Background and Objectives: Kefiran (Kef) is a water-soluble polysaccharide that can form transparent film however, it is brittle. Therefore, in order to improve the mechanical properties of kefiran film, a mixture with other polymers can be offered. The expansion of mixed systems can propose kefiran and polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) as a new composite film. Materials and Methods: Solutions of 20 gr...

The design of reliable micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) requires understanding of material properties of devices, especially for free-standing thin structures such as membranes, bridges, and cantilevers. The desired characterization system for obtaining mechanical properties of active materials often requires load control. However, there is no such device among the currently available to...

in recent years the aluminum matrix composites are gaining wide spread applications in automotive, aerospace, defense, sport and other industries. the reason for this is their exciting properties like high specific strength, stiffness, hardness, wear resistance, dimensional stability and designer flexibility. the present work reports on mechanical properties and microstructure analysis of al-si...

The paper shows that there is no finite set of forbidden minors which characterizes classes of independence models that are representable by Gaussian, discrete and binary distributions, respectively. In addition, a way to prove the nonexistence of a finite characterization for any other class of independence models is suggested. MSC 2000: 60A99, 68T30, 94A15

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In this paper, we obtain a forbidden-minor characterization of the class of binary gammoids M such that, for every pair of elements x, y of M, both the splitting matroid Mx,y and the element splitting matroid M ′ x,y are binary gammoids.

A connected edge-colored graphG is said to be rainbow-connected if any two distinct vertices of G are connected by a path whose edges have pairwise distinct colors, and the rainbow connection number rc(G) ofG is the minimum number of colors that can make G rainbow-connected. We consider families F of connected graphs for which there is a constant kF such that every connected F-free graph G with...

Categorical skew lattices are a variety of skew lattices on which the natural partial order is especially well behaved. While most skew lattices of interest are categorical, not all are. They are characterized by a countable family of forbidden subalgebras. We also consider the subclass of strictly categorical skew lattices.

We characterize graphs that have intersection representations using unit intervals with open or closed ends such that all ends of the intervals are integral in terms of infinitely many minimal forbidden induced subgraphs. Furthermore, we provide a quadratic-time algorithm that decides if a given interval graph admits such an intersection representation.

An undirected graph G = (V, E) is a probe split graph if its vertex set can be partitioned into two sets, N (nonprobes) and P (probes) where N is independent and there exists E′ ⊆ N ×N such that G′ = (V, E ∪ E′) is a split graph. Recently Chang et al. gave an O(V (V +E)) time recognition algorithm for probe split graphs. In this article we give O(V 2 +V E) time recognition algorithms and charac...