Decay Rate Kinetics of Ozone Gas in Rice Grains

The present study was carried out to evaluate the effects of ozone on rice grains for the following three conditions: saturation time, decay rate, and half-life of ozone. Experiments were performed in different bed thicknesses (5 and 10 cm) and moisture content (11.4 and 14.2% wb) at atmospheric conditions. The lowest saturation time of ozone was 119 min, with the concentration of 516 ppm for rice grains ozonated at 5-cm bed thickness with 11.4% (wb) moisture content. The decay rate kinetics of ozone obtained were consistent with a first-order model. Regarding the half-life of ozone, the lowest value obtained was 6.78 min for rice grains ozonated at 10-cm bed thickness with 14.2% (wb) moisture content.     

Energy management for commercial servers

Servers: high-end, multiprocessor systems running commercial workloads, have typically included extensive cooling systems and resided in custom-built rooms for high-power delivery. Recently, as transistor density and demand for computing resources have rapidly increased, even these high-end systems face energy-use constraints. Commercial-server energy management now focuses on conserving power in the memory and microprocessor subsystems. Because their workloads are typically structured as multiple application programs, system-wide approaches are more applicable to multiprocessor environments in commercial servers than techniques that primarily apply to single-application environments, such as those based on compiler optimizations.     

Performance of cellular packet CDMA in an integrated voice/data network

This paper presents a simulation-based study of cellular packet CDMA systems operating in an integrated voice/data traffic scenario. Spread-spectrum CDMA provides a suitable framework for resource-shared packet transport capable of combining isochronous (voice, ISDN) and bursty data services. In this work, a general network model for cellular packet CDMA with mixed voice/data traffic is described and used to evaluate the capacity/performance impact of several key system parameters. First, the effect of spreading factor (N) and forward error correction (FEC) rate are studied, confirming earlier work indicating a weak dependence onN and a well-defined optimum code rate in the range of 0.5–0.7 (with BCH coding). Next, the effect of propagation loss coefficient () on network capacity is investigated over a range of possible assumptions for, including both constant and distance-dependent models. The results show that system capacity depends strongly on, varying by as much as a factor of 2 over the range of parameters considered. For a given distance-dependent assumption, performance results are also obtained for different cell sizes in order to understand the overall spatial reuse efficiency achievable in different cellular and microcellular scenarios. This is followed by an investigation of traffic source model effects: first the capacity improvement from voice activity detection VAD) is presented, showing the expected 21 gains. Results for varying proportions of voice and data traffic intensities indicate that the operating efficiency does not change significantly as the proportion of bursty data relative to voice is varied.     

Bacteria-Responsive Self-Assembly of Antimicrobial Peptide Nanonets for Trap-and-Kill of Antibiotic-Resistant Strains

Bacterial trapping using nanonets is a ubiquitous immune defense mechanism against infectious microbes. These nanonets can entrap microbial cells, effectively arresting their dissemination and rendering them more vulnerable to locally secreted microbicides. Inspired by this evolutionarily conserved anti-infective strategy, a series of 15 to 16 residue-long synthetic β-hairpin peptides is herein constructed with the ability to self-assemble into nanonets in response to the presence of bacteria, enabling spatiotemporal control over microbial killing. Using amyloid-specific K114 assay and confocal microscopy, the membrane components lipoteichoic acid and lipopolysaccharide are shown to play a major role in determining the amyloid-nucleating capacity as triggered by Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria respectively. These nanonets displayed both trapping and killing functionalities, hence offering a direct improvement from the trap-only biomimetics in literature. By substituting a single turn residue of the non-amyloidogenic BTT1 peptide, the nanonet-forming BTT1-3A analog is produced with comparable antimicrobial potency. With the same sequence manipulation approach, BTT2-4A analog modified from BTT2 peptide showed improved antimicrobial potency against colistin-resistant clinical isolates. The peptide nanonets also demonstrated robust stability against proteolytic degradation, and promising in vivo efficacy and biosafety profile. Overall, these bacteria-responsive peptide nanonets are promising clinical anti-infective alternatives for circumventing antibiotic resistance.     

Design of Online Vitals Monitor by Integrating Big Data and IoT

In this work, we design a multisensory IoT-based online vitals monitor (hereinafter referred to as the VITALS) to sense four bedside physiological parameters including pulse (heart) rate, body temperature, blood pressure, and peripheral oxygen saturation. Then, the proposed system constantly transfers these signals to the analytics system which aids in enhancing diagnostics at an earlier stage as well as monitoring after recovery. The core hardware of the VITALS includes commercial off-the-shelf sensing devices/medical equipment, a powerful microcontroller, a reliable wireless communication module, and a big data analytics system. It extracts human vital signs in a pre-programmed interval of 30 min and sends them to big data analytics system through the WiFi module for further analysis. We use Apache Kafka (to gather live data streams from connected sensors), Apache Spark (to categorize the patient vitals and notify the medical professionals while identifying abnormalities in physiological parameters), Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) (to archive data streams for further analysis and long-term storage), Spark SQL, Hive and Matplotlib (to support caregivers to access/visualize appropriate information from collected data streams and to explore/understand the health status of the individuals). In addition, we develop a mobile application to send statistical graphs to doctors and patients to enable them to monitor health conditions remotely. Our proposed system is implemented on three patients for 7 days to check the effectiveness of sensing, data processing, and data transmission mechanisms. To validate the system accuracy, we compare the data values collected from established sensors with the measured readouts using a commercial healthcare monitor, the Welch Allyn® Spot Check. Our proposed system provides improved care solutions, especially for those whose access to care services is limited.     

Organometallic L-Alanine Cadmium Iodide Crystals for Optical Device Fabrication

Single crystals of L-alanine cadmium iodide (LACI) were grown by the slow evaporation technique at room temperature. A single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SXRD) model was used to evaluate the crystal structure of the as-grown LACI crystal. The energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis and ultraviolet-visible-near infrared (UV-vis-NIR) transmittance studies were carried out, and the results reveal the presence of elements in the title compound. From the transmittance data, the optical bandgap as a function of photon energy was estimated, and the different optical constants were calculated. A fluorescence study was performed for the LACI crystal. Thermogravimetric and differential thermal analyses have also been studied to investigate the thermal property of the LACI crystal. The efficiency of the second harmonic generation (SHG) of the title crystal was investigated. The magnetic and electrical properties were estimated by the vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) analysis and impedance study, respectively.     

Robust observer‐based stabilization of Lipschitz nonlinear uncertain systems via LMIs ‐ discussions and new design procedure

This paper presents a new observer‐based controller design method for Lipschitz nonlinear systems with uncertain parameters and ‐bounded disturbance inputs. In the presence of uncertain parameters, the separation principle is not applicable even in the case of linear time invariant systems. A state of the art review for uncertain linear systems is first presented to describe the shortcomings and conservatism of existing results for this problem. Then a new LMI‐based design technique is developed to solve the problem for both linear and Lipschitz nonlinear systems. The features of the new technique are the use of a new matrix decomposition, the allowance of additional degrees of freedom in design of the observer and controller feedback gains, the elimination of any need to use equality constraints, the allowance of uncertainty in the input matrix and the encompassing of all previous results under one framework. An extensive portfolio of numerical case studies is presented to illustrate the superiority of the developed design technique to existing results for linear systems from literature and to illustrate application to Lipschitz nonlinear systems. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On spacing policies for highway vehicle automation

This paper develops a framework for the design and evaluation of spacing policies for adaptive cruise control. Spacing policies are evaluated from the point of view of string stability, traffic flow stability and traffic flow capacity. The standard constant time-gap spacing policy can guarantee string stability but is shown to suffer from poor traffic capacity and traffic flow instability. An "ideal" spacing policy is proposed that evolves naturally from the evaluation framework. The proposed spacing policy is a nonlinear function of speed. It provides string stability and traffic flow stability as well as a higher traffic flow capacity compared to the standard time-gap controller. An associated result proved in the paper is that traffic flow stability implies string stability for flow volumes up to a described maximum value.     

Multi-response optimization of Nd:YAG laser cutting parameters of Ti-6Al-4V superalloy sheet

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - This study proposes a multi-response optimization approach for the Nd: YAG laser cutting parameters of titanium superalloy sheet (Ti-6Al-4V). The...     

Porous PZT ceramics for receiving transducers

PZT-air (porous PZT) and PZT-polymer (polymer impregnated porous PZT) piezocomposites with varying porosity/polymer volume fractions have been manufactured. The composites were characterized in terms of hydrostatic charge (d/sub h/) and voltage (g/sub h/) coefficients, permittivity, hydrostatic figure of merit (d/sub h/.g/sub h/), and absolute sensitivity (M). With decreasing PZT ceramic volume, g/sub h/ increased, and d/sub h/.g/sub h/ had a broad maximum around 80 to 90% porosity/polymer content. The absolute sensitivity was also increased. In each case, PZT-air piezocomposites performed better than PZT-polymer piezocomposites. Hydrophones constructed from piezocomposites showed slightly lower measured receiving sensitivities than calculated values for piezocomposite materials, which was due to the loading effect of the cable and the low permittivity associated with the piezocomposites.