Multielemental characterisation of cobalt by glow discharge quadrupole mass spectrometry

Multielemental determination and the assessment of purity of cobalt metal used in the preparation of Ni-based super-alloys have been carried out by glow discharge quadrupole mass spectrometry (GD-QMS). Relative sensitivity factors (RSF) generated from certified iron matrix reference samples (NIST 663 and 664 low alloy steel pin standards) could be used for the determination of different trace element constituents of the sample. Different wet chemical procedures were also carried out for the determination of the trace constituents in the sample. The GD-QMS results are in reasonably good agreement with those obtained from wet chemical procedures, validating the use of the RSF values generated on low alloy steel standards for the computation of trace element concentrations in cobalt metal. A variety of molecular ions formed through the reaction of cobalt (matrix) with the discharge gas (argon) were also detected.     

Inorganic oxide core, polymer shell nanocomposite as a high K gate dielectric for flexible electronics applications

Organic/inorganic core shell nanoparticles have been synthesized using high K TiO(2) as the core nanoparticle, and polystyrene as the shell. This material is easy to process and forms transparent continuous thin films, which exhibit a dielectric constant enhancement of over 3 times that of bulk polystyrene. This new dielectric material has been incorporated into capacitors and thin film transistors (TFTs). Mobilities approaching 0.2 cm(2)/V.s have been measured for pentacene TFTs incorporating the new TiO(2) polystyrene nanostructured gate dielectric, indicating good surface properties for pentacene film growth. This novel strategy for generating high K flexible gate dielectrics will be of value in improving organic and flexible electronic device performance.     

Extraction spectrophotometric determination of cobalt and nickel using ethylthioxanthate

A spectrophotometric method for the determination of cobalt and nickel using a new reagent sodium ethylthioxanthate has been described. The yellow-colored cobalt complex and red-colored nickel complex have been extracted quantitatively using carbon tetrachloride in the pH ranges 4.0–11 and 4.0–6.7, respectively. The colors of these complexes are stable and absorbances have been measured at 389 nm for cobalt and 495 nm for the nickel complexes. Few ions interfere but the method has been applied successfully for the determination of these metal ions in various complex materials.     

Manifold Preserving Features and Regression for Semantic Labelling in High Dimensional Images

Wireless Personal Communications - This paper proposes an combined method for manifold preservation and Subspace Eigenvectors(SE) based regression in high dimensional (HD) images. We studied...     

Rapid Suzuki‐Miyaura cross‐coupling reaction catalyzed by zirconium carboxyphosphonate supported mixed valent Pd(0)/Pd(II) catalyst

Mixed valent Pd(0)/Pd(II) nano‐sized aggregates supported onto a chemically robust layered zirconium carboxyphosphonate framework is prepared and its catalytic activity in Suzuki‐Miyaura cross coupling reaction is explored. The exceptionally high catalytic efficacy of the heterogeneous catalyst in Suzuki‐Miyaura cross coupling reaction is signified by remarkably short reaction time 2 minutes and high turnover frequency of 1.3 x 10⁴ hr^?1. The catalyst can be recycled several times without significant loss of catalytic efficacy, while spectroscopic, structural and microscopic investigations suggest the integrity of the catalyst even after fifth catalytic cycle. The unique ability of the zirconium carboxyphosphonate framework to interact strongly with palladium in dual Pd(0)/Pd(II) oxidation states has been attributed to this remarkable augmentation of catalytic efficacy.     

Effect of polymer and ion concentration on mechanical and drug release behavior of gellan hydrogels using factorial design

Developing optimized hydrogel products requires an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms that drive hydrogel tunability. Here, we performed a full 4 × 4 factorial design study investigating the impact of gellan, a naturally derived polysaccharide (1%, 2%, 3%, or 4% w/v) and CaCl₂ concentration (1, 3, 7, or 10 mM) on the viscoelastic, swelling, and drug release behavior of gellan hydrogels containing a model drug, vancomycin. These concentrations were chosen to specifically provide insight into gellan hydrogel behavior for formulations utilizing polymer and salt concentrations expanding beyond those commonly reported by previous studies exploring gellan. With increasing gellan and CaCl₂ concentration, the hydrogel storage moduli (0.1–100 kPa) followed a power-law relationship and on average these hydrogels had higher liquid absorption capability and greater total drug release over 6 days. We suggest that the effects of gellan and CaCl₂ concentration and their interactions on hydrogel properties can be explained by various phenomena that lead to increased swelling and increased resistance to network expansion.     

A multilevel hybrid anomaly detection scheme for industrial wireless sensor networks

Real-time sensing plays an important role in ensuring the reliability of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). Sensor nodes in IWSNs have inherent limitations that give rise to different anomalies in the network. These anomalies can lead to disastrous and harmful situations or even serious system failures. This article presents a formulation to the design of an anomaly detection scheme for detecting the anomalous node along with the type of anomaly. The proposed scheme is divided into two major parts. First, spatiotemporal correlation within a cluster is obtained for the normal and anomalous behavior of sensor nodes. Second, the multilevel hybrid classifier is used by combining the sequential minimal optimization support vector machine (SMO-SVM) as a binary classifier with optimally pruned extreme learning machine (OP-ELM) as a multiclass classifier for detection of an anomalous node and type of anomalies, respectively. Mahalanobis distance-based lightweight K-Medoid clustering is used to build a new set of training datasets that represents the original training dataset, by significantly reducing the training time of a multilevel hybrid classifier. Results are analyzed using standard WSN datasets. The proposed model shows high accuracy, i.e., 94.79% and detection rate, i.e., 94.6% with a reduced false positive rate as compared to existing hybrid methods.     

A simulation as a service cloud middleware

Many seemingly simple questions that individual users face in their daily lives may actually require substantial number of computing resources to identify the right answers. For example, a user may want to determine the right thermostat settings for different rooms of a house based on a tolerance range such that the energy consumption and costs can be maximally reduced while still offering comfortable temperatures in the house. Such answers can be determined through simulations. However, some simulation models as in this example are stochastic, which require the execution of a large number of simulation tasks and aggregation of results to ascertain if the outcomes lie within specified confidence intervals. Some other simulation models, such as the study of traffic conditions using simulations may need multiple instances to be executed for a number of different parameters. Cloud computing has opened up new avenues for individuals and organizations with limited resources to obtain answers to problems that hitherto required expensive and computationally-intensive resources. This paper presents SIMaaS, which is a cloud-based Simulation-as-a-Service to address these challenges. We demonstrate how lightweight solutions using Linux containers (e.g., Docker) are better suited to support such services instead of heavyweight hypervisor-based solutions, which are shown to incur substantial overhead in provisioning virtual machines on-demand. Empirical results validating our claims are presented in the context of two case studies.