Impact behavior and fractographic study of carbon nanotubes grafted carbon fiber-reinforced epoxy matrix multi-scale hybrid composites

Carbon nanotubes are the most promising reinforcement for high performance composites. Multiwall carbon nanotubes were directly grown onto the carbon fiber surface by catalytic thermal chemical vapor deposition technique. Multi-scale hybrid composites were fabricated using the carbon nanotubes grown fibers with epoxy matrix. Morphology of the grown carbon nanotubes was investigated using field emission scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. The fabricated composites were subjected to impact tests which showed 48.7% and 42.2% higher energy absorption in Charpy and Izod impact tests respectively. Fractographic analysis of the impact tested specimens revealed the presence of carbon nanotubes both at the fiber surface and within the matrix which explained the reason for improved energy absorption capability of these composites. Carbon nanotubes presence at various cracks formed during loading provided a direct evidence of micro crack bridging. Thus the enhanced fracture strength of these composites is attributed to stronger fiber–matrix interfacial bonding and simultaneous matrix strengthening due to the grown carbon nanotubes.     

Mechanical damage characterization of glass fiber-reinforced polymer laminates by ultrasonic maps

A method for simultaneous measurement of the thickness and density for Glass Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) laminate plates with ultrasonic waves in C-Scan mode is presented in the form of maps. The method uses three different signals in immersion pulse-echo C-Scan mode. The maps obtained based on the density show the heterogeneity of the material at high resolution at the pixel level (1 × 1 mm²) and therefore they represent an efficient tool to assess and evaluate the damage of the composite structures after manufacturing and after an applied mechanical loading.     

共享交通的时空轨迹检索与群体发现

为解决共享交通下的共乘用户群体发现效率低、准确率不高问题，依据R-树原理建立GeoOD-Tree索引，并在此基础上提出以最大化共乘率为目标的群体发现策略。首先，对原始时空轨迹数据进行特征提取与标定处理，挖掘有效出行起讫点（OD）轨迹；其次，针对用户起讫点轨迹的特征，建立GeoOD-Tree索引进行有效的存储管理；最后，给出以最大化共乘行程为目标的群体发现模型，并运用K最近邻（KNN）查询对搜索空间剪枝压缩，提高群体发现效率。采用西安市近12000辆出租车营运轨迹数据，选取动态时间规整（DTW）等典型算法与所提算法在查询效率与准确率上进行性能对比分析。与DTW算法相比，所提算法的准确率提高了10.12%，查询效率提高了约15倍。实验结果表明提出的群体发现策略能有效提高共乘用户群体发现的准确率和效率，可有效提升共乘出行方式的出行率。     

An adaptive image steganographic scheme based on Noise Visibility Function and an optimal chaotic based encryption method

Steganography is the science of hiding secret message in an appropriate digital multimedia in such a way that the existence of the embedded message should be invisible to anyone apart from the sender or the intended recipient. This paper presents an irreversible scheme for hiding a secret image in the cover image that is able to improve both the visual quality and the security of the stego-image while still providing a large embedding capacity. This is achieved by a hybrid steganography scheme incorporates Noise Visibility Function (NVF) and an optimal chaotic based encryption scheme. In the embedding process, first to reduce the image distortion and to increase the embedding capacity, the payload of each region of the cover image is determined dynamically according to NVF. NVF analyzes the local image properties to identify the complex areas where more secret bits should be embedded. This ensures to maintain a high visual quality of the stego-image as well as a large embedding capacity. Second, the security of the secret image is brought about by an optimal chaotic based encryption scheme to transform the secret image into an encrypted image. Third, the optimal chaotic based encryption scheme is achieved by using a hybrid optimization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is allowing us to find an optimal secret key. The optimal secret key is able to encrypt the secret image so as the rate of changes after embedding process be decreased which results in increasing the quality of the stego-image. In the extracting process, the secret image can be extracted from the stego-image losslessly without referring to the original cover image. The experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme not only has the ability to achieve a good trade-off between the payload and the stego-image quality, but also can resist against the statistics and image processing attacks.     

Multiobjective PSO based adaption of neural network topology for pixel classification in satellite imagery

The proposed work involves the multiobjective PSO based adaption of optimal neural network topology for the classification of multispectral satellite images. It is per pixel supervised classification using spectral bands (original feature space). This paper also presents a thorough experimental analysis to investigate the behavior of neural network classifier for given problem. Based on 1050 number of experiments, we conclude that following two critical issues needs to be addressed: (1) selection of most discriminative spectral bands and (2) determination of optimal number of nodes in hidden layer. We propose new methodology based on multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) technique to determine discriminative spectral bands and the number of hidden layer node simultaneously. The accuracy with neural network structure thus obtained is compared with that of traditional classifiers like MLC and Euclidean classifier. The performance of proposed classifier is evaluated quantitatively using Xie-Beni and β indexes. The result shows the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional one.     

Synergistic effect of co-alloying elements on site preferences and elastic properties of Ni3Al: A first-principles study

The site preferences of co-alloying elements (Mo–Ta, Mo–Re, Mo–Cr) in Ni₃Al are studied using first-principles calculations, and the effects of these alloying elements on the elastic properties of Ni₃Al are evaluated by elastic property calculations. The results show that the Mo–Ta, Mo–Re and Mo–Cr atom pairs all prefer Al–Al sites and the spatial neighbor relation of substitution sites almost has no influence on the site preference results. Furthermore, the Young's modulus of Ni₃Al increases much higher by substituting Al–Al sites with co-alloying atoms, among which Mo–Re has the best strengthening effect. The enhanced chemical bondings between alloying atoms and their neighbor host atoms are considered to be the main strengthening mechanism of the alloying elements in Ni₃Al.     

Iterative equalization combining algorithm in intersymbol interference channel

To realize joint optimization of spatial diversity and equalization combining in the intersymbol interference (ISI) channel, an iterative equalization combining algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses the coefficients of Turbo equalization to calculate the combination weights without estimating the signal to noise ratio in each diversity branch. The equalized symbols from different diversity branches are combined, and the extrinsic information output from the decoder is fed back to the equalizers, so as to exchange soft information between the equalizers and the decoder. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed using the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart and verified by simulations. Results show that our approach fully exploits time domain information from the multipath channel and spatial domain information from multi receiving antennas, which efficiently improve the performance of the receiver in the severe ISI channel.     

In-situ TEM observation of structural changes in nano-crystalline CoCrCuFeNi multicomponent high-entropy alloy (HEA) under fast electron irradiation by high voltage electron microscopy (HVEM)

The structural changes induced in a CoCrCuFeNi multicomponent nano-crystalline high-entropy alloy (HEA) under fast electron irradiation were investigated by in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) using a high voltage electron microscope (HVEM). A fine-grained face centered cubic (fcc) single phase was obtained in the sputtered specimens. The fcc solid solution showed high phase stability against irradiation over a wide temperature range from 298 to 773 K, and remained as the main constituent phase even when the samples were irradiated up to 40 displacement per atom (dpa). Moreover, the irradiation did not seem to induce grain coarsening. This is the first report on the irradiation damage in 5-component HEA under MeV electron irradiation.     

Genetic algorithm and self organizing map based fuzzy hybrid intelligent method for color image segmentation

The grouping of pixels based on some similarity criteria is called image segmentation. In this paper the problem of color image segmentation is considered as a clustering problem and a fixed length genetic algorithm (GA) is used to handle it. The effectiveness of GA depends on the objective function (fitness function) and the initialization of the population. A new objective function is proposed to evaluate the quality of the segmentation and the fitness of a chromosome. In fixed length genetic algorithm the chromosomes have same length, which is normally set by the user. Here, a self organizing map (SOM) is used to determine the number of segments in order to set the length of a chromosome automatically. An opposition based strategy is adopted for the initialization of the population in order to diversify the search process. In some cases the proposed method makes the small regions of an image as separate segments, which leads to noisy segmentation. A simple ad hoc mechanism is devised to refine the noisy segmentation. The qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods.