Epoxy/poly(methyl methacrylate) interpenetrating polymer networks—morphology,mechanical and thermal properties

Full and semi-IPNs were prepared from epoxy and poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA), by the sequential mode of synthesis and were characterized by measurements of ultimate tensile strength (UTS), elongation at break, modulus, and toughness. Aromatic polyamine adducts and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate were used as the crosslinkers for epoxy and comonomer/crosslinker for methyl methacrylate monomer, respectively. Higher UTS and modulus of the semi-IPNs over full IPNs were attributed to the higher probability of interpenetration. The weight retention in the thermal decomposition of the IPNs and semi-IPNs were higher than the epoxy homopolymer. This enhancement was presumably related to the presence of the unzipped methyl methacrylate monomer which acted as radical scavangers in the epoxy degradation. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A Shot boundary Detection Technique based on Visual Colour Information

The paper proposes a novel video segmentation system with maiden application of CIEDE2000 colour-difference and mean luminace pattern. CIEDE2000 colour-difference uses Lab colour space which is a stable and efficient colour space. The main advantage of Lab colour space model is that it can approximate all the available colours perceived by our human eye. CIEDE2000 colour difference is used for detecting abrupt transitions in the video. The novel contribution of the paper is the maiden use of the mean luminance pattern, increasing and decreasing patterns of the mean value of frame luminance, for detecting the gradual transition. The approach is validated on standard databases TRECVid 2001 and 2007 test video database. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with recently reported techniques and found to be superior as compared to other techniques. The accuracy achieved with the proposed method on the standard databases is 95.9% for cut transition, 78.6% for gradual transition and 92.1% overall.

     

Generalizing Multi-agent Graph Exploration Techniques

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - The system of multiple agents working in coordination for a given task has several advantages on faster completion, fault-tolerance, etc....     

Influence of nucleation and growth mechanisms on the heat deflection temperature of a reactively processed polypropylene nanocomposite

The development of a reactively processed polypropylene nanocomposite (PPNC) with consequential improvements in the heat deflection temperature (HDT), Vicat softening temperature (VST), and crystallization peak temperature (T_c) is reported herein. Neat PP without nanoclay was also reactively processed to elucidate the effects of fillers on the improvement in physical properties. The results show a considerable improvement in the HDT of PPNC (77.9 °C) compared to those of neat PP (62.6 °C) and reactively processed branched PP (BPP; 69.2 °C). Moreover, the T_c of PP in PPNC improved by ~14% compared to that of neat PP. Various models of nonisothermal crystallization kinetics were employed to elucidate the nucleation and crystal growth mechanisms, and to correlate them with the observed HDT improvement in PPNC. Thermal transitions investigated by modulated differential scanning calorimetry explained the changes observed in the VSTs of all the samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on a significant improvement in HDT along with a marked increase in Tc. Such simultaneous improvements in HDT, VST, and T_c are highly desirable for applications involving the use of PP-based materials in rigid packaging.     

Self adaptive animation based on user perspective

In this paper we present a new character animation technique in which the animation adapts itself based on the change in the user’s perspective, so that when the user moves and their point of viewing the animation changes, then the character animation adapts itself in response to that change. The resulting animation, generated in real-time, is a blend of key animations provided a priori by the animator. The blending is done with the help of efficient dual-quaternion transformation blending. The user’s point of view is tracked using either computer vision techniques or a simple user-controlled input modality, such as mouse-based input. This tracked point of view is then used to suitably select the blend of animations. We show a way to author and use such animations in both virtual as well as augmented reality scenarios and demonstrate that it significantly heightens the sense of presence for the users when they interact with such self adaptive animations of virtual characters.     

Detailed Real-Time Urban 3D Reconstruction from Video

The paper presents a system for automatic, geo-registered, real-time 3D reconstruction from video of urban scenes. The system collects video streams, as well as GPS and inertia measurements in order to place the reconstructed models in geo-registered coordinates. It is designed using current state of the art real-time modules for all processing steps. It employs commodity graphics hardware and standard CPU’s to achieve real-time performance. We present the main considerations in designing the system and the steps of the processing pipeline. Our system extends existing algorithms to meet the robustness and variability necessary to operate out of the lab. To account for the large dynamic range of outdoor videos the processing pipeline estimates global camera gain changes in the feature tracking stage and efficiently compensates for these in stereo estimation without impacting the real-time performance. The required accuracy for many applications is achieved with a two-step stereo reconstruction process exploiting the redundancy across frames. We show results on real video sequences comprising hundreds of thousands of frames.     

Verification of evolving software via component substitutability analysis

This paper presents an automated and compositional procedure to solve the substitutability problem in the context of evolving software systems. Our solution contributes two techniques for checking correctness of software upgrades: (1) a technique based on simultaneous use of over-and under-approximations obtained via existential and universal abstractions; (2) a dynamic assume-guarantee reasoning algorithm—previously generated component assumptions are reused and altered on-the-fly to prove or disprove the global safety properties on the updated system. When upgrades are found to be non-substitutable, our solution generates constructive feedback to developers showing how to improve the components. The substitutability approach has been implemented and validated in the ComFoRT reasoning framework, and we report encouraging results on an industrial benchmark. This is an extended version of a paper, Dynamic Component Substitutability Analysis, published in the Proceedings of the Formal Methods 2005 Conference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3582, by the same authors. This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. CNS-0411152, CCF-0429120, CCR-0121547, and CCR-0098072, the Semiconductor Research Corporation under grant no. TJ-1366, the US Army Research Office under grant no. DAAD19-01-1-0485, the Office of Naval Research under grant no. N00014-01-1-0796, the ICAST project and the Predictable Assembly from Certifiable Components (PACC) initiative at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any sponsoring institution, the US government or any other entity.     

The effects of boundary conditions on the basal glide of ice crystals in compression

Creep experiments were conducted on ice crystals in compression to investigate the effects of boundary conditions on a single-slip system deformed in plane strain. Friction at the platens of the deformation apparatus introduces a bending moment which causes a variation in the amount of lattice rotation across the specimen. This is shown to occur in mechanically constrained crystals observed through plane polarized light. Relieving the constraints and minimizing friction at the ice-platen contact leads to the widening of the sample near the specimen-platen interface and the production of tails symmetrically disposed about the longitudinal axis of the deformed crystals. This is interpreted to originate from a bending moment in the opposite sense from that obtained in the constrained crystals, resulting from a progressive increase in slip displacement towards the platens where the segments of the slip plane become shorter. When the crystal ends were constrained but allowed to move sideways, a simple shear regime was established in which lattice slip was concentrated in the centre of the crystal.     

The synthesis of pixelated metamaterial cross polarizer using binary wind driven optimization algorithm

Microsystem Technologies - In this paper synthesis of two wideband Metamaterial Cross Polarizer (MCPs) is proposed. The synthesis of proposed MCPs is done by using Binary Wind Driven Optimization...     

A systematic mapping of semi-formal and formal methods in requirements engineering of industrial Cyber-Physical systems

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing - The requirements engineering of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems is extremely challenging due to large system sizes, component heterogeneity, involvement of...