Application of Polymer Based Nanocomposites for Water Shutoff—A Review

One highly undesirable characteristic of mature assets that inhibits oil recovery is high water production. Polymer gel treatment is a popular conformance improvement technique applied in this regard due to its cost effectiveness and proved efficiency. Despite this popularity, optimum performance of polymer hydrogels in water shut off is inhibited by excessive aggregation, difficulty in controlling gelation, and their instability at high temperature and high salinity reservoir conditions. To address these shortcomings, research on the application of nanoparticles (NPs) in polymer hydrogels to manage thermal stability and salinity sensitivity has significantly increased in the recent past. By incorporating metal-based NPs, silica or graphene at nanoscale; the gel strength, storage modulus, salinity tolerance and thermal stability of commonly used polymers have been greatly enhanced. In this paper, the advances in experimental studies on polymer-based nanocomposites are discussed and field experiences from adoption of polymer composites reviewed.

Coping With Stigma and Destigmatizing Intervention Strategies: An Analytical Framework

This paper addresses the stigmatization process, outlining the meaning of the social stigma and the different types of stigmata, focusing further on the ways in which stigmatized people cope with stigma and on the main intervention strategies that can be used for destigmatization. A social stigma is an undesirable characteristic or an unfavourable element, along with any generalization or attribution of further characteristics that can lower or humiliate the individual. Not the characteristic itself, but a negative meaning in the social and cultural context, make the person concerned a stigma bearer. Stigmatization describes how actual or potential negative characteristics are ascribed to a person, and thus this person is assigned to a certain socially disregarded group. At the same time, stigmatization involves associating the person concerned with the prejudices and stereotypes connected to the assigned devaluating characteristic and the experience of varied forms of discrimination. To avoid the consequences of their social stigma, the people concerned to develop in diverse social situations in different ways to cope with their stigmatization. Among these, correction, avoidance or defensive attitude, inner distance, compensation, alternative relationships, external assignment, and hostile bravado are highlighted and discussed in the paper. Destigmatization, as a reverse process to stigmatization, can be targeted through various intervention strategies. The paper addresses the most frequently used destigmatizing intervention strategies, namely protest, education, and contact, emphasizing their strengths, especially of the last two, and arguing that, depending on the type of stigma and the social context, a mixture of intervention strategies is more effective, and therefore desirable.

Resistance Reconceptualized

In vernacular understandings or conversations about resistance as it occurs with students in public schools, it is frequently viewed as a negative action or set of behaviours to be changed or curtailed. This paper puts forward an argument that allows for the possibility of seeing moments of resistance as something to be recognized and celebrated with students. I do not suggest that resistance must always or only be viewed in this manner, but rather that it might be viewed thus, and thereby allow for multiple understandings of an action such as resistance. Beginning with my own hegemonic understanding of resistance as a necessarily bad/undesirable characteristic or behaviour, I then build on Foucault’s relational approach to understanding power (and its operations), leading then to a discussion of student engagement as also a relational process and one that has more than one possible form. By offering a possibility of understanding student engagement as a process that works both within and outside the structures that produce and maintain the White, middle class, heterosexual, abled, Christian, male child as the defacto subject of schooling, I build an argument that opens a more fluid conception of resistance than the necessarily negative action it is often perceived to be.

Drag Reduction Using Passive Methods on KIA PRIDE Car Model

An experimental study on a KIA pride (SAIPA 131) car model with scale of 1:14 in the wind tunnel was made beside the real car tests. Some of the modifications to passive flow control which are (vortex generator, spoiler and slice diffuser) were added to the car to reduce the drag force which its undesirable characteristic that increase fuel consumption and exhaust toxic gases. Two types of calculations were used to determine the drag force acting on the car body. Firstly, is by the integrating the values of pressure recorded along the pressure taps (for the wind tunnel and the real car testing), secondly, is by using one component balance device (wind tunnel testing) to measure the force. The results show that, the average drag estimated on the baseline car for different Reynolds numbers was (0.381) and the drag force was reduced by adding a spoiler and a slice diffuser to (4.45%, 1.5%) respectively, whereas the amount of drag reduction was (5.46%) when all drag reduction modifications were added together on the base car. No effect was noticed as vortex generators when added separately. The deviation in the drag coefficient from the real car testing was about (6.2%) and shows a very good agreements between the real car test and that of the wind tunnel test.

Short Segment Statewide Screening of Midblock Crashes in South Carolina

The AASHTO Highway Safety Manual (HSM) presents a variety of methods for quantitatively estimating crash frequency or severity at a variety of locations. The HSM predictive methods require the roadway network to be divided into homogeneous segments and intersections, or sites populated with a series of attributes. It recommends a minimum segment length of 0.1 mi. This research focuses on segment lengths of less than 0.1 mi for statewide screening of midblock crash locations to identify site specific locations with high crash incidence. The paper makes an argument that many midblock crashes can be concentrated along a very short segment because of an undesirable characteristic of a specific site. The use of longer segments may “hide” the severity of a single location if the rest of the segment has few or no additional crashes. In actuality, this research does not divide sections of roads into short segments. Instead, a short-window approach is used. The underlying road network is used to create a layer of segment polygons using GIS buffering. Crash data are then overlaid and aggregated to the segment polygons for further analysis. The paper makes a case for the use of short fixed segments to do statewide screening and how accurately geocoded crash data is key to its use. A comparison is made with a sliding-window approach (Network Kernel Density). The benefit of using fixed segments is that they are much less complex than using the sliding-window approach. Because the segmentation can be the same from year to year, direct comparisons can be made over time while spatial integrity is maintained.

Role of Fault Attributions and Other Factors in Adults’ Attitudes Toward Hypothetical Children With an Undesirable Characteristic

A total of 184 adults read descriptions of six hypothetical children with various undesirable characteristics (i.e., being extremely overweight, extremely aggressive, extremely shy, a poor student, a poor athlete, displaying symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Following each description, the participants were asked to rate how much they disagree or agree that the child, the child’s parents, and the child’s biological condition (i.e., “something wrong inside the child’s body or brain”) are at fault for the onset and the perpetuation of the undesirable characteristic. In addition, the participants were asked to rate their attitude toward each child using a 100-point “feeling thermometer.” Analyses of the participants’ various fault attribution ratings revealed that they tended to agree more strongly that a child’s parents and his/her biological condition are at fault for the onset and the perpetuation of the child’s undesirable characteristic than is the child him/herself. Despite the participants’ reluctance to blame a hypothetical child for his/her undesirable characteristic, regression analyses revealed that, in general, the more they blamed the child for the onset of his/her undesirable characteristic, the more negative their attitude was toward the child. However, the participants’ ratings of the extent to which the child’s parents or biological condition are at fault for the onset and the perpetuation of the child’s undesirable characteristic were not found to be associated with their attitude toward any of the children. Similarities and differences between the present findings and those reported in prior studies involving younger individuals are addressed.

Digital Watermarking for Multimedia Security Management

The availability of versatile multimedia processing software and the far-reaching coverage of the interconnected networks have facilitated flawless copying and manipulations of digital media. The ever-advancing storage and retrieval technologies also have smoothed the way for large-scale multimedia database applications. However, abuses of these facilities and technologies pose pressing threats to multimedia security management in general, and multimedia copyright protection and content integrity verification in particular. Although cryptography has a long history of application to information and multimedia security, the undesirable characteristic of providing no protection to the media once decrypted has limited the feasibility of its widespread use. For example, an adversary can obtain the decryption key by purchasing a legal copy of the media but then redistributing the decrypted copies of the original.

Tendon sheath analysis for estimation of distal end force and elongation for sensorless distal end

SUMMARYTendon sheath actuation is found in many applications, particularly in robotic hands and surgical robots. Due to the friction between the tendon and sheath, many undesirable characteristic such as backlash, hysteresis and non-linearity are present. It is desirable to know the end-effector force and elongation of the tendon to control the system effectively, but it is not always feasible to fix sensors at the end effector. A method to estimate the end-effector parameters using only a force and position sensor at the proximal site is given. An analytical study is presented and experiments are reported to support the result, showing a maximum full-scale error of approximately 7%. This result is achieved if the shape of the sheath remains the same and buckling is negligible. The results presented in this study could contribute towards haptic development in robotics surgery.

Effect of Processing Conditions on Curvature of Anode/Electrolyte SOFC Half-Cells Fabricated by Electrophoretic Deposition

Thin-electrolyte anode-supported solid oxide fuel cells (YSZ/NiO–YSZ) were fabricated for intermediate-temperature operation using electrophoretic deposition (EPD). During cosintering, the half-cells were observed to warp—an undesirable characteristic—due to mismatch in the sintering rates. The influence of the temperature for anode presintering—a key processing step—on the curvature of the half-cells induced by sintering was investigated over 700–1400°C. It was found that the maximum curvature occurred for an anode presintered at 900°C, while the minimum was observed at 1200°C. Anode presintering temperature was also found to affect the rate of electrophoretic deposition. At low presintering temperatures, the rate of EPD increased due to the enhancement in substrate (anode) electronic conductivity as a result of an increased percolating network of NiO. Further increases in presintering temperature, however, resulted in a decrease in the EPD rate due to the formation of a surface layer with poor electronic conductivity as a result of NiO diffusion from the NiO-YSZ anode to the sintering crucible.

Digital Watermarking for Multimedia Security Management

The availability of versatile multimedia processing software and the far-reaching coverage of the interconnected networks have facilitated flawless copying and manipulations of digital media. The ever-advancing storage and retrieval technologies also have smoothed the way for large-scale multimedia database applications. However, abuses of these facilities and technologies pose pressing threats to multimedia security management in general, and multimedia copyright protection and content integrity verification in particular. Although cryptography has a long history of application to information and multimedia security, the undesirable characteristic of providing no protection to the media once decrypted has limited the feasibility of its widespread use. For example, an adversary can obtain the decryption key by purchasing a legal copy of the media but then redistributing the decrypted copies of the original.