Designing Self‐Supported Metal‐Organic Framework Derived Catalysts for Electrochemical Water Splitting

To achieve efficient water splitting, it is essential to develop catalysts with high electrochemical performance, enhanced durability and tunable properties. Most of the transition metal‐based catalysts employed for the water splitting have been fabricated on the solid‐electrode support by using binder, which decreases the activity and durability of the catalyst system. In this respect, self‐supported metal organic framework (MOF) derived catalysts have been introduced with enhanced catalytic activity and mechanical stability for the electrochemical water splitting. The self‐supported MOF derived catalysts exhibit improved electronic conductivity, high electrochemical surface area, enhanced mechanical stability and strong catalyst‐support interaction. Moreover, these catalysts possess highly porous and hollow structure with designed morphology and multi‐metallic composition. Recently, a tremendous effort has been provided to explore this newly growing field and new dimensions and directions have been achieved. Looking at this point, we have described here the basic principles of catalyst design from self‐supported MOF, structural and interface engineering by controlling the electronic structure of the catalysts to improve the water splitting activity. In addition, the challenges and difficulties associated with this field have been pointed out and addressed for the future progress in this field.     

Medium energy,heavy and inert ion irradiation of metallic thin films: studies of surface nano‐structuring and metal burrowing

In context to the ion induced surface nanostructuring of metals and their burrowing in the substrates, we report the influence of Xe and Kr ion‐irradiation on Pt:Si and Ag:Si thin films of ~5‐nm thickness. For the irradiation of thin films, several ion energies (275 and 350 keV of Kr; 450 and 700 keV of Xe) were chosen to maintain a constant ratio of the nuclear energy loss to the electronic energy loss (S_n/S_e) in Pt and Ag films (five in present studies). The ion‐fluence was varied from 1.0 × 10¹⁵ to 1.0 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm². The irradiated films were characterized using Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy (RBS), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The AFM and SEM images show ion beam induced systematic surface nano‐structuring of thin films. The surface nano‐structures evolve with the ion fluence. The RBS spectra show fluence dependent burrowing of Pt and Ag in Si upon the irradiation of both ion beams. At highest fluence, the depth of metal burrowing in Si for all irradiation conditions remains almost constant confirming the synergistic effect of energy losses by the ion beams. The RBS analysis also shows quite large sputtering of thin films bombarded with ion beams. The sputtering yield varied from 54% to 62% by irradiating the thin films with Xe and Kr ions of chosen energies at highest ion fluence. In the paper, we present the experimental results and discuss the ion induced surface nano‐structuring of Pt and Ag and their burrowing in Si. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Embedding hypercubes into cylinders, snakes and caterpillars for minimizing wirelength

We consider the problem of embedding hypercubes into cylinders to minimize the wirelength. Further, we show that the edge isoperimetric problem solves the wirelength problem of regular graphs and, in particular, hypercubes into triangular snakes and caterpillars.     

Enhancement of dielectric constant in PVDF polymer using dendrite-shaped PbS nanostructures

Dendrite-shaped PbS has been successfully synthesized using hydrothermal method on a large scale. The formation of dendrite-shaped PbS was confirmed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A detailed study of variations in dielectric properties on frequency and temperature shows that composites of PVDF and dendrite-shaped PbS have significantly higher dielectric constant than PVDF/PbS nanoparticles (NP) nanocomposites due to low percolation threshold.     

Concentration of fish serum albumin (FSA) in the aqueous extract of Indonesian Perciformes fishes’ muscle tissue

Fish serum albumin (FSA) is an aquatic resource that has potential to be developed as nutraceutical. Therefore, research was undertaken to assess albumin levels in the aqueous extract of muscle tissue of several Perciformes commonly available at a local fish market in Indonesia. Three random replicates for each of 17 Perciformes species were collected and assessed for their FSA content by application of a reversed-phase (C4) HPLC analytical method. Results of these analyses showed that the albumin concentration of the extracts was in the range 3.49–12.61 g/L, and that they varied significantly (P < 0.05) between species and families. This finding may mean that FSA levels are species and family dependent, something that could be investigated in future studies. As fishes from the family Scrombidae showed the highest concentration (12.61 g/L) of FSA, they would likely have the most value as a source for production of albumin-based nutritional and/or clinical products.     

A novel content-based active contour model for brain tumor segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is a crucial step in surgical and treatment planning. Intensity-based active contour models such as gradient vector flow (GVF), magneto static active contour (MAC) and fluid vector flow (FVF) have been proposed to segment homogeneous objects/tumors in medical images. In this study, extensive experiments are done to analyze the performance of intensity-based techniques for homogeneous tumors on brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. The analysis shows that the state-of-art methods fail to segment homogeneous tumors against similar background or when these tumors show partial diversity toward the background. They also have preconvergence problem in case of false edges/saddle points. However, the presence of weak edges and diffused edges (due to edema around the tumor) leads to oversegmentation by intensity-based techniques. Therefore, the proposed method content-based active contour (CBAC) uses both intensity and texture information present within the active contour to overcome above-stated problems capturing large range in an image. It also proposes a novel use of Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix to define texture space for tumor segmentation. The effectiveness of this method is tested on two different real data sets (55 patients - more than 600 images) containing five different types of homogeneous, heterogeneous, diffused tumors and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images). Remarkable results are obtained in segmenting homogeneous tumors of uniform intensity, complex content heterogeneous, diffused tumors on MR images (T1-weighted, postcontrast T1-weighted and T2-weighted) and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images of varying intensity, texture, noise content and false edges). Further, tumor volume is efficiently extracted from 2-dimensional slices and is named as 2.5-dimensional segmentation.