Experimental Investigation on the Effect of Tool Rotational Speed on Mechanical Properties of AA6082-T6 Friction Stir-Welded Butt Joints

Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention - In this study, the effect of tool rotational speed on mechanical properties of AA 6082-T6 aluminum alloy was investigated. Different welded joints were...     

GGA-SIC Calculations for Electronic and Magnetic Study of CdS Alloys

Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism - Electronic and magnetic properties of CdS-based, doped by various transition metal elements (Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co or Ni), dilute magnetic...     

Microgrid management using hybrid inverter fuzzy-based control

Neural Computing and Applications - Microgrid systems are becoming a very promising solution to meet the power demand growth especially in remote areas where diesel generators (DG) are commonly...     

Healthcare knowledge sharing among a community of specialized physicians

Healthcare organizations strive to make the best use of their organizational knowledge. The collective know-hows of the medical workers directly affect the quality of the delivered healthcare services. This study addresses the healthcare knowledge-sharing among a community of specialized physicians. An extensive study of the literature on knowledge-sharing in industries generally and healthcare organizations specifically were presented. Six focal elements were detected in previous attempts to address the knowledge-sharing status in healthcare organizations. Additionally, three previous models for healthcare knowledge management were analyzed. The studied literature along with the three studied models helped in constructing the framework and suggesting a suitable research methodology for primary data collection. Qualitative approach of in-depth interview technique was used for interviewing eight specialized physicians. The data collected from the interviewees were then analyzed and produced explanatory themes and codes. These themes are physicians’ acquisition of medical knowledge, staff participating in the knowledge sharing, knowledge-sharing culture, ICT-based knowledge sharing and top management involvement. The findings resulted in recognizing four considerations which ought to be taken into account for successful knowledge-sharing activities and learning initiatives in the healthcare organization. Conclusions and recommendations for future studies were presented based on the implications of this research study.     

Towards a compliance requirement management for SMSEs: a model and architecture

Information Systems and e-Business Management - Today’s business entities face an ever-growing number of laws and regulations due to recent high profile business scandals and failures. Small...     

Phase Behavior of Poly(butyl acrylate) Networks in Nematic Liquid Crystal Solvents

Summary: This paper reports the phase behavior of photochemically crosslinked poly(butyl acrylate) networks in nematic liquid crystal (LC) solvents. The swelling properties are studied as a function of temperature for two low molecular weight nematic LCs, 4‐cyano‐4′‐pentylbiphenyl (5CB) and the eutectic mixture of cyanoparaphenylenes (E7). Chemically crosslinked polymer networks were formed by the UV radiation of initial solutions of the reactive monomer, butyl acrylate, a crosslinker (hexanediol diacrylate), and a photoinitiator. To obtain different network densities, the ratio of butyl acrylate to hexanediol diacrylate was varied prior to polymerization/crosslinking reactions. Immersion in an excess of the LC solvent allowed for the measurement of size increase by polarized optical microscopy in terms of temperature. Length, width, and diagonal ratios were calculated considering swollen to dry network states of the samples. In general, swelling leads to an increase in the network size by increasing the temperature with a significant dependence on the degree of crosslinking. A large shift in the swelling ratio was found in the vicinity of the nematic to isotropic transition temperatures of the LCs.

     

Electrocardiogram Signal Denoising Using Discrete Wavelet Transform

The most common noises in ECG （electrocardiogram） signal processing are BW （baseline wandering） and the 50 or 60 Hz PLI （power line interferences）. In order to remove these two major source of noises, we have used the recent powerful DWT （discrete wavelet transform） signal processing in ECG signals which are obtained from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The results indicate that DWT is a good method for filtering noises without changing the morphology of ECG, and can be applied to all types of ECG signals, whether normal or presenting arrhythmias.     

Pilot contamination mitigation based on antenna subset transmission for mmWave massive MIMO

This paper tackles the problem of pilot contamination (PC) in mmWave Massive MIMO cellular systems. We propose an analog precoder based on antenna subset transmission technique to mitigate the PC. This technique ensures the interfering signal to become noise‐like signal thus helping a more efficient estimation of channel coefficients. Also, this strategy is low cost and introduces no complexity load. The result shows the effectiveness of the proposed precoder to mitigate PC issue.     

Microwave-assisted synthesis of isosorbide-derived diols for the preparation of thermally stable thermoplastic polyurethane

In order to prepare thermally stable isosorbide-derived thermoplastic polyurethane, the synthesis of two new chiral exo–exo configured diols, prepared from isosorbide, and two types of diphenols (bisphenol A and thiodiphenol) was described. The synthesis conditions were optimized under conventional heating and microwave irradiations. To prove their suitability in polymerization, these monomers were successfully polymerized using 4,4′-diphenylmethane diisocyanate (MDI) and hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI). Both monomers and polymers have been studied by NMR, FT-IR, TGA, DSC; intrinsic viscosity of polymers has also been determined. The results showed the effectiveness of the synthetic strategy proposed; moreover, a dramatic reduction of the reaction time and an important improvement of the monomers yield using microwave irradiation have been demonstrated. The monomers, as well as the polymers, showed excellent thermal stability both in air and nitrogen. It was also shown that the introduction of sulphur in the polyurethane backbone was effective in delaying the onset of degradation as well as the degradation rate.