The Influence of Parameters on the Crack Formation of Pigmented Water Borne Barrier Coatings During Folding

Water borne barrier coatings with pigments have great potential to replace extruded polymer coatings because they can be recycled and are more likely to break down in the environment. When formed into a package, these coated papers often need to be folded, which usually leads to decreased barrier performance of the coating, but this issue is not well documented in the literature. In this thesis, the influences of pigment type, shape, and pigment volume concentration (PVC) on the water vapor transmission rate (WVTR) and fold resistance were characterized for barrier coating formulations. Some experiments include the addition of flexible pigments and latex. A finite element method-based model was developed to simulate the folding process. These simulations were compared to experimental results to better understand the key parameters that affect crack formation in water borne barrier coatings. Plate shaped pigments gave the best WVTR results before folding but tended to generate large cracks and poor water vapor barrier properties after folding. Spherical plastics pigments yielded smaller cracks than other mineral pigments that had different shapes and higher modulus. High paper thickness, coating thickness, pigment loadings, aspect ratios, and modulus were predicted by the model to increase the likelihood of a crack formation. Experiments and the model indicate that using lower modulus (more flexible) pigments improved crack resistance compared to coatings made with higher modulus kaolin. The model predicted the key trends of the results for two pigment types at various pigment loadings. Talc and glitter gave a less crack generation than kaolin and mica when folded, It may because of smaller modulus of talc and glitter. Adding a flexible latex reduced the crack formation and lead to good barrier performance even after folding. Adding pigment into latex also eliminated the blocking problem but reduced the flexibility of the coating

Support Structures and Their Impacts on Work Outcomes of Online Workers in Developing Countries

Online labor platforms (OLPs) are transforming how firms operate and how people work. While much attention has been paid to understand how OLPs use algorithms to match workers with consumers and how OLPs are different from traditional firms, little is known about how this new form of firm impacts marginalized populations. Likewise, little is known about what factors lead to online workers’ work success. This short paper aims to explore the support structures for online laborers in developing countries. Drawing on the literature, we distill two types of support structure, namely, formal support from the platform firm, and informal support from peers. The current study seeks to develop in-depth understanding of support structures for online workers in developing countries and how support structures impact their work outcomes

Emancipation Research in Information Systems: Integrating Agency, Dialogue, Inclusion, and Rationality Research

Emancipation is a key concept in critical theories. Prior work suggests that emancipation is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Many conceptualizations of emancipation exist, and emancipation is defined in different ways. Existing empirical studies mainly focus on one or few components of emancipation. To have an integrated understanding of emancipation, we review the literature on emancipation in information systems (IS), with a view toward developing a typology of components of emancipation in the IS field. The typology of emancipation components consists of four components: freedom to act, freedom to express, freedom to belong and freedom to think. These components relate to the concepts of agency, dialogue, inclusion, and rationality, respectively

An interactive segmentation method based on superpixel

This paper proposes an interactive image-segmentation method which is based on superpixel. To achieve fast segmentation, the method is used to establish a Graphcut model using superpixels as nodes, and a new energy function is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ method has excellent performance in terms of segmentation accuracy and computation efficiency compared with other segmentation algorithm based on pixels