Increasing amounts of plastic waste in the
environment have become a problem of gigantic proportions.
The case of linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE)
is especially significant as it is widely used for packaging
and other applications. This synthetic polymer is normally
not biodegradable until it is degraded into low molecular
mass fragments that can be assimilated by microorganisms.
Blends of nonbiodegradable polymers and biodegradable
commercial polymers such as poly (vinyl alcohol)
(PVA) can facilitate a reduction in the volume of plastic
waste when they undergo partial degradation. Further, the
remaining fragments stand a greater chance of undergoing
biodegradation in a much shorter span of time. In this
investigation, LLDPE was blended with different proportions
of PVA (5–30%) in a torque rheometer. Mechanical,
thermal, and biodegradation studies were carried out on
the blends. The biodegradability of LLDPE/PVA blends
has been studied in two environments: (1) in a culture medium
containing Vibrio sp. and (2) soil environment, both
over a period of 15 weeks. Blends exposed to culture medium
degraded more than that exposed to soil environment.
Changes in various properties of LLDPE/PVA
blends before and after degradation were monitored using
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, a differential
scanning calorimeter (DSC) for crystallinity, and scanning
electron microscope (SEM) for surface morphology among
other things. Percentage crystallinity decreased as the PVA
content increased and biodegradation resulted in an
increase of crystallinity in LLDPE/PVA blends. The results
prove that partial biodegradation of the blends has
occurred holding promise for an eventual biodegradable
product
Description:
Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Vol. 124, 257–265 (2012)
Latex waste products contain rubber hydrocarbon of very high
quality, which is only lightly cross linked. Selected wastes such as thread waste
and glove waste were modified into processable materials by a novel economic
process and thermoplastic elastomers were prepared by blending these modified
waste materials with high density polyethylene in various proportions. The
mechanical properties as well as the rheological behaviour of these blends were
evaluated and compared with those of the natural rubber-high density
polyethylene blends.
Due to the emergence of multiple language support on
the Internet, machine translation (MT) technologies are
indispensable to the communication between speakers using
different languages. Recent research works have started to
explore tree-based machine translation systems with syntactical
and morphological information. This work aims the development
of Syntactic Based Machine Translation from English to
Malayalam by adding different case information during
translation. The system identifies general rules for various
sentence patterns in English. These rules are generated using the
Parts Of Speech (POS) tag information of the texts. Word
Reordering based on the Syntax Tree is used to improve the
translation quality of the system. The system used Bilingual
English –Malayalam dictionary for translation.
Description:
2012 International Conference on Data Science & Engineering (ICDSE)