Ultramicroscopy of association colloids formed from block copolymers

Ultramicroscopy studies have been made of micelle formation by two poly(styrene)-poly(isoprene) block copolymers in organic solvents (N,N-dimethylacetamide and n-decane respectively) and a poly(l-glutamic acid)-poly(l-leucine) block copolymer in an aqueous solution of 0.2M NaCl at pH = 4.0. The technique provides a method of determining the number-average translational diffusion coefficient) $\text{D}\text{?}{}_{\mathrm{n}}$, of association colloids and leads, via the Stokes-Einstein relation, to a measure of the number-average of the reciprocal hydrodynamic radius $\text{(R}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>D</mtext><mtext>?</mtext>}}{}^1\text{)}{}_{\mathrm{n}}$ for spherical particles. Particles having a radius less than approximately 30 nm were too small to be detected by the technique.The ultramicroscopy results were compared with data obtained by laser light scattering photon correlation spectroscopy which provides a measure of the z-average translational diffusion coefficient. $\text{D}\text{?}{}_{\mathrm{z}}$. An additional comparison was made by carrying out measurements on two well-characterized poly(styrene/divinyl benzene) latices.     

Integration Concepts for the Fabrication of LTCC Structures

At the Keck Smart Materials Integration Laboratory at Penn State University, low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) material systems have been used to fabricate a number of devices for a variety of applications. This article presents an overview of the integration of the concepts and materials that we have used to achieve miniaturization and unique device function. Examples of microwave filters, metamaterial antennas, and a dielectrophoretic cell sorter will be presented, with emphasis on device modeling and design, prototype construction methods, and test results.     

Perfect secret sharing scheme based on vertex domination set

Due to the fast development in data communication systems and computer networks in recent years, the necessity to protect the secret data has become extremely imperative. Several methods have been proposed to protect the secret data; one of them is the secret sharing scheme. It is a method of distributing a secret K among a finite set of participants, in such a way that only predefined subset of participant is enabled to reconstruct a secret from their shares. A secret sharing scheme realizing uniform access structure described by a graph has received a considerable attention. In this scheme, each vertex represents a participant and each edge represents a minimum authorized subset. In this paper, an independent dominating set of vertices in a graph G is introduced and applied as a novel idea to construct a secret sharing scheme such that the vertices of the graph represent the participants and the dominating set of vertices in G represents the minimal authorized set. While most of the previous schemes were based on the principle of adjacent vertices, the proposed scheme is based upon the principle of non-adjacent vertices. We prove that the scheme is perfect, and the lower bound of the information rate of this new construction is improved when compared to some well-known previous constructions. We include an experiment involving security threats to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

The benefits of the transition from fossil fuel to solar energy in Libya: A street lighting system case study

The Libyan economy is dominated by the oil and the gas industry which are considered as the primary energy sources for the generating power plants. With the increased energy demands in the near future, Libya will be forced to burn more oil and gas. This, in turn will result in reducing the country revenue, threatening the economy and increasing the CO₂ emission. This triggers the alarm for Libya to an urgent plan to diversify the energy sources through using sustainable energy. The sun showers Libya every day by a huge amount of sunshine, especially during the peaks in the summer days. Recently, the country has been struggling to satisfy its escalating energy demands. The residential and street lighting loads constitute more than 50% of the electricity demands in Libya. Street lighting consumes more than 3.996 TW h, which is around one fifth of the energy demands in Libya. Energy conservation and transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy could have significant profit on the energy sector in Libya. For example, Libya is still relying on the old-fashioned, inefficient and unsustainable street lighting systems. Replacing the old technology lighting systems with up-to-date solar powered lighting system can achieve energy saving and sustainability. In this paper, improving the energy situation in Libya through replacing the high pressure sodium street lighting systems with solar powered LED street lighting systems is investigated. A four km road is chosen as a case study. Four alternatives are analyzed; grid-powered high pressure sodium lamp street lighting system, grid-powered LED lamp street lighting system, stand-alone solar powered LED street lighting system and grid-connected solar powered LED street lighting system. The four options are compared in terms of the capital cost, maintenance cost, total cost, fuel cost and the CO₂ emission. Replacing the high pressure sodium lamp system with LED lamp system saves 75% of energy and reduces the CO₂ emission by 75%. The stand-alone solar powered LED lighting system cuts the CO₂ emission, saves the fuel and is economically feasible. Furthermore, improvement is attained if the solar powered lighting system is connected to the grid where the excess energy is fed to the grid. The two solar powered options are economically feasible and sustainable.     

Recessive Robinow syndrome: with emphasis on endocrine functions

We present the characteristic features of 14 children with the recessive form of Robinow syndrome and the growth hormone (GH) response to provocation with clonidine and the serum insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) concentration in 12 of these children. The gonadotropin (luteinizing hormone [LH] and follicle-stimulating hormone [FSH]) response to gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) was evaluated in early pubertal and pubertal patients, and the testosterone response to human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) was evaluated in males. Children with Robinow syndrome, born at full-term, were short at birth (length, 41.4+/-2.1 cm) and had markedly slow growth velocity (GV) during the first year (13.1+/-2.1 cm/yr); consequently, they were significantly short at the end of the first year of life (length, 54.4+/-2.9 cm). This intrauterine and early extrauterine growth delay reflected low growth potential. During childhood, the GV standard deviation score (GVSDS) remained low (-2.17+/-0.83). Despite the presence of empty sella in all of the patients, they had an adequate GH response to clonidine provocation (peak, 19.3+/-5.8 microg/L) and a normal serum IGF-I concentration (309+/-142 ng/mL) for their age. During childhood and early adolescence, boys with Robinow syndrome had low basal testosterone and a low testosterone response to HCG stimulation (3,000 IU/m2/d intramuscularly [IM] for 3 days). However, their basal and GnRH-stimulated FSH concentrations were normal. Two girls (Tanner II breast development) had a normal serum estradiol (E2) concentration but high LH and FSH responses to GnRH stimulation. This suggested either defective feedback of E2 on the hypothalamic-pituitary axis or hyporesponsiveness of the ovaries to gonadotropin. Four weeks of HCG therapy (2,500 IU/m2 IM twice weekly) in three boys with Robinow syndrome increased the penile length and testicular volume, denoting a significant Leydig cell response to prolonged HCG stimulation and the presence of functioning androgen receptors. It is suggested that HCG and/or testosterone therapy during infancy may improve the severe micropenis in these patients.     

CAD model repair using knowledge-guided NURBS

This paper presents a methodology to repair flawed migrated models that are designed with knowledge-guided NURBS (KGN). Incompatible traditional CAD packages that are based on NURBS technology have been for many years carrying out the exchange of models and data through either neutral file formats (IGES or STEP) or proprietary formats. The exchange process most often produces poor quality data and results in errors in the migrated CAD models costing the industry billions of dollars every year. While previous studies by large focus on finding means to repair migrated models through patching, we propose to repair errors in CAD models which are generated using KGN through a reconstructing process instead of patching. We have implemented a prototype system to show that employing the right tools on the stored knowledge and data a designer can reconstruct a migrated model based on new local requirements of the receiving system without having to repair it, avoiding delay and corrective processes that only produce patched-up design bases and limiting the effective use of such models.     

The corrosion behaviour of Cr/Co/Mo-alloyed low residual carbon steels in seawater solutions

The general corrosion behaviour of low residual steels alloyed with chromium or cobalt or molybdenum in seawater solutions was studied. The carbon content of low residual steels ranged from 0.1 to 0.4%, chromium content between 1.0 and 4.0%, cobalt content between 1.0 and 3.0%, and molybdenum content between 0.3 and 1.0%. Repeated laboratory tests demonstrated that low levels of chromium reduce the dissolution rate of low residual steels in seawater solutions. The results of this study suggest that cobalt alloying plays a neutral role, whereas molybdenum plays a major role in reducing the corrosion rates, particularly in higher carbon steels.     

A robust digital audio watermarking scheme based on DWT and Schur decomposition

The vulnerability of digital audio signals for different types of risks requires an imperceptible and robust digital audio watermarking scheme. In this research, we propose creating one such imperceptible and robust hybrid watermarking scheme based on a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and Schur decomposition hybrid method. The proposed scheme embeds the foreground bits of the watermarking image into the least significant bit of the diagonal coefficients of the triangular matrix S generated from Schur decomposition. Schur decomposition is applied on the second sub-band HL₂ generated from applying a second-level 2D-Haar DWT on the first channel of the original audio signal. We analyze the proposed digital audio watermarking scheme’s performance in terms of signal to noise ratio (SNR), objective difference grades (ODG), and subjective difference grades (SDG) that resulting 81.43, 4.78 and 0.184, respectively. The resulting of payload capacity, NC, and BER are as high as 319.29 bps, 0.9911, and 0.0135, respectively. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme is inaudible and robust against common types of attacks such as Gaussian noise, re-quantization, re-sampling, low-pass filter, high-pass filter, echo, MP3 compression, and cropping. In comparison with state-of-the-art audio watermarking schemes, the proposed scheme’s performance is superior in term of imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload size.

     

Efficient performance computations for trellis-coded modulation

The algorithm given by Rouanne and Costello (1989) for the computation of the distance spectrum is improved for trellis-coded modulation schemes having uncoded bits, i.e., for trellis diagrams having parallel paths. It is shown that, when through a trellis corresponding to such kind of codes, all parallel transitions (labeled by signal selectors) between states are considered as a single branch labeled by a subset, then defining subset selector distance polynomials makes the computational complexity of the distance spectrum dependent on the number of states as compared to the complexity of Rouanne and Costello algorithm which depends on the number of paths to be extended