Some issues on toughening, fire retardancy, and wear/scratch damage in polyamide-based nanocomposites

Addition of small percentage of nanoclay layers to polymers significantly improves many of their mechanical, physical and transport properties. Despite these improvements, some issues remain with the resultant nanocomposites and include concerns on fracture toughness, flame retardancy (and thermal stability), and scratch-wear resistance. It is the inadequacy of these specified properties that has curtailed potential applications of this class of new materials. Here, we present the efforts and approaches that were made to understand some facets of these issues in achieving a balance between different mechanical and physical properties, with particular emphasis on our recent and current research findings

Effects Of Post-Deposition Annealing Temperature And Time On Physical Properties Of Metal-Organic Decomposed Lanthanum Cerium Oxide Thin Film.

Lanthanum cerium oxide (LaxCeyOz) precursor was prepared using metal-organic decomposition method. The effects of post-deposition annealing temperatures (400-1000 °C) and annealing time (15-120 minutes) in argon ambient on physical properties of the deposited film were investigated

Finite temperature Casimir pistons for electromagnetic field with mixed boundary conditions and its classical limit

In this paper, the finite temperature Casimir force acting on a two-dimensional Casimir piston due to electromagnetic field is computed. It was found that if mixed boundary conditions are assumed on the piston and its opposite wall, then the Casimir force always tends to restore the piston towards the equilibrium position, regardless of the boundary conditions assumed on the walls transverse to the piston. In contrary, if pure boundary conditions are assumed on the piston and the opposite wall, then the Casimir force always tend to pull the piston towards the closer wall and away from the equilibrium position. The nature of the force is not affected by temperature. However, in the high temperature regime, the magnitude of the Casimir force grows linearly with respect to temperature. This shows that the Casimir effect has a classical limit as has been observed in other literatures.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Journal of Physics

Systematic characterization of novel lncRNAs responding to phosphate starvation in Arabidopsis thaliana

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Using genetic evolutionary software application testing to verify a DSP SoC

Copyright © 2008 IEEEA digital signal processor (DSP) system-on-chip (SoC) can be designed using a variety of architectures and techniques. This often presents different verification challenges compared to conventional SoC or processor designs. Verification of such designs should take into account the goals and applications of the DSP, and how they are eventually used. This paper proposes an application based verification methodology and demonstrates this technique on a real-life DSP SoC design. Our technique employs a library of specially devised application functions as test building blocks, followed by a genetic evolutionary test generator to compose these application functions into effective test programs.Adriel Cheng, Cheng-Chew Lim, Yihe Sun, Hu He, Zhixiong Zhou, Ting Le

Selection rules for Brillouin light scattering from eigenvibrations of a sphere

Selection rules governing Brillouin light scattering from the vibrational eigenmodes of a homogeneous, free-surface submicron sphere have been derived using group theory. The derivation is for the condition where the sphere diameter is of the order of the excitation light wavelength. Well-resolved spectral data obtained from Brillouin light scattering from submicron silica spheres provide experimental verification of the selection rules.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure