Relation between chemical structure of yellow disperse dyes and their lightfastness

Five yellow disperse dyes were synthesized and their dyeing, fastness and photodegradation behaviors were investigated. It was found that dyes derived from phenylindole and N-alkylaminobenzene showed dye uptake directly proportional to the dye concentration, but the build-up of dyes derived from carbazole and pyridone were not good. The wavelength at maximum absorption, molar extinction coefficient, and the tendency to the photodegradation were strongly dependent on the electron donating ability of the coupling component. The dye, whose coupling component was phenylindole, possessed the excellent dyeing properties and the high degree of lightfastness. UVA had an effect on the inhibition of the photodegradation especially for the easily photodegradable dyes.     

Conjoint analysis of high-performance fabrics for mountaineering jacket

Conjoint analysis is a method for measuring and modeling consumer preferences for multiattribute alternatives. The purpose of this research was to determine the preferred high-performance fabrics for a mountaineering jacket to identify those fabric attributes best suited to the consumer’s needs. A conjoint analysis was conducted using 120 samples taken from mountaineering club members including university students and amateur hikers, who ranked their preferences in the selection of a hypothetical jacket based on the profiles derived from an orthogonal design. Our results show that the water/windproof attribute was the most important in choosing a hypothetical jacket (27.6 %), followed by price (24.9 %), breathability (24.8 %), durability (18.1 %), and weight (4.6 %).     

Structure-property relationship and shape memory effect of polyurethane copolymer cross-linked with pentaerythritol

Polyurethane block copolymers chemically cross-linked by pentaerythritol, a four-way cross-linker, are tested for the shape memory effect. One of the copolymers shows higher shape recovery than any other shape memory copolymer synthesized by us so far. The copolymer maintains a surprising 94 % shape recovery after the third cyclic test. The four-way cross-linking by pentaerythritol and interaction between hard segments are mainly responsible for the very high shape recovery. Tensile mechanical properties also significantly improve by cross-linking. Glass transition temperature (T _g ) slightly increases with cross-linking content. Other characterization such molecular weight, IR, and X-ray diffraction is also carried out to understand the arrangement of copolymer chains.     

A new color index for vegetation segmentation and classification

Color vegetation indices enable various precision agriculture applications by transforming a 3D-color image into its 1D-grayscale counterpart, such that the color of vegetation pixels can be accentuated, while those of nonvegetation pixels are attenuated. The quality of the transformation is essential to the outcomes of computational analyses to follow. The objective of this article is to propose a new vegetation index, the Elliptical Color Index (ECI), which leverages the quadratic discriminant analysis of 3D-color images along a normalized red (r)—green (g) plane. The proposed index is defined as an ellipse function of r and g variables with a shape parameter. For comparison, the ECI’s performance was evaluated along with six other indices, by using 240 color images as a test sample captured from four vegetation species under different illumination and background conditions, together with the corresponding ground-truth patterns. For comparative analysis, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and the precision–recall (PR) curves helped quantify the overall performance of vegetation segmentation across all of the vegetation indices evaluated. For a practical appraisal of vegetation segmentation outcomes, this paper applied Gaussian filtering, and then the thresholding method of Otsu, to the grayscale images transformed by each of the indices. Overall, the test results confirmed that ECI outperforms the other indices, in terms of the area under the curves of ROC and PR, as well as other performance metrics, including total error, precision, and F-score.

     

Application of microbially induced calcite precipitation to prevent soil loss by rainfall: effect of particle size and organic matter content

Journal of Soils and Sediments - Soil loss by rainfall is a serious problem in civil and environmental engineering. In this study, microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) was applied to...     

Electrokinetic remediation of heavy metal-contaminated soils: performance comparison between one- and two-dimensional electrode configurations

Journal of Soils and Sediments - Electrokinetic (EK) soil remediation is significantly affected by the electrode configurations. Therefore, this study was conducted to compare the performance of...     

Fluorescence and NIR spectroscopic study on the water interaction in polycarbonate film

Water interactions in polycarbonate films have been studied using fluorescence and NIR Fourier transform spectroscopy. During water sorption process, the fluorescence emission spectra showed sensitive changes with the peak at 332 nm red shifted by 18 nm with water sorption. This red-shifted peak could be due to phenyl-2-phenoxybezoate, which is one of two major thermal degradation products in polycarbonate. In the spectra of phenyl-2-phenoxybenzoate in dimethyl formamide solution, a progressive red shift was also observed with the water addition. By using the NIR spectra, hydrogen-bonding interactions of the sorbed water with polycarbonate were investigated. It was found that water can be analyzed as free water S₀ or single hydrogen bonded water, S₁ while double hydrogen bonded water was negligible. During water immersion, most water species which are present as S₀ species decrease slightly, with a small increase in S₁ species. During desorption, S₀ species decrease sharply, while S1 species is reduced gradually. Two examples of S₁ structure in water-sorbed polycarbonate are proposed.     

Effect of glycerol cross-linking and PDI on the shape memory effect and mechanical properties of polyurethane

A series of shape memory polyurethane (PU) copolymers synthesized from 1,4-phenyldiisocyanate (PDI), poly(tetramethyleneglycol) (PTMG), 1,4-butanediol (BD) as a chain extender, and glycerol as a cross-linking agent were tested for the mechanical properties and the shape memory effect at the temperature 20 °C above melting temperature (T _m), and were compared with other PUs synthesized from 4,4′-methylene-bis-phenyldiisocyanate (MDI), PTMG, and BD. Mechanical properties and shape memory effect were improved substantially by adopting both PDI and glycerol. Interestingly, enthalpy of melting and T _m were not affected by the glycerol content. Vibration and shock absorption ability was investigated by measuring both loss tan δ and storage modulus with dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA).     

Evaluation of water holding capacity and breadmaking properties for frozen dough containing ice structuring proteins from winter wheat

The effects of ice structuring proteins (ISPs) from white wheat and storage conditions on the water holding capacity (WHC) and breadmaking properties of frozen dough were investigated. The WHC of frozen dough was measured by centrifugation and the breadmaking properties were assessed as proofing time and bread specific volume. It was found that the prolonged frozen storage and freeze–thaw cycles decreased the WHC and breadmaking properties of dough. ISPs were highly effective in increasing the WHC of frozen dough and improving the breadmaking properties. There was a strong correlation between WHC and breadmaking properties (proofing time and bread specific volume) of frozen dough.     

Copper metallization of poly(ethylene terephthalate) fabrics via intermediate polyaniline layers

Poly(ethylene terephthalate) fabrics were metallized through electroless plating of copper. The copper plating was performed on palladium-decorated polyaniline surfaces, and polyaniline was present as an intermediate layer on fabrics to facilitate palladium formation. Different oxidation states of polyaniline were tested in their efficacy in Pd (II) reduction and subsequent Cu plating. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy was used to monitor the surface changes along the metallization procedure, and surface resistance was measure to probe the electrical properties of the metallized fabrics.