Environment Friendly Composite Materials: Biocomposites and Green Composites

Biocomposites can supplement and eventually replace petroleum-based composite materials in several applications. Several critical issues related to bio-fiber surface treatments is to make it a more suitable matrix for composite application and promising techniques need to be solved to design biocomposite of interest. The main motivation for developing biocomposites has been and still is to create a new generation of fiber reinforced plastics material competitive with glass fiber reinforced ones which are environmentally compatible in terms of products, use and renewal. There is an immense opportunity in developing new biobased products, but the real challenge isto design suitable bio-based products through innovation ideas. Green materials are the wave of the future. Bionanocomposites have very strong future prospects, though the present low level of production, some deficiency intechnology and high cost restrict them from a wide range of applications.Defence Science Journal, Vol. 64, No. 3, May 2014, pp. 244-261, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.64.732

Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning

While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short

On FPL configurations with four sets of nested arches

The problem of counting the number of Fully Packed Loop (FPL) configurations with four sets of a,b,c,d nested arches is addressed. It is shown that it may be expressed as the problem of enumeration of tilings of a domain of the triangular lattice with a conic singularity. After reexpression in terms of non-intersecting lines, the Lindstr\"om-Gessel-Viennot theorem leads to a formula as a sum of determinants. This is made quite explicit when min(a,b,c,d)=1 or 2. We also find a compact determinant formula which generates the numbers of configurations with b=d.Comment: 22 pages, TeX, 16 figures; a new formula for a generating function adde

Direct observation of electron doping in La0.7Ce0.3MnO3 using x-ray absorption spectroscopy

We report on a X-ray absorption spectroscopic (XAS) study on a thin film of La0.7Ce0.3MnO3, a manganite which was previously only speculated to be an electron doped system. The measurements clearly show that the cerium is in the Ce(IV) valence state and that the manganese is present in a mixture of Mn2+ and Mn3+ valence states. These data unambiguously demonstrate that La0.7Ce0.3MnO3 is an electron doped colossal magnetoresistive manganite, a finding that may open up new opportunities both for device applications as well as for further basic research towards a better modelling of the colossal magnetoresistance phenomenon in these materials.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, revised versio

Direct numerical simulations of statistically steady, homogeneous, isotropic fluid turbulence with polymer additives

We carry out a direct numerical simulation (DNS) study that reveals the effects of polymers on statistically steady, forced, homogeneous, isotropic fluid turbulence. We find clear manifestations of dissipation-reduction phenomena: On the addition of polymers to the turbulent fluid, we obtain a reduction in the energy dissipation rate, a significant modification of the fluid energy spectrum, especially in the deep-dissipation range, a suppression of small-scale intermittency, and a decrease in small-scale vorticity filaments. We also compare our results with recent experiments and earlier DNS studies of decaying fluid turbulence with polymer additives.Comment: consistent with the published versio

A Cloudy/Xspec Interface

We discuss new functionality of the spectral simulation code CLOUDY which allows the user to calculate grids with one or more initial parameters varied and formats the predicted spectra in the standard FITS format. These files can then be imported into the x-ray spectral analysis software XSPEC and used as theoretical models for observations. We present and verify a test case. Finally, we consider a few observations and discuss our results.Comment: 13 pages, 1 table, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PAS