Search Results (281)

Sodium lignosulfonate (SLS) is an abundant and low-cost by-product generated during the sulfite pulping process, which is typically conducted at 120–180 °C depending on the pulping pH and base cation. Due to its richness in phenylpropane structural units, it holds significant potential as a bio-based resource for the synthesis of phenolic resins. However, its broad molar-mass distribution, limited flame retardance and low reactivity (particularly for SLS obtained from acidic solution process) limit how much of it can be built into phenolic resins. Here, SLS was activated through catalytic oxidation with air over a mixed manganese/cerium/cobalt acetate catalyst under alkaline conditions at 90 °C, then functionalized through an aqueous treatment-blending sequence with sodium hypophosphite, sodium pyroantimonate and triethylenetetramine and recovered as its aluminum salt, referred to as lignosulfonate–aluminum–amine (LAA) salt, to enhance its flame retardance. Gel permeation chromatography showed that scission and coupling run in parallel: the population at Mn = 745 g/mol fell from 98.46% to 95.67% of the peak area, while the high-molar-mass population rose from 1.54% to 4.33% and its Mn from 20,168 to 38,338 g/mol. For SLS oxidized with 0.5 wt% catalyst for 4 h, the onset of the first DSC endotherm shifted from 92.9 to 139.7 °C and the decomposition endotherm from about 230 to about 247 °C. Replacing 30 wt% of the phenol charge with LAA gave a foamed insulation layer of apparent density 43 kg/m³ and thermal conductivity 0.044 W/(m·K). In comparative handling observations, the modified foam appeared tougher than the unmodified foam; in a non-standardized open-flame screening test, it carbonized at the surface and self-extinguished within 10 s after flame removal. These foam coatings are much more suitable for a thick insulation layer foamed and cured in place rather than a thin film. The catalytic process performed at 90 °C using air as the O₂ provider avoids the hydrothermal activation normally conducted at 170–260 °C and provides a lower-temperature route to a multi-ligand-modified bio-based resource for phenolic insulation coatings with high bio-based content. Full article

Citrus processing by-products represent a sustainable source of bioactive plant complexes with potential applications in intestinal health. This study investigated the effects of standardized food-grade orange (OE) and lemon (LE) pomace extracts and their simulated gastrointestinal digestates (DIGs) on intestinal epithelial responses and selected probiotic strains. Caco-2 cells were used to assess cytotoxicity, epithelial wound closure, and, in differentiated monolayers challenged with lipopolysaccharide (LPS), extracellular levels of SOD2, catalase, Nrf2, IL-6, IL-8, TNF-α, and IL-1β. In parallel, the effects of OE, LE, and their corresponding DIGs on the growth and cell-surface hydrophobicity of four probiotic lactic acid bacteria were evaluated. OE and LE DIGs were non-cytotoxic and promoted epithelial wound closure in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. In LPS-challenged monolayers, both DIGs counteracted alterations in extracellular oxidative stress-related proteins and reduced pro-inflammatory cytokine levels without affecting cell viability. OE and LE also produced strain-dependent effects on probiotic growth and cell-surface hydrophobicity, which were modified by gastrointestinal digestion. Overall, these findings extend previous evidence on the intestinal bioactivity of Citrus pomace-derived plant complexes and support their further investigation as sustainable food-grade ingredients for gut health applications. Full article

Smart systems, the Industrial Internet of Things, and cyber-physical networks increasingly make decisions on the devices where data is generated, on nodes short of memory, compute, energy, and bandwidth, and exposed to real adversaries. Two research currents have grown to meet this: one makes artificial intelligence small and distributed (quantization, pruning, distillation, TinyML, federated and split learning), the other makes it safe (defenses against poisoning, backdoors, inversion, and evasion). This review argues that the two are entangled rather than parallel. Operators that shrink a model or scatter it across nodes also redraw its attack surface, each carrying a security dividend and a security liability, and because a node’s resources are finite and shared, model capacity and defense strength compete for one multi-dimensional budget. We formalize this as an efficiency-decentralization-security (EDS) design tension, explicitly a tension and not an impossibility, and show with published measurements that the coupling is non-monotonic. Around this thesis we build three artifacts, following an explicit design-science research process: an evidence-graded scoring matrix that separates each operator’s security dividend from its liability across seven axes and reports the direction of every effect separately from the confidence in the evidence behind it; a resource-aware threat model that judges attack and defense feasibility against a tiered device, gateway, network, and server budget with stated units; and a co-design framework whose decision workflow terminates in a defense-selection program and a verification step under adaptive attack. We work the framework through an industrial predictive-maintenance scenario with the resource arithmetic computed line by line, and evaluate it retrospectively against six published edge-AI systems. The result is a decision-support guide for building edge AI that is efficient, decentralized, and secure at once. Full article

Floating involute splines are widely used in aviation power transmission systems for torque transmission. In this study, a finite element model considering the dynamic deformation of a floating involute spline shaft was established to analyze the influence of shaft deformation on the misalignment state of the spline pair under various typical dynamic overload conditions. Furthermore, a contact simulation model of the floating spline pair with an actual tooth profile was developed to investigate the effect of deformation-induced misalignment on the contact pressure distribution over the tooth surface. In addition, the contact fatigue strength of the spline pair under dynamic loading conditions, including limit loads and ultimate loads, was evaluated. The results indicate that axial overload can induce axial displacement of the mating surfaces of the floating spline, thereby reducing the effective axial contact length. Radial overload and gyroscopic moments can lead to parallel misalignment and angular misalignment of the spline, respectively. Under combined overload conditions, angular misalignment is dominant under limit loads, whereas parallel misalignment becomes more pronounced under ultimate loads. Moreover, significant stress concentration and non-uniform load distribution are observed in the contact stress field under both limit and ultimate loading conditions. A quantitative analysis method for floating spline misalignment under the superposition of multiple maneuvering loads has been established. Full article

Drainage pipeline environments are typically characterized by darkness, high humidity, water accumulation, sediment deposition, reflective surfaces, and severe occlusions. These challenging conditions make conventional single-sensor inspection methods highly susceptible to environmental interference, resulting in false detections, missed defects, and insufficient reliability in defect confirmation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a vision–LiDAR–ultrasonic multi-sensor fusion method for defect confirmation in drainage pipeline inspection. The three sensing streams are processed in parallel rather than using visual detection as the exclusive trigger: the vision branch performs high-recall screening of apparent defects, the LiDAR branch continuously evaluates geometric anomalies in spatially indexed point-cloud segments, and the ultrasonic branch independently evaluates wall-thickness and echo anomalies along the valid probe-contact path. Candidate regions proposed by any branch are merged through timestamp-, odometry-, and coverage-aware spatial association, after which all available visual, geometric, and acoustic evidence at each union candidate is mapped to basic probability assignments and fused using reliability-constrained Dempster–Shafer evidence theory. The five-run evaluation on the fixed 105-group test subset (18 defects and 87 non-defects) gives the proposed method an Accuracy of 97.7 ± 0.5%, Precision of 93.4 ± 2.2%, Recall of 93.3 ± 2.5%, F1-score of 93.3 ± 1.5%, and false-alarm rate of 1.4 ± 0.5%. Under the same test protocol, the vision-only baseline gives an F1-score of 81.1 ± 2.4% and a false-alarm rate of 3.9 ± 0.6%. These results are calculated from the measured per-group predictions obtained in the experiments. Full article

Fruit drying transforms a living, water-rich tissue into a stable food through coupled changes in moisture distribution, structure, color, nutrients, and aroma. Although drying technologies and non-destructive sensing have advanced rapidly, these fields have largely developed in parallel, leaving the relationship between quality formation and measurable process signals insufficiently resolved. Here, physical and chemical changes during drying are connected to the signals that can support quality prediction. Current evidence shows that moisture loss and surface appearance are the most tractable real-time targets. Texture, bioactive retention, and flavor remain less accessible because their signals depend more strongly on internal structure, reference chemistry, or sensory response. Optical, magnetic-resonance, thermal, volatile-sensing, and electrical approaches consequently provide complementary rather than interchangeable views of the product. Multimodal models improve prediction when the added signals resolve different aspects of drying, but redundant inputs can increase complexity without improving transferability. Progress toward intelligent fruit drying therefore depends on matching sensors to the evolving product state, validating models beyond individual batches and instruments, and linking predictions to practical process decisions. This process–quality perspective provides a basis for moving from retrospective quality assessment toward reliable monitoring and controlled drying. Full article

Healthcare cleaning services are essential for infection prevention and control, but they also contribute to the carbon footprint of healthcare facilities through recurrent consumption of detergents, disinfectants, textiles, water, energy, and transport-related resources. This sequential, non-randomized, single-facility evaluation compared a traditional cleaning protocol with a Green protocol oriented to the Italian Minimum Environmental Criteria (Criteri Ambientali Minimi, CAM) for cleaning services at Domus Nova Hospital, a private accredited healthcare facility in Ravenna, Italy. A risk-based microbiological monitoring plan was applied to low-, medium-, and medium-high-risk areas, prioritizing high-touch surfaces and using RODAC contact plates and sterile swabs. In parallel, a comparative Life Cycle Assessment was conducted in accordance with ISO 14040, ISO 14044, and ISO 14067 principles, using Global Warming Potential over 100 years as the main impact indicator and the functional unit of one square meter of cleaned hospital surface maintained for one year. The two protocols were assessed during different monitoring periods of unequal duration; therefore, the study was interpreted as a whole-system operational comparison rather than as a randomized trial or formal equivalence/non-inferiority assessment. After cleaning, all 64 observations obtained under the Green protocol met the adopted surface-hygiene acceptability criteria, compared with 55 of 64 observations under the Traditional protocol. No predefined target pathogenic indicators were recovered from post-cleaning samples under the applied culture conditions. From a climate-impact perspective, the Green protocol reduced the carbon footprint by 39.0%, corresponding to an avoided impact of 450 g CO2e m⁻² year⁻¹ and 2663.5 kg CO2e year⁻¹ at the facility scale. The main climate-related benefits were associated with the combined effect of textile-system redesign, lower energy consumption, optimized product use, and reduced operator transport. These findings support the use of integrated surface-hygiene indicators and life-cycle metrics to inform healthcare cleaning procurement, while highlighting that the results concern culture-based surface contamination indicators from a single facility and do not directly assess infection transmission or patient outcomes. Full article

This study evaluated the effect of modifying pine and birch wood veneers with graphene oxide (GO) and the duration of UV irradiation on roughness parameters (Ra, Rz, Rq). Surface roughness was evaluated in directions both perpendicular and parallel to the grain after 0, 16, 32, and 48 h of photoageing exposure. The study showed that the measurement direction was the main factor determining the values of the roughness parameters. The interaction between impregnation and UV exposure time was significant, indicating that the effect of UV radiation depended on the impregnation used. The roughness parameters for birch were relatively stable. In contrast, for non-impregnated pine, UV radiation caused an increase in roughness, particularly in the direction perpendicular to the grain. Graphene oxide impregnation altered the ageing course of the pine surface, resulting in reduced roughness parameters at longer exposure times. Full article

The Post Office Horizon scandal represents one of the most severe miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history, rooted in the deployment of a defective IT system and the institutional suppression of evidence that exposed its unreliability. This paper provides a systematic analysis of the scandal through the combined lenses of cyber security, digital forensics, and IT governance, drawing directly on the Post Office Horizon Public Inquiry dataset—including witness testimony, technical documentation, audit records, and internal communications spanning more than two decades. While many of the technical and procedural failures discussed have been documented in prior scholarship, the paper’s principal contribution is the systematic mapping of those failures against recognised governance frameworks and the Legally Accountable Digital Systems (LADS) proposal this mapping motivates. We identify and analyse five interconnected failure categories: software defects and poor system design; deficient patch governance; inadequate audit logging and compromised evidence integrity; investigative failures and prosecutorial conflict of interest; and a systemic absence of technical expertise and independent oversight. Each category is mapped against nine governance framework documents, including ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, NIST SP 800-218 (SSDF), COBIT 2019, ISO/IEC 27035, NIST SP 800-61, and ISO/IEC 27036, with ISO/IEC 27037 applied additionally to evidential handling failures and NIST SP 800-92 to log management failures. A counterfactual analysis indicates that compliance with these frameworks could plausibly have detected, exposed, or substantially reduced most of the documented failures, though this claim is necessarily inferential and conditional on good-faith implementation. The scandal was therefore not caused primarily by the absence of adequate frameworks but by their wholesale non-application and by institutional incentives, examined later in the paper, that can undermine even fully compliant controls. However, the analysis also surfaces a governance gap that no existing framework addresses: the institutional failure mode in which the organisation responsible for system integrity holds active incentives to suppress evidence of failure rather than remediate it. To address this gap, we propose the concept of Legally Accountable Digital Systems (LADS)—a governance category for systems whose outputs are used as evidence in legal proceedings—and outline three supplementary pillars: technical independence, institutional independence, and forensic admissibility governance. We draw a parallel with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, arguing that the Horizon Inquiry dataset provides an equivalent empirical foundation for the statutory reform of digital evidence governance. Finally, we outline the substantial research opportunities the Inquiry dataset presents across IT systems analysis, cyber security, forensic accounting, social network analysis, and legal informatics—a resource comparable in significance to the Enron materials that shaped a generation of corporate governance reform. Full article

Landfill leachate circuits that operate without discharge, by recirculating aerated leachate onto the waste mass, are widespread in South-East Europe, yet their long-term behaviour is rarely documented with sample-level data. This study reports a six-year (2020–2025) seasonal monitoring campaign at a sanitary landfill in northern Serbia (alluvial aquifer of the Sava River, transboundary Danube basin) and re-examines it with a transparent multivariate protocol. Seventy-two leachate samples (collection well, aeration lagoon, sedimentation lagoon; n = 24 each, 30 parameters), 28 realised surface-water campaigns, and six years of groundwater summaries were evaluated by principal component analysis/factor analysis (PCA/FA, Varimax normalized), hierarchical cluster analysis, PERMANOVA, non-parametric paired tests and, for benchmarking, supervised machine learning. The pooled leachate model (n = 72; 21 variables; KMO = 0.700; Bartlett χ² = 956, p < 0.001) retained four factors by parallel analysis, explaining 61.6% of total variance; after rotation the factors accounted for 27.7%, 14.3%, 10.4%, and 9.3%. Factor 1 grouped organic load with particle-reactive metals (COD, BOD₅, Fe, Ni, Cr, As, Zn), Factor 2 a reduced sulfur–fluoride–BTEX signature, Factor 3 temperature-driven nitritation, and Factor 4 a nitrate–manganese redox contrast. Crucially, paired campaign-by-campaign comparison showed no removal of the dominant pollutants along the circuit. Median COD, BOD₅ and NH₄-N were not lower in the sedimentation lagoon than in the collection well, while pH rose from 8.08 to 8.75 (p < 0.001); only Cu, Pb, NO₃-N, and NO₂-N decreased significantly. The circuit therefore homogenises and concentrates dissolved load rather than removing it. Downstream surface water was significantly enriched in electrical conductivity (+110 µS/cm), total dissolved solids, NH₄-N, and NO₂-N relative to upstream (Wilcoxon, p < 0.05), and groundwater showed episodic conductivity up to 12,760 µS/cm and NH₄-N up to 102 mg/L. Cytotoxicity (MTT) confirmed biological relevance, with MRC-5 viability falling to 37% after 24 h exposure to 50 vol.% groundwater (Pw3) versus 60% in A549 cells. A random-forest classifier separated circuit units far better than PCA-based discrimination (76.4% versus 54.2% cross-validated accuracy) and distinguished the 2020–2021 pandemic period from 2022–2025 with 94.2% accuracy, a period effect also confirmed by PERMANOVA (R² = 7.2%, p < 0.001). The results indicate that closed-loop recirculation without an engineered discharge barrier transfers, rather than eliminates, contaminant load, and that after-care of such systems requires mass-balance monitoring and polishing treatment. Full article

Curves constructed directly on point clouds are a core primitive in reverse engineering, product design, and point-based CAD; many workflows additionally require the curve to lie in a plane—e.g., as a section profile, inspection path, or design reference. This paper presents an algorithmic framework for computing free and plane-constrained geodesic curves directly on oriented point clouds, without any intermediate surface or mesh reconstruction. A geodesic-curvature-minimizing solver that combines a Newton/conjugate-gradient flow with directed projection, elliptic Gabriel neighborhoods, and Taubin smoothing forms the backbone; the plane-constrained problem is then reduced to a one-parameter pencil of planes through the endpoint chord and solved per plane by alternating projection onto the cloud and the plane, with a projection-only pre-lift and a penalized length objective that rejects sections floating off the cloud; the returned section is the best found over a sampled pencil of candidate planes. The returned sections are attached to the cloud within a small fraction of the mean sampling distance. All algorithms are given in pseudocode with convergence criteria and complexity estimates. Two parallel realizations of the plane search are developed and measured: a multithreaded CPU backend (about 3× over the serial scan) and a WebGPU backend that evaluates the whole plane pencil in a single compute dispatch. Accuracy is validated against the analytic conic sections of a cone and against cylinder and sphere benchmarks whose optimal plane is known in closed form; robustness is assessed under noise, non-uniform sampling, missing regions, outliers, and perturbed normals, and against both a slab-projection baseline and the conventional reconstruct-then-slice route. Five applications—shoe-last reverse engineering with a C² surface reconstruction, anthropometric girth measurement, medical transverse sectioning, dimensional metrology on industrial mold scans, and cleaning-path planning for a robotic surface-treatment task—demonstrate the plane-constrained geodesic curves in practice. Full article

The microstructures and torsional fracture morphologies of S2 alloy steel screwdriver bits were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The bits were oil-quenched from 830 °C and 860 °C and subsequently tempered at 150 °C and 170 °C under three carbon potential levels (0.35, 0.40, and 0.45). In parallel, Deform-3D and Ansys Workbench were employed to simulate and compare the microstructure evolution during quenching, the residual stress field after quenching and tempering, and the stress distribution developed under torsional loading. The results reveal that the non-planar fracture and low qualification rate of the bits arise from two independent but synergistic mechanisms: (1) insufficient austenitizing at 830 °C fails to produce fully uniform austenite, resulting in non-uniform martensitic microstructure and inhomogeneous hardness distribution after quenching; (2) low furnace carbon potential (≤0.35) causes surface decarburization and the formation of massive ferrite at the near-surface region, which acts as preferential crack initiation sites. Furthermore, the transformation stress generated during quenching, the residual stress remaining after tempering, and the stress concentration at tooth edges under service loading jointly promote crack initiation and propagation. A uniform, high-hardness tempered martensite microstructure is obtained when the bits are austenitized at 860 °C with the carbon potential strictly maintained between 0.40 and 0.45, held for 60 min before oil quenching, and air-cooled after tempering at 170 °C. This optimized heat-treatment route eliminates surface decarburization, ensures microstructural homogeneity, reduces residual stress, and enables the bits to fail by planar fracture under torsional load with 100% qualification rate. Full article

To address the critical thermal challenges in high-performance computing and three-dimensional integrated circuits, the doping-tunable control of near-field thermal radiation using CMOS-compatible materials offers a highly promising non-contact cooling strategy. In this work, radiative heat transfer between two parallel heavily phosphorus-doped silicon plates separated by a vacuum gap is studied using fluctuational electrodynamics. A doping-dependent Drude model is employed to describe the dielectric response of doped silicon, including carrier concentration, ionization, and mobility effects. The influences of gap width and doping concentration on the total and spectral heat transfer are systematically analyzed. The results show that the heat transfer increases sharply as the gap decreases and is mainly governed by TM-polarized evanescent modes. Under symmetric doping, the spectral peak shifts to higher frequencies as the doping concentration increases from ${10}^{18}$ to ${10}^{21} {\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$, while the strongest transfer occurs at ${10}^{19} {\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$ because of favorable surface-plasmon-polariton coupling and impedance matching. These findings provide a theoretical foundation for chip-scale thermal management and on-chip radiative cooling in CMOS-compatible silicon platforms, although practical implementation would require dynamic tuning mechanisms and device-level engineering in future work. Full article

Crack-parallel stress modifies the near-tip stress state and may influence the development of the fracture process zone (FPZ) in rock. However, the spatial and temporal evolution of the FPZ during hydraulic fracturing cannot be reconstructed from the final fracture morphology alone. In this study, visual hydraulic-fracturing experiments were conducted on seven tight-sandstone specimens, with crack-parallel stress varied from 0 to 10 MPa while the other experimental conditions were kept consistent. Time-resolved full-field digital image correlation (DIC), combined with displacement–strain cross-calibration, was used to continuously track the initiation, expansion, localization, and coalescence of the FPZ, as well as the evolution of the traction-free crack tip and crack opening displacement (COD) on the specimen surface. The observations showed that the macroscopic traction-free crack did not form instantaneously but developed through progressive localization and coalescence of distributed damage within the FPZ. At the specimen level, the tests under nonzero crack-parallel stress exhibited shorter maximum FPZ lengths (14.7–30.6 mm) and lower critical COD values (10.5–27.5 μm) than the single 0 MPa reference specimen (80.9 mm and 38.2 μm, respectively). Given the limited replication, these differences are treated as descriptive specimen-level observations. The critical COD also varied non-monotonically across the tested stress levels. Three specimen-level FPZ–crack initiation patterns were identified: localized, matrix-nucleation, and diffuse-to-localized patterns. Their occurrence indicates that crack-parallel stress modifies near-tip confinement and crack-opening conditions, while specimen-scale heterogeneity and local defect distribution influence damage localization and the crack initiation site. These time-resolved observations reveal the spatiotemporal transition from distributed FPZ damage to traction-free crack formation, providing process-level information that cannot be obtained from the final fracture state alone. Full article

The decarbonization of industrial heating systems is one of the major challenges of the current energy transition. Gas-fired radiant tubes dominate industrial heating in large-span, high-bay buildings due to their high efficiency and low operating costs; however, the absence of equivalent electric solutions capable of replacing them represents a significant technological and scientific gap. This paper presents the design, construction, and experimental characterization of an innovative electric radiant tube prototype developed within the INFRAEL research project. The prototype consists of a 100 mm diameter steel tube housing nickel–chromium resistive elements in various configurations, powered from a 230 V AC supply. Thermal measurements were performed using Type K thermocouples distributed along the tube, a non-contact infrared thermometer, and thermovision imaging, complemented by MATLAB R2025bTrial-based interpolation for mapping the thermal field on a receiving plane placed 2 m below the tube. Experimental results show that at a total power of ~1.2 kW (two resistors in parallel), the tube surface reaches temperatures exceeding 250 °C, corresponding to medium-wave infrared emission (~4 μm). A single 630 W resistor yields surface temperatures of approximately 136–160 °C. The temperature distribution on the receiving plane is relatively uniform. The study identifies key optimization directions—resistor geometry, thermal insulation, and integration with photovoltaic sources—with the goal of developing a competitive, zero-carbon alternative to gas-fired radiant heating systems in industrial environments. Full article