Terpolymerization of Triisopropylsilyl Acrylate,Methyl Methacrylate,and Butyl Acrylate: Reactivity Ratio Estimation

Ternary monomer reactivity ratios of triisopropylsilyl acrylate (SiA), methyl methacrylate (MMA), and n‐butyl acrylate (BA), as common monomers in self‐polishing coatings (SPCs) binders are obtained using experimental data collected from free radical bulk polymerization at 70 °C. Different terpolymerizations at low and medium‐high conversions are performed at optimized feed compositions. Estimations are made using the error‐in‐variables model (EVM) framework, applying the recast form of the Alfrey–Goldfinger (AG) model and a direct numerical integration (DNI) approach to the collected data. Estimations from individual low and medium‐high conversion data are compared to those found with the combined data (full conversion range data). The highest certainty in point estimates are obtained with analysis of the full conversion range data. Furthermore, the reactivity ratios determined from the combined data fall between those found with analysis of individual low and medium‐high conversion data, another corroboration of reliable data collection. Reactivity ratios determined from analysis of the combined data (r_SiA/MMA = 0.4185, r_MMA/SiA = 1.3754, r_SiA/BA = 0.8739, r_BA/SiA = 0.5736, r_BA/MMA = 0.3692, r_MMA/BA = 1.7919) are used in the recast AG model to predict cumulative terpolymer composition as a function of conversion. The experimental data and model prediction show satisfactory agreement.     

Synthesis and characterization of PEGylated iron and graphene oxide magnetic composite for curcumin delivery

Nowadays, nanostructures have been given significant attention in medical and biological fields. Among these nanostructures, graphene oxide (GO) has been widely used in drug delivery systems, because of its unique properties, and the ability to connect to other nanostructures such as magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) as well as polymers by its functional groups. In this research, first, GO was prepared by exfoliating graphite according to the modified Hummer’s method, and then the Fe₃O₄ NPs were synthesized by a simple co-precipitation method on GO nanosheets. In the next step, with the help of the ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide/N-hydroxysuccinimide coupling reagents, the polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymer was bonded to the GO-Fe₃O₄ nanocomposite. Finally, anti-cancer drug, curcumin (Cur) was loaded onto the nanocomposite and the Cur loading ratio was measured at about 8%. The samples were evaluated using Fourier transform-infrared, differential scanning calorimtery, vibrating-sample magnetometry, atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scattering techniques. The results show that the prepared nanocomposite is an appropriate candidate for biomedical applications.     

Effect of the Solvent Polarity on the Optical Properties in the (OC)5Cr=(OEt)(Ph) Complex: A Quantum Chemical Study

Russian Journal of Physical Chemistry A - In this study, using the B3LYP* method, quantum chemical computations were applied for analyzing the effects of solvent on the electronic spectrum features...     

Analysis of natural convection from a column of cold horizontal cylinders using Artificial Neural Network

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) offer an alternative way to tackle complex problems. They can learn from the examples and once trained can perform predictions and generalizations at high speed. They are particularly useful in behavior or system identification. According to the above advantages of ANN in the present paper ANN is used to predict natural convection heat transfer and fluid flow from a column of cold horizontal circular cylinders having uniform surface temperature. Governing equations are solved in a few specified cases by finite volume method to generate the database for training the ANN in the range of Rayleigh numbers of 10⁵–10⁸ and a range of cylinder spacing of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 diameters, thereafter a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) network is used to capture the behavior of flow and temperature fields and then generalized this behavior to predict the flow and temperature fields for any other Rayleigh numbers. Different training algorithms are used and it is found that the resilient back-propagation algorithm is the best algorithm regarding the faster training procedure. To validate the accuracy of the trained network, comparison is performed among the ANN and available CFD results. It is observed that ANN can be used more efficiently to determine cold plume and thermal field in lesser computational time. Based on the generalized results from the ANN new correlations are developed to estimate natural convection from a column of cold horizontal cylinders with respect to a single horizontal cylinder.     

Weak Density of Smooth Maps in W 1, 1(M,N) for Non-Abelian π1(N)

We prove that smooth maps are dense in the sense of biting convergence in W ^{1, 1}(M, N) when M and Nare compact Riemannian manifolds and N is closed.     

Morphological characterization of cells in concentrated suspensions using multispectral diffuse optical tomography

Based on a non-spherical model of particle scattering, we investigate the capabilities and limitations of a T-matrix based inverse algorithm to morphologically characterize cells in concentrated suspensions. Here the cells are modeled as randomly orientated spheroidal particles with homogenous dielectric properties and suspended in turbid media. The inverse algorithm retrieves the geometrical parameters and the concentration of cells simultaneously by inverting the reduced scattering coefficient spectra obtained from multispectral diffuse optical tomography (MS-DOT). Both round and spheroidal cells are tested and the role of multiple and higher order scattering of particles on the performance of the algorithm is evaluated using different concentrations of cells.     

Balanced Metrics and Chow Stability of Projective Bundles over Kähler Manifolds II

In the previous article (Seyyedali, Duke Math. J. 153(3):573–605, 2010), we proved that slope stability of a holomorphic vector bundle E over a polarized manifold (X,L) implies Chow stability of $(\mathbb{P}E^{*},\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}E^{*}}(1)\otimes\pi^{*} L^{k})$ for k?0 if the base manifold has no nontrivial holomorphic vector field and admits a constant scalar curvature metric in the class of 2πc ₁(L). In this article, using asymptotic expansions of the Bergman kernel on Sym ^d E, we generalize the main theorem of Seyyedali (Duke Math. J. 153(3):573–605, 2010) to polarizations $(\mathbb{P}E^{*},\mathcal {O}_{\mathbb{P}E^{*}}(d)\otimes\pi^{*} L^{k})$ for k?0, where d is a positive integer.     

Acceleration of alkenyltrimethylsilane fluorination under mild conditions using ultrasound

Alkenyltrimethylsilanes are selectively fluorodesilated to alkenyl fluoride very readily by reaction with 1-chloromethyl-4-fluoro-1,4-diazoniabicyclo[2,2,2]octane bis-tetrafluoroborate (Selectfluor) and N-fluorobenzensulfonimids at room temperature under ultrasound. In the presence of ultrasound irradiation in the case of one of the reactions, the yield was 85% after 25 min, but using the previously established thermal method the yield was only 32% after 20 h.     

Computing topological indices of Sudoku graphs

In QSAR/QSPR study, physico-chemical properties and topological indices such as Randi?, atom-bond connectivity (ABC) and geometric-arithmetic (GA) index are used to predict the bioactivity of chemical compounds. A topological index is actually designed by transforming a chemical structure into a numeric number. These topological indices correlate certain physico-chemical properties like boiling point, stability, strain energy etc. of chemical compounds. Graph theory has found a considerable use in this area of research. The topological indices of certain interconnection networks were studied recently by Imran et al. (Appl Math Comput 244:936–951, 2014). In this paper, we extend this study to \(n\times n\) Sudoku graphs and derive analytical closed results of general Randi? index \(R_{\alpha }(G)\) for different values of “\(\alpha \)” for Sudoku (SK). We also compute the general Randi?, first Zagreb, ABC, GA, \(ABC_{4}\) and \(GA_{5}\) indices and give closed formulae of these indices for Sudoku graphs.