Fast determination of critical eluent composition for polymers by gradient chromatography

Gradient chromatography was applied in order to calculate the composition at elution for different methacrylates on normal phase columns. In addition the composition at elution was determined for polyethyleneoxide on a reverse phase column. It is shown that high molar mass polymers elute for a given homopolymer irrespective of their molar mass at the same eluent composition, which varies only slightly with gradient slope. In general the composition at elution in gradient chromatography is expected to be slightly lower than the true critical composition. For high molar mass polymers we found this composition to be close to the critical composition determined by isocratic experiments. The difference between the composition at elution and the true critical composition for a variety of polymethacrylates and for polyethyleneglycol was found to be only between 0.2 and 5%. Thus, after estimating the composition at elution, only a small number of additional isocratic experiments is needed to find the exact critical composition.     

Novel Organometallic Aromatic Azo Polyesters Based on Ferrocene

Some ferrocene containing aromatic azo polyesters were prepared by condensing 1,1-ferrocenedicarbonyl chloride with different azo groups containing aromatic diols, which were synthesized by diazotization coupling reaction from aromatic diamines. The polymeric products were separated as two portions on the basis of their solubility and subsequently characterized by their elemental analysis and FTIR spectral studies. Thermal properties of the products were measured by differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetry and the activation energies of pyrolysis were calculated using Horowitz and Metzger's method. The molecular weights of the soluble portions were determined by gel permeation chromatography (GPC) and these portions were also characterized by their inherent viscosities and UV-Vis spectroscopic studies.     

Brain tumor classification from multi-modality MRI using wavelets and machine learning

In this paper, we propose a brain tumor segmentation and classification method for multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging scans. The data from multi-modal brain tumor segmentation challenge (MICCAI BraTS 2013) are utilized which are co-registered and skull-stripped, and the histogram matching is performed with a reference volume of high contrast. From the preprocessed images, the following features are then extracted: intensity, intensity differences, local neighborhood and wavelet texture. The integrated features are subsequently provided to the random forest classifier to predict five classes: background, necrosis, edema, enhancing tumor and non-enhancing tumor, and then these class labels are used to hierarchically compute three different regions (complete tumor, active tumor and enhancing tumor). We performed a leave-one-out cross-validation and achieved 88% Dice overlap for the complete tumor region, 75% for the core tumor region and 95% for enhancing tumor region, which is higher than the Dice overlap reported from MICCAI BraTS challenge.     

Optimized and load balanced clustering for wireless sensor networks to increase the lifetime of WSN using MADM approaches

Wireless Networks - The power utilization has verified as a major problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many researchers have provided efficient solutions for power utilization. Clustering is...     

Low thermal conductivity in porous SiC–SiO2–Al2O3–TiO2 ceramics induced by multiphase thermal resistance

The introduction of multiple heterogeneous interfaces in a ceramic is an efficient way to increase its thermal resistance. Novel porous SiC–SiO₂–Al₂O₃–TiO₂ (SSAT) ceramics were fabricated to achieve multiple heterogeneous interfaces by sintering equal volumes of SiC, SiO₂, Al₂O₃, and TiO₂ compacted powders with polysiloxane as a bonding phase and carbon as a template at 600 °C in air. The porosity could be controlled between 66% and 74% by adjusting the amounts of polysiloxane and the carbon template. The lowest thermal conductivity (0.059 W/(m·K) at 74% porosity) obtained in this study is an order of magnitude lower than those (0.2–1.3 W/(m·K)) of porous monolithic SiC, SiO₂, Al₂O₃, and TiO₂ ceramics at an equivalent porosity. The typical specific compressive strength value of the porous SSAT ceramics at 74% porosity was 3.2 MPa cm³/g.     

TIE algorithm: a layer over clustering-based taxonomy generation for handling evolving data

Taxonomy is generated to effectively organize and access large volume of data. A taxonomy is a way of representing concepts that exist in data. It needs to continuously evolve to reflect changes in data. Existing automatic taxonomy generation techniques do not handle the evolution of data; therefore, the generated taxonomies do not truly represent the data. The evolution of data can be handled by either regenerating taxonomy from scratch, or allowing taxonomy to incrementally evolve whenever changes occur in the data. The former approach is not economical in terms of time and resources. A taxonomy incremental evolution (TIE) algorithm, as proposed, is a novel attempt to handle the data that evolve in time. It serves as a layer over an existing clustering-based taxonomy generation technique and allows an existing taxonomy to incrementally evolve. The algorithm was evaluated in research articles selected from the computing domain. It was found that the taxonomy using the algorithm that evolved with data needed considerably shorter time, and had better quality per unit time as compared to the taxonomy regenerated from scratch.     

Space-time discretizing optimal DRP schemes for flow and wave propagation problems

The present paper reports constrained optimization of explicit Runge–Kutta (RK) schemes, coupled with optimal upwind compact scheme to achieve dispersion relation preservation (DRP) property for high performance computing. Essential ideas of optimization employed in arriving at the proposed time integration scheme are extension of the earlier work reported in Rajpoot et al. (J Comput Phys 2010;229:3623–51). This is in turn an application of the correct error evolution equation in Sengupta et al. (J Comput Phys 2007;226:1211–8). Resultant DRP scheme demonstrated the idea for explicit spatial central difference schemes. Present work is similar, extending it for near-spectral accuracy compact schemes. Practical utility of the developed method is demonstrated by solution of model problems and for flow problems by solving Navier–Stokes equation, some of which cannot be solved by conventional schemes, as the problem of rotary oscillation of cylinder.Developed method is calibrated with: (i) flow past a circular cylinder performing rotary oscillation at Re = 150 and (ii) flow inside a 2D lid-driven cavity (LDC) at Reynolds numbers of Re = 1000 and Re = 10,000. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons show excellent match for rotary oscillation cylinder cases with the experimental results of Thiria et al. (J Fluid Mech 2006;560:123–47). Results for LDC for Re = 1000 are compared with that in Botella & Peyret (Comp Fluids 1998;27:421–33) and results for Re = 10,000 are compared with recent published ones showing triangular vortex in the core.     

Annealing Induced Enhancement in Magnetic Properties of Co0.5Zn0.5Fe2O4 Nanoparticles

In this paper, cobalt zinc ferrite (Co_0.5Zn_0.5Fe₂O₄) nanoparticles (NPs) have been prepared using chemical co-precipitation method. In order to investigate the annealing induced effects on their various physical properties, the prepared samples have been annealed at 500 °C, 650 °C and 1000 °C and then compared with as-prepared sample. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns of as-prepared and annealed samples at various temperatures exhibit single phase spinel structure. Enhancement in crystallinity and crystallite size is observed with the increase in annealing temperature. The annealing has also greatly influence the morphology and grain size of prepared NPs. The Co_0.5Zn_0.5Fe₂O₄ NPs have shown remarkable enhancement in magnetic moment with increase in annealing temperature. The bandgap energies of Co_0.5Zn_0.5Fe₂O₄ NPs have been measured via UV Spectrometer and observed to decrease with annealing temperature. FTIR spectra of the samples reveal the presence of both high frequency and low-frequency bands due to tetrahedral and octahedral sites, which corroborate well with the XRD results. The observed characteristics of cobalt zinc ferrite NPs as a function of annealing temperature are the rising contender for many data storage and nanodevice applications. Finally, the genotoxicity of prepared nanoferrites has been checked via comet assay.