Synergistic Effects of Polybenzimidazole and Aramide on Enhancing Flame-Retardancy and Solubility

Aromatic and functional polymers with processibility derived from biobased starting materials are prerequisite considering sustainable society. Poly(2,5-benzimidazole)s are rigid-rod polymers to show ultrahigh thermal stability such as flame retardance, while usually suffer from poor solubility. Here, poly(benzimidazole-co-amide)s are synthesized from two biobased monomers, 3,4-diaminobenzoic acid and a semirigid comonomer, 4-aminohydrocinnamic acid. The copolymers with an amide composition of 80 mol% and higher are soluble in widely used polar solvents to fabricate the films keeping high flame retardance, which is comparable with popular high-performance polymers such as aromatic polyimides, polyetheretherketone, polyphenylene sulfide, etc.     

An efficient verifiable (t,n)-threshold secret image sharing scheme with ultralight shares

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A secret sharing scheme partitions a secret into a set of shares and distributes them among the eligible participants, with each participant receiving one share...     

The relationship between highly-cited papers and the frequency of citations to other papers within-issue among three top information science journals

Scientometrics - This study investigates a potential relationship between highly-cited scholarly papers and the number of citations received by other papers with which they share a journal issue....     

Impact of adhesive ingredients on adhesion between rubber and brass-plated steel wire in tire

Proficiency on underlying mechanism of rubber-metal adhesion has been increased significantly in the last few decades. Researchers have investigated the effect of various ingredients, such as hexamethoxymethyl melamine, resorcinol, cobalt stearate, and silica, on rubber-metal interface. The role of each ingredient on rubber-metal interfacial adhesion is still a subject of scrutiny. In this article, a typical belt skim compound of truck radial tire is selected and the effect of each adhesive ingredient on adhesion strength is explored. Out of these ingredients, the effect of cobalt stearate is found noteworthy. It has improved adhesion strength by 12% (without aging) and by 11% (humid-aged), respectively, over control compound. For detailed understanding of the effect of cobalt stearate on adhesion, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy are utilized to ascertain the rubber coverage and distribution of elements. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results helped us to understand the impact of Cu_XS layer depth on rubber-metal adhesion. The depth profile of the Cu_XS layer was found to be one of the dominant factors of rubber-metal adhesion retention. Thus, this study has made an attempt to find the impact of different adhesive ingredients on the formation of Cu_XS layer depth at rubber-metal interface and establish a correlation with adhesion strength simultaneously.     

A VLSI architecture for a half-edge-based corner detector

Corner detection is a low-level feature detection operator that is of great use in image processing applications, for example, optical flow and structure from motion by image correspondence. The detection of corners is a computationally intensive operation. Past implementations of corner detection techniques have been restricted to software. In this paper we propose an efficient very large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture for detection of corners in images. The corner detection technique is based on the half-edge concept and the first directional derivative of Gaussian. Apart from the location of the corner points, the algorithm also computes the corner orientation and the corner angle and outputs the edge map of the image. The symmetrical properties of the masks are utilized to reduce the number of convolutions effectively, from eight to two. Therefore, the number of multiplications required per pixel is reduced from 1800 to 392. Thus, the proposed architecture yields a speed-up factor of 4.6 over conventional convolution architectures. The architecture uses the principles of pipelining and parallelism and can be implemented in VLSI.     

FluNet: A hybrid internet simulator for fast queue regimes

Motivated by the scale and complexity of simulating large-scale networks, recent research has focused on hybrid fluid/packet simulators, where fluid models are combined with packet models in order to reduce simulation complexity as well as to track dynamics of end-sources accurately. However, these simulators still need to track the queuing dynamics of network routers, leading to considerable simulation complexity in a large-scale network model. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid simulator – FluNet – where queueing dynamics are not tracked, but instead, an equivalent rate-based model is used. The FluNet simulator is predicated on a fast-queueing regime at bottleneck routers, where the queue length fluctuates on a faster time-scale than end systems. This allows us to simulate large-scale systems, where the simulation “time step-size” is governed only by the time-scale of the end-systems, and not by that of the intermediate routers; whereas a queue-tracking based fluid simulator would require decreasingly smaller step-sizes as the system scale size increases. We validate our model using a ns-2 based implementation. Our results indicate a good match between packet systems and the associated FluNet system.     

Effect of epitaxial realignment on the leakage behavior of arsenic-implanted,as-deposited polycrystalline Si-on-single crystal Si diodes

When dopants are indiffused from a heavily implanted polycrystalline silicon film deposited on a silicon substrate, high thermal budget annealing can cause the interfacial “native” oxide at the polycrystalline silicon-single crystal silicon interface to break up into oxide clusters, causing epitaxial realignment of the polycrystalline silicon layer with respect to the silicon substrate. Anomalous transient enhanced diffusion occurs during epitaxial realignment and this has adverse effects on the leakage characteristics of the shallow junctions formed in the silicon substrate using this technique. The degradation in the leakage current is mainly due to increased generation-recombination in the depletion region because of defect injection from the interface.     

A finite range failure model

In the present article the characterstics of a finite range failure time distribution, that includes the rectangular distribution as a particular case, are studied. When shape parameter surpass unity then the distribution is IFR otherwise it always remains IFRA. A graphic shape of the distribution is also formed for certain admissible values of the constants.