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MOF-based mixed-matrix membranes (MMMs) prepared using standard routes often exhibit poor adhesion between polymers and MOFs. Herein, we report an unprecedented systematic exploration on polymer functionalization as the key to achieving defect-free MMMs. As a case study, we explored computationally MMMs based on the combination of the prototypical UiO-66(Zr) MOF with polymer of intrinsic porosity-1 (PIM-1) functionalized with various groups including amidoxime, tetrazole, and N-((2-ethanolamino)ethyl)carboxamide. Distinctly, the amidoxime-derivative PIM-1/UiO-66(Zr) MMM was predicted to express the desired enhanced MOF/polymer interfacial interactions and thus subsequently prepared and evaluated experimentally. Prominently, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy confirmed optimal adhesion between the two components in contrast to the nanometer-sized voids/defects shown by the pristine PIM-1/UiO-66(Zr) MMM. Notably, single-gas permeation measurements further corroborated the need of optimal MOF/polymer adhesion in order to effectively enable the MOF to play a role in the gas transport of the resulting MMM.

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries and capacitors are potentially competitive grid-scale energy storage devices because of their great features such as safety, environmental friendliness, and low cost. Herein, a completely new phenanthroline covalent organic framework (PA-COF) was synthesized and introduced in zinc-ion supercapatteries (ZISs) for the first time. Our as-synthesized PA-COF shows a high capacity of 247 mAh g–1 at a current density of 0.1 A g–1, with only 0.38% capacity decay per cycle during 10 000 cycles at a current density of 1.0 A g–1. Although covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are attracting great attention in many fields, our PA-COF has been synthesized using a new strategy involving the condensation reaction of hexaketocyclohexanone and 2,3,7,8-phenazinetetramine. Detailed mechanistic investigations, through experimental and theoretical methods, reveal that the phenanthroline functional groups in PA-COF are the active zinc ion storage sites. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the cointercalation of Zn2+ (60%) and H+ (40%) into PA-COF using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy and deuterium solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We believe that this study opens a new avenue for COF material design for zinc-ion storage in aqueous ZISs.

Magic-sized clusters represent materials with unique properties at the border between molecules and solids and provide important insights into the nanocrystal formation process. However, synthesis, doping, and especially structural characterization become more and more challenging with decreasing cluster size. Herein, we report the successful introduction of Co2+ ions into extremely small-sized CdSe clusters with the intention of using internal ligand field transitions to obtain structural insights. Despite the huge mismatch between the radii of Cd2+ and Co2+ ions (>21%), CdSe clusters can be effectively synthesized with a high Co2+ doping concentration of ∼10%. Optical spectroscopy and mass spectrometry suggest that one or two Co2+ ions are substitutionally embedded into (CdSe)13 clusters, which is known as one of the smallest CdSe clusters. Using magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy on the intrinsic ligand field transitions between the different 3d orbitals of the transition metal dopants, we demonstrate that the Co2+ dopants are embedded on pseudotetrahedral selenium coordinated sites despite the limited number of atoms in the clusters. A significant shortening of Co-Se bond lengths compared to bulk or nanocrystals is observed, which results in the metastability of Co2+ doping. Our results not only extend the doping chemistry of magic-sized semiconductor nanoclusters, but also suggest an effective method to characterize the local structure of these extremely small-sized clusters.

The building profile plays a very important role in controlling the direct penetration of daylight into the interior space of a building. The excess depth of external offsets developed by the building profile during the planning process and a window within such offsets are often not sufficient and, the occupants may have to suffer from the visual and thermal discomfort. For this research, the representative case ‘Type Design’ is a residential building from Nagpur region of Central India, has a hot and dry climate. This ‘Type Design’ and other residential buildings often have the major issues related to the performance of daylight and thermal comfort due to a lack of rules related to minimum and maximum size of the depth of offsets formed by the building profile in the Development Control Regulation. The windows inside of offsets are often insufficient to light the interior spaces. Similarly, adding balconies to a residential building profile acts as a type of offset where a window in such a wall may have similar such problems of penetration of daylight into the interior space. The aim of this research is to derive the applicable size of the depth of these offsets that are most importantly configured with the balcony of the livable area of a dwelling unit of the ‘Type Design’ to achieve the optimum daylight and thermal comfort. This research includes an evaluation of the selected parameters by comparative analysis of useful daylight illuminance (UDI), thermal comfort hours and orientation of the building with the help of dynamic simulation by using ‘Daysim’, a ‘radiance analysis tool’ and ‘temperature distribution tool’ from Ecotect software. The findings of this research include the applicable minimum depth of an offset shall be 0.65 m and the maximum shall be 1.40 m when it configured with balconies of livable areas of the residential building without compromising the comfort indoor temperature with respect to the orientation of residential building.

The dynamic behaviour of fiber reinforced composites plays a significant role on the performance of the laminated composite materials. In the present study the dynamic characteristics of cellulose Glass Epoxy Composites (CGEC) and Cellulose Kevlar epoxy composites (CKEC) were investigated and compared with pristine glass epoxy (GE) and Kevlar Epoxy (KE) composites using Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer (DMA). Cellulose particles were liquefied in organic solvents such as Acetone, Dimethylformamide (DMF), Ethanol and Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) to inspect the settling time and it was found that cellulose particles settled in short interval of time in solvents and hence NaOH was used to make solution as better dispersion with high settling time was observed with NaOH. The Glass and Carbon plies were coated with Cellulose using semi automated coating technique. The DMA test was conducted in accordance with ASTM 1867-13. The tests results revealed that initially all the samples exhibited high storage modulus but there was a small drop in storage modulus in the temperature range of 50-70˚C and considerable drop in storage modulus was observed in the temperature range of 70-90˚C and also it was found that composite laminates changed in state from solid to elastic beyond glass transition temperature (Tg)

The conformance testing problem for dynamical systems asks, given two dynamical models (e.g., as Simulink diagrams), whether their behaviors are "close" to each other. In the semi-formal approach to conformance testing, the two systems are simulated on a large set of tests, and a metric, defined on pairs of real-valued, real-timed trajectories, is used to determine a lower bound on the distance. We show how the Skorokhod metric on continuous dynamical systems can be used as the foundation for conformance testing of complex dynamical models. The Skorokhod metric allows for both state value mismatches and timing distortions, and is thus well suited for checking conformance between idealized models of dynamical systems and their implementations. We demonstrate the robustness of the metric by proving a transference theorem: trajectories close under the Skorokhod metric satisfy "close" logical properties in the timed linear time logic FLTL (Freeze LTL) containing a rich class of temporal and spatial constraint predicates involving time and value freeze variables. We provide efficient window-based streaming algorithms to compute the Skorokhod metric for both piecewise affine and piecewise constant traces, and use these as a basis for a conformance testing tool for Simulink. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in finding discrepant behaviors on a set of control system benchmarks, including an industrial challenge problem.

S.K. and V.S.K. contributed equally to this work. This work was financially supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under Award No. OSR-CRG2017-3379.

Three different models of tipping bucket rain gauges (TBRs), viz. HS-TB3 (Hydrological Services Pty Ltd.), ISCO-674 (Isco, Inc.) and TR-525 (Texas Electronics, Inc.), were calibrated in the lab to quantify measurement errors across a range of rainfall intensities (5 mm·h− 1 to 250 mm·h− 1) and three different volumetric settings. Instantaneous and cumulative values of simulated rainfall were recorded at 1, 2, 5, 10 and 20-min intervals. All three TBR models showed a substantial deviation (α = 0.05) in measurements from actual rainfall depths, with increasing underestimation errors at greater rainfall intensities. Simple linear regression equations were developed for each TBR to correct the TBR readings based on measured intensities (R2 > 0.98). Additionally, two dynamic calibration techniques, viz. quadratic model (R2 > 0.7) and T vs. 1/Q model (R2 = > 0.98), were tested and found to be useful in situations when the volumetric settings of TBRs are unknown. The correction models were successfully applied to correct field-collected rainfall data from respective TBR models. The calibration parameters of correction models were found to be highly sensitive to changes in volumetric calibration of TBRs. Overall, the HS-TB3 model (with a better protected tipping bucket mechanism, and consistent measurement errors across a range of rainfall intensities) was found to be the most reliable and consistent for rainfall measurements, followed by the ISCO-674 (with susceptibility to clogging and relatively smaller measurement errors across a range of rainfall intensities) and the TR-525 (with high susceptibility to clogging and frequent changes in volumetric calibration, and highly intensity-dependent measurement errors). The study demonstrated that corrections based on dynamic and volumetric calibration can only help minimize—but not completely eliminate the measurement errors. The findings from this study will be useful for correcting field data from TBRs; and may have major implications to field- and watershed-scale hydrologic studies.

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are models for sequential decision-making that inform decision making in many fields, including healthcare, manufacturing, and others. However, the optimal policy for an MDP may be sensitive to the reward and transition parameters which are often uncertain because parameters are typically estimated from data or rely on expert opinion. To address parameter uncertainty in MDPs, it has been proposed that multiple models of the parameters be incorporated into the solution process, but solving these problems can be computationally challenging. In this article, we propose a policy-based branch-and-bound approach that leverages the structure of these problems and numerically compare several important algorithmic designs. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods on test cases from the literature including randomly generated MDPs, a machine maintenance MDP, and an MDP for medical decision making.

Subsurface (tile) drainage is a necessary practice for economic crop production in humid, poorly drained regions of the world. Drainage water management (DWM), also known as controlled drainage, is among the suite of practices designed to mitigate water quality issues associated with subsurface drainage. Studies evaluating DWM generally include field experiments or simulation models to estimate water quality impacts. Combining field studies with model simulations can provide a more comprehensive assessment. Furthermore, using multiple approaches can provide a range of effectiveness rather than a single estimate, which can help define the uncertainty associated with DWM effectiveness. The goal of this study was to demonstrate the variability in estimated DWM effectiveness using 10 years of measured data and a calibrated hydrologic model. The study field, located in central Ohio, was under a free drainage (FD) mode from 2005 through 2008, and under DWM from 2009 through 2014. We used three approaches to compare discharge and nitrate concentrations and loads: before-and-after, paired-field, and DRAINMOD-NII simulated scenarios. Based on the three evaluation approaches, DWM increased surface runoff by 50% (∼13 mm), reduced annual drainage discharge between 8 and 23% (∼19 to 69 mm), annual mean NO3-N concentrations between −1 and 2.5%, and NO3-N loads between 9 and 25% (∼2.8 to 10.3 kg ha−1 yr−1). DWM also reduced the frequency of drainage discharge, and increased magnitudes of surface runoff, evapotranspiration, and seepage losses. The true magnitude of DWM effectiveness remains somewhat uncertain, especially in fields prone to seepage and runoff losses. However, using a combined assessment approach can help address the uncertainty associated with estimated DWM effectiveness at watershed and regional scales.

S.K. and J. J. contributed equally to this work. This work was financially supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under Award No. OSR-CRG2017-3379. The authors thank Mrinal K. Hota for his valuable help during the electrochemical experiments.

Cerebral malaria (CM) is a life-threatening clinical syndrome associated with 5-10% of malarial infection cases, most prevalent in Africa. About 23% of cerebral malaria cases are misdiagnosed as false positives, leading to inappropriate treatment and loss of lives. Malarial retinopathy (MR) is a retinal manifestation of CM that presents with a highly specific set of lesions. The detection of MR can reduce the false positive diagnosis of CM and alert physicians to investigate for other possible causes of the clinical symptoms and apply a more appropriate clinical intervention of underlying diseases. In order to facilitate easily accessible and affordable means of MR detection, we have developed an automated software system that detects the retinal lesions specific to MR, whitening and hemorrhages, using retinal color fundus images. The individual lesion detection algorithms were combined into an MR detection model using partial least square classifier. The classifier model was trained and tested on retinal image dataset obtained from 64 patients presenting with clinical signs of CM (44 with MR, 20 without MR). The MR detection model yielded specificity of 92% and sensitivity of 68%, with an AUC of 0.82. The proposed MR detection system demonstrates potential for broad screening of MR and can be integrated with a low-cost and portable retinal camera, to provide a bed-side tool for confirming CM diagnosis.

Embedded controllers for cyber-physical systems are often parameterized by look-up maps representing discretizations of continuous functions on metric spaces. For example, a non-linear control action may be represented as a table of pre-computed values, and the output action of the controller for a given input computed by using interpolation. For industrial-scale control systems, several man-hours of effort are spent in tuning the values within the look-up maps. %and sub-optimal performance is often associated with %inappropriate values in look-up maps. Suppose that during testing, the controller code is found to have sub-optimal performance. The parameter fault localization problem asks which parameter values in the code are potential causes of the sub-optimal behavior. We present a statistical parameter fault localization approach based on binary similarity coefficients and set spectra methods. Our approach extends previous work on (traditional) software fault localization to a quantitative setting where the parameters encode continuous functions over a metric space and the program is reactive. We have implemented our approach in a simulation workflow for control systems in Simulink. Given controller code with parameters (including look-up maps), our framework bootstraps the simulation workflow to return a ranked list of map entries which are deemed to have most impact on the performance. On a suite of industrial case studies with seeded errors, our tool was able to precisely identify the location of the errors.

The coefficient of restitution is widely used to characterize the energy dissipation rate in numerical simulations involving particle collisions. The challenge in measuring the coefficient of restitution is the strong scatter seen in experimental data that results from varying particle properties, i.e. shape and surface roughness, and from imperfections in the experimental technique. To minimize this scattering, a novel experimental setup was developed based on two synchronized high-speed cameras capturing the collision behaviour of a particle in three dimensions. To measure the wet restitution coefficient, which describes particle impact in the presence of a liquid layer in the contact region, additional accuracy can be achieved by measuring the liquid layer thickness by a high-precision optical confocal sensor. The coefficient of restitution was measured for glass particles with two different diameters, at different relative velocities and liquid layer thicknesses, with a focus on small collision velocities and thin liquid layers, using both the improved (three dimensional) and the conventional (two dimensional) approaches to quantify the improvement of the new method's accuracy.

A new measuring technique for studying heat transfer in gas–solid fluidized beds is proposed using infrared (IR) thermography. An infrared camera is coupled with a visual camera to simultaneously record images to give instantaneous thermal and hydrodynamic data of a pseudo 2D fluidized bed. The established techniques: digital image analysis (DIA) and particle image velocimetry (PIV) are combined with IR thermography to obtain combined quantitative (i.e. hydrodynamic and thermal) data sets. In this work, the calibration procedure and the methods that are used to combine the data obtained by the different techniques are discussed. The combined technique provides insightful information on the heat transfer in a fluidized bed for varying particle size, aspect ratio and background (or fluidization) gas velocity.

In this study a prismatic spouted bed was characterized experimentally and modelled by means of 3D CFD-DEM simulations. The main focus was on the investigation of the influence of the gas flow rate on the bed dynamics and spouting stability. Pressure drop time series obtained at different gas velocities were used for the identification of flow regimes by means of the frequency domain and of chaotic properties such as the correlation dimension and Kolmogorov entropy. The gas and particle dynamics were investigated through simulations of different operational regimes: the spouting onset, as well as stable and instable regimes. A 3-D bed behaviour, typical for slot-rectangular beds, was found. A good agreement between simulations and experiments in the particle flow patterns, bed expansion and dynamics of characteristic gas pressure fluctuations was achieved. The particle dynamics as a function of the gas velocity was investigated for the entire bed. For one of the stable regimes, the bed regions showing different particle dynamics (spout, fountain and annulus) were characterized in detail. A regime map showing the stable operational window in dependence on an inlet-to-bed size ratio and gas velocity is also provided.

We present Shrinking Horizon Model Predictive Control (SHMPC) for linear dynamical systems, under stochastic disturbances, with probabilistic constraints encoded as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications. The control objective is to minimize a cost function under the restriction that the given STL specification be satisfied with some minimum probability. The presented approach utilizes the knowledge of the disturbance distribution to synthesize the controller in SHMPC. We show that this synthesis problem can be (conservatively) transformed into sequential optimizations involving linear constraints. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach by evaluating its performance on room temperature control of a building.

We present Shrinking Horizon Model Predictive Control (SHMPC) for discrete-time linear systems with Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specification constraints under stochastic disturbances. The control objective is to maximize an optimization function under the restriction that a given STL specification is satisfied with high probability against stochastic uncertainties. We formulate a general solution, which does not require precise knowledge of the probability distributions of the (possibly dependent) stochastic disturbances; only the bounded support intervals of the density functions and moment intervals are used. For the specific case of disturbances that are independent and normally distributed, we optimize the controllers further by utilizing knowledge of the disturbance probability distributions. We show that in both cases, the control law can be obtained by solving optimization problems with linear constraints at each step. We experimentally demonstrate effectiveness of this approach by synthesizing a controller for an HVAC system., Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, Submitted to IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control. A limited subset of the results of this paper is accepted for presentation at American Control Conference 2017

Many problems in the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) reduce to the following optimization problem: given a CPS which transforms continuous-time input traces in R m to continuous-time output traces in R n and a cost function over output traces, find an input trace which minimizes the cost. Cyber-physical systems are typically so complex that solving the optimization problem analytically by examining the system dynamics is not feasible. We consider a black-box approach, where the optimization is performed by testing the input-output behaviour of the CPS. We provide a unified, tool-supported methodology for CPS testing and optimization. Our tool is the first CPS testing tool that supports Bayesian optimization. It is also the first to employ fully automated dimensionality reduction techniques. We demonstrate the potential of our tool by running experiments on multiple industrial case studies. We compare the effectiveness of Bayesian optimization to state-of-the-art testing techniques based on CMA-ES and Simulated Annealing.

There is an urgent need to develop metal-free, low cost, durable, and highly efficient catalysts for industrially important oxygen evolution reactions. Inspired by natural geodes, unique melamine nanogeodes are successfully synthesized using hydrothermal process. Sulfur-modified graphitic carbon nitride (S-modified g-CN x ) electrocatalysts are obtained by annealing these melamine nanogeodes in situ with sulfur. The sulfur modification in the g-CN x structure leads to excellent oxygen evolution reaction activity by lowering the overpotential. Compared with the previously reported nonmetallic systems and well-established metallic catalysts, the S-modified g-CN x nanostructures show superior performance, requiring a lower overpotential (290 mV) to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a Tafel slope of 120 mV dec−1 with long-term durability of 91.2% retention for 18 h. These inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and easy-to-synthesize catalysts with extraordinary performance will have a high impact in the field of oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalysis.

The creation of satisfying urban environments calls for the planners, designers and policy makers to understand the structures that cause residents to feel satisfied with their environments. The paper focuses on qualitative aspects of the childrens play spaces in the urban neighborhoods of Nagpur which were analysed with the background of their daily activity schedule survey, their assement of the existing play provisions and their aspirations from their neighborhood environment quality. Apart from these studies, the childrens and their parents perceptions of the quality of urban residential environments was also studied. The literature review gave an extract of relevant attributes of environmental quality (EQ) which became the theoritical basis for the work. The research generates an approach to assessing the child friendliness of our urban neighborhoods, which in certain ways is not even catering to the most fundamental right of the child to play; it also generates a matrix of children’s needs and parameters relevant to Indian context. A theoretical model of the residents satisfaction is also generated which forms the base for the qualitative questionnaire analysis in SPSS 20 with a set of dependent and independent variables which shows the correlation of the resident’s satisfaction with child friendliness of neighborhoods in the Indian context. The regression model and mathematical equation as an outcome of the qualitative analysis was also validated upon two other urban neighborhoods of the city of Nagpur. The research with all its tools used and the approach adopted can help in undertaking such child-centered researches in other cities of India which have their own unique issues and characteristics of urban growth.

We investigate quantifying the difference between two hybrid dynamical systems under noise and initial-state uncertainty. While the set of traces for these systems is infinite, it is possible to symbolically approximate trace sets using \emph{reachpipes} that compute upper and lower bounds on the evolution of the reachable sets with time. We estimate distances between corresponding sets of trajectories of two systems in terms of distances between the reachpipes. In case of two individual traces, the Skorokhod distance has been proposed as a robust and efficient notion of distance which captures both value and timing distortions. In this paper, we extend the computation of the Skorokhod distance to reachpipes, and provide algorithms to compute upper and lower bounds on the distance between two sets of traces. Our algorithms use new geometric insights that are used to compute the worst-case and best-case distances between two polyhedral sets evolving with time., Full version of paper accepted at HSCC 2016

Displaying information on transparent screens offers new opportunities in next-generation electronics, such as augmented reality devices, smart surgical glasses, and smart windows. Outstanding luminance and transparency are essential for such “see-through” displays to show vivid images over clear background view. Here transparent quantum dot light-emitting diodes (Tr-QLEDs) are reported with high brightness (bottom: ≈43 000 cd m−2, top: ≈30 000 cd m−2, total: ≈73 000 cd m−2 at 9 V), excellent transmittance (90% at 550 nm, 84% over visible range), and an ultrathin form factor (≈2.7 µm thickness). These superb characteristics are accomplished by novel electron transport layers (ETLs) and engineered quantum dots (QDs). The ETLs, ZnO nanoparticle assemblies with ultrathin alumina overlayers, dramatically enhance durability of active layers, and balance electron/hole injection into QDs, which prevents nonradiative recombination processes. In addition, the QD structure is further optimized to fully exploit the device architecture. The ultrathin nature of Tr-QLEDs allows their conformal integration on various shaped objects. Finally, the high resolution patterning of red, green, and blue Tr-QLEDs (513 pixels in.−1) shows the potential of the full-color transparent display.

The separation of the retinal vessel network into distinct arterial and venous vessel trees is of high interest. We propose an automated method for identification and separation of retinal vessel trees in a retinal color image by converting a vessel segmentation image into a vessel segment map and identifying the individual vessel trees by graph search. Orientation, width, and intensity of each vessel segment are utilized to find the optimal graph of vessel segments. The separated vessel trees are labeled as primary vessel or branches. We utilize the separated vessel trees for arterial-venous (AV) classification, based on the color properties of the vessels in each tree graph. We applied our approach to a dataset of 50 fundus images from 50 subjects. The proposed method resulted in an accuracy of 91.44% correctly classified vessel pixels as either artery or vein. The accuracy of correctly classified major vessel segments was 96.42%.

We study synthesis of controllers for real-time systems, where the objective is to stay in a given safe set. The problem is solved by obtaining winning strategies in the setting of concurrent two player timed automaton games with safety objectives. To prevent a player from winning by blocking time, we restrict each player to strategies that ensure that the player cannot be responsible for causing a Zeno run. We construct winning strategies for the controller which require access only to (1) the system clocks (thus, controllers which require their own internal infinitely precise clocks are not necessary), and (2) a logarithmic (in the number of clocks) number of memory bits (i.e. a linear number of memory states). Precisely, we show that for safety objectives, a memory of size (3+lg(|C|+1)) bits suffices for winning controller strategies, where C is the set of clocks of the timed automaton game, significantly improving the previous known exponential memory states bound. We also settle the open question of whether winning region-based strategies require memory for safety objectives by showing with an example the necessity of memory for such strategies to win for safety objectives. Finally, we show that the decision problem of determining if there exists a receptive player-1 winning strategy for safety objectives is EXPTIME-complete over timed automaton games.

We introduce quantatitive timed refinement metrics and quantitative timed simulation functions, incorporating zenoness checks, for timed systems. These functions assign positive real numbers between zero and infinity which quantify the timing mismatches between two timed systems, amongst non-zeno runs. We quantify timing mismatches in three ways: (1) the maximum timing mismatch that can arise, (2) the "steady-state" maximum timing mismatches, where initial transient timing mismatches are ignored; and (3) the (long-run) average timing mismatches amongst two systems. These three kinds of mismatches constitute three important types of timing differences. Our event times are the global times, measured from the start of the system execution, not just the time durations of individual steps. We present algorithms over timed automata for computing the three quantitative simulation functions to within any desired degree of accuracy. In order to compute the values of the quantitative simulation functions, we use a game theoretic formulation. We introduce two new kinds of objectives for two player games on finite state game graphs: (1) eventual debit-sum level objectives, and (2) average debit-sum level objectives. We present algorithms for computing the optimal values for these objectives for player 1, and then use these algorithms to compute the values of the quantitative timed simulation functions.

Laminates of fibre reinforced compositesare weak in through thicknessbut strong in fibre direction, this lead to development of hybridizationconcept in polymer composites. In this work a new method of disperssing cellulose micro particleson unidirectional (UD) Glass fibre epoxy composite using semi-automated draw down coating technique was adopted to enhance fracture toughness.Test results show that by adding cellulose increases the load carrying competency by 32% in mode-I as compare to Glass- Epoxy composite samples. Imrovement in interlaminar critical energy release rates (GiC and GnC) up to 55% in Mode -I and 19 %in Mode -II respectively was also observed. This enahancement in fracture toughnees is due to the amount of fiber bridging seen during crack initiation and propagation.

Nowadays composite materials exhibit sudden and catastrophic failure, which is undesirable for several applications. A new class of hybrid laminates was prepared using semi-automated draw down coating method with varying surface coating densities on unidirectional (UD) Glass fiber. Cellulose particles were coated on UD Glass fiber to investigate the effect of pseudo-ductility to improve mechanical behavior. Glass Cellulose epoxy hybrid laminate was fabricated with 5%, 7.5% and 10% of cellulose. Coating with 5% Cellulose produces a coating density of 319.08 g/m2 and exhibits the appreciable pseudo ductile tensile stress-strain behavior with a non-linear variation at second part followed by linear variation at initial region. The response of tensile stress had shown 27% improvement in tensile modulus (330MPa) as compared to neat glass epoxy laminate with 0.04% of pseudo ductile strain. Further, flexural strength and inter-laminar shear strength of each specimen configuration were calculated and found good improvement in flexural strength with cellulose coated samples as compared to Glass-Epoxy laminate.

The notion of delays arises naturally in many computational models, such as, in the design of circuits, control systems, and dataflow languages. In this work, we introduce automata with delay blocks (ADBs), extending finite state automata with variable time delay blocks, for deferring individual transition output symbols, in a discrete-time setting. We show that the ADB languages strictly subsume the regular languages, and are incomparable in expressive power to the context-free languages. We show that ADBs are closed under union, concatenation and Kleene star, and under intersection with regular languages, but not closed under complementation and intersection with other ADB languages. We show that the emptiness and the membership problems are decidable in polynomial time for ADBs, whereas the universality problem is undecidable. Finally we consider the linear-time model checking problem, i.e., whether the language of an ADB is contained in a regular language, and show that the model checking problem is PSPACE-complete.

We consider two-player games played in real time on game structures with clocks and parity objectives. The games are concurrent in that at each turn, both players independently propose a time delay and an action, and the action with the shorter delay is chosen. To prevent a player from winning by blocking time, we restrict each player to strategies that ensure that the player cannot be responsible for causing a zeno run. First, we present an efficient reduction of these games to turn-based (i.e., nonconcurrent) finite-state (i.e., untimed) parity games. The states of the resulting game are pairs of clock regions of the original game. Our reduction improves the best known complexity for solving timed parity games. Moreover, the rich class of algorithms for classical parity games can now be applied to timed parity games. Second, we consider two restricted classes of strategies for the player that represents the controller in a real-time synthesis problem, namely, limit-robust and bounded-robust strategies. Using a limit-robust strategy, the controller cannot choose an exact real-valued time delay but must allow for some nonzero jitter in each of its actions. If there is a given lower bound on the jitter, then the strategy is bounded-robust. We show that exact strategies are more powerful than limit-robust strategies, which are more powerful than bounded-robust strategies for any bound. For both kinds of robust strategies, we present efficient reductions to standard timed automaton games. These reductions provide algorithms for the synthesis of robust real-time controllers., Accepted in conference FORMATS 2008. Pages 22

We add freeze quantifiers to the game logic ATL in order to specify real-time objectives for games played on timed structures. We define the semantics of the resulting logic TATL by restricting the players to physically meaningful strategies, which do not prevent time from diverging. We show that TATL can be model checked over timed automaton games. We also specify timed optimization problems for physically meaningful strategies, and we show that for timed automaton games, the optimal answers can be approximated to within any degree of precision.