Magnetic and microwave properties of Sm1?xBa2Cu3+xO7?δ superconductors at 4.2 K prepared by an organic carbonate coprecipitation route

Samples of Sm₁Ba₂Cu₃O_7– and Sm_0.95Ba₂Cu_3.05O_7– are prepared by a coprecipitation technique using organic carbonates in the presence of stable polymers. The electrical, magnetic, and microwave measurements have been carried out to characterize the materials. Both normal (Sm₁Ba₂Cu₃O_7– ) and copper-rich (Sm_0.95Ba₂Cu_3.05O_7– ) samples showed sharp superconducting transitions at 94 K. Lower and upper critical fields of the samples are estimated from magnetization measurements. The critical magnetization current density (J _mc ) and pinning force density (F _p ) of the samples are obtained from the magnetization hysteresis loop at 4.2 K for fields up to 5T. Superconducting parameters (H _c (O),K _GL,,) are obtained by using the values of lower and upper critical magnetic fields. Microwave-induced d.c. voltage measurements indicated a smaller number of weak links for copper-rich samples. The enhancement of critical current density and the reduction of total number of weak links for copper-rich samples may be due to the increase in hole concentration caused by the partial replacement of Sm by Cu.     

Optimization of material formulation and processing parameters in relation to mechanical properties of bioepoxy/clay nanocomposites using Taguchi design of experiments

This article aims to study the effects of material formulation and processing parameters on mechanical properties of bioepoxy/clay nanocomposites based on epoxidized soybean oil (ESO) via Taguchi design of experiments (DoEs). A mixed‐level DoE with an L₁₆ orthogonal array was constructed to achieve maximum levels of tensile strength, tensile modulus, and impact strength for corresponding bionanocomposites. Pareto analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to identify significant factors and preferred formulations in the manufacture of bioepoxy/clay nanocomposites. The ESO content was found to have the most significant effect with regards to bionanocomposite mechanical properties with contribution percentages of 66.63, 72.96, and 40.14% for their tensile strength, tensile modulus, and impact strength, respectively. With regards to material processing parameters, mechanical mixing speed was identified as a critical factor to achieve optimal tensile and impact properties. Nonetheless, the results also indicated clay content to be a significant factor for tensile strength, whereas curing agent type was vital for the improvement of tensile modulus and impact strength. Clay type and sonication time were also found to be significant factors for impact strength. In contrast to this, manufacturing parameters such as mechanical mixing temperature, mixing time, and sonication frequency were considered to be non‐significant factors due to their low cumulative contribution percentages of <10%. Finally, experimental confirmation tests based on the preferred combination of factors demonstrated good agreement with statistically predicted results. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2018 , 135, 45769.     

Preparation and Properties of Halloysite Nanotubes/Poly(ethylene methyl acrylate)-Based Nanocomposites by Variation of Mixing Methods

Halloysite nanotube-based inorganic–organic polymer nanocomposite has been developed with improved mechanical strength in one direction by solution mixing followed by melt mixing. Melt mixing, solution mixing, and melt-cum-solution mixing were performed to optimize the mechanical strength of the nanocomposites. The field emission scanning electron microscopic images and small-angle X-ray scattering spectrum can support the unidirectional array of halloysite nanotubes in the matrix. The tensile properties revealed that solution–melt mixing is the most desired way to develop clay-based nanocomposites. Thermal characterizations implied that thermal stability was improved after nanoclay incorporation. Dynamic mechanical analysis showed the flow properties and the “Payne effect” of the nanocomposites.     

A network selection method for handover in vehicle-to-infrastructure communications in multi-tier networks

Network selection is very important for a successful handover in a multi-tier heterogeneous networks. However, the primary challenges currently faced by research community is the lack of availability of network information at the mobile node side for efficiently select the most appropriate target network. It is practically difficult for an UE to get network information from base stations/access point of the neighbouring networks before connecting to them. In response to this, this paper proposes a network selection method that applies the knowledge of mobility data and the network load information to carry out an efficient handover for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication over multi-tier heterogeneous networks. We first derive key parameters, such as relative direction index, proximity index, residence time index, and network load index to select the best candidate network. A moving vehicle would be able to select the most appropriate target network by selecting one or more of the above parameters. We then test our algorithms by developing a dual mode vehicle On-Board Unit equipped with both Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) and Wi-Fi network interface cards in OPNET simulator. The performance of the proposed handover method is evaluated by extensive OPNET-based simulation experiments. In the simulation model, we consider a multi-tier heterogeneous network comprising of a macro and multiple small cells of LTE-A and IEEE 802.11n technologies. Results show that our proposed handover method offers about 50% higher throughput and up to 43% higher packet delivery ratio than the conventional received signal strengths based network selection method.

     

Composite Adaptive Control of Uncertain Euler‐Lagrange Systems with Parameter Convergence without PE Condition

This work proposes a novel composite adaptive controller for uncertain Euler‐Lagrange (EL) systems. The composite adaptive law is strategically designed to be proportional to the parameter estimation error in addition to the tracking error, leading to parameter convergence. Unlike conventional adaptive control laws which require the regressor function to be persistently exciting (PE) for parameter convergence, the proposed method guarantees parameter convergence from a milder initially exciting (IE) condition on the regressor. The IE condition is significantly less restrictive than PE, since it does not rely on the future values of the signal and that it can be verified online. The proposed adaptive controller ensures exponential convergence of the tracking and the parameter estimation errors to zero once the sufficient IE condition is met. Simulation results corroborate the efficacy of the proposed technique and also establishes it's robustness property in the presence of unmodeled bounded disturbance.     

Development of a novel glucosamine/silk fibroin–chitosan blend porous scaffold for cartilage tissue engineering applications

Silk fibroin–chitosan blend is reported to be an attractive scaffold material for tissue engineering applications. In our earlier study, we developed a scaffold having an optimal silk fibroin–chitosan blend ratio of 80:20 and proved its potentiality for cartilage tissue engineering applications. Glucosamine is one of the major structural components of cartilage tissue. The present work investigates the effect of glucosamine components on the physicochemical and biocompatibility properties of this scaffold. To this end, varied amounts of glucosamine were added to silk fibroin–chitosan blend with the aim of improving various scaffold properties. The addition of glucosamine components did not show any significant change in physicochemical properties of silk fibroin–chitosan blend scaffolds. The composite scaffold showed an open pore structure with desired pore size and porosity. However, cell culture study using human mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood revealed an overall increase in cell supportive properties of glucosamine-added scaffolds. Cell viability, cell proliferation and glycosaminoglycan assays confirmed enhanced cell viability and proliferation of mesenchymal stem cells. Thus, this study demonstrated the beneficial effect of glucosamine on improving the cell supportive property of silk fibroin–chitosan blend scaffolds making it more potential for cartilage tissue regeneration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the study of glucosamine-added silk fibroin–chitosan blend porous scaffolds seeded with mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood.     

A rapid quantitative protocol for measuring carbon nanotube degree of dispersion in a waterborne epoxy–amine matrix material

The available literature makes it very clear that accurate measurements of carbon nanotube dispersion quality are very complicated and the typical characterization is neither simple nor reliable. Most methods to quantify carbon nanotube dispersion reported in the literature require investigator-chosen assumptions or software interpretations that are impractical at best and misleading at worst for facile application. Herein, we report on the use of visible light absorption-based method(s) and validate that these were quantitative for discerning dispersibility differences for MWCNTs with three distinct surface chemistry modifications and concentration levels blended with polymeric materials. Ultimately, the dispersion quality was quantified via the trendline slope of the thickness-normalized absorbance values as a function of MWCNT concentration. Extremely poor dispersions were represented by statistically insignificant slope trendlines. Our data revealed that hydroxyl surface modification increased MWCNT dispersibility by a factor of ~2.8 and ~2.6 compared to the as-received MWCNT formulations via the absorption and the blackness methods, respectively. These results support and quantifiably validate that simple optical blackness values directly measured the degree of dispersion for MWCNTs in coatings applied to substrates, and our data support that this is a simple and effective quality control metric.     

Deep learning in multi-object detection and tracking: state of the art

Applied Intelligence - Object detection and tracking is one of the most important and challenging branches in computer vision, and have been widely applied in various fields, such as health-care...     

Performance of CPU/GPU compiler directives on ISO/TTI kernels

GPUs are slowly becoming ubiquitous devices in High Performance Computing, as their capabilities to enhance the performance per watt of compute intensive algorithms as compared to multicore CPUs have been identified. The primary shortcoming of a GPU is usability, since vendor specific APIs are quite different from existing programming languages, and it requires a substantial knowledge of the device and programming interface to optimize applications. Hence, lately a growing number of higher level programming models are targeting GPUs to alleviate this problem. The ultimate goal for a high-level model is to expose an easy-to-use interface for the user to offload compute intensive portions of code (kernels) to the GPU, and tune the code according to the target accelerator to maximize overall performance with a reduced development effort. In this paper, we share our experiences of three of the notable high-level directive based GPU programming models—PGI, CAPS and OpenACC (from CAPS and PGI) on an Nvidia M2090 GPU. We analyze their performance and programmability against Isotropic (ISO)/Tilted Transversely Isotropic (TTI) finite difference kernels, which are primary components in the Reverse Time Migration (RTM) application used by oil and gas exploration for seismic imaging of the sub-surface. When ported to a single GPU using the mentioned directives, we observe an average 1.5–1.8x improvement in performance for both ISO and TTI kernels, when compared with optimized multi-threaded CPU implementations using OpenMP.     

Exertion of Inhibiting Effect by Aluminosilicate Layers on Swelling of Solution Blended EVA/Clay Nanocomposite

Summary: Ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) copolymer/dodecyl ammonium ion intercalated montmorillonite (12Me‐MMT) nanocomposites were swelled in xylene under atmospheric condition. Swelling index of these nanocomposites decreased with filler loading indicating that the solvent uptake of these nanocomposites was inversely related to the filler contents. The volume fractions of nanocomposites showed an increasing trend with filler concentration because of unswelling effect exerted by aluminosilicate layers. The cross‐link density was determined using the Flory‐Rehner equation and it was observed that the cross‐link density of these nanocomposites also showed an increasing trend with increasing filler loading. Free energy change (ΔG_mix) and the change in entropy (ΔS_mix) on swelling of EVA/12Me‐MMT nanocomposites in xylene were calculated and these values reaffirmed that the interaction between polymer chains and silicate layers was very strong which induced remarkable inhibiting ability on EVA matrix when swelled in xylene.

TEM photograph of EVA/12Me‐MMT nanocomposite containing 8 wt.‐% 12Me‐MMT.