Great enhancement of mechanical features in PLA based composites containing aligned few layer graphene (FLG), the effect of FLG loading,size, and dispersion on mechanical and thermal properties

Four series of polylactide (PLA) based composite films containing horizontally aligned few layer graphene (FLG) flakes of high aspect ratio and adsorbed albumin are prepared. The mechanical and thermal properties varies with percentage, dispersion degree and size of FLG flakes. Great improvement up to 290% and 360% of tensile modulus and strength respectively were obtained for the composite containing high lateral size of FLG at 0.17% wt, and up to 60% and 80% for the composite with very well dispersed 0.02% wt FLG. The composites of PLA and PEG-PLLA containing very well dispersed FLG flakes at 0.07% wt are ductile showing enhancement of elongation at break up to respectively 80% and 88%. Relatively high electrical conductivity, 5 × 10⁻³ S/cm, is measured for PLA film charged with 3% of FLG.     

Crack growth angle prediction of an internal crack under mixed mode load for unfilled elastomer using the strain energy density factor

This article investigates the prediction of the crack growth angle of an existing internal crack under mixed mode loading at the crack tip for an unfilled ethylene propylene diene terpolymer rubber (EPDM). For the realization of mixed mode loading, the cracks of the uniaxial loaded specimens were oriented with different angles to the loading direction. The energy density factor was used as a potential criterion for determining the crack growth angle. The determination of the strain energy density factor was carried out simulatively in Abaqus. The second-order Ogden model was used to describe the rubber-like material behavior. The relative local minimum of the strain energy density factor provides the possible growth angle. The experimental investigations show that the initial cracks grow orthogonally to the loading direction for the different crack orientation angles. For the crack orientation angle parallel to the load direction, the crack growth was observed because the strong stretching of the specimen caused strong necking in the crack region. The crack growth for the remaining crack orientation angles were induced due to shear loading at the crack tip. The predictive angle of different crack orientation angles shows very good accordance to the measured crack growth angles.     

Equation of state and the dynamic compression of cerium in the range of the γ-α phase transition

A thermodynamically complete equation of two-phase (γ, α) state of cerium was derived in terms of a pseudobinary solid-solution model developed by Aptekar’ and Ponyatovskii. According to the model, unalloyed cerium is considered to be a substitutional solid solution whose components are represented by atoms with different electron configurations. The free energy of the individual phases (solid-solution components) is represented as a sum of three terms that describe the atomic interaction at T = 0 K, quasi-harmonic lattice vibrations, and the combined contribution of the anharmonicity and thermally excited electrons. The equation of state is shown to adequately describe the unusual behavior of cerium under the effect of static actions. In this work, calculations of the dynamic compression of cerium are performed. The calculations indicate that, up to the completion of the γ-α transition, the formation of the shockwave front in cerium is impossible and compression of cerium occurs in an isentropic wave of simple compression. As the pressure increases, a multiwave configuration with the participation of isentropic and shock waves is realized in cerium. The initial state in which the shock wave is propagated changes depending on the wave intensity; i.e., the initial state “slides” along the leading isentropic wave. The shock adiabat was shown to not pass through the very complex range of metastable existence of α-, α′-, and α″ phases. This provides prerequisites for experimental finding the α-ε transformation which can occur in the shock wave and is not masked with the preceding α-α′ and α′-α″ transformations. When assuming the absence of the α-ε transformation, the calculated coordinates of the point corresponding to the start of melting in the shock wave are p _melt = 11.3 GPa and T _melt = 1130 K.     

Breakdown of passive film on nickel in borate solutions containing halide anions

The effect of Cl⁻, Br⁻ and I⁻ anions as aggressive agents on the anodic behaviour of nickel electrode in deaerated Na₂B₄O₇ solutions have been investigated by galvanostatic polarization technique. Lower concentrations of the halide anions have no effect on the mechanism of nickel passivation. An increase in the halide anions concentration causes oscillation of the potential in the oxygen evolution region. This could be attributed to the destruction of the passivity by halide anions and repassivation of the film by anodic current and/or OH⁻ anions. Higher aggressive anion concentrations cause breakdown of the passive film and initiated pitting corrosion. As the temperature increases, the breakdown potential is shifted towards the more negative direction. On the other hand, as the pH of the solution increases, the breakdown potential is shifted toward more positive direction, indicating increased protection of the passive film. The activation energy, , of the oxide film formation in the presence of Cl⁻ anions was calculated and was found to be 21 kJ/mol.     

Investigations on composition and morphology of electrochemical conversion layer/titanium dioxide deposit on stainless steel

In this study, the formation and characterization of conversion coatings modified by a sol-gel TiO₂ deposit were investigated as a way to develop a new photocatalyst for water and air depollution. The conversion coating, characterised by strong interfacial adhesion, high roughness and high surface area facilitates the sol-gel deposition of titania and enhances its adhesion to the substrate. The conversion treatment is carried out in an acid solution. Observation by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) reveals a rough surface with pores and cavities. According to SIMS measurements, the thickness of the initial conversion layer is evaluated at about 1.5 μm. On this pre-functionalised support, the titanium dioxide was deposited by the sol-gel method. The roughness measurements coupled with SIMS analysis allowed a precise evaluation of the surface state of the final layers. The coating consists of two layers: a TiO₂ outer layer and an inner layer containing iron chromium oxides. Characterization by X-ray diffraction (XRD) showed the existence of the TiO₂ anatase structure as the main compound.     

PCET based copy-move forgery detection in images under geometric transforms

With the advent of the powerful editing software and sophisticated digital cameras, it is now possible to manipulate images. Copy-move is one of the most common methods for image manipulation. Several methods have been proposed to detect and locate the tampered regions, while many methods failed when the copied region undergone some geometric transformations before being pasted, because of the de-synchronization in the searching procedure. This paper presents an efficient technique for detecting the copy-move forgery under geometric transforms. Firstly, the forged image is divided into overlapping circular blocks, and Polar Complex Exponential Transform (PCET) is employed to each block to extract the invariant features, thus, the PCET kernels represent each block. Secondly, the Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Searching Problem is used for identifying the potential similar blocks by means of locality sensitive hashing (LSH). In order to make the algorithm more robust, morphological operations are applied to remove the wrong similar blocks. Experimental results show that our proposed technique is robust to geometric transformations with low computational complexity.     

To what end? Drip irrigation and the water–energy–food nexus in Morocco

This article draws on three case studies of drip irrigation adoption in Morocco to consider the water–energy–food nexus concept from a bottom-up perspective. Findings indicate that small farmers' adoption of drip irrigation is conditional, that water and energy efficiency does not necessarily reduce overall consumption, and that adoption of drip irrigation (and policies supporting it) can create winners and losers. The article concludes that, although the water–energy–food WEF nexus concept may offer useful insights, its use in policy formulation should be tempered with caution. Technical options that appear beneficial at the conceptual level can have unintended consequences in practice, and policies focused on issues of scarcity and efficiency may exacerbate other dimensions of poverty and inequality.     

Decentralized Networked Control System Design Using Takagi-Sugeno (TS) Fuzzy Approach

This paper proposes a new method for control of continuous large-scale systems where the measures and control functions are distributed on calculating members which can be shared with other applications and connected to digital network communications.At first, the nonlinear large-scale system is described by a Takagi-Sugeno(TS) fuzzy model. After that, by using a fuzzy LyapunovKrasovskii functional, sufficient conditions of asymptotic stability of the behavior of the decentralized networked control system(DNCS),are developed in terms of linear matrix inequalities(LMIs). Finally, to illustrate the proposed approach, a numerical example and simulation results are presented.     

Design optimization of the quantization and a pipelined 2D-DCT for real-time applications

The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is one of the most widely used techniques for image compression. Several algorithms are proposed to implement the DCT-2D. The scaled SDCT algorithm is an optimization of the DCT-1D, which consists in gathering all the multiplications at the end. In this paper, in addition to the hardware implementation on an FPGA, an extended optimization has been performed by merging the multiplications in the quantization block without having an impact on the image quality. A simplified quantization has been performed also to keep higher the performances of the all chain. Tests using MATLAB environment have shown that our proposed approach produces images with nearly the same quality of the ones obtained using the JPEG standard. FPGA-based implementations of this proposed approach is presented and compared to other state of the art techniques. The target is an an Altera Cyclone II FPGA using the Quartus synthesis tool. Results show that our approach outperforms the other ones in terms of processing-speed, used resources and power consumption. A comparison has been done between this architecture and a distributed arithmetic based architecture.     

Effect of kinesthetic and tactile haptic feedback on the quality of experience of edutainment applications

Haptic technologies and applications have received enormous attention in the last decade. The incorporation of haptic modality into multimedia applications adds excitement and enjoyment to an application. It also adds a more natural feel to multimedia applications, that otherwise would be limited to vision and audition, by engaging as well the user’s sense of touch, giving a more intrinsic feel essential for ambient intelligent applications. However, the improvement of an application’s Quality of Experience (QoE) by the addition of haptic feedback is still not completely understood. The research presented in this paper focuses on the effect of haptic feedback and what it potentially adds to the experience of the user as opposed to the traditional visual and auditory feedback. In essence, it investigates certain issues regarding stylus-based haptic education applications and haptic-enhanced entertainment videos. To this end, we used two haptic applications: the haptic handwriting learning tool to experiment with force feedback haptic interaction and the tactile YouTube application for tactile haptic feedback. In both applications, our analysis shows that the addition of haptic feedback will increase the QoE in the absence of fatigue or discomfort for this category of applications. This implies that the incorporation of haptic modality (both force feedback as well as tactile feedback) has positively contributed to the overall QoE for the users.