Jabbari H¹, M Gholamhosseini¹, M Naeemi², A Nasiri³

Phyton-International Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol.87, pp. 133-142, 2018, DOI:10.32604/phyton.2018.87.133

Abstract Two experiments were performed in 2011-2012 to investigate the response of three oilseed rape cultivars to drought stress, grown under two climate conditions in Iran (cold and hot climates). The experiments were conducted using a randomized complete-block design arranged in split-plot with three replicates. The irrigation treatments (FI: full irrigation; WIF: withholding irrigation at flowering stage, and WIS: withholding irrigation at the silique formation stage until physiological maturity) were allocated to main plots, whereas subplots consisted of the oilseed rape cultivars: early maturating (GKH2005), relatively late maturing (Opera) and late maturing (Okapi). Drought caused a… More >

Wang XG¹, Wuyunna^1*, CA Busso², YT Song¹, FJ Zhang¹, GW Huo¹

Phyton-International Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol.87, pp. 123-132, 2018, DOI:10.32604/phyton.2018.87.123

Abstract Chemical elements, such as carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), are major limiting nutrients in arid and semiarid grasslands and their stoichiometry (C:N:P) is a very important ratio to determine. In addition, it is critical to understand how plant stoichiometry responds to multiple environmental factors at the species level. In this study, we conducted a greenhouse experiment to investigate the effects of salt stress (4 g NaCl/kg soil), drought (35% of the soil water holding capacity) and N addition (10 g N/m²), as well as their interactions, on C, N and P concentrations and C:N:P… More >

Xiaojian Zhou^1,2, Hui Wang¹, Jun Zhang², Zhifeng Zheng¹, Guanben Du^1,2,*

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.1, pp. 68-74, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634150

Abstract Pineapple leaf nanofibers (PLNFs) extracted from pineapple leaf fiber were used for reinforcing biobased polyurethane foam (BPU). The dispersion performance of PLNF in the foaming mixture system, nanocomposite foaming behavior, cell morphology, cell size, density, compressive strength and dimensional stability were investigated. The viscosity of the mixtures increased with increasing the PLNF content. The addition of a tiny amount of PLNF did not influence the exothermic temperature of the foam system, but reduced the expansion and gel time of the nanocomposite foams. This reduced time was found to increase the production efficiency. Scanning electron More >

S. Gaidukovs^1,2,*, G. Gaidukova², A. Ivdre^1,3, U. Cabulis³

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.7, pp. 755-763, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2018.634112

Abstract This article deals with the study of the viscoelastic and thermal properties of polyurethane (PU) rigid foams from biobased and recycled components. Rapeseed oil (RO) and recycled poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) were used to synthesize PU polyols. Addition of adipic acid (ADA) to polyol resulted in improved thermal and viscoelastic properties of foam materials. ADA content was varied from 1 to 6 wt%. Results of the dynamic mechanical spectra indicate an increase of the storage modulus E′ and the loss modulus E″ in the whole temperature range for specimens with higher loading of ADA. In addition, More >

Kunal Wazarkar, Anagha Sabnis*

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.5, pp. 517-528, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634181

Abstract This research work discloses the preparation of polyurethane coatings from cardanol modified using thiolene chemistry, wherein unsaturated long alkyl chain of cardanol was successfully utilized via thiol-ene click reaction to synthesize polyol. For this purpose, cardanol and thioglycerol was reacted in the presence of Irgacure 184 (photoinitiator) and 1,8-Diazabicyclo[5.4.0]undec-7-ene (catalyst) and exposed to UV light for 12 h at 80 °C. One mole of thioglycerol was successfully added across the double bond of fatty chain of cardanol and confirmed by chemical and spectroscopic analysis. Further, the polyol thus prepared was cured with various polyisocyanates, viz., More >

Kahina Iggui^1,2,*,†, Mustapha Kaci², Nicolas Le Moigne¹, Anne Bergeret¹

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.3, pp. 288-298, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634184

Abstract The effects of accelerated photooxidation on the molecular weight and thermal and mechanical properties of Cast PHBV and PHBV/Cloisite 30B (3 wt%) bionanocomposites are investigated herein. Through size exclusion chromatography (SEC) analysis, a significant decrease in both weight and number average molecular weights was observed for all irradiated samples over time, resulting from the chain scission mechanism. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) data indicated a decrease in degree of crystallinity and melting temperature after UV exposure, with the appearance of double melting peaks related to the changes in the crystal structure of PHBV. Thermal stability, tensile More >

Zhedian Zhou¹, Tal Geva², Rahul H. Rathod², Alexander Tang², Chun Yang³, Kristen L. Billiar⁴, Dalin Tang^1,*,3, Pedro del Nido⁵

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 99-115, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.00558

Abstract Patients with repaired Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF), a congenital heart defect which includes a ventricular septal defect and severe right ventricular outflow obstruction, account for the majority of cases with late onset right ventricle (RV) failure. The current surgical approach, which includes pulmonary valve replacement/insertion (PVR), has yielded mixed results. A computational parametric study using 7 patient-specific RV/LV models based on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) data as "virtual surgery" was performed to investigate the impact of patch size, RV remodeling and tissue regeneration in PVR surgery design on RV cardiac functions. Two patch sizes, three… More >

Jiangguo Lin¹, Botao Xiao^1,2, Quhuan Li¹, Ying Fang¹, Jianhua Wu^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.1, pp. 37-49, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.015.037

Abstract The protein structure-function paradigm implies that the structure of a protein defines its function. Crystallization techniques such as X-ray, electron microscopy (EM) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have been applied to resolve the crystal structure of numerous proteins, provided beautiful and informative models of proteins. However, proteins are not intrinsically in static state but in dynamic state, which is lack in crystal models. The protein flexibility, a key mechanical property of proteins, plays important roles in various biological processes, such as ligand-receptor interaction, signaling transduction, substrate recognition and post-translational modifications. Advanced time-resolved crystallography has been More >

Suzhen Wang¹, Yanpiao Zhang¹, Lu Zhang¹, Ning Cao^{2, *}, Chaoyi Pang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.56, No.3, pp. 415-431, 2018, DOI:10.3970/cmc.2018.03716

Abstract Spark is a fast unified analysis engine for big data and machine learning, in which the memory is a crucial resource. Resilient Distribution Datasets (RDDs) are parallel data structures that allow users explicitly persist intermediate results in memory or on disk, and each one can be divided into several partitions. During task execution, Spark automatically monitors cache usage on each node. And when there is a RDD that needs to be stored in the cache where the space is insufficient, the system would drop out old data partitions in a least recently used (LRU) fashion… More >

Qidi Wu¹, Yibing Li¹, Yun Lin^1,*, Ruolin Zhou²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.56, No.1, pp. 91-105, 2018, DOI:10.3970/cmc.2018.02771

Abstract The conventional sparse representation-based image classification usually codes the samples independently, which will ignore the correlation information existed in the data. Hence, if we can explore the correlation information hidden in the data, the classification result will be improved significantly. To this end, in this paper, a novel weighted supervised spare coding method is proposed to address the image classification problem. The proposed method firstly explores the structural information sufficiently hidden in the data based on the low rank representation. And then, it introduced the extracted structural information to a novel weighted sparse representation model More >