BEHAVIOUR OF HEMP AND SISAL FIBER REINFORCED POLYPROPYLENE COMPOSITES
The use of vegetal fibres in thermoplastic matrix is increasing mainly because of their opportunity to recycle the structures. An another advantage is to provide materials for developing countries were these fibers are abundant. Nowadays, a lot of studies are more focused on the fibers to understand their microstructure and to establish their mechanical properties [1,2]. One of the main results is to see that these properties exibit a large uncertainty. The main question is to know if this uncetainty propagates through the different scales upto the structures providing stochastic proporties at the macroscale. The goal of this work is to carry out several tensile tests on coupons to establish the uncertainty of the investigated materials taking into account the crosshead speed.
Quality of chemically modified hemp fibers.
Hemp fibers are very interesting natural material for textile and technical applications now. Applying hemp fibers to the apparel sector requires improved quality fibers. In this paper, hemp fibers were modified with sodium hydroxide solutions (5% and 18% w/v), at room and boiling temperature, for different periods of time, and both under tension and slack, in order to partially extract noncellulosic substances, and separate the fiber bundles. The quality of hemp fibers was characterised by determining their chemical composition, fineness, mechanical and sorption properties. The modified hemp fibers were finer, with lower content of lignin, increased flexibility, and in some cases tensile properties were improved. An original method for evaluation of tensile properties of hemp fibers was developed.
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.