Surface Properties of Low Density Polyethylene upon Low-Temperature Plasma Treatment with Various Gases

The surface of a LDPE was modified by Ar, O₂, N₂, CO₂ gaseous plasma. The changes in surface morphology and surface wettability were investigated using AFM and SEM. The surface chemical changes of LDPE were also characterized by FTIR-ATR. The SEM and AFM results demonstrated variable changes in surface roughness for different types of plasma gas used, the changes being more for the Ar and N₂ plasma treatments. Considering the nature of the LDPE film, XRD studies were carried out to determine changes in the percentage crystalinity. The results showed that all low pressure O₂, Ar, N₂, CO₂ gas plasmas improved the wettability of LDPE films. Contact angles decreased significantly depending on the discharge powers and exposure times. Surface morphology was also found to vary with plasma discharge powers, exposure times, and the type of gas being used. Ar and N₂ gas plasmas in general produced more superior results.     

A new scale of electronegativity based on electrophilicity index

By calculating the energies of neutral and different ionic forms (M2+, M+, M, M-, and M2-) of 32 elements (using B3LYP/6-311++G** level of theory) and taking energy (E) to be a Morse-like function of the number of electrons (N), the electrophilicity values (omega) are calculated for these atoms. The obtained electrophilicities show a good linearity with some commonly used electronegativity scales such as Pauling and Allred-Rochow. Using these electrophilicities, the ionicities of some diatomic molecules are calculated, which are in good agreement with the experimental data. Therefore, these electrophilicities are introduced as a new scale for atomic electronegativity, chi(omega)0. The same procedure is also performed for some simple polyatomic molecules. It is shown that the new scale successfully obeys Sanderson's electronegativity equalization principle and for those molecules which have the same number of atoms, the ratio of the change in electronegativity during the formation of a molecule from its elements to the molecular electronegativity (Delta chi/chi omega) is the same.     

Bass Numbers of Local Cohomology Modules with Respect to an Ideal

Let be a commutative Noetherian local ring and let be an ideal of R. We give some inequalities between the Bass numbers of an R–module and those of its local cohomology modules with respect to . As an application of these inequalities, we recover results of Delfino-Marley and Kawasaki by showing that for a minimax R-module M and for any non-negative integer i, the Bass numbers of the ith local cohomology module are finite if one of the following holds:

Simulation of proppant transport at intersection of hydraulic fracture and natural fracture of wellbores using CFD-DEM

Proppants transport is an advanced technique to improve the hydraulic fracture phenomenon,in order to promote the versatility of gas/oil reservoirs.A numerical ...     

Top local cohomology modules and Gorenstein injectivity with respect to a semidualizing module

Let ${(R, \mathfrak{m})}$ be a commutative Noetherian local ring of Krull dimension d, and let C be a semidualizing R-module. In this paper, it is shown that if R is complete, then C is a dualizing module if and only if the top local cohomology module of ${R, H _{\mathfrak{m}} ^{d} (R)}$ , has finite G _C -injective dimension. This generalizes a recent result due to Yoshizawa, where the ring is assumed to be complete Cohen-Macaulay.     

Shellable quasi-forests and their h-triangles

In this paper we show that a quasi-forest is shellable if and only if its h-triangle satisfies ${h_{i,j}(\Delta)=0 \quad \forall i, \forall j >1 }$ . In addition, it will be shown that a quasi-forest is sequentially Cohen-Macaulay if and only if it is shellable.     

On the non-vanishing of local cohomology modules

It is shown that for any Artinian modules M, M is the greatest integer i such that (M ) 0.