Influence of accelerated curing on the compressive strength of polymer-modified concrete

In recent building practice, rapid construction is one of the principal requisites. Furthermore, in designing concrete structures, compressive strength is the most significant of all parameters. While 3-d and 7-d compressive strength reflects the strengths at early phases, the ultimate strength is paramount. An effort has been made in this study to develop mathematical models for predicting compressive strength of concrete incorporating ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) at the later phases. Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) goodness-of-fit test was used to examine distribution of the data. The compressive strength of EVA-modified concrete was studied by incorporating various concentrations of EVA as an admixture and by testing at ages of 28, 56, 90, 120, 210, and 365 d. An accelerated compressive strength at 3.5 hours was considered as a reference strength on the basis of which all the specified strengths were predicted by means of linear regression fit. Based on the results of KS goodness-of-fit test, it was concluded that KS test statistics value (D) in each case was lower than the critical value 0.521 for a significance level of 0.05, which demonstrated that the data was normally distributed. Based on the results of compressive strength test, it was concluded that the strength of EVA-modified specimens increased at all ages and the optimum dosage of EVA was achieved at 16% concentration. Furthermore, it was concluded that predicted compressive strength values lies within a 6% difference from the actual strength values for all the mixes, which indicates the practicability of the regression equations. This research work may help in understanding the role of EVA as a viable material in polymer-based cement composites.     

A knowledge construction methodology to automate case-based learning using clinical documents

The case-based learning (CBL) approach has gained attention in medical education as an alternative to traditional learning methodology. However, current CBL systems do not facilitate and provide computer-based domain knowledge to medical students for solving real-world clinical cases during CBL practice. To automate CBL, clinical documents are beneficial for constructing domain knowledge. In the literature, most systems and methodologies require a knowledge engineer to construct machine-readable knowledge. Keeping in view these facts, we present a knowledge construction methodology (KCM-CD) to construct domain knowledge ontology (i.e., structured declarative knowledge) from unstructured text in a systematic way using artificial intelligence techniques, with minimum intervention from a knowledge engineer. To utilize the strength of humans and computers, and to realize the KCM-CD methodology, an interactive case-based learning system(iCBLS) was developed. Finally, the developed ontological model was evaluated to evaluate the quality of domain knowledge in terms of coherence measure. The results showed that the overall domain model has positive coherence values, indicating that all words in each branch of the domain ontology are correlated with each other and the quality of the developed model is acceptable.     

Electrical and magnetic properties of lithium borate glass containing iron

Journal of Materials Science Letters -     

Effect of the addition of Fe2O3 and heat treatment duration on the magnetic susceptibility of V2O5-P2O5-B2O3 glass system

The effect of the addition of Fe₂O₃ and heat treatment duration on the magnetic susceptibility of vanadium borophosphate glass were studied. The magnetic susceptibility of glass samples was found to increase with increasing Fe₂O₃ content, which may be explained by the formation of the FeO₆ group and the change of Fe²⁺ to Fe³⁺ which has higher paramagnetic properties. No detectable changes in the magnetic susceptibility with heat treatment for the samples containing 0.0, 0.5 and 1.0 mol% Fe₂O₃ was observed. The magnetic susceptibility for the heat treated samples containing 2.5, 5.0 and 7.5 mol% Fe₂O₃ decreases sharply with increasing duration of heat treatment up to 6 h and then remains almost constant. The sharp decrease in magnetic susceptibility of 2.5 mol% Fe₂O₃ is attributed to the increase in the number of ferrous ions. The sharp decrease for samples containing 5.0 and 7.5 mol% Fe₂O₃ is attributed to the increase in the number of Fe³⁺ in tetrahedral co-ordination. The rate of crystallization owing to the heat treatment was calculated and was found to increase with increasing iron oxide content. The geometry of crystallization was found to be in three-, two-and one-dimension(s) for samples containing 2.5, 5.0 and 7.5 mol% Fe₂O₃, respectively.     

An efficient numerical algorithm for the study of time fractional Tricomi and Keldysh type equations

Engineering with Computers - This work addresses a hybrid scheme for the numerical solutions of time fractional Tricomi and Keldysh type equations. In proposed methodology, Haar wavelets are used...     

Brain tumor classification from multi-modality MRI using wavelets and machine learning

In this paper, we propose a brain tumor segmentation and classification method for multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging scans. The data from multi-modal brain tumor segmentation challenge (MICCAI BraTS 2013) are utilized which are co-registered and skull-stripped, and the histogram matching is performed with a reference volume of high contrast. From the preprocessed images, the following features are then extracted: intensity, intensity differences, local neighborhood and wavelet texture. The integrated features are subsequently provided to the random forest classifier to predict five classes: background, necrosis, edema, enhancing tumor and non-enhancing tumor, and then these class labels are used to hierarchically compute three different regions (complete tumor, active tumor and enhancing tumor). We performed a leave-one-out cross-validation and achieved 88% Dice overlap for the complete tumor region, 75% for the core tumor region and 95% for enhancing tumor region, which is higher than the Dice overlap reported from MICCAI BraTS challenge.     

Interface engineering of short-period Ni/V multilayer X-ray mirrors

Low-energy ion-assisted magnetron sputter deposition has been used for the synthesis of highly reflective Ni/V multilayer soft X-ray mirrors. A low ion energy and a high ion-to-metal flux ratio were employed in order to stimulate the adatom mobility while minimizing ion-induced intermixing at the interfaces. An analytic model, based on the binary collision approximation, was used in order to gain insight into low-energy ion–surface interactions as a function of ion energy and ion-to-metal flux ratio. The model predicted a favorable region in the ion energy-flux parameter space where only surface atomic displacements are stimulated during growth of Ni and V for multilayers. For a series of Ni/V multilayer mirrors with multilayer periods about Λ = 1.2 nm, grown with a continuous ion assistance using energies in the range 7–36 eV and with ion-to-metal flux ratios Φ_Ni = 4.7 and Φ_V=20.9, specular and diffuse X-ray scattering analyses revealed that ion energies of 27–31 eV produced the best trade-off between reduced interfacial roughness and intermixing. However, it was also concluded that an interface mixing of about ± 1 atomic distance is unavoidable when a continuous flux of assisting ions is used.

To overcome this limitation, a sophisticated interface engineering technique was employed, where the first 0.3 nm of each layer was grown with a high-flux low-energy ion assistance and the remaining part was grown with a slightly higher ion energy. This method was demonstrated to largely eliminate the intermixing while maintaining the smoothening effect of ion assistance. Two Ni/V multilayer soft X-ray mirror structures, one with 500 periods designed for near-normal incidence and one 150 periods reflecting polarizer at the Brewster angle, were grown utilizing the interface engineering concept. Both the near-normal incidence reflectivity as well as polarizability were improved by a factor of 2 as compared to previously reported data for an X-ray energy of E = 511 eV.