Effects of pyrolysis temperatures on the textural,magnetic, morphology,and catalytic properties of supported nickel nanoparticles

The development of base metal catalysts for industrially important reactions continues to be an important goal of catalysis research. Herein, the effects of pyrolysis temperature on the textural, structural, surface, magnetics properties and catalytic properties of silica-supported nickel nanoparticles (NiNPs) were thoroughly investigated. Mono-dispersed NiNPs encapsulated in graphitic shells were first successfully obtained and were characterized using a variety of methods such as BET surface area measurement, CO-pulse chemisorption, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), and superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) measurement. The findings showed that all catalysts’ properties were considerably altered with change in pyrolysis temperature. Hydrogenation of diphenylacetylene was then selected as the model reaction for the evaluation of the catalytic performance of the graphitic-shelled NiNPs. After testing, pyrolysis of a nickel at 800 °C (catalyst A) displayed tremendous activity and selectivity to produce >94% of stilbene with selectivities of 99% for the Z-isomer.     

Solitary wave solutions of the improved KdV equation by VIM

The variational iteration method (VIM) is applied to solve numerically the improved Korteweg-de Vries equation (IKdV). A correction function is constructed with a general Lagrange multiplier that can be identified optimally via the variational theory. This technique provides a sequence of functions with easily computable components that converge rapidly to the exact solution of the IKdV equation. Propagation of single, interaction of two, and three solitary waves, and also birth of solitons have been discussed. Three invariants of motion have been evaluated to determine the conservation properties of the problem. This procedure is promising for solving other nonlinear equations.     

The generalized Gompertz distribution

This paper deals with a new generalization of the exponential, Gompertz, and generalized exponential distributions. This distribution is called the generalized Gompertz distribution (GGD). The main advantage of this new distribution is that it has increasing or constant or decreasing or bathtub curve failure rate depending upon the shape parameter. This property makes GGD is very useful in survival analysis. Some statistical properties such as moments, mode, and quantiles are derived. The failure rate function is also derived. The maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters are derived using a simulations study. Real data set is used to determine whether the GGD is better than other well-known distributions in modeling lifetime data or not.     

One pot synthesis of ethyl carboxylate and acetyl selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline derivatives and their tetra/pentacyclic systems

Abstract

Ethylcarboxylate and acetyl selenoloquinoline derivatives were prepared in a one pot synthesis via reaction of sodium hydrogen selenide and 2-chloro-3-cyano-4-methylquinoline followed by reactions with ethyl chloroacetate and chloro acetone respectively which used as precursors to synthesize many of tetra and pentacyclic systems. A new series of pyrimido [4′,5′:4,5]selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline, thiazino[2’,3’:4,5]selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline, oxazino[2',3':4,5]selenolo[3,2-b]quinoline, pyrido[2′,3′:4,5]selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline, pyrido[2′,3′:4,5]selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline-2-substituted selenyl and selenolo[2′,3′:5,6]pyrido[2″,3″:4,5]selenolo[2,3-b]quinoline derivatives were prepared. Elemental analysis, IR, ¹H NMR, ¹³ Abdel-Hafez, S. H.; Gobouri, A. A.; Alshanbari, N. A.; Gad El-Rab, S. M. F. Synthesis of Novel Vitamin E Containing Sulfa Drug Derivatives and Study Their Anti-Bacterial Activity. Med. Chem. Res. 2018, 27, 2341–2352. DOI: 10.1007/s00044-018-2240-7.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]C NMR and mass spectra confirmed the structures of the newly synthesized compounds.     

Quantitative trace analysis of fullerenes in river sediment from Spain and soils from Saudi Arabia

A quantitative method based on ultrasound-assisted toluene extraction followed by liquid chromatography–electrospray ionization–tandem mass spectrometry for the analysis of C₆₀ and C₇₀ fullerenes, N-methylfulleropyrrolidine, [6, 6]-phenyl C₆₁ butyric acid methyl ester and [6, 6]-thienyl C₆₁ butyric acid methyl ester has been developed. The method was validated using fortified blank river sediments according to the criteria of Commission Decision 2002/657/EC. The method limits of detection ranged from 14 to 290 pg/g, making it suitable for its application in environmental analysis. The method has been applied to investigate fullerene content in 58 soil samples collected from different urban and industrial areas in Saudi Arabia and in river sediment from six different sites in the Llobregat River Basin. In addition, in the case of the Llobregat River, superficial water samples from the same sites of the sediments were collected and analysed using a previous method. In soils from Saudi Arabia, C₆₀-fullerene was the only compound that was detected and quantified in 19 % of samples. In the sediments of the Llobregat River, C₆₀-fullerene was also the only one detected (33 % of the samples), while in river water, C₇₀-fullerene was the most frequent compound, and it was quantified in 67 % of the samples. However, C₆₀-fullerene was present in two of the six samples, but at higher concentrations than C₇₀-fullerene, ranging from 0.9 to 7.8 ng/L.     

Stability and implementable ℋ<Subscript>∞</Subscript> filters for singular systems with nonlinear perturbations

In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing ℋ_∞ filter for a class of continuous-time uncertain singular systems with nonlinear perturbations, which can be realized in practice. The perturbation is a time-varying function of the system state and satisfies a Lipschitz constraint. The design objective is to guarantee that a prescribed upper bound on an ℋ_∞ performance of the robust filter is attained for all possible energy-bounded input disturbances and all admissible uncertainties and which can be implemented on-line to get a good replica of the state. We first establish sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of solution to the singular system connected with the normal filter. Using a linear matrix inequality (LMI) format, we then provide a sufficient condition for the asymptotic stability of the realizable ℋ_∞ filter. Then by means of a convex analysis procedure the filter gain matrices are derived and an important special case is readily deduced. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the theoretical developments.     

Nonlinear and Robust Control Schemes for Offshore Steel Jacket Platforms

This paper presents two control schemes to control the dynamicresponse of an offshore steel jacket platform due to wave-inducedforces. The objective of the controllers is to greatly reduce theinternal system oscillations and to obtain a smooth response ofthe steel jacket platform when subjected to nonlinear self-excitedhydrodynamic forces. The first controller is a nonlinearcontroller whose design is based on Lyapunov theory. The secondcontroller is a robust state feedback linear controller whosedesign is based on an optimal control approach. Both controlschemes guarantee the asymptotic stability of the system. Thetheoretical developments are illustrated through simulationresults of the proposed control schemes. Furthermore, theperformance of the offshore steel jacket platform is presentedwhen a direct velocity feedback controller is applied to thesystem. It is found that the performance of the system with theproposed controllers is better than the performance of the systemwith the direct velocity feedback controller.     

Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multidomain Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection

With the rapid growth of fingerprint-based biometric systems, it is essential to ensure the security and reliability of the deployed algorithms. Indeed, the security vulnerability of these systems has been widely recognized. Thus, it is critical to enhance the generalization ability of fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) cross-sensor and cross-material settings. In this work, we propose a novel solution for addressing the case of a single source domain (sensor) with large labeled real/fake fingerprint images and multiple target domains (sensors) with only few real images obtained from different sensors. Our aim is to build a model that leverages the limited sample issues in all target domains by transferring knowledge from the source domain. To this end, we train a unified generative adversarial network (UGAN) for multidomain conversion to learn several mappings between all domains. This allows us to generate additional synthetic images for the target domains from the source domain to reduce the distribution shift between fingerprint representations. Then, we train a scale compound network (EfficientNetV2) coupled with multiple head classifiers (one classifier for each domain) using the source domain and the translated images. The outputs of these classifiers are then aggregated using an additional fusion layer with learnable weights. In the experiments, we validate the proposed methodology on the public LivDet2015 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the average classification accuracy over twelve classification scenarios from 67.80 to 80.44% after adaptation.     

On the sliding mode control of a Ball on a Beam system

This paper investigates the sliding mode control of the Ball on a Beam system. A static and a dynamic sliding-mode controllers are designed using a simplified model of the system; the simplified model renders the system feedback linearizable. Then, a static and a dynamic sliding-mode controllers are designed using the complete model of the Ball on a Beam system. Simulation results indicate that the proposed controllers work well. The four proposed controllers are implemented using an experimental setup. Implementation results indicate that the proposed control schemes work well. As expected, it is found that the proposed two controllers which are designed using the complete model of the system gave better performance than the ones designed using the simplified model of the system. In addition, the experimental results indicate the two dynamic controllers greatly reduce the chattering usually associated with sliding-mode controllers.