New process to control hydrolysis step during sol-gel preparation of sulfated zirconia catalysts

Sulfated zirconia catalysts were prepared by sol-gel process using a new method allowing the control of the hydrolysis step of zirconium alkoxides. Prepared samples were characterized by N₂ adsorption (desorption) at 77 K, XRD, chemical analysis of total sulfur and XPS. Catalytic properties have been evaluated in n-butane and n-hexane isomerization reactions. Obtained results show that time necessary for gelation is significant and depends considerably on the nature of the zirconium precursor. Concerning the properties of the solids obtained by this method, it has been noted that the use of the zirconium propoxide led to a better retention of the sulfate species, which improves activity during isomerization reactions. It has been found also that an initial S/Zr molar ratio equal to 0.5 allowed to obtain an optimal sulfur content and a high specific surface area.     

Fine characterization of the ethylene and ethane sorption in poly(amide 12-block-tetramethylenoxide) copolymer/AgBF4 membranes

Ethylene/ethane sorption characteristics were determined for dry Pebax™ (poly(amide 12-block-tetramethylenoxide) copolymer)/AgBF₄ membranes by using an electronic microbalance. The membranes containing 0.7 and 22 wt.% AgBF₄ showed a dual-mode sorption isotherm. The ethane isotherms for all the membranes were of the Henry-type, which is the normal sorption for gases in rubbery polymers. The abnormal presence of Langmuir sorption sites only for ethylene in the rubbery copolymer, never reported sofar, is attributed to the silver-based specific complexation sites. The silver salt which dissolved in limited amounts in the rubbery copolymer had a much smaller Langmuir sorption capacity than the salt that crystallized in the copolymer. The sorption kinetics indicate that the crystallized salt did adsorb slowly ethylene according to a zeroth-order kinetics, but not ethane. The gas uptake kinetics resulting from a step of the pressure surrounding the copolymer exhibited one stage for ethane but two stages for ethylene. For the latter, there was first a fast Fickian sorption stage, then a drift of the zeroth-order sorption of ethylene on salt crystals, which contributes for a large part to the total uptake. The zeroth-order sorption suggests that the sorbed ethylene amount in the second-stage is independent of the crystal-surface coverage. The value of the Fickian diffusion coefficient calculated by fitting the kinetics with a solution of the second Fick’s law was 5 × 10⁻¹² m²/s for both ethylene (the first stage) and ethane, and is typical for small organic compounds in a rubbery material.     

Interior Layers for Second-Order Singular Equations

Our aim in this article is to study singularly perturbed problems which display boundary layers in the interior of the domain. These interior boundary layers which supplement the usual boundary layers at the boundary, are generated by discontinuities in the data. Second-order linear elliptic one-dimensional and multi-dimensional problems are considered in this article.     

The polynomial discrete Radon transform

This paper presents a new approach called polynomial discrete Radon transform (PDRT), regarded as a generalization of the classical finite discrete Radon transform. Specifically, the PDRT transforms an image into Radon space by summing the pixels according to polynomial curves. The PDRT can be applied on square \(p \times p\) images where \(p\) is assumed to be a prime number. It is based on a simple arithmetic operations and requires no data interpolation. An interesting property of the PDRT is its exact inversion. This means that an image can be transformed and then perfectly reconstructed. Through this study, we show that the new approach can be applied for some pattern recognition applications.     

Performance analysis of multiple‐input multiple‐output relay networks based impulse radio ultra‐wideband

In this paper, we study the performance of time hopping pulse position modulation for impulse radio ultra‐wideband. We consider relay network applying decode‐and‐forward protocol. The channels between nodes adopt the IEEE 802.15.4a norms. The bit error rate performance is analyzed considering the effect of interference. Our results show significant improvement due to the diversity gain provided by the relay nodes. However, the performance is limited when multiple access interference (MAI) is present. To combat the MAI effect and further improve the detection reliability, we propose to use antenna selection at the relay. The relay receiver is assumed to be equipped with multiple antennas, and only the best antenna is selected. This is shown to improve the performance in the presence of MAI and improve the diversity gain.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Promoting Effect of Soluble Polysaccharides Extracted from Ulva spp. on Zea mays L. Growth

Seaweeds can play a vital role in plant growth promotion. Two concentrations (5 and 10 mg/mL) of soluble polysaccharides extracted from the green macroalgae Ulva fasciata and Ulva lactuca were tested on Zea mays L. The carbohydrate and protein contents, and antioxidant activities (phenols, ascorbic, peroxidase, and catalase) were measured, as well as the protein banding patterns. The soluble polysaccharides at 5 mg/mL had the greatest effect on the base of all of the parameters. The highest effects of soluble polysaccharides on the Zea mays were 38.453, 96.76, 4, 835, 1.658, 7.462, and 38615.19, mg/mL for carbohydrates, proteins, phenol, µg ascorbic/mL, mg peroxidase/g dry tissue, and units/g tissue of catalase, respectively. The total number of protein bands (as determined by SDS PAGE) was not changed, but the density of the bands was correlated to the treatments. The highest band density and promoting effect were correlated to 5 mg/mL soluble polysaccharide treatments extracted from Ulva fasciata in Zea mays, which can be used as a biofertilizer.     

An adaptive multiuser detector for DS‐CDMA systems in multipath fading channels

In this paper, we investigate the performance of an adaptive multistage detection scheme for direct‐sequence code‐division multiple‐access (DS‐CDMA) systems. The first stage consists of an adaptive multiuser detector which is based on the linear constrained minimum variance (LCMV) criterion. The interference cancellation (IC) occurs in the second stage. The performance of the iterative receiver over both flat and frequency‐selective fading channels is investigated and compared to the single‐user bound. In all cases, and under heavy system loads with near‐far problems, the iterative receiver is shown to offer substantial performance improvement and large gain in user‐capacity relative to the standard LCMV. In flat‐fading channels, our results show that the performance of the iterative detector is very close to the single‐user bound. For the frequency‐selective channel, this performance is noted to be in the order of 1 dB far from the single‐user bound. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An integrated FEC coding scheme for ATM transmission over regenerative satellite networks

The application of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) on both wireless and satellite networks requires system adaptation. This adaptation has to improve the overall system's performance, and achieve high quality‐of‐service classes approaching that for fibre‐optic communications. In this paper, a new integrated forward‐error‐correction (FEC) coding scheme is introduced for ATM transmission over regenerative satellite networks. The proposed FEC scheme is a concatenation of two Reed–Solomon codes tailored for the header and payload parts of the ATM cell. This integrated coding scheme is shown to significantly improve the cell loss ratio as compared to the standard CRC code used in the ATM cell header. We obtain both upper and lower performance bounds for the concatenated code and check their accuracy when compared to exact system's performance. Both analytical and simulation results show that a cell loss ratio and bit‐error rate (BER) of 10^?25 and 10^?7 can be, respectively, achieved with minimum delay requirements on the SATCOM link. Finally, an approximation for the system's throughout is obtained. It is shown that using a hybrid selective‐repeat automatic‐repeat‐request (SR‐ARQ) with the RS code, a large throughput of approximately 0.843 can be achieved at BERs lower than 10^?7 for data services. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Viscoplastic behaviour of a medium density polyethylene (MDPE): Constitutive equations based on double nonlinear deformation model

The viscoplastic behaviour of a medium density ethylene–butene copolymer (MDPE) is investigated by using samples cut out from thick-walled MDPE pipe. Extensive experimental work has been performed to characterise the nonlinear time-dependent response of such semi-crystalline thermoplastic material. Tests were carried out at 60 °C, on smooth tensile, full axisymmetrically notched creep tensile (FNCT) and double edge notched tensile (DENT) specimens.     

Antenna/relay selection for coded cooperative networks with AF relaying

In this paper, we consider antenna/relay selection for coded cooperative networks in an effort to improve their end-to-end performance by improving the detection reliability at the relay nodes. Considering amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying, we analyze a previously proposed distributed coded cooperation scheme in conjunction with antenna/relay selection. Specifically, we derive upper bounded expressions for the bit error rate assuming M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) transmission. Our analytical results show that the maximum diversity order of the system is maintained for the entire range of symbol error rate of interest, unlike the case without antenna/relay selection. Several numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.