an emerging class of drug targets. Here we searched for inhibitors of divalent metal transporters in a library of 1,676 commercially available 3D-shaped fragment-like molecules from the generated database GDB-17, which lists all possible organic molecules up to 17 atoms of C, N, O, S and halogen following simple criteria for chemical stability and synthetic feasibility. While screening against DMT1 (SLC11A2), an iron transporter associated with hemochromatosis and for which only very few inhibitors are known, only yielded two weak inhibitors, our approach led to the discovery of the first inhibitor of ZIP8 (SLC39A8), a zinc transporter associated with manganese homeostasis and osteoarthritis but with no previously reported pharmacology, demonstrating that this target is druggable.     

Multiplicity and word sense: evaluating and learning from multiply labeled word sense annotations

Supervised machine learning methods to model word sense often rely on human labelers to provide a single, ground truth label for each word in its context. We examine issues in establishing ground truth word sense labels using a fine-grained sense inventory from WordNet. Our data consist of a sentence corpus of 1,000 sentences: 100 for each of ten moderately polysemous words. Each word was given multiple sense labels??or a multilabel??from trained and untrained annotators. The multilabels give a nuanced representation of the degree of agreement on instances. A suite of assessment metrics is used to analyze the sets of multilabels, such as comparisons of sense distributions across annotators. Our assessment indicates that the general annotation procedure is reliable, but that words differ regarding how reliably annotators can assign WordNet sense labels, independent of the number of senses. We also investigate the performance of an unsupervised machine learning method to infer ground truth labels from various combinations of labels from the trained and untrained annotators. We find tentative support for the hypothesis that performance depends on the quality of the set of multilabels, independent of the number of labelers or their training.     

Extended recommendation-by-explanation

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction - Studies have shown that there is an intimate connection between the process of computing recommendations and the process of generating corresponding...     

New grounded passive elements-based external multiplier-less memelement emulator to realize the floating meminductor and memristor

A novel memelement emulator configuration has been reported in the presented work. This proposed configuration can be used to realize the function of a floating meminductor as well as the memristor element through proper selection of employed passive elements. The presented emulator circuit is based on MVDCC (modified VDCC) and OTA, which are CMOS implemented electronically tunable ABBs (Active Building Blocks). The designed circuit employs only two ABBs and three grounded passive elements. As per the knowledge of the authors, no such emulation configuration with a floating architecture has been reported so far, which can realize the behaviour of two mem-elements without the use of any external multiplier IC/circuitry, passive inductor or mutation through any externally employed memelement. It can be considered as a notable design feature along with its other advantages like electronically/resistively tunable emulated response and use of only grounded passive elements. Moreover, proposed circuit has been investigated for the consideration of non-idealities and different port parasitics of employed blocks. For the verification purpose, PSPICE simulation environment with CMOS 0.18 µm TSMC technology parameters, has been selected. The functioning of the realized meminductive and memristive behaviour has also been verified through the application example circuits designed using developed emulator circuit. Afterwards, the commercial IC based realization of the proposed emulator circuit has been shown and experimental results are discussed.

     

An innovative interconnect structure with improved Elmore delay estimation model for deep submicron technology

With advancements in technology, size and speed have been the important facet in VLSI interconnects. The channel length of the device reduces to tens of nanometers, as the technology is transferring to the deep submicron level. This leads to the requirement of long interconnects in VLSI chips. Interconnects are known as the basic building block that can vary from size to size. They provide a connection between two or more blocks and have scaling problems that an IC designer faces while designing. As scaling increases, the impact of interconnect in the VLSI circuits became even more important. It controls all the important electrical characteristics on the chip. With scale-down technology, interconnects not only become closer with each other but their dimensions also change which can directly impact the circuit parameters. Certain RC models have already been defined to control these parameters but in this paper, authors have proposed a new improved Elmore delay estimation model (RC) to reduce delay and power consumption in interconnect circuits. An optimized Elmore delay calculation was performed for uniform and non-uniform wires to reduce the time constant of the interconnect circuits. Further, the proposed model is estimated and verified theoretically. A new improved RC model is compared to the designed π-model that shows remarkable results. We also observed the linear relationship of power consumption and delay for both the RC models and found that in π-model, upon decreasing the length of wire the power first increases then decreases but in the proposed model, the power first increases then remain constant and then further increases upon increasing the length of wire. Our proposed model shows the remarkable values as the average percentage improvement of power is 75.167% and delay as 74.714% is achieved using a uniform distribution.

     

Coating characteristics of electron beam cured bisphenol A diglycidyl ether diacrylate resin containing 1,6-hexanediol diacrylate on wood surface

Electron beam curing of bisphenol A diglycidyl ether diacrylate resin (BDGDA) mixed with varying amount of 1,6-hexanediol diacrylate monomer (HDDA) was investigated using low energy DC electron beam accelerator. Cured coating films were analyzed by Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), gel fraction, swelling ratio and thermogravimetric (TG) techniques. The wood surfaces cured with different coating compositions were tested for their end use performance properties like gloss, pencil hardness, scratch resistance, mar resistance, abrasion resistance, chemical resistance, steam resistance and cigarette burn resistance. FTIR studies indicated that the density of acrylate functionality and degree of curing increased with the HDDA content in the feed mixture. This observation was supported by gel fraction and swelling studies as well. The thermal stability, pencil hardness, mar resistance, abrasion resistance and solvent resistance properties of coating were observed to improve with the incorporation of HDDA. However, there was significant decrease in gloss and scratch resistance at higher HDDA content. The coating showed excellent steam and stain resistance but poor resistance to cigarette burns.     

Synthesis and electroluminescence properties of zinc(2,2′ bipyridine)8-hydroxyquinoline

New electroluminescent material, namely zinc(2,2′ bipyridine)8-hydroxyquinoline [Zn(Bpy)q] has been synthesized and characterized. A solution of Zn(Bpy)q showed absorption maxima at 382 nm and 342 nm in toluene solution attributed to π − π transition. The photoluminescence spectrum in toluene solution showed peak at 545 nm. The material was stable up to 350 °C. Organic light emitting diode (OLED) fabricated with the structure ITO/α-NPD/Zn(Bpy)q/Alq₃/LiF/Al exhibits a broad electroluminescence peak at 548 nm. The maximum current efficiency of OLED was 1.34 cd/A at 5 V and the maximum power efficiency 0.84 lm/W at 5 V.     

A direct method to determine transfer function parameters in case of hydrogen evolution reaction

Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy is one of the efficient methods for studying reaction mechanisms. In case of hydrogen evolution reaction, the transfer function involved is very complex. It is therefore usually obtained through indirect methods. First, a simple equivalent circuit is usually fitted to the experimental data using complex non-linear least square methods. The circuit parameters thus obtained are then transformed to transfer function parameters. In the present approach, the procedure for obtaining transfer function has been simplified through its piecewise definition in various frequency ranges. A direct method to obtain transfer function using asymptotic analysis has been presented. The method to reduce error involved in the analysis has also been discussed. It has been shown that the approach will also be applicable for other systems.