A Full Connectable and High Scalable Key Pre-distribution Scheme Based on Combinatorial Designs for Resource-Constrained Devices in IoT Network

Considering the internet of things (IoT), end nodes such as wireless sensor network, RFID and embedded systems are used in many applications. These end nodes are known as resource-constrained devices in the IoT network. These devices have limitations such as computing and communication power, memory capacity and power. Key pre-distribution schemes (KPSs) have been introduced as a lightweight solution to key distribution in these devices. Key pre-distribution is a special type of key agreement that aims to select keys called session keys in order to establish secure communication between devices. One of these design types is the using of combinatorial designs in key pre-distribution, which is a deterministic scheme in key pre-distribution and has been considered in recent years. In this paper, by introducing a key pre-distribution scheme of this type, we stated that the model introduced in the two benchmarks of KPSs comparability had full connectivity and scalability among the designs introduced in recent years. Also, in recent years, among the combinatorial design-based key pre-distribution schemes, in order to increase resiliency as another criterion for comparing KPSs, attempts were made to include changes in combinatorial designs or they combine them with random key pre-distribution schemes and hybrid schemes were introduced that would significantly reduce the design connectivity. In this paper, using theoretical analysis and maintaining full connectivity, we showed that the strength of the proposed design was better than the similar designs while maintaining higher scalability.

     

Purification,structural data and biological properties of polysaccharide from Prunus amygdalus gum

This work demonstrates the efficiency of almond gum polysaccharides (AGPs) as bioactive compounds. AGPs were first extracted using H₂O₂, in the presence of NaOH, at different times and temperatures. The optimal extraction conditions were 4% H₂O₂ and 2 N NaOH, for 7 h at 50 °C, leading to an extraction yield of 58.2% (w/w). After a purification step, the retained AGPs were characterised using high‐performance liquid chromatography showing a molecular weight of 99.3 kDa. The monosaccharide composition of AGPs were assessed using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. AGPs were found to be a complex heteropolysaccharide with a repeating unit mainly composed of galactose, arabinose, xylose, mannose, rhamnose, and glucuronic acid with the respective ratios: 45:26:7:10:1:11. The acidic nature of the polysaccharide is due to the presence of glucuronic acid. Total antioxidant activity, free radical‐scavenging activity and reducing power assay of AGPs were investigated. The obtained results showed high antioxidant activities of AGPs. Furthermore, beyond 60 mg mL^?1, AGPs exhibited bacterial growth inhibition for five pathogenic strains: Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus feacalis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Salmonella typhimurium.     

Enhanced Photoelectrochemistry in CdS/Au Nanoparticle Bilayers

Three different configurations of Au‐nanoparticle/CdS‐nanoparticle arrays are organized on Au/quartz electrodes for enhanced photocurrent generation. In one configuration, Au‐nanoparticles are covalently linked to the electrode and the CdS‐nanoparticles are covalently linked to the bare Au‐nanoparticle assembly. The resulting photocurrent, φ = 7.5 %, is ca. 9‐fold higher than the photocurrent originating from a CdS‐nanoparticle layer that lacks the Au‐nanoparticles, φ = 0.8 %. The enhanced photocurrent in the Au/CdS nanoparticle array is attributed to effective charge separation of the electron–hole pair by the injection of conduction‐band electrons from the CdS‐ to the Au‐nanoparticles. Two other configurations involving electrostatically stabilized bipyridinium‐crosslinked Au/CdS or CdS/Au nanoparticle arrays were assembled on the Au/quartz crystal. The photocurrent quantum yields in the two systems are φ = 10 % and φ = 5 %, respectively. The photocurrents in control systems that include electrostatically bridged Au/CdS or CdS/Au nanoparticles by oligocationic units that lack electron‐acceptor units are substantially lower than the values observed in the analogous bipyridinium‐bridged systems. The enhanced photocurrents in the bipyridinium‐crosslinked systems is attributed to the stepwise electron transfer of conduction‐band electrons to the Au‐nanoparticles by the bipyridinium relay bridge, a process that stabilizes the electron–hole pair against recombination and leads to effective charge separation.     

Mathematical modeling of falling liquid film evaporation process

A mathematical model of evaporation process from a laminar falling liquid film on a vertical plate of constant temperature is presented. The model is developed with and without interfacial shear stress due to the vapor flow at the liquid film surface. The vapor pressure drop, vapor exit velocity and cooling rate are calculated for different liquid mass flow values. It is shown that lower liquid mass flow produces higher cooling rate. The results also show that the interfacial shear stress has a considerable negative effect on the cooling rate. It is proved that there exists an optimum distance between the plates, which gives the maximum volumetric cooling rate.     

Adhesion, growth and differentiation of human bone marrow stromal cells on non-porous calcium carbonate and plastic substrata: effects of dexamethasone and 1,25dihydroxyvitamin D3

Bone marrow contains stromal fibroblastic stem cells which have the potential to differentiate into bone-forming cells. Therefore addition of bone marrow to porous bone substitutes such as coral or coralline hydroxyapatite may be expected to enhance bone ingrowth into these implants. This study was designed to evaluate the possibility of growing human bone marrow stromal fibroblastic cells (HBMC) on a calcium carbonate substrate. For this purpose, HBMC were cultured for 20 days on plastic or calcium carbonate and cell adhesion, growth, and differentiation were studied. It was concluded that calcium carbonate is a highly compatible material for the growth of HBMC. Cells were capable of adhesion within 30 min and were spread within 24 h on this material. However, plating efficiency was decreased in comparison to plastic. Population doubling times (PDT) showed that they were similar when the cells were grown on plastic or calcium carbonate as substratum (PDT=4, 5.5 days). Early protein synthesis included collagen I, collagen III, osteopontin and bone sialoprotein. To induce differentiation of HBMC on plastic and calcium carbonate the influence of dexamethasone (Dex) and 1,25dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25(OH)₂D₃) on alkaline phosphatase (ALP) expression was studied. Basic ALP activity was similar when cells were grown on plastic or calcium carbonate. However, Dex and 1,25(OH)₂D₃ increased ALP activity of HBMC which could be driven best towards osteogenesis in the presence of Dex and 1,25(OH)₂D₃.     

Impact of initial moisture content levels,freezing rate and instant controlled pressure drop treatment (DIC) on dehydrofreezing process and quality attributes of quince fruits

Dehydrofreezing process involves water partial removal before freezing. This treatment has been proposed in order to reduce the negative impacts of conventional or even accelerated freezing, especially on the textural quality of high water content fruits and vegetables. Indeed, in such cases, freezing and thawing processes result in severe damage of the integrity of product’s cell structure due to the formation of ice crystals. For this purpose, quince fruits (7?g H₂O/g db) were subjected to convective air drying of 40?°C and 3m/s to reach different water content levels of 2, 1, and 0.3?g H₂O/g db. Freezing profiles obtained at various freezing rates (V₁, V₂, and V₃) for different water contents allowed the main freezing characteristics such as the Initial Freezing Temperature (IFT), the Practical Freezing time (PFt), and the Specific Freezing time (SFt) to be assessed. The impact of freezing rate was important on PFt and SFt, and more pronounced for high water contents (W between 7 and 2?g H₂O/g db (dry basis)). Furthermore, IFT decreased sharply when initial sample water content decreased. Indeed, it started at ?0.8?°C for W?=?7g H₂O/g db, while it reached a value of ?8.2?°C for samples of W?=?1g H₂O/g db. Since convective air drying normally triggers shrinkage which causes a detrimental deformation of fruit structures, instant controlled pressure drop (DIC) treatment was used to improve the texture and enhance the whole dehydrofreezing performance and the final frozen-thawed product quality. Moreover, DIC implied a slight increase of PFt compared to untreated ones. On the other hand, quality attributes were estimated through the assessment of thawed water exudate (TWE g H₂O/100?g db), color and texture (maximum puncture force as index of firmness): freezing rate and water content had great impacts on TWE. Hence, the lower the water content, the weaker the TWE. Furthermore, the TWE of the pre-dried quince (0.3?g H₂O/g db) had higher value for DIC-textured samples than for the un-treated ones. Indeed, DIC-texturing leads to a well-controlled structure expansion of the cell wall. These textural changes resulted in more lixiviation of residual water. Consequently, water becomes more available, hence more releasable after thawing. Finally, the partial removal of water by air drying before freezing remarkably reduced the negative impact of freezing/thawing processes on final quince color. Decisively, the firmness of quince fruit increased with the decrease of water content level.

Abbreviations: DMC: Dry Matter Concentration (%); DIC: Instant controlled pressure drop; W: Water content dry basis (g H₂O/g db); IFT: Initial Freezing Temperature (°C); PFt: Practical Freezing time (min); SFt: Specific Freezing time (min); TWE: Thawed Water Exudate (g H₂O/100?g db); L, a, and b: Color coordinates; (L): The degrees of lightness; (a) and (–a): The redness (a) or greenness (?a), respectively; (b) and (?b): The yellowness (b) or blueness (?b), respectively; ΔE*_ab: Total color difference; L₀, a₀, and b₀: Color coordinates of fresh or dried quince samples; SD: Standard Deviation; ANOVA: Analysis of variances; LSD: Least Significant Differences; cp: Specific Heat of the product depending on composition (dry material and water content)(KJ/kg K); cp_d: Specific Heat of the dry material (KJ/kg K); cp_W: Specific Heat of water (KJ/kg K); V₁: Freezing rate without insulation; V₂: Freezing rate with a food stretch film insulation with thickness e2?=?3?mm and thermal conductivity λ₂?=?0.17 W/m K; V₃: Freezing rate with a versatile flexible insulation (Armacell) with thickness e3?=?13mm and weak thermal conductivity λ₃?=?0.036 W/m K; v_d: Volume of dry material of quince sample (mm³); v_H2O: Volume of quince sample water (mm³); v_t: Total volume of quince sample (mm³); e₀: Quince sample thickness (mm); e₂: Insulation thickness in the case V2; = 3?mm; ; e₃: Insulation thickness in the case V3; = 13?mm; ; λ₀: Quince sample conductivity (W/m K); λ₂: Insulation conductivity in the case V2;?=?0.17 W/m K; ; λ₃: Insulation conductivity in the case V3;?=?0.036 W/m K; λ_d: Conductivity of quince sample dry material (W/m K); λ_H2O: Conductivity of water (W/m K); λ_equiv: Equivalent conductivity of quince sample versus water content (W/m K); m_i and m_f: Weights of the frozen and thawed samples, respectively     

An expressive framework and efficient algorithms for the analysis of collaborative tagging

The rise of Web 2.0 is signaled by sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube, and social tagging is essential to their success. A typical tagging action involves three components, user, item (e.g., photos in Flickr), and tags (i.e., words or phrases). Analyzing how tags are assigned by certain users to certain items has important implications in helping users search for desired information. In this paper, we develop a dual mining framework to explore tagging behavior. This framework is centered around two opposing measures, similarity and diversity, applied to one or more tagging components, and therefore enables a wide range of analysis scenarios such as characterizing similar users tagging diverse items with similar tags or diverse users tagging similar items with diverse tags. By adopting different concrete measures for similarity and diversity in the framework, we show that a wide range of concrete analysis problems can be defined and they are NP-Complete in general. We design four sets of efficient algorithms for solving many of those problems and demonstrate, through comprehensive experiments over real data, that our algorithms significantly out-perform the exact brute-force approach without compromising analysis result quality.     

Inter-comparative study of quantitative methods of industrial clinker

Impurities from the raw materials, the grinding and the homogenization of the raw materials, the kiln instability and the complexity of the cooling step, all these factors make it difficult to obtain a perfect evaluation of the mineralogical composition of Portland clinker. We studied the limitations of the most commonly used quantitative methods and recommend some procedures to obtain reliable and reproducible results of quantitative analyses. Different clinker samples (provided by the Bizerte Cement Company (Tunisia)) were subjected to an elemental analysis by X-ray fluorescence and the mineralogical composition was determined by the Bogue calculation and by X-ray powder diffraction combined with the Rietveld method (Different softwares were used: XPert High Score Plus version 2.0 and TOPAS version 4.2). We then compared the results obtained by the Rietveld method and the Bogue calculation to the specific peak areas of each phase. The content of each phase, determined by the Rietveld method, varied proportionally to the change in peak area; a significant difference in these results was found by using the elementary Bogue calculation.     

Robust‐Adaptive Control Strategies for a Time Delay Bioelectrochemical Process Using Interval Observers

The paper addresses the design and the analysis of adaptive and robust‐adaptive control strategies for a complex recycled wastewater treatment bioprocess. The design procedures are developed under the realistic assumptions that the bacterial growth rates are unknown and the influent flow rates are time‐varying and uncertain, but some lower and upper bounds of these uncertainties are known. The proposed control structures are achieved by combining a linearizing control law with an appropriately (asymptotic or interval based) state observer and with a parameter estimator used for on‐line estimation of unknown kinetics. These approaches are applied to a complex time delay bioprocess resulting from the association of a recycling bioreactor with an electrochemical reactor. Numerical simulations are performed in order to validate the proposed algorithms.