Background The silicon tetrahydride or silanes is an inorganic colourless gas with spontaneous combustion in air at room temperature [1–3]. Silane or functionalized silanes has widely industrial and medical applications, and works as coupling and impermeabilizing agent. Silane coupling agents have also been applied to bond glass and carbon fibers to polymer matrices, creating a strong adhesion ...

A recently proposed swarm intelligence technique for Fuzzy Cognitive Map learning is described. The technique employs the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm to minimize a proper objective function, whose global minimizers correspond to suboptimal weight matrices of the Fuzzy Cognitive Map. New instances of an industrial test problem are studied, justifying the usefulness of the technique as ...

The existence of specific expansive minerals in the clay soil related to the climatological conditions, seasonable variation of rainfall precipitation (wet and dry periods) and fluctuation of water table in Mediterranean countries, has resulted to induce unexpected shrinkage and swelling movements with all the unfavourable consequences. It was observed that light industrial structures and small...

Surface water systems such as rivers, lakes and ground water are affected by the natural processes such as erosion of minerals and dissolution of nutrients from the overlying rocks as well as anthropogenic influences from urban, industrial and agricultural activities. These degradation of surface water quality resulted in altered species composition and decreased overall health of aquatic commu...

Manganese minerals are widely distributed throughout the globe. The most important industrial uses of Mn are in the manufacture of steel, non-ferrous alloys, carbon-zinc batteries and some chemical reagents. Microbial recovery of manganese from low grade manganese ores using bioleaching was investigated in this paper. A bacterial strain, Staphylococcus epidermidis (MTCC-435) was collected from ...