Large Area Self-Assembled Ultrathin Polyimine Nanofilms Formed at the Liquid–Liquid Interface Used for Molecular Separation

Separation membranes with higher molecular weight cut-offs are needed to separate ions and small molecules from a mixed feed. The molecular sieving phenomenon can be utilized to separate smaller species with well-defined dimensions from a mixture. Here, the formation of freestanding polyimine nanofilms with thicknesses down to ≈14 nm synthesized via self-assembly of pre-synthesized imine oligomers is reported. Nanofilms are fabricated at the water–xylene interface followed by reversible condensation of polymerization according to the Pieranski theory. Polyimine nanofilm composite membranes are made via transferring the freestanding nanofilm onto ultrafiltration supports. High water permeance of 49.5 L m^-2 h⁻¹ bar⁻¹ is achieved with a complete rejection of brilliant blue-R (BBR; molecular weight = 825 g mol⁻¹) and no more than 10% rejection of monovalent and divalent salts. However, for a mixed feed of BBR dye and monovalent salt, the salt rejection is increased to ≈18%. Membranes are also capable of separating small dyes (e.g., methyl orange; MO; molecular weight = 327 g mol⁻¹) from a mixed feed of BBR and MO. Considering a thickness of ≈14 nm and its separation efficiency, the present membrane has significance in separation processes.     

Low power and high speed design issues of CMOS Hamming code generation and error detection circuit at 22 nm and 16 nm channel length of MOS transistor

Microsystem Technologies - This paper represents low power and high speed design issues of Hamming code generation and error detection circuit using complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)...     

Assessing the sustainability of a manufacturing process using life cycle assessment technique—a case of an Indian pharmaceutical company

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Manufacturing organizations are under continuous pressure to implement sustainability in their activities. There is a need to identify the...     

Transport phenomena in laser surface alloying

A three dimensional, transient model is developed for studying heat transfer, fluid flow and mass transfer for the case of a single-pass laser surface alloying process. The numerical study is performed in a co-ordinate system fixed to the laser which moves with a constant scanning speed. The coupled momentum, energy and species conservation equations are solved using a finite volume technique. Phase change processes are modelled using a fixed-grid enthalpy-porosity technique, which is capable of predicting the continuously evolving solid-liquid interface. The three-dimensional model is able to predict the species concentration distribution inside the molten pool during alloying, as well as in the entire cross section of the solidified alloy. Corresponding experimental results show a good qualitative agreement with the numerical predictions with regard to pool shape and final composition distribution.     

Situating natural language understanding within experience-based design

Building useful systems with an ability to understand "real" natural language input has long been an elusive goal for Artificial Intelligence. Well-known problems such as ambiguity, indirectness, and incompleteness of natural language inputs have thwarted efforts to build natural language interfaces to intelligent systems. In this article, we report on our work on a model of understanding natural language design specifications of physical devices such as simple electrical circuits. Our system, called KA, solves the classical problems of ambiguity, incompleteness and indirectness by exploiting the knowledge and problem-solving processes in the situation of designing simple physical devices. In addition, KA acquires its knowledge structures (apart from a basic ontology of devices) from the results of its problem-solving processes. Thus, KA can be bootstrapped to understand design specifications and user feedback about new devices using the knowledge structures it acquired from similar devices designed previously.In this paper, we report on three investigations in the KA project. Our first investigation demonstrates that KA can resolve ambiguities in design specifications as well as infer unarticulated requirements using the ontology, the knowledge structures, and the problem-solving processes provided by its design situation. The second investigation shows that KA's problem-solving capabilities help ascertain the relevance of indirect design specifications, and identify unspecified relations between detailed requirements. The third investigation demonstrates the extensibility of KA's theory of natural language understanding by showing that KA can interpret user feedback as well as design requirements. Our results demonstrate that situating language understanding in problem solving, such as device design in KA, provides effective solutions to unresolved problems in natural language processing.     

Imperfections and impurity phases in flux grown RCrO3 (R = La,Yb) single crystals

Results of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray analytical (EDAX) investigations, conducted on some elevated structures displayed by flux grown rare earth orthochromite, RCrO₃ (R = La, Yb) crystals, are presented. The peculiar structures exhibited by crystal surfaces indicate imperfections and impurity phases. EDAX of elevated structures reveals the various phases to be composed of lead associated materials which may probably be either Pb₂CrO₅ or Pb₂OF₂ (flux). Other secondary crystallization of impurity phases, ROF (R = La, Yb) is illustrated in the case of RCrO₃ (R = La, Yb) crystals. The elevated structures illustrate their non-stoichiometric behaviour. Precipitation of impurity phases and formation of imperfections during the growth of RCrO₃ (R = La, Yb) crystals and their effect on the crystalline quality is discussed.     

Microbiological safety of kinema, a fermented soya bean food

Kinema is a fermented soya bean food of Nepal and the hilly regions of North-eastern States of India. Generally, the fermentation is dominated by Bacillus spp. that often cause alkalinity and desirable stickiness in the product. The present study was undertaken in a limited number of commercial (market) kinema samples to test for the presence of foodborne pathogens and their properties. Bacillus cereus was present in numbers exceeding 10⁴ cfu/g product in five of the tested 15 market samples. Enterobacteriaceae and coliform bacteria exceeded 10⁵ cfu/g in 10 of the 15 samples. Escherichia coli exceeding 10⁵ cfu/g was found in two samples. Staphylococcus aureus was not detected in any of the tested samples. Of 31 isolated typical and atypical strains of B. cereus, 18 representative strains were tested qualitatively for the ability to produce diarrhoeal type enterotoxin (BCET) using an Oxoid BCET-RPLA test kit. Overall, BCET was formed by 12 strains in BHIG (brain heart infusion broth +1% glucose), by seven strains on sterilized cooked rice, and by five strains on sterilized cooked soya beans. Semi-quantitative tests on BCET revealed that levels exceeding 256 ng/g soya beans, produced by single pure culture inoculation with the isolated B. cereus strains, were reduced to ≤ 8 ng/g by frying kinema in oil, a common procedure when making kinema curry. It was also shown in a mixed pure culture experiment that a kinema strain B. Subtilis DK-W1, is able to suppress growth and BCET formation by a selected toxin producing strain (BC7-5) of B. cereus. It is concluded that the traditional way of making kinema and its culinary use in curries is safe. However, for novel applications of kinema, safety precautions are advisable.     

A tutorial on wavelets from an electrical engineering perspective.I. Discrete wavelet techniques

The objective of this paper is to present the subject of wavelets from a filter-theory perspective, which is quite familiar to electrical engineers. Such a presentation provides both physical and mathematical insights into the problem. It is shown that taking the discrete wavelet transform of a function is equivalent to filtering it by a bank of constant-Q filters, the non-overlapping bandwidths of which differ by an octave. The discrete wavelets are presented, and a recipe is provided for generating such entities. One of the goals of this tutorial is to illustrate how the wavelet decomposition is carried out, starting from the fundamentals, and how the scaling functions and wavelets are generated from the filter-theory perspective. Examples (including image compression) are presented to illustrate the class of problems for which the discrete wavelet techniques are ideally suited. It is interesting to note that it is not necessary to generate the wavelets or the scaling functions in order to implement the discrete wavelet transform. Finally, it is shown how wavelet techniques can be used to solve operator/matrix equations. It is shown that the “orthogonal-transform property” of the discrete wavelet techniques does not hold in numerical computations