An interaction energy integral method for nonhomogeneous materials with interfaces under thermal loading

A plane crack problem of nonhomogeneous materials with interfaces subjected to static thermal loading is investigated. A modified interaction energy integral method (IEIM) is developed to obtain the mixed-mode thermal stress intensity factors (TSIFs). Compared with the previous IEIM, the original point of this paper is: the domain-independence of the modified IEIM still stands in nonhomogeneous materials with interfaces under thermal loading. Therefore, the modified IEIM can still be applied to obtain the TSIFs of nonhomogeneous material even if the integral domain includes interfaces. The modified IEIM is combined with the extended finite element method (XFEM) to solve several thermal fracture problems of nonhomogeneous materials. Good agreement can be obtained compared with the analytic solutions and the domain-independence of the IEIM is verified. Therefore, the present method is effective to study the TSIFs of nonhomogeneous materials even when the materials contain interfaces. The influence of the discontinuity of the material properties (thermal expansion coefficient, thermal conductivity and Young’s modulus) on the TSIFs is investigated. The results show that the discontinuity of both thermal expansion coefficient and Young’s modulus affects the TSIFs greatly, while the discontinuity of thermal conductivity does not arouse obvious change of the TSIFs.     

An Efficient Module for Full Adders in Quantum-dot Cellular Automata

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), a new computing paradigm at nanoscale, may be a prospective alternative to conventional CMOS-based integrated circuits. Modular design methodology in QCA domain has not been widely investigated. In this paper, an efficient module with fault tolerance is proposed, which can be employed to fabricate three-input and five-input majority gates that are the fundamental primitives for designing circuits in QCA. With cells omission in the versatile module, various logic gates will be achieved, such as Nand-Nor-Inverter (NNI) gate and And-Or-Inverter (AOI) gate. Moreover, in order to seek out an efficient full adder, five various QCA full adders are designed and exhaustively compared in terms of area, complexity, latency, reliability and power dissipation and also compared with existing fault-tolerant full adders. Two simulation tools, QCADesigner and QCAPro, are utilized in the waveform simulations for verifying the correctness of proposed circuits and power consumption, respectively. The analysis results reveal that full adder V has significant improvements in contrast to its counterparts with above criteria. To test the practicability of full adder V, multi-bit adders will be designed in single-layer and compared with previous adders in terms of area, complexity and QCA cost, which proves the merits of our work.     

Growth of large-sized Ce:Y3Al5O12 (Ce:YAG) scintillation crystal by the temperature gradient technique (TGT)

In this work, Ce:YAG crystal with the size of ?4 in was successfully grown by the TGT method. The optical and scintillation properties of as-grown Ce:YAG crystals were investigated. Three obvious absorption bands at 223, 340 and 460 nm and two weak color-center absorption bands at 296 and 370 nm are observed in as-grown Ce:YAG crystal. Fluorescence with an emission peak at 398 nm is observed due to the color centers, and absorption bands of the color centers can be eliminated by annealing in O₂ or H₂ atmosphere at 1673 K for 24 h. Yellow-green fluorescence centered at 530 nm is found when the crystal was excited at 460 nm and the 530 nm excitation spectrum shows two peaks at 340 and 460 nm. X-ray fluorescence spectrum of as-grown crystal shows three emission peaks at 300, 360 and 530 nm. An average light output of 1360 phe/MeV and a single exponential decay with the decay time constant of 62.97 ns are found in as-grown Ce:YAG crystal.     

A domain-independent interaction integral for magneto-electro-elastic materials

Magneto-electro-elastic (MEE) materials usually consist of piezoelectric (PE) and piezomagnetic (PM) phases. Between different constituent phases, there exist lots of interfaces with discontinuous MEE properties. Complex interface distribution brings a great difficulty to the fracture analysis of MEE materials since the present fracture mechanics methods can hardly solve the fracture parameters efficiently of a crack surrounded by complex interfaces. This paper develops a new domain formulation of the interaction integral for the computation of the fracture parameters including stress intensity factors (SIFs), electric displacement intensity factor (EDIF) and magnetic induction intensity factor (MIIF) for linear MEE materials. The formulation derived here does not involve any derivatives of material properties and moreover, it can be proved that an arbitrary interface in the integral domain does not affect the validity and the value of the interaction integral. Namely, the interaction integral is domain-independent for material interfaces and thus, its application does not require material parameters to be continuous. Due to this advantage, the interaction integral becomes an effective approach for extracting the fracture parameters of MEE materials with complex interfaces. Combined with the extended finite element method (XFEM), the interaction integral is employed to solve several representative problems to verify its accuracy and domain-independence. Good results show the effectiveness of the present method in the fracture analysis of MEE materials with continuous and discontinuous properties. Finally, the particulate MEE composites composed of PE and PM phases are considered and four schemes of different property-homogenization level are proposed for comparing their effectiveness.     

Noise-induced outer synchronization between two different complex dynamical networks

In this paper, based on the theory of stochastic differential equations, we study the outer synchronization between two different complex dynamical networks with noise coupling. The theoretical result shows that two different complex networks can achieve generalized outer synchronization only with white-noise-based coupling. Numerical examples further verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the theoretical results. Numerical evidence shows that the synchronization rate is proportional to the noise intensity.     

Synthesis and Antioxidant Activities of Novel 4,4′‐Arylmethylene‐bis(1H‐pyrazole‐5‐ol)s from Lignin

A series of novel bispyrazoles joined by arylmethylene at C‐4 position were synthesized with aromatic aldehydes obtained from lignin and screened for their in vitro antioxidant activities by N,N‐diphenyl‐N′‐picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2′‐azino‐bis(3‐ethylenzothiazoline‐sulphonic acid) diammonium salt (ABTS⁺) radical scavenging assays. All of these compounds exhibited good DPPH and ABST⁺ radical scavenging activities as compared to the standard, Trolox, which suggested their potential as promising agents for curing tumors or other free radical‐related diseases.     

A polar corundum oxide displaying weak ferromagnetism at room temperature

Combining long-range magnetic order with polarity in the same structure is a prerequisite for the design of (magnetoelectric) multiferroic materials. There are now several demonstrated strategies to achieve this goal, but retaining magnetic order above room temperature remains a difficult target. Iron oxides in the +3 oxidation state have high magnetic ordering temperatures due to the size of the coupled moments. Here we prepare and characterize ScFeO(3) (SFO), which under pressure and in strain-stabilized thin films adopts a polar variant of the corundum structure, one of the archetypal binary oxide structures. Polar corundum ScFeO(3) has a weak ferromagnetic ground state below 356 K-this is in contrast to the purely antiferromagnetic ground state adopted by the well-studied ferroelectric BiFeO(3).     

Nuclear inelastic scattering and Mössbauer spectroscopy as local probes for ligand binding modes and electronic properties in proteins: vibrational behavior of a ferriheme center inside a β-barrel protein

In this work, we present a study of the influence of the protein matrix on its ability to tune the binding of small ligands such as NO, cyanide (CN(-)), and histamine to the ferric heme iron center in the NO-storage and -transport protein Nitrophorin 2 (NP2) from the salivary glands of the blood-sucking insect Rhodnius prolixus. Conventional M?ssbauer spectroscopy shows a diamagnetic ground state of the NP2-NO complex and Type I and II electronic ground states of the NP2-CN(-) and NP2-histamine complex, respectively. The change in the vibrational signature of the protein upon ligand binding has been monitored by Nuclear Inelastic Scattering (NIS), also called Nuclear Resonant Vibrational Spectroscopy (NRVS). The NIS data thus obtained have also been calculated by quantum mechanical (QM) density functional theory (DFT) coupled with molecular mechanics (MM) methods. The calculations presented here show that the heme ruffling in NP2 is a consequence of the interaction with the protein matrix. Structure optimizations of the heme and its ligands with DFT retain the characteristic saddling and ruffling only if the protein matrix is taken into account. Furthermore, simulations of the NIS data by QM/MM calculations suggest that the pH dependence of the binding of NO, but not of CN(-) and histamine, might be a consequence of the protonation state of the heme carboxyls.     

A sensitive dual signal amplification method for western blotting based on antibody-functionalised graphene oxide and gold nanoparticles

In this study, we report an ultrasensitive western blotting method using antibody-functionalised graphene oxide sheets and gold nanoparticles. Additionally, the cost is reduced greatly by conjugating two different primary antibodies on gold nanoparticles (C. Welinder and L. Ekblad, J. Proteome Res., 2011, 10, 1416-1419).     

Optimal time decay of the quantum Landau equation in the whole space

We are concerned with the Cauchy problem of the quantum Landau equation in the whole space. The existence of local in time nearby quantum Maxwellian solutions is proved by the iteration method and generalized maximum principle. Based on Kawashima?s compensating function and nonlinear energy estimates, the global existence and the optimal time decay rate of those solutions are obtained under some conditions on initial data.