19672 research outputs found
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Solubility of CO2 in aqueous 2‑amino‑1, 3‑propanediol (Serinol) at elevated pressures
No full textIn this work, aqueous 2‑amino‑1, 3‑propanediol solution (serinol) was investigated as a potential solvent for CO2 capture from different gas streams. Prior to CO2 solubility experiments, a qualitative prediction technique was performed on serinol to ensure its potentiality as a CO2 capture solvent. This was done using COSMO-RS approach based on quantum chemistry calculations. Based on this approach, serinol showed good affinity towards hydrogen–bond donors which proved to be beneficial in developing intermolecular interaction between serinol and CO2. The solubility of CO2 in serinol was then investigated at serinol concentrations ranging from 1 M to 3 M, temperatures ranging from 313.15 K to 353.15 K and CO2 partial pressures ranging from 1034.31 kPa to 2068.43 kPa. The solubility of CO2 in serinol reached a highest value of 1.64 mol of CO2/mol of serinol when the serinol concentration was 1 M, at 313.15 K and 2068.43 kPa. Meanwhile, Henry's law constant of CO2 in serinol was calculated using N2O analogy at 313.15 K and 333.15 K for molar concentrations of 1 M and 3 M of serinol. Results showed that the physical solubility of CO2 in serinol increased as the temperature and the concentration of the solution decreased. The lowest value of Henry's law constant of CO2 was 599.4 kPa·m3·kmol−1, for 1 M of serinol at 313.15 K. Furthermore, the recyclability of 3 M of serinol was investigated at 313.15 K and partial pressures ranging from 1034.31 kPa to 2068.43 kPa. At 1034.31 kPa, the solubility of CO2 in 3 M of aqueous serinol after the 3rd regeneration cycles were reduced to 72.73%
Coexistence of dielectric relaxation and magnetic relaxation in compressively strained BiFeO3/Ba0.7Sr0.3TiO3 superlattices
No full textSuperlattices (SLs) consisting of multiferroic BiFeO3 (BFO) and dielectric Ba0.7Sr0.3TiO3 were epitaxially grown on a (001)-oriented Nb:SrTiO3 substrate using pulsed laser deposition. An improved ferroelectricity with a high-temperature polarization of ∼63.7 μC/cm2 at 470 K was observed. The SL exhibited both dielectric and magnetic relaxation properties. Two distinct dielectric relaxations were found: a carrier hopping process between Fe2+ and Fe3+ from 273 to 410 K and the long-range migration of oxygen vacancies from 430 to 573 K. Spin-glass behavior with a freezing temperature of ∼86.6 K was also observed. This work provides a promising path forward to tailor the multiferroic properties of BFO-based structures for high-temperature applications. © 2019 Author(s)
Enhancement of high temperature performance of cement blocks via CO 2 curing
No full textCarbonation for the curing of cement-based materials has been gaining increased attention in recent years, especially in light of emerging initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. Carbonation method or CO 2 curing is founded on the basis of the reaction between CO 2 and cement products to form thermally stable and denser carbonate, which not only improves the physical and mechanical properties of cement-based materials, but also has the ability to utilize and store CO 2 safely and permanently. This study aims to assess the effect of CO 2 curing technology on the high-temperatures performance of cement blocks. Upon molding, dry-mix cement blocks were cured under statically accelerated carbonation condition (20% CO 2 concentration with 70% relative humidity) for 28 days, followed by exposure to elevated temperatures of 300 °C to 800 °C in order to comprehensively study the principal phase changes and decompositions of cement hydrates. The results indicated that CO 2 curing improved the performance of cement blocks, such as enhancement in the residual compressive strength and reducing the sorptivity. At 600 °C, the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed a denser microstructure while thermal analisis and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis also clearly demonstrated that higher amounts of calcium carbonate were present in the cement blocks after CO 2 curing, suggesting better high-temperature performance compared to natural cured cement blocks. In general, an improved high-temperature performance, specifically at 600 °C of the dry-mixed cement blocks was demonstrated by adopting the CO 2 curing technology. This confirms the potential of utilizing CO 2 curing technology in not only improving quality of cement blocks, new avenue for storing of CO2 in construction material can be realized at the same time. © 201
Carpal bone segmentation using fully convolutional neural network
No full textBackground: Bone Age Assessment (BAA) refers to a clinical procedure that aims to identify a discrepancy between biological and chronological age of an individual by assessing the bone age growth. Currently, there are two main methods of executing BAA which are known as Greulich-Pyle and Tanner-Whitehouse techniques. Both techniques involve a manual and qualitative assessment of hand and wrist radiographs, resulting in intra and inter-operator variability accuracy and time-consuming. An automatic segmentation can be applied to the radiographs, providing the physician with more accurate delineation of the carpal bone and accurate quantitative analysis. Methods: In this study, we proposed an image feature extraction technique based on image segmentation with the fully convolutional neural network with eight stride pixel (FCN-8). A total of 290 radiographic images including both female and the male subject of age ranging from 0 to 18 were manually segmented and trained using FCN-8. Results and Conclusion: The results exhibit a high training accuracy value of 99.68% and a loss rate of 0.008619 for 50 epochs of training. The experiments compared 58 images against the gold standard ground truth images. The accuracy of our fully automated segmentation technique is 0.78 ± 0.06, 1.56 ±0.30 mm and 98.02% in terms of Dice Coefficient, Hausdorff Distance, and overall qualitative carpal recognition accuracy, respectively. © 2019 Bentham Science Publishers
How scientific production positively affect social psychology intervention? A bibliometric analysis on the science of well-being
No full textPurpose: The recent decades were witnessed such a rapid rise in wellbeing researches on the field of psychology. Social psychology intervention (SPI) has a strong impact on individual mental health and remarkable achievement in education domain. In this context, subject development within the last years could be illustrated through a bibliometric approach. This research aimed to analyze the scientific productivity while considering global trends of psychological intervention. Methodology: Web of Science Core Collection databases were selected in the period from 1990 to mid-2018. By thoroughly scrutinizing the objects which came to this attention, the trend of documents, publication date, geographic contribution to the field, relevant authorship and most cited articles, as well as frequent keywords from more than thousand references, were investigated. Main Findings: The results clearly indicate that the United States of America dedicates itself with the highest level of attention in the area of social psychology intervention. Whereas, lower attention was focused on the research criteria in Asian continent, except China. Although the majority of the studies on SPI approach is from USA, but performed analysis highlight the vast research potential to validate without any specific considerations to certain region settings or cultures. Implications/Applications: Despite advantages of SPI, the majority of the existed researches has been carried out predominantly in United States. Whereas, from defining the unit of analysis, the hypothesis might worthily be studied by practitioners to generalize the issue over various frameworks. © Mehrollahia et al
Tailoring morphological characteristics of zinc oxide using a one-step hydrothermal method for photoelectrochemical water splitting application
No full textIn the present paper describe the zinc oxide (ZnO) with various morphologies have been synthesized using the one-step hydrothermal method, in which the growth of ZnO nanostructures are significantly tailored by adjusting the pH level between 9 and 12 using 0.1 M Sodium hydroxide (NaOH). Significant results reveal the morphological properties of ZnO nanostructures varied with different pH values with the formation of ZnO nanostructures have different morphological such as a baton, star, flower, and rod-like structures. The present results show the rod-like structure of ZnO nanostructures exhibits the highest photocurrent density of 746.61 μAcm−2 (at 1.23 V vs RHE) under simulated solar AM 1.5G illumination in Potassium hydroxide (KOH) medium, also the other morphologies. The dependent of the photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting properties on the different morphological of ZnO nanostructures are studied. Achieving the morphological evolution mechanism has become one of the method to obtain the production of the hydrogen growth regime used for solar energy conversion and their applied storage potentials. The application of the ZnO nanostructures for PEC water splitting was proposed with the adoption of screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs). These are to quantify the best degree of the highest photocurrent density with one-step tailoring with an ideal modeling system to enhance PEC water splitting performances. Thus, the screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPEs) has been used as an alternative method for fabrication and photoelectrodes testings. © 2019 Hydrogen Energy Publications LL
Hawai‘i Jungle Writing: Where There is the Most Life
No full textThis autoethnography uses a series of loosely connected personal reflections, imaginative flights and academic commentary to explore life writing from the Hawaiian jungle. Jungle–the cacophonic chaos of ecologic diversity, memory, intersection, interdependence, fragility and, of course, impending end and rebirth–overflows with biology, yet is also threatened by it. The writing of the struggle of the jungle is nothing less than the writing of the struggle of life. To illuminate the intersection between jungle writing and life writing, the piece places writing of the jungle within the context of my own memories of Hawai‘i, the ecosystem surrounding my parents’ home, the threat to endemic jungle life, and the broader development and underlying themes of nature writing and ecocriticism. I also reflect on how writing of the jungle made me consider my own relationship with it and with life writing. The fragmented, somewhat disordered style of the piece reflects the jumbled and nonlinear nature of the jungle and of life. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Predatory Journals on Trial: Allegations, Responses, and Lessons for Scholarly Publishing from FTC v. OMICS
No full textOn 25 August 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued OMICS Group Inc., iMedPub LLC, Conference Series LLC, and Srinubabu Gedela, all affiliated with open access mega-publisher OMICS International, for deception in their solicitation of journal articles and advertising of conferences. The ongoing lawsuit seeks to stop OMICS's deceptive practices and disgorge US 2.1 billion for harm caused by the lawsuit to its business and employees. This article describes the main arguments, counter-arguments, and court decisions in the 5920 pages of pleadings, exhibits, and orders that have been filed through 14 October 2018. The article then evaluates the case to formulate key take-aways for publishers, editors, academics, and universities. Depending on its ultimate outcome, the case against OMICS may be a turning point in the practices of questionable open access online publishers, making this interim case assessment pertinent to all concerned about the future of academic publishing. © University of Toronto Press
SecureSurgiNET: A framework for ensuring security in telesurgery
No full textThe notion of surgical robotics is actively being extended to enable telesurgery, where both the surgeon and patient are remotely located and connected via a public network, which leads to many security risks. Being a safety-critical application, it is highly important to make telesurgery robust and secure against active and passive attacks. In this article, we propose the first complete framework, called SecureSurgiNET, for ensuring security in telesurgery environments. SecureSurgiNET is primarily based on a set of well-established protocols to provide a fool-proof telesurgical robotic system. For increasing the efficiency of secured telesurgery environments, the idea of a telesurgical authority is introduced that ensures the integrity, identity management, authentication policy implementation, and postoperative data security. An analysis is provided describing the security and throughput of Advanced Encryption Standard during the intraoperative phase of SecureSurgiNET. Moreover, we have tabulated the possible attacks on SecureSurgiNET along with the devised defensive measures. Finally, we also present a time complexity analysis of the SecureSurgiNET through simulations. © The Author(s) 2019
Developmental Impacts of Remittances on Migrant-Sending Households: Micro-Level Evidence from Punjab, Pakistan
No full textThis article analyzes the overall and type of developmental impacts of remittances for migrant-sending households (HHs) in districts of Punjab, Pakistan. For this purpose, an HH-based human development index is constructed based on the dimensions of education, health and housing, with a view to enrich insights into interactions between remittances and HH development. Using high-quality data from a HH micro-survey for Punjab, the study finds that most migrant-sending HHs are better off than the HHs without this stream of income. More importantly, migrant HHs have significantly higher development in terms of housing in most districts of Punjab relative to non-migrant HHs. Thus, the government would need policy interventions focusing on housing to address inequalities in human development at the district-HH level, and subsequently balance its current focus on the provision of education and health. © The Author(s) 2019