Agricultural residues management is considered to be a vital strategy in order to accomplish resource conservation and to maintain the quality of the environment. In recent years, biofibers have attracted increasing interest due to their wide applications in food packaging and in the biomedical sciences. These eco-friendly polymers reduce rapidly and replace the usage of the petroleum-based synthetic polymers due to their safety, low production costs, and biodegradability. This paper reports an efficient method for the production of the cellulose acetate biofiber from flax fibers and cotton linters. The used process satisfied a yield of 81% and 54% for flax fibers and cotton linters respectively (based on the weight of the cellulosic residue used). The structure of the produced bioplastic was confirmed by X-ray diffraction, FT-IR and gel permeation chromatography. Moreover, this new biopolymer is biodegradable and is not affected by acid or salt treatment but is alkali labile. A comparison test showed that the produced cellulose acetate was affected by acids to a lesser extent than polypropylene and polystyrene. Therefore, this new cellulose acetate bioplastics can be applied in both the food industry and medicine

One of the factors that significantly affects the efficiency of oil and gas industry equipment is the scales formed in the pipelines. In this innovative, non-invasive system, the inclusion of a dual-energy gamma source and two sodium iodide detectors was investigated with the help of artificial intelligence to determine the flow pattern and volume percentage in a two-phase flow by considering the thickness of the scale in the tested pipeline. In the proposed structure, a dual-energy gamma source consisting of barium-133 and cesium-137 isotopes emit photons, one detector recorded transmitted photons and a second detector recorded the scattered photons. After simulating the mentioned structure using Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code, time characteristics named 4th order moment, kurtosis and skewness were extracted from the recorded data of both the transmission detector (TD) and scattering detector (SD). These characteristics were considered as inputs of the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. Two neural networks that were able to determine volume percentages with high accuracy, as well as classify all flow regimes correctly, were trained.

This paper proposes a barrier function adaptive non-singular terminal sliding mode controller for a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) quad-rotor in the existence of matched disturbances. For this reason, a linear sliding surface according to the tracking error dynamics is proposed for the convergence of tracking errors to origin. Afterward, a novel non-singular terminal sliding surface is suggested to guarantee the finite-time reachability of the linear sliding surface to origin. Moreover, for the rejection of the matched disturbances that enter into the quad-rotor system, an adaptive control law based on barrier function is recommended to approximate the matched disturbances at any moment. The barrier function-based control technique has two valuable properties. First, this function forces the error dynamics to converge on a region near the origin in a finite time. Secondly, it can remove the increase in the adaptive gain because of the matched disturbances. Lastly, simulation results are given to demonstrate the validation of this technique.

In this study, an adaptive nonsingular finite time control technique based on a barrier function terminal sliding mode controller is proposed for the robust stability of n^th-order nonlinear dynamic systems with external disturbances. The barrier function adaptive terminal sliding mode control makes the convergence of tracking errors to a region near zero in the finite time. Moreover, the suggested method does not need the information of upper bounds of perturbations which are commonly applied to the sliding mode control procedure. The Lyapunov stability analysis proves that the errors converge to the determined region. Last of all, simulations and experimental results on a complex new chaotic system with a high Kaplan–Yorke dimension are provided to confirm the efficacy of the planned method. The results demonstrate that the suggested controller has a stronger tracking than the adaptive controller and the results are satisfactory with the application of the controller based on chaotic synchronization on the chaotic system.