A Degradable Inverse Vulcanized Copolymer as a Coating Material for Urea Produced under Optimized Conditions.

Global enhancement of crop yield is achieved using chemical fertilizers; however, agro-economy is affected due to poor nutrient uptake efficacy (NUE), which also causes environmental pollution. Encapsulating urea granules with hydrophobic material can be one solution. Additionally, the inverse vulcanized copolymer obtained from vegetable oils are a new class of green sulfur-enriched polymer with good biodegradation and better sulfur oxidation potential, but they possess unreacted sulfur, which leads to void generations. In this study, inverse vulcanization reaction conditions to minimize the amount of unreacted sulfur through response surface methodology (RSM) is optimized. The copolymer obtained was then characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). FTIR confirmed the formation of the copolymer, TGA demonstrated that copolymer is thermally stable up to 200 °C temperature, and DSC revealed the sulfur conversion of 82.2% (predicted conversion of 82.37%), which shows the goodness of the model developed to predict the sulfur conversion. To further maximize the sulfur conversion, 5 wt% diisopropenyl benzene (DIB) as a crosslinker is added during synthesis to produce terpolymer. The urea granule is then coated using terpolymer, and the nutrient release longevity of the coated urea is tested in distilled water, which revealed that only 65% of its total nutrient is released after 40 days of incubation. The soil burial of the terpolymer demonstrated its biodegradability, as 26% weight loss happens in 52 days of incubation. Thus, inverse vulcanized terpolymer as a coating material for urea demonstrated far better nutrient release longevity compared with other biopolymers with improved biodegradation; moreover, these copolymers also have potential to improve sulfur oxidation.

Observer-based robust control of one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems.

This paper presents an observer-based controller design for the class of nonlinear systems with time-varying parametric uncertainties and norm-bounded disturbances. The design methodology, for the less conservative one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems, involves astute utilization of Young's inequality and several matrix decompositions. A sufficient condition for simultaneous extraction of observer and controller gains is stipulated by a numerically tractable set of convex optimization conditions. The constraints are handled by a nonlinear iterative cone-complementary linearization method in obtaining gain matrices. Further, an observer-based control technique for one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems, robust against L2-norm-bounded perturbations, is contrived. The proposed methodology ensures robustness against parametric uncertainties and external perturbations. Simulation examples demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies are presented.