Fully renewable limonene‐derived polycarbonate as a high‐performance alkyd resin

Limonene‐derived polycarbonate‐based alkyd resins (ARs) have been prepared by copolymerization of limonene dioxide with CO₂, catalysed by a β‐diiminate zinc–bis(trimethylsilyl)amido complex, and subsequent chemical modification with soybean oil fatty acids using triphenylethylphosphonium bromide as the catalyst. This quantitative partial modification was realized via epoxy–carboxylic acid chemistry, affording ARs with higher oil lengths, lower polydispersities and higher glass transition temperatures (T_g) in comparison to a conventional polyester AR based on phthalic acid, multifunctional polyol pentaerythritol and soybean fatty acid. The novel limonene polycarbonate AR and the conventional polyester AR were evaluated as coatings and both the physical drying (without the presence of the oxidative drying accelerator Borchi® Oxy Coat) and chemical curing (with Borchi® Oxy Coat) processes of these coatings were monitored by measuring the König hardness and complex modulus development with time. A better performance was obtained for the alkyd paint containing polycarbonates modified with fatty acids (FA‐PCs), which showed a faster chemical drying, a higher König hardness and a higher T_g in coating evaluation, demonstrating that the fully renewable FA‐PCs are promising resins for alkyd paint applications. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry     

Crack–Tip Toughness of a Soft Lead Zirconate Titanate

Crack–opening displacement (COD) measurements were performed on a commercial lead zirconate titanate (PZT). The intrinsic fracture toughness (or crack–tip toughness) of this material was determined using a new evaluation procedure, which takes into account the near–tip CODs and complete crack profile CODs. The crack–tip toughness K _I0 was determined from an extrapolation of COD data obtained at various loading stages, thus avoiding the complications caused by subcritical crack growth in PZT. Results for plane strain and plane stress condition are presented.     

An International Collaborative Study on Trypsin Inhibitor Assay for Legumes,Cereals, and Related Products

For determining trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA) in soy products, the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) Method Ba 12-75 has been used. It measures differences in absorbance at 410 nm of bovine trypsin activity toward a synthetic substrate (Nα-benzoyl-DL-arginine-p-nitroanilide) in the absence and presence of an inhibitor. Recently, a significantly improved method was developed (JAOCS, 2019, 96:635–645), featuring 5 mL of total assay volume, enzyme-last sequence, and single inhibitor level in duplicate. It is proposed as the AOCS Method Ba 12a-2020. As a part of the AOCS method approval process, a collaborative study involving 12 international laboratories was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The study involved measuring TIA in 10 selected test samples plus a blind duplicate. They included soybeans, pulses, cereals, and their processed products (flours, concentrates, and isolates). After rigorous statistical treatment of the data, only three outliers were removed from the data of two samples. Repeatability relative standard deviations (RSDr) for the 11 samples ranged from 0.99% to 5.52%. Reproducibility RSD (RSD_R) ranged from 7.07% to 22.92%, with seven samples having RSD_R around 10% or less. The remaining four samples had very low TIA, and their RSD_R values ranged from 13.34% to 22.92%. The study has demonstrated reliable performance of the proposed AOCS method. Several collaborators carried out additional experiments addressing some aspects of the method, leading to further refinements. The proposed method is undergoing evaluation by the AOCS Uniform Methods Committee for adoption as an Official Method for measuring TIA in various legume and grain products.     

Revolving Vernier Mechanism Controls Size of Linear Homomultimer

A new kind of the Vernier mechanism that is able to control the size of linear assembly of DNA origami nanostructures is proposed. The mechanism is realized by mechanical design of DNA origami, which consists of a hollow cylinder and a rotatable shaft in it connected through the same scaffold. This nanostructure stacks with each other by the shape complementarity at its top and bottom surfaces of the cylinder, while the number of stacking is limited by twisting angle of the shaft. Experiments have shown that the size distribution of multimeric assembly of the origami depends on the twisting angle of the shaft; the average lengths of the multimer are decamer, hexamer, and tetramer for 0°, 10°, and 20° twist, respectively. In summary, it is possible to affect the number of polymerization by adjusting the precise shape and movability of a molecular structure.     

Learning Photometric Invariance for Object Detection

Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.     

A Parallelization Approach for Hard Real-Time Systems and Its Application on Two Industrial Programs

Applications in industry often have grown and improved over many years. Since their performance demands increase, they also need to benefit from the availability of multi-core processors. However, a reimplementation from scratch and even a restructuring of these industrial applications is very expensive, often due to high certification efforts. Therefore, a strategy for a systematic parallelization of legacy code is needed. We present a parallelization approach for hard real-time systems, which ensures a high reusage of legacy code and preserves timing analysability. To show its applicability, we apply it on the core algorithm of an avionics application as well as on the control program of a large construction machine. We create models of the legacy programs showing the potential of parallelism, optimize them and change the source codes accordingly. The parallelized applications are placed on a predictable multi-core processor with up to 18 cores. For evaluation, we compare the worst case execution times and their speedups. Furthermore, we analyse limitations coming up at the parallelization process.     

Quality through Managed Improvement and Measurement (QMIM): Towards a Phased Development and Implementation of a Quality Management System for a Software Company

The paper describes results of a longitudinal study of developments in the area of software product and process quality improvement within a Hungarian software company, IQSOFT Ltd. This company has been active in this area since 1993, trying to build, introduce and maintain an efficiently working quality management system which, e.g., fulfils the ISO 9001 requirements, allows steady software process improvement and, at the same time, conforms to company's own needs. Over the last eight years five phases could be distinguished. Each phase is described shortly, following the same structure, namely: basic starting points, key problem areas, literature consulted, activities and design executed, reflections on what happened and why. The lessons resulting from the analysis of this case have been formulated in terms of guidelines. We feel that these are applicable to any low maturity software development organisation embarking on a product or process quality improvement endeavour. These guidelines are developed around a framework containing the basic issues of software production (project management, technical processes and products). The guidelines advocate a careful step-by-step development of definitions, quality characteristics, and metrics related to these objects while at the same time developing and introducing the associated process.     

The influence of virtual presence: Effects on experienced cognitive load and learning outcomes in educational computer games

Does the immersive design of an educational gaming environment affect learners’ virtual presence and how much do they learn? Does virtual presence affect learning? This study tries to answer these questions by examining the differences in virtual presence and learning outcomes in two different computer-based multimedia environments: a gaming environment with high immersive design vs. hypertext learning environment with low immersive design. As the main focus, the effect of virtual presence on learning is also explained and tested. By identifying virtual presence as a variable that may determine learning, it is argued that computer gaming environments present a new challenge for researchers to investigate, particularly, the effects of virtual presence on the immersive design of games in order to help designers to predict which instructional configurations will maximize learning performance. In general, results revealed that the high-immersive gaming environment leads to the strongest form of virtual presence but also decreased learning. Although regression analyses indicate that virtual presence positively influences trivial- and non-trivial learning outcomes, learners who learned in a low-immersive environment outperformed the gaming group. A mediation analysis showed that the relation between virtual presence and non-trivial learning outcomes is partly mediated through increased cognitive load.