4,232 research outputs found
Effect of Soil Washing on Petroleum-Hydrocarbon Distribution on Sand Surfaces
A soil washing study was performed to evaluate the treatability of New River sand contaminated in the laboratory with a petroleum distillate. Unaltered and base-extracted sands were mixed with petroleum hydrocarbons, equilibrated, and washed with water or a surfactant at two different pH values (7 and 12). The surfactant had no significant effect on contaminant removal efficiencies at neutral pH. Treatment efficiencies of baseextracted sand particles were 10 to 13% higher than for the unaltered sands. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with elemental X-ray microprobe was used to determine the distribution of iron and carbon on the New River sand surface. Qualitative interpretations of the SEM/X-ray photomicrographs disclosed that iron oxides were associated with organic carbon on the sand surfaces, with sulfur believed to be a constituent of the petroleum contamination. Low petroleum removal efficiencies for New River sand observed in previous studies were believed to be influenced by the high iron oxide content of the sand and the affinity of these metal oxides to bind natural and petroleum-derived organic carbon
Studies on Microbiological Corrosion of Metals: Part I Isolation and Identification of Sulphate Reducing Bacteria from Jodhpur Soil
A strain of sulphate reducing bacteria present in Jodhpur soil has been isolate and identified as Desulphovibrio desulphuricans
Geometric Phase in Entangled Bipartite Systems
The geometric phase (GP) for bipartite systems in transverse external
magnetic fields is investigated in this paper. Two different situations have
been studied. We first consider two non-interacting particles. The results show
that because of entanglement, the geometric phase is very different from that
of the non-entangled case. When the initial state is a Werner state, the
geometric phase is, in general, zero and moreover the singularity of the
geometric phase may appear with a proper evolution time. We next study the
geometric phase when intra-couplings appear and choose Werner states as the
initial states to entail this discussion. The results show that unlike our
first case, the absolute value of the GP is not zero, and attains its maximum
when the rescaled coupling constant is less than 1. The effect of
inhomogeneity of the magnetic field is also discussed.Comment: 5 pages and to be published in Euro. Phys. J.
ALICE: An Automatic Design Flow for eFPGA Redaction
Fabricating an integrated circuit is becoming unaffordable for many semiconductor design houses. Outsourcing the fabrication to a third-party foundry requires methods to protect the intellectual property of the hardware designs. Designers can rely on embedded reconfigurable devices to completely hide the real functionality of selected design portions unless the configuration string (bitstream) is provided. However, selecting such portions and creating the corresponding reconfigurable fabrics are still open problems. We propose ALICE, a design flow that addresses the EDA challenges of this problem. ALICE partitions the RTL modules between one or more reconfigurable fabrics and the rest of the circuit, automating the generation of the corresponding redacted design
Not All Fabrics Are Created Equal: Exploring eFPGA Parameters for IP Redaction
Semiconductor design houses rely on third-party foundries to manufacture their integrated circuits (ICs). While this trend allows them to tackle fabrication costs, it introduces security concerns as external (and potentially malicious) parties can access critical parts of the designs and steal or modify the intellectual property (IP). Embedded field-programmable gate array (eFPGA) redaction is a promising technique to protect critical IPs of an ASIC by redacting (i.e., removing) critical parts and mapping them onto a custom reconfigurable fabric. Only trusted parties will receive the correct bitstream to restore the redacted functionality. While previous studies imply that using an eFPGA is a sufficient condition to provide security against IP threats like reverse-engineering, whether this truly holds for all eFPGA architectures is unclear, thus motivating the study in this article. We examine the security of eFPGA fabrics generated by varying different FPGA design parameters. We characterize the power, performance, and area (PPA) characteristics and evaluate each fabric’s resistance to Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based bitstream recovery. Our results encourage designers to work with custom eFPGA fabrics rather than off-the-shelf commercial FPGAs and reveals that only considering a redaction fabric’s bitstream size is inadequate for gauging security
Zero Order Spectrophotometric Method for Estimation of Escitalopram Oxalate in Tablet Formulations
A new, simple, fast and reliable zero order spectrophotometric method has been developed for determination of Escitalopram Oxalate in bulk and tablet dosage forms. The quantitative determination of drug was carried out using the zero order values (absorbance) measured at 238 nm. Calibration graph constructed at 238 nm was linear in concentration range of 2-20 µg/ml with correlation coefficient 0.9999. The method was found to be precise, accurate, specific, and validated as per ICH guidelines and can be used for determination of Escitalopram Oxalate in tablet formulations
The UTMOST pulsar timing programme I: overview and first results
We present an overview and the first results from a large-scale pulsar timing
programme that is part of the UTMOST project at the refurbished Molonglo
Observatory Synthesis Radio Telescope (MOST) near Canberra, Australia. We
currently observe more than 400 mainly bright southern radio pulsars with up to
daily cadences. For 205 (8 in binaries, 4 millisecond pulsars) we publish
updated timing models, together with their flux densities, flux density
variability, and pulse widths at 843 MHz, derived from observations spanning
between 1.4 and 3 yr. In comparison with the ATNF pulsar catalogue, we improve
the precision of the rotational and astrometric parameters for 123 pulsars, for
47 by at least an order of magnitude. The time spans between our measurements
and those in the literature are up to 48 yr, which allows us to investigate
their long-term spin-down history and to estimate proper motions for 60
pulsars, of which 24 are newly determined and most are major improvements. The
results are consistent with interferometric measurements from the literature. A
model with two Gaussian components centred at 139 and fits the transverse velocity distribution best. The pulse duty
cycle distributions at 50 and 10 per cent maximum are best described by
log-normal distributions with medians of 2.3 and 4.4 per cent, respectively. We
discuss two pulsars that exhibit spin-down rate changes and drifting subpulses.
Finally, we describe the autonomous observing system and the dynamic scheduler
that has increased the observing efficiency by a factor of 2-3 in comparison
with static scheduling.Comment: 31 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA
The first interferometric detections of Fast Radio Bursts
We present the first interferometric detections of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs),
an enigmatic new class of astrophysical transient. In a 180-day survey of the
Southern sky we discovered 3 FRBs at 843 MHz with the UTMOST array, as part of
commissioning science during a major ongoing upgrade. The wide field of view of
UTMOST ( deg) is well suited to FRB searches. The primary beam
is covered by 352 partially overlapping fan-beams, each of which is searched
for FRBs in real time with pulse widths in the range 0.655 to 42 ms, and
dispersion measures 2000 pc cm. Detections of FRBs with the UTMOST
array places a lower limit on their distances of km (limit of
the telescope near-field) supporting the case for an astronomical origin.
Repeating FRBs at UTMOST or an FRB detected simultaneously with the Parkes
radio telescope and UTMOST, would allow a few arcsec localisation, thereby
providing an excellent means of identifying FRB host galaxies, if present. Up
to 100 hours of follow-up for each FRB has been carried out with the UTMOST,
with no repeating bursts seen. From the detected position, we present 3
error ellipses of 15 arcsec x 8.4 deg on the sky for the point of origin for
the FRBs. We estimate an all-sky FRB rate at 843 MHz above a fluence of 11 Jy ms of events sky d at the 95
percent confidence level. The measured rate of FRBs at 843 MHz is of order two
times higher than we had expected, scaling from the FRB rate at the Parkes
radio telescope, assuming that FRBs have a flat spectral index and a uniform
distribution in Euclidean space. We examine how this can be explained by FRBs
having a steeper spectral index and/or a flatter log-log
distribution than expected for a Euclidean Universe.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
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