Preparation of hollow fiber membranes for gas separation

Today, immersion precipitation is the most often used process for the preparation of gas separation membranes from polymeric materials. In this process a polymer solution in the form of a thin liquid film or hollow fiber is immersed in a nonsolvent bath where the polymer precipitates and forms a membrane. \ud The immersion precipitation process can be performed by various means. The dual bath spinning process is one specific way which can be used, e.g., for the preparation of hollow fiber membranes for gas separation. In this process hollow fibers are spun by contacting the polymer solution with two properly chosen coagulents successively. The first coagulant is used to 'extract' solvent out of the polymer solution. The contact time is short in order to create a thin layer of high polymer concentration at the interface. The second coagulent is used to quickly precipitate the polymer solution to form the membrane. With this spinning process, hollow fibers with the intrinsic selectivity of the polymer material can be easily obtained without the necessity of coating.\ud This thesis is aimed on extending the knowledge on membrane formation and on further developing the dual bath spinning process for the preparation of gas separation hollow fibers with both high selectivity and high flux

The domination number and the least QQ-eigenvalue

A vertex set $D$ of a graph $G$ is said to be a dominating set if every vertex of $V(G)\setminus D$ is adjacent to at least a vertex in $D$, and the domination number $\gamma(G)$ ($\gamma$, for short) is the minimum cardinality of all dominating sets of $G$. For a graph, the least $Q$-eigenvalue is the least eigenvalue of its signless Laplacian matrix. In this paper, for a nonbipartite graph with both order $n$ and domination number $\gamma$, we show that $n\geq 3\gamma-1$, and show that it contains a unicyclic spanning subgraph with the same domination number $\gamma$. By investigating the relation between the domination number and the least $Q$-eigenvalue of a graph, we minimize the least $Q$-eigenvalue among all the nonbipartite graphs with given domination number.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

The valley filter efficiency of monolayer graphene and bilayer graphene line defect model

In addition to electron charge and spin, novel materials host another degree of freedom, the valley. For a junction composed of valley filter sandwiched by two normal terminals, we focus on the valley efficiency under disorder with two valley filter models based on monolayer and bilayer graphene. Applying the transfer matrix method, valley resolved transmission coefficients are obtained. We find that: i) under weak disorder, when the line defect length is over about $15\rm nm$, it functions as a perfect channel (quantized conductance) and valley filter (totally polarized); ii) in the diffusive regime, combination effects of backscattering and bulk states assisted intervalley transmission enhance the conductance and suppress the valley polarization; iii) for very long line defect, though the conductance is small, polarization is indifferent to length. Under perpendicular magnetics field, the characters of charge and valley transport are only slightly affected. Finally we discuss the efficiency of transport valley polarized current in a hybrid system.Comment: 6 figure

View Independent Vehicle Make, Model and Color Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network

This paper describes the details of Sighthound's fully automated vehicle make, model and color recognition system. The backbone of our system is a deep convolutional neural network that is not only computationally inexpensive, but also provides state-of-the-art results on several competitive benchmarks. Additionally, our deep network is trained on a large dataset of several million images which are labeled through a semi-automated process. Finally we test our system on several public datasets as well as our own internal test dataset. Our results show that we outperform other methods on all benchmarks by significant margins. Our model is available to developers through the Sighthound Cloud API at https://www.sighthound.com/products/cloudComment: 7 Page