A multiscale phenomenological constitutive model for strain rate dependent tensile ductility in nanocrystalline metals

Acknowledgments No external funding was received for this project.Peer reviewedPostprin

Exploring Identifiers of Research Articles Related to Food and Disease using Artificial Intelligence

The research project aims to understand how variation in writing styles and flexibility of text mining methods control their ability to extract useful information from articles about food and health. Those areas of study are significant because they incorporate features of text mining methods and food-health articles. The project will build a database and mining tools that would change the way we search and collect information from scientific publications and the way we analyze this information for further applications. The strategy to achieve the project’s goal is to engage several teams of undergraduate students in Applied Computing to develop a food-health portal. Some teams will develop text mining tools and others use these tools and existing data-mining tools to extract the portal contents from articles about food-health. The information extracted will create and inform a database of food/health relationships. The project addresses several issues of central importance to the success of text mining techniques extracting useful food-health information for serving society now and in future. Those include: how writing style of an article is determined automatically, how main topic of an article/document is identified automatically, how useful information is extracted from an article/document to help national and international researchers in conducting further research, how available food articles can be quickly utilized to help the society, how undergraduate students gain skills required for extracting useful information from the huge amount of data available on the internet

Voltammetric studies of some azo compounds derived from 4-methyl-6,7-dihydroxy coumarin in microemulsion and aqueous media

The cyclic voltammetric(CV) behavior of some azo compounds based on coumarin derivatives  was investigated in microemulsion systems and in aqueous solutions. The obtained results indicated that these compounds undergo an irreversible 4-electron reduction step leading to cleavage of the N=N center with the formation of amine compounds in all media. The effect of medium on the CV parameters was discussed. The total number of electrons involved in the reduction process was determined by controlled potential coulometry. Also, The effect of substituents on the electrode reaction pathway and the kinetic parameters of the electrode process were calculated and discussed. Based on the data obtained the electroreduction mechanism was suggested and discussed

Determining an optimum cropping pattern for Egypt

Agriculture is considered to be the major economic activity in Egypt despite the government policies that favored other sectors since the second half of the 20th century. However, Egypt currently faces a food security challenge that stems from the increasing demand for food in light of huge population growth and the inability of the agricultural sector to fulfill the abovementioned increasing demand. This research focuses on the vertical expansion of the agricultural sector through attempting to determine the optimum cropping mix for Egypt in the year 2017. A fuzzy goal programming (FGP) approach for optimal land allocation is utilized. In the model formulation, five goals were modeled; namely crop production, net profit, investment, fertilizers and water requirements. A tolerance based FGP technique was employed to account for the fuzziness of the selected goals. Without imposing any constraints to ensure food security, results show that it is not optimal to grow strategic crops, including wheat, broad beans, and maize. Accordingly, constraints were set on the minimum land allocations to strategic crops. Results of the model indicate that achieving food security has some costs in terms of profitability and fertilizers utilization. Yet, it is possible for the government to target higher levels of self-sufficiency of strategic items as the costs are tolerable. The resulting land allocations indicated that the profit goal was fuzzily achieved only in the winter season, yielding a level of profit that is lower than the target by only 0.68%. As for the fertilizers requirements goals, they were partially achieved in both the winter and the summer seasons. As a measure of sensitivity, the model was solved using different weight structures, and setting different constraints on essential crops stemming from the potential of a population growth rate that is greater than expected