Synthesis and evaluating of carbon nanoallotrope-biomacromolecule gel composites as drug delivery systems

This work was done to assess the role of precursors (agro and graphite) on performance of carbon nanoallotropes-biomacromolecules composite as drug delivery for controlling the release of niacin. In this respect graphene oxide and bagasse-based carbon oxide were synthesized and chelated with chitosan (Cs-GO and Cs-Co). These gel composites were characterized by many techniques [morphology, differential scanning calorimetry, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, swelling, encapsulation efficiency (EE) and loading (L) % of niacin. Another series of experiments was carried out for studying the role of replacing part of carbon nanoallotrope by carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) on performance of produced drug carries, these systems were coded as Cs-GO-CMC and Cs-Co-CMC. The data showed that, the Cs-GO gel composite provided maximum release of NA, at 5 h, for pH's simulated gastric and intestinal fluids; pH. 2.1 and pH 7.4 (1120 mg/L and 757 mg/L). The incorporation of CMC is not acceptable as it provided low drug release together with burst release of NA-drug, and consequently possible caused tissue irritation or toxicity in the human body. The Cs-GO and Cs-CO systems with relatively low drug loading were recommended for their better controllability system to NA release, which prolonging benefit of human with niacin. The NA release from all investigated gels followed Fickian and non-Fickian diffusion mechanisms.     

Flute breakage detection during end milling using Hilbert–Huang transform and smoothed nonlinear energy operator

Real time tool condition monitoring has great significance in modern manufacturing processes. In order to prevent possible damages to the workpiece or the machine tool, reliable monitoring techniques are required to provide fast response to the unexpected tool failure. Milling is one of the most fundamental machining operations. During the milling process, the current of feed motor is weakly related to the cutter condition, the change of power consumption is not significant to identify tool condition. Thus, current of motor-based tool condition still requires some new approaches to sort out significant pattern that could be employed to indicate tool condition. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to detect end mill flute breakage via the feed-motor current signals, which implements Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) analysis and a smoothed nonlinear energy operator (SNEO) to extract the crucial characteristics from the measured signals to indicate tool breakage. Experiments on a CNC Vertical Machining Centre are presented to show the algorithm performance. The results show that this method is feasible and can accurately and efficiently monitor the conditions of the end mill under varying cutting conditions.     

Effect of Al<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript> particles on the microstructure and sliding wear of 7075 Al alloy manufactured by squeeze casting method

Aluminum (Al) alloy 7075 reinforced with Al₂O₃ particles was prepared using the stir casting method. The microstructure of the cast composites showed some degree of porosity and sites of Al₂O₃ particle clustering, especially at high-volume fractions of Al₂O₃ particles. Different squeeze pressures (25 and 50 MPa) were applied to the cast composite during solidification to reduce porosity and particle clusters. Microstructure examinations of the squeeze cast composites showed remarkable grain refining compared with that of the matrix alloy. As the volume fraction of particles and applied squeeze pressure increased, the hardness linearly increased. This increase was related to the modified structure and the decrease in the porosity. The effect of particle volume fraction and squeeze pressure on the dry-sliding wear of the composites was studied. Experiments were performed at 10, 30, and 50 N with a sliding speed of 1 m/s using a pin-on-ring apparatus. Increasing the particle volume fraction and squeeze pressure improved the wear resistance of the composite compared with that of the monolithic alloy, because the Al₂O₃ particles acted as load-bearing constituents. Also, these results can be attributed to the fact that the application of squeeze pressure during solidification led to a reduction in the porosity, and an increase in the solidification rate, leading to a finer structure. Moreover, the application of squeeze pressure improved the interface strength between the matrix and Al₂O₃ particles by elimination of the porosity at the interface, thereby providing better mechanical locking.     

Optical properties of amorphous Ge28-xSe72Sbx thin films

Bulk glasses of formal composition Ge_28−xSe₇₂Sb_x with 0≤x≤28 were prepared by applying the quench technique. The optical transmission spectra—using a melt were measured in the range from 200 to 1200 nm for Ge_28−xSe₇₂Sb_x films which are prepared by thermal evaporation technique. A simple, straightforward procedure suggested by Swanepoel, which is based on the use of interference fringes, has been applied to calculate the film thickness. On other hand the driving absorption coefficient (α), consequently the band tail width E_e and the optical band gap have been estimated. The real (ε′) and imaginary parts (ε″) of the dielectric constant have been determined and the optical band gap can also be calculated as a function of imaginary part (ε″). The dispersion parameters such as E₀(single-oscillator energy), E_d (dispersive energy) and M₋₁, M₋₃ (moments) were discussed in terms of the single-oscillator Wemple–DiDomenico model.     

Pressure sintering of W-15wt.%Cu alloys prepared by mechanical alloying as a subsequent densification treatment method

1. Introduction W-Cu alloys are widely used in many fields due to their superior properties [1]. With the rapid de-velopment of technology, more demands are being made on the W-Cu alloys. For instance, higher heat conductivity, lower thermal expansion coefficient, and more rigorous air tightness are required when these alloys are used for electronic package materi-als, such as heat sink materials. Especially, the re-quirement of more rigorous air tightness means that the W-Cu alloys must pos…     

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.     

Effect of temperature and moisture on electrical conductivity in polyaniline/polyurethane (PANI/PU) blends

Miscible blend of conductive polyaniline/polyurethane (PANI/PU) showed preferable electrical property at low percolation threshold compared to immiscible blend of PANI/polystyrene-isoprene-copolymer (PANI/SIS) and carbon black/PU composite (CB/PU). The time dependence of the electrical conductivity was investigated with these samples aged under different humidity and temperatures. The electrical conductivity of PANI/PU (11.5/88.5, v/v) decreased with aging time and the morphology changed with time in the coexistence of high moisture and high temperature. After the aging treatment, the film of the miscible blend was re-dissolved and re-cast. The morphology and electrical conductivity were found to recover to the same state as the original film. In addition, the recovery mechanism of the morphology and the conductivity was also proposed here.     

Virtual screening of eighteen million compounds against dengue virus: Combined molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations study

Dengue virus is a major issue of tropical and sub-tropical regions. Dengue virus has been the cause behind the major alarming epidemics in the history with mass causalities from the decades. Unavailability of on-shelf drugs for the prevention of further proliferation of virus inside the human body results in immense number of deaths each year. This issue necessitates the design of novel anti-dengue drug. The protease enzyme pathway is the critical target for drug design due to its significance in the replication, survival and other cellular activities of dengue virus. Therefore, approximately eighteen million compounds from the ZINC database have been virtually screened against nonstructural protein 3 (NS3). The incremental construction algorithm of Glide docking program has been used with its features high throughput virtual screening (HTVS), standard precision (SP), extra precision (XP) and in combination of Prime module, induced fit docking (IFD) approach has also been applied. Five top-ranked compounds were then selected from the IFD results with better predicted binding energies with the catalytic triad residues (His51, Asp75, and Ser135) that may act as potential inhibitors for the underlying target protease enzyme. The top-ranked compounds ZINC95518765, ZINC44921800, ZINC71917414, ZINC39500661, ZINC36681949 have shown the predicted binding energies of −7.55, −7.36, −8.04, −8.41, −9.18 kcal/mol, respectively, forming binding interactions with three catalytically important amino acids. Top-docking poses of compounds are then used in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In computational studies, our proposed compounds confirm promising results against all the four serotypes of dengue virus, strengthening the opportunity of these compounds to work as potential on-shelf drugs against dengue virus. Further experimentation on the proposed compounds can result in development of strong inhibitors.     

A large vocabulary system for Arabic online handwriting recognition

The success of using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for speech recognition application has motivated the adoption of these models for handwriting recognition especially the online handwriting that has large similarity with the speech signal as a sequential process. Some languages such as Arabic, Farsi and Urdo include large number of delayed strokes that are written above or below most letters and usually written delayed in time. These delayed strokes represent a modeling challenge for the conventional left-right HMM that is commonly used for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for handling delayed strokes in Arabic online handwriting recognition using HMMs. We also show that several modeling approaches such as context based tri-grapheme models, speaker adaptive training and discriminative training that are currently used in most state-of-the-art ASR systems can provide similar performance improvement for Hand Writing Recognition (HWR) systems. Finally, we show that using a multi-pass decoder that use the computationally less expensive models in the early passes can provide an Arabic large vocabulary HWR system with practical decoding time. We evaluated the performance of our proposed Arabic HWR system using two databases of small and large lexicons. For the small lexicon data set, our system achieved competing results compared to the best reported state-of-the-art Arabic HWR systems. For the large lexicon, our system achieved promising results (accuracy and time) for a vocabulary size of 64k words with the possibility of adapting the models for specific writers to get even better results.     

Design of a printed log‐periodic dipole array antenna with high gain for millimeter‐wave applications

In this article, a V‐band printed log‐periodic dipole array (PLPDA) antenna with high gain is proposed. The antenna prototype is designed, simulated, fabricated, and tested. Simulation results show that this antenna can operate from 42 to 82 GHz with a fractional impedance bandwidth of 64.5% covering the whole V‐band (50–75 GHz). The antenna has a measured impedance matching bandwidth that starts from 42 to beyond 65 GHz with good agreement between the experimental and simulated results. At 50 and 65 GHz, the antenna has a measured gain of 10.45 and 10.28 dBi, respectively, with a gain variation of 2.6 dBi across the measured frequency range. The antenna prototype exhibits also stable radiation patterns over the operating band. It achieves side‐lobe suppression better than 17.26 dB in the H‐plane and better than 8.95 dB in the E‐plane, respectively. In addition, the cross‐polarization component is 18.5 dB lower than the copolarization with front‐to‐back ratio lower than 24.1 dB in both E‐ and H‐planes across the desired frequency range. Based on a comparison of performance among the reported work in the literature, we can say that the proposed PLPDA antenna is a proper candidate to be used in many applications at V‐band frequency. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 25:185–193, 2015.