Curing behavior,mechanical properties,intermolecular interaction,and morphology of silicone/polypyrrole/polymer electrolyte composites

The curing behavior, mechanical properties, intermolecular interaction, and morphology of silicone, polypyrrole, and polymer electrolyte composites were studied. A rigid‐body pendulum rheometer was used to determine the curing behavior of silicone/PEL blends. The polymer structure was evaluated using FTIR and Differential Scanning Calorimetery. The mechanical properties, including stress, strain, and hardness, were measured using a material testing system. The morphology of the composites was measured using scanning electron micrographs. The intermolecular interaction of the composites was measurement using dynamic mechanical analysis. The results show that the curing reaction rate is fast upon addition of 10 wt % of polymer electrolyte for silicone. The linear molecular structure of the polymer electrolyte was wound around the silicone polymer network structure forming a semi‐interpenetrating network. The intermolecular interaction was influenced by the composites, and the Ppy film effect on the surface of SP10 blends is more uniform than that of silicone. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 2754–2764, 2006     

Effects of reactive low‐profile additives on the properties of cured unsaturated polyester resins. II. Glass‐transition temperature and mechanical properties

The effects of reactive poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and poly(vinyl acetate)‐block‐poly(methyl methacrylate) (PVAc‐b‐PMMA) as low‐profile additives (LPAs) on the glass‐transition temperature and mechanical properties of low‐shrink unsaturated polyester resin (UP) were investigated by an integrated approach of determining static phase characteristics, reaction kinetics, cured sample morphology, and property measurements. The factors that, according to Takayanagi mechanical models, control the glass‐transition temperature in each phase region of the cured samples, as identified by both the thermally stimulated currents method and dynamic mechanical analysis, and the mechanical properties are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 100: 867–878, 2006     

Dynamic properties of rubber vibration isolators and antivibration performance of nanoclay‐modified PU/PEL blends system

This research explores the interlayer effect, dynamic mechanical properties, hysteresis behavior, and dynamic antivibration properties of PEL (polypropylene oxide‐polyethylene oxide copolymer with LiClO₄ 20 wt%) for modified PU (mPU) blends with clay and organoclay of varying amounts. The results show that the d‐spacing between the layers of clay and organoclay ranges between 1.78–1.88 nm in the presence of PEL. The dynamic mechanical analysis indicates that the presence of clay and organoclay increases the vibration isolators of the nanocomposites under 20°C. It is found that organically modified clay significantly improves the antivibration performance of the blends based on the compressive vibration hysteresis effect. From the results of the dynamic antivibration test, the dynamic ratio of the blends decreases with the addition of clay or organoclay. In addition, clay is better than organoclay in enhancing the vibration isolation of the mPU blends. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 45:539–548, 2005. © 2005 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Visual secret sharing with cheating prevention revisited

Visual secret sharing (VSS) is a variant form of secret sharing, and is efficient since secret decoding only depends on the human vision system. However, cheating in VSS, first showed by Horng et al., is a significant issue like a limelight. Since then, plenty of studies for cheating activities and cheating prevention visual secret sharing (CPVSS) schemes have been introduced. In this paper, we revisit some well-known cheating activities and CPVSS schemes, and then categorize cheating activities into meaningful cheating, non-meaningful cheating, and meaningful deterministic cheating. Moreover, we analyze the research challenges in CPVSS, and propose a new cheating prevention scheme which is better than the previous schemes in the aspects of some security requirements.     

An efficient phishing webpage detector

Phishing attack is growing significantly each year and is considered as one of the most dangerous threats in the Internet which may cause people to lose confidence in e-commerce. In this paper, we present a heuristic method to determine whether a webpage is a legitimate or a phishing page. This scheme could detect new phishing pages which black list based anti-phishing tools could not. We first convert a web page into 12 features which are well selected based on the existing normal and fishing pages. A training set of web pages including normal and fishing pages are then input for a support vector machine to do training. A testing set is finally fed into the trained model to do the testing. Compared to the existing methods, the experimental results show that the proposed phishing detector can achieve the high accuracy rate with relatively low false positive and low false negative rates.     

Locality sensitive hashing for sampling-based algorithms in association rule mining

Association rule mining is one of the most important techniques for intelligent system design and has been widely applied in a large number of real applications. However, classical mining algorithms cannot process very large databases in a reasonable amount of time. The sampling approach that processes a subset of the whole database is a viable alternative. Obviously, such an approach cannot extract perfectly accurate rules. Previous works have tried to improve the accuracy by removing “outliers” from the initial sample based on global statistical properties in the sample. In this paper, we take the view that the initial sample may actually consist of multiple possibly overlapping subsets or clusters. It is more reasonable to apply data clustering techniques to the initial sample before outlier removal is performed on the resulting clusters, so that outliers are removed based on local properties of individual clusters. However, clustering transactional data with very high dimensions is a difficult problem by itself. We solve this problem by interpreting locality sensitive hashing as a means for data clustering. Previously proposed algorithms may be then optionally used to remove the outliers in the individual clusters. We propose several concrete algorithms based on this general strategy. Using an extensive set of synthetic data and real datasets, we evaluate our proposed algorithms and find that our proposals exhibit better accuracy or execution time, or both, than previously proposed algorithms.     

Numerical analysis of performance enhancement and non-isothermal reactant transport of a cylindrical methanol reformer wrapped with a porous sheath under steam reforming

This paper accomplished a three-dimensional computational analysis of the methanol reformer with steam reforming by the Arrhenius form of reaction model and SIMPLE-C algorithm. The performance enhancement and non-isothermal reactant transport of the cylindrical reformer wrapped with a porous sheath were investigated. The parameters, including temperature of internal heater (T_H), porosity (ε), and thickness of porous sheath (R_P), on methanol conversion, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide productions, temperature and velocity fields with the same inlet conditions have been investigated. The results present that higher methanol conversion and richer hydrogen production occur as temperature of heater, porosity, and porous sheath thickness increase. As temperature of internal heater is equal to 250 °C, employing a porous sheath with ε = 0.9 and R_P = 10 mm to wrap a reformer results in the maximum enhancements of 35.71% in methanol conversion and 21.18% in hydrogen production. Besides, a porous sheath with ε = 0.5 and R_P = 10 mm leads to the maximum reduction of 2.23% in carbon monoxide produced from the reformer at T_H = 300 °C.     

Immunomagnetic reduction assay on chloramphenicol extracted from shrimp

The application of the assay methodology, called immunomagnetic reduction, using bio-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles as labeling markers for chloramphenicol was investigated. The reduction in the alternative-current (ac) magnetic susceptibility χ_ac of magnetic nanoparticles caused by the association between magnetic nanoparticles and chloramphenicol was detected as a function of the concentration of chloramphenicol. In this study, the characterizations used to detect chloramphenicol, such as low-detection limit and interference, were also conducted. Furthermore, the extracting processes for chloramphenicol from shrimp were explored. Thus, the platform for detecting chloramphenicol residue in shrimp via immunomagnetic reduction was demonstrated. Such platform showed features of a 0.1-ppb low-detection limit, low interference from other kinds of antibiotics, and easy operation.     

GPC observations of branching effects in anionic polymerization of methyl methacrylate: A preliminary study

The anionic polymerization of methyl methacrylate was performed in tetrahydrofuran (THF) at ?78°C, using sec‐butyllithium/1,1‐diphenylethylene (DPE) as the initiation system. The effects of polymerization time and initiator concentration on the branching reaction were studied. High vacuum was used to prevent contamination during the polymerization. Gel permeation chromatography (GPC) was used to characterize the branching effect qualitatively. Experimental results indicated that the monomer conversion reached more than 98% in a polymerization time of 10 min. The branching reaction occurred after high monomer conversion, resulting in a tail of high molecular weight in the GPC trace. This branching effect, observed by GPC, increased with polymerization time. Rapid termination was thus probably required immediately after all of the monomer was consumed in the preparation of a well‐defined PMMA without a high‐molecular‐weight tail in this diphenylbutylllithium/THF/?78°C system. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

Improved Light Extraction of Nitride-Based Flip-Chip Light-Emitting Diodes Via Sapphire Shaping and Texturing

A novel flip-chip structure of GaN-sapphire light-emitting diodes (LEDs) was developed to improve the external quantum efficiency, where the sapphire substrate was textured and shaped with beveled sidewalls using a wet etching technique. The forward voltage of the conventional flip-chip and shaped flip-chip GaN LEDs were 2.84 and 2.85 V at 20 mA, respectively. This indicates that the GaN LED was not destroyed during the sapphire wet etching process. It was found that the output power increased from 9.3 to 14.2 mW, corresponding to about 52% increases in the external quantum efficiency. The results agree well with the simulation data that the shaped flip-chip GaN LED can provide better light extraction efficiency than that of the conventional flip-chip sample