Improvement of Ni-Cermet performance of protonic ceramic fuel cells by catalyst

Generally, the NiO composite anode becomes porous after reduction. To infiltrate additional catalysts such as Pd into the NiO-composite anode before reducing NiO to Ni, a porous NiO composite anode for protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) was fabricated in this study. The porous NiO composite was fabricated by adding graphite as a pore former along with CuO as a sintering agent. The addition of graphite increased the porosity of the NiO composite anode but resulted in poor sinterability, which was addressed by adding CuO as a sintering agent to the NiO composite anode. The Pd catalyst was added to the NiO-composite anode before reducing NiO to Ni. The composite anode for PCFC with three components, namely Ni, protonic ceramics, and a Pd catalyst, was obtained by reducing NiO to Ni during the measurement. The addition of the Pd catalyst improved the anode performance in methane fuel and hydrogen fuel by enhancing the catalytic activity for the electrochemical reaction on the surface.     

Hybrid Segmentation Scheme for Skin Features Extraction Using Dermoscopy Images

Objective and quantitative assessment of skin conditions is essential for cosmeceutical studies and research on skin aging and skin regeneration. Various handcraft-based image processing methods have been proposed to evaluate skin conditions objectively, but they have unavoidable disadvantages when used to analyze skin features accurately. This study proposes a hybrid segmentation scheme consisting of Deeplab v3+ with an Inception-ResNet-v2 backbone, LightGBM, and morphological processing (MP) to overcome the shortcomings of handcraft-based approaches. First, we apply Deeplab v3+ with an Inception-ResNet-v2 backbone for pixel segmentation of skin wrinkles and cells. Then, LightGBM and MP are used to enhance the pixel segmentation quality. Finally, we determine several skin features based on the results of wrinkle and cell segmentation. Our proposed segmentation scheme achieved a mean accuracy of 0.854, mean of intersection over union of 0.749, and mean boundary F1 score of 0.852, which achieved 1.1%, 6.7%, and 14.8% improvement over the panoptic-based semantic segmentation method, respectively.     

Electro-Photoluminescence Color Change for Deformable Visual Encryption

Although structural coloring and photoluminescence (PL) have been investigated for radiation-responsive color change, electroluminescence (EL) has not been used for the radiation-responsive system. An electro-photoluminescence (EPL) color change is presented here. The phosphors in the alternating current electroluminescence (ACEL) act simultaneously as electro-luminophores and photo-luminophores. The EPL chromaticity is systematically investigated depending on the ACEL frequency and UV intensity. It is found that the PL variation depending on UV intensity is the mechanism of the EPL color change. It is revealed that EL and PL can be controlled independently in the low electric field so that the EPL chromaticity can be adjusted by a linear combination of the EL color and the PL color. The EPL color-changing device is used as a deformable visual encryption system and a soft skin for a soft robotic rover, imitating the concealment and signaling functions in nature.     

Fretting cracking behavior of nub of last-stage blade for steam turbine

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - Nub-and-sleeve of last-stage blade for steam turbine is a part-span damper. The nub is vulnerable to fretting cracking since it is in contact with the...     

Assessment of two-parameter mixed models for large eddy simulations of transitional and turbulent flows

In the present study, improved two-parameter mixed models for large eddy simulations are proposed based on previous two-parameter mixed models of Salvetti and Banerjee [1] and Horiuti [2]. The subgrid-scale (SGS) stress in our models is decomposed into the modified Leonard stress, modified cross stress and modified SGS Reynolds stress terms. Although the modified Leonard stress term is explicitly calculated based on the scale-similarity, the modified cross stress term is built using an extension of the filtered Bardina model proposed by Horiuti [3] for better predictions of the interaction between resolved and unresolved scales (i.e., energy exchange). The modified SGS Reynolds stress is modeled by the dynamic Smagorinsky model or by a dynamic global model, leading to two unknown model coefficients for the modified cross stress and the modified SGS Reynolds stress terms. In order to demonstrate the reliability of the proposed SGS models, large eddy simulations of two types of flows (i.e., a fully developed turbulent channel flow and a transitional boundary layer flow) are performed. It is shown that the modified cross stress term makes an important contribution to the accurate predictions of such flows because the emergence of negative SGS dissipation (backward scatter) by the modified cross stress term decreases the excessive positive SGS dissipation (forward scatter). A direct comparison of the turbulent statistics with those from previous SGS models shows that the proposed SGS models result in better prediction performance both in transitional and turbulent flows.

     

A resilient buffer allocation scheme in active queue management: a stochastic cooperative game theoretic approach

During the last decade, a plentiful number of active queue management schemes have been proposed, but their main objectives are simply allocating the buffer resource to all flows evenly, or protecting responsive flows from being degraded by unresponsive flows. However, the sending rates of the responsive flows can be determined diversely, and not all unresponsive flows have aggressively high sending rates. Furthermore, it is rational to reserve a portion of the buffer resource for certain privileged traffic. Grounded by these evidences, in this paper, we present a resilient active queue management algorithm, named Prior‐Core‐based Buffer Allocation considering diverse congestion control algorithms, fair‐unresponsive flows, and some privileged traffic. Our approach is based on stochastic cooperative game theory, where the payoffs yielded by cooperation are described by random variables, and the core is defined only over the distribution of these random payoffs; the core in this situation is called the prior‐core. As a result, it is shown that our buffer allocation, yielded by the prior‐core, achieves completely fair allocation for those flows whose requirement does not exceed the fair‐share regardless of the responsiveness, whereas aggressive flows are restricted according to availability of the buffer; all these are verified through ns‐2 simulation experiments. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed deep learning platform for pedestrian detection on IT convergence environment

The Journal of Supercomputing - IT technology and traditional industries have been combined recently, resulting in IT convergence technology in various fields. Through convergence with the...     

Carburization of iron using CO−H<Subscript>2</Subscript> gas mixture

Iron carbides formed on the surface of iron and iron oxide samples at 640 °C in a gas mixture of CO?H₂ were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Mössbauer spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction patterns (XRD), and by measuring mass change. The Fe₃C amount of the samples has been quantitatively evaluated by the weight change during carburization. While Fe₂O₃ powder was mostly completed to Fe₃C in the early stage, within 5 min after reduction reactions, the conversion of Fe powder sample to Fe₃C (iron carbide) was almost finished after 10 min. The carburization rate of a Fe sheet was very slow and intermediate products (Fe₂C, Fe₅C₂) were observed. This phenomenon is largely due to the difficulty of carbon diffusion into its dense surface. It was found that the carburization rate was affected by change of surface conditions and surface area by reduction, degradation, and cracks at high temperature. This study should help provide a fundamental understanding of carburization in the field of iron-making and suggest a direction for its further development.     

Method of electrochemical etching of tungsten tips with controllable profiles

We demonstrate a new and simple process to fabricate tungsten tips with good control of the tip profile. In this process, we use a commercial function generator without any electronic cutoff circuit or complex mechanical setup. The tip length can be varied from 160 μm to 10 mm, corresponding to an aspect ratio of 1.6-100. The radius of curvature of the tip apex can be controlled to a size <10 nm. Surface roughness and the taper angle can be controlled independently. Through control of the etching parameters, the tip length, the radius of curvature, surface roughness, and the taper angle can be controlled to suit different requirements of various applications. The possible etching mechanisms are also discussed.     

1H-MRS of femoral red and yellow bone marrow fat composition and water content in healthy young men and women at 3 T

Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine - There is a discrepancy between studies suggesting that higher bone marrow fat saturation is associated with impaired health, and...