Damage Assessment and Strength Predictions in S-Glass/Epoxy Laminates Subjected to Low Energy Impact

Composite materials have become one of the leading materials for manufacturing in the aerospace industry today. Compared to conventional aerospace metals, composites generally have higher strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios, good fatigue and corrosion resistance and reduced parts count. However, like any other material, they also have disadvantages. They are inherently brittle and are thus prone to impact damage. Low energy/velocity impact damage, in particular, can be dangerous because the damage oftentimes goes undetected and can subsequently grow under load. Also known as barely visible impact damage (BVID), this area of concentration focuses on the small-scale damage that may be very difficult to detect yet can be lethal. The primary emphasis of this research is to predict the residual compressive strength of a 16-ply laminate [(0°/±45°/90°)2]s after experiencing low energy/velocity impact using combined technical approaches of ultrasonic C-scan and neural networks. To accomplish this, each test specimen was ultrasonically C-scanned after impact testing. A MATLAB computer program was then used to convert the image files into numeric data, which they were presented to a backpropagation neural network in order to predict the residual compressive strength. Microsoft Excel was used to take the average of the diagonal values of the normalized image data. Here the average prediction error turned out to be 3.9 percent, while the worst-case prediction error was 14.6 percent. This research also focused on identifying, sorting, and classifying how the composite laminates failed under compression after experiencing low energy/low velocity impact. Acoustic emission (AE) parameter data were collected during compression testing, and then inputted into an artificial neural network (ANN) for classification. Specifically a Kohonen Self Organizing Map (SOM) was used to sort and classify the failure mechanisms that occurred within the weakened composites. The associated BVID failure modes, otherwise known as failure mechanisms, were believed to consist primarily of transverse and longitudinal matrix cracks, delaminations, and occasionally fiber breaks. Even though delaminations are the most critical failure modes in BVID under compression, the other failure mechanisms also contribute significantly. Furthermore, it appeared that it was also possible to sort out and determine the transition regions between BVID and visible impact damage (VID) with AE data. Thus, it is important to know how the material fails so that necessary precautions can be taken to minimize these critical failure modes

Textual Manifold-based Defense Against Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Recent studies on adversarial images have shown that they tend to leave the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, making them significantly more challenging for current models to make correct predictions. This so-called off-manifold conjecture has inspired a novel line of defenses against adversarial attacks on images. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space induced by pretrained language models, in which adversarial texts tend to have their embeddings diverge from the manifold of natural ones. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that projects text embeddings onto an approximated embedding manifold before classification. It reduces the complexity of potential adversarial examples, which ultimately enhances the robustness of the protected model. Through extensive experiments, our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings without trading off clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first NLP defense that leverages the manifold structure against adversarial attacks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/dangne/tmd}

Enzyme-Assisted Aqueous Extraction Of Cashew Nut (Anacardium occidentale L.) Oil

Enzyme-assisted aqueous extraction method was applied to extract oil from cashew nut (Anacardium occidentale L.). The commercial enzyme (Viscozyme cassava C) was tested for effectiveness in releasing oil during the aqueous extraction. The effect of several parameters such as material/water ratio, enzyme concentration and duration for enzyme incubation on the oil yield was investigated. The conditions for maximum oil release were found with the material/water ratio of 1:9, enzyme concentration of 1% (v/w E/S), and in 3 h of enzyme incubation at 50oC with constant shaking. The maximum oil yield obtained at those conditions (38.88 % raw material) was significantly (p <0.05) higher than that of the control (without enzyme) (35.92 %), and it represented 86.28 % recovery of the total oil in seed. No hexane and other organic solvents were needed for this process. The cashew nut oil by enzyme-assisted aqueous extraction was relatively stable. Both peroxide value and free fatty acid value were lower than those in the oil obtained by Soxhlet method. Total un-saturated fatty acid in the cashew nut oil was about 84.43 %, in which the most abundant was oleic acid (65.0 %), followed by linoleic acid (18.53%). Cashew nut oil is a good dietary source of un-saturated fatty acids

The Organizational Culture Strategy SMEs During Economic Crises

The importance of organizational culture in the operation and performance of businesses has been widely acknowledged, but there is inconsistency in findings about the impact of culture on organizational performance across studies. This study aimed to achieve two objectives: first, to establish the relationship between the quality of accounting information systems (AIS), organizational culture, and the financial performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam; and second, to survey the organizational culture strategy of Vietnamese SMEs in the context of economic crises. The study survey was conducted in May 2023 and involved 242 SMEs in Vietnam. The research model was tested using Smart PLS. The results suggest that AIS has a positive relationship with both organizational culture and the financial performance of SMEs. However, organizational culture only affects financial performance related to organizational adaptability during a crisis. Moreover, a flexible, external adaptation, and balanced cultural approach strategy has a significant impact on the financial performance of SMEs. During a crisis, managers expect employees to adapt in order to achieve strategic goals and plans while simultaneously balancing stability, engagement, and employee satisfaction to achieve organizational effectiveness. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-06-015 Full Text: PD

A new stability results for the backward heat equation

In this paper, we regularize the nonlinear inverse time heat problem in the unbounded region by Fourier method. Some new convergence rates are obtained. Meanwhile, some quite sharp error estimates between the approximate solution and exact solution are provided. Especially, the optimal convergence of the approximate solution at t = 0 is also proved. This work extends to many earlier results in (f2,f3, hao1,Quan,tau1, tau2, Trong3,x1).Comment: 13 page