Electron transfer mediator PCN secreted by aerobic marine Pseudomonas aeruginosa accelerates microbiologically influenced corrosion of TC4 titanium alloy

Titanium alloys possess excellent corrosion resistance in marine environments,thus the possibility of their corrosion caused by marine microorganisms is neglected.In this work,microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) of TC4 titanium alloy caused by marine Pseudomonas aeruginosa was investigated through electrochemical and surface characterizations during a 14-day immersion test.Results revealed that the unstable surface caused by P.aeruginosa resulted in exposure of Ti2O3 and severe pitting corrosion with maximum pit depth of 5.7 μm after 14 days of incubation.Phenazine-1-carboxy[ate (PCN),secreted by P.aeruginosa,promoted extracellular electron transfer (EET) and accelerated corrosion.Deletion of the phzH gene,which codes for the enzyme that catalyzes PCN production,from the P.aeruginosa genome,resulted in significantly decreased rates of corrosion.These results demonstrate that TC4 titanium alloy is not immune to marine MIC,and EET contributes to the corrosion of TC4 titanium alloy caused by P.aeruginosa.     

Towards the Establishment of a Continuous Nondestructive Monitoring Technique for Fresh Concrete

Despite the fact that concrete is the most widely used construction material, conventional techniques for the estimation of the mechanical properties are only applicable to the hardened material. Moreover, concerning the fresh concrete examination, the already existing techniques provide only qualitative information, are not representative over the full time period of curing, setting and hardening or have limited accuracy and repeatability. In this study, the acoustic emission (AE) technique is employed in order to investigate the activity within fresh concrete as early as a few minutes after mixing. Several processes like settlement, segregation, formation and migration of air bubbles, as well as formation of hydrates produce AEs which so far have not been properly examined in literature. The first and foremost goal is to check the capacity of the new AE setup to record emissions earlier than previous studies (just after casting). The next goal concerns the possibility to characterize the different types of emissions relatively to their original source mechanism while the final goal would be the investigation of possible correlations between the early age acoustic activity and the final mechanical properties. For this reason, an AE setup is applied utilizing the favorable wave transmission properties of the metal casting molds, which act as a sort of waveguide. After validating its sensitivity, several laboratory tests are performed in concrete with varying water and aggregate content. It is found that the rate of AE activity follows trends similar to the typical hydration curves known from literature and is also indicative of the mix parameters. Finally, it should be mentioned that it is the first study that exploits the acoustic activity as early as the moment of mixing while apart from the number of emissions which is usually examined, the monitoring includes waveform parameters that show strong characterization potential.     

Mechanical properties,moisture absorption,and dyeability of polyamide 5,6 fibers

Polyamide 5,6 (PA56) and polyamide 6 (PA6) fibers were spun by melt spinning process and drawn by a thermal drawing in order to improve their mechanical properties. The effects of drawing conditions on mechanical properties, moisture absorption, and dyeing behavior were investigated by means of tensile testing measurements, moisture absorption test, as well as color strength measurements. It was found that the tenacity and Young’s modulus were significantly increased, while the elongation at break decreased as the draw ratio (DR) and temperature increased due to the increase in molecular orientation along the fiber axis and the crystallinity. PA56 fibers showed a little lower mechanical properties and much higher moisture regain than PA6 fibers at different DRs. This can be attributed to the amide group content in the polymer backbone, which yields higher moisture regain in PA56 fibers than PA6 fibers. The dyeing behaviors of PA56 fiber, in terms of dyebath exhaustion, color strength, and wash fastness are similar as those of PA6. Those results indicated that PA56 is a competitive novel fiber for textile material.     

Warranting Quality of Steel Bridge Coating

Civil infrastructure systems, particularly the highway and bridge systems, have become a focal point of attention both nationally and among researchers. Because many of the nation's bridges have been identified by the Federal Highway Administration as deficient, more attention needs to be given to the quality of bridge coatings, which act as inhibitors of bridge deterioration. This paper represents an extended study by the authors to establish and implement contract warranties for steel bridge coatings. First, the earlier activities in warranting the quality of bridge coatings are reviewed. Next, the writers focus on the basic categories of a steel bridge coating warranty, especially the warranty period and defects for which the contractor is held responsible. The paper further illustrates the functioning of a hybrid model for nondestructive quality assessment of steel bridge coatings. The model provides objective and quantitative analysis to improve the coating quality assessment process. This approach prevents potential conflicts that might arise between the state Department of Transportation and the bridge-coating contractors during the warranty implementation.     

手写笔应用前景推动内容创建

本文介绍了多种手写笔方案,并认为有源手写笔方法最为理想,因为最接近钢笔或铅笔使用的用户体验,还可以通过各种先进的手势与屏幕互动,比如放大、滚动、擦除,以及翻页。     

A novel CMOS charge-pump circuit with current mode control 110 mA at 2.7 V for telecommunication systems

This paper presents a novel organization of switch capacitor charge pump circuits based on voltage doubler structures. Each voltage doubler takes a dc input and outputs a doubled dc voltage. By cascading voltage doublers the output voltage increases up to 2 times. A two-phase voltage doubler and a multiphase voltage doubler structures are discussed and design considerations are presented. A simulator working in the Q-V realm was used for simplified circuit level simulation. In order to evaluate the power delivered by a charge pump, a resistive load is attached to the output of the charge pump and an equivalent capacitance is evaluated. To avoid the short circuit during switching, a clock pairs generator is used to achieve multi-phase non-overlapping clock pairs. This paper also identifies optimum loading conditions for different configurations of the charge pumps. The proposed charge-pump circuit is designed and simulated by spice with TSMC 0.35-μm CMOS technology and operates with a 2.7 V to 3.6 V supply voltage. It has an area of 0.4 mm2; it was designed with a frequency regulation of 1 MHz and internal current mode to reduce power consumption.     

Regularizing the effect of input noise injection in feedforward neural networks training

Injecting input noise during feedforward neural network (NN) training can improve generalization performance markedly. Reported works justify this fact arguing that noise injection is equivalent to a smoothing regularization with the input noise variance playing the role of the regularization parameter. The success of this approach depends on the appropriate choice of the input noise variance. However, it is often not known a priori if the degree of smoothness imposed on the FNN mapping is consistent with the unknown function to be approximated. In order to have a better control over this smoothing effect, a loss function putting in balance the smoothed fitting induced by the noise injection and the precision of approximation, is proposed. The second term, which aims at penalizing the undesirable effect of input noise injection or controlling the deviation of the random perturbed loss, was obtained by expressing a certain distance between the original loss function and its random perturbed version. In fact, this term can be derived in general for parametrical models that satisfy the Lipschitz property. An example is included to illustrate the effectiveness of learning with this proposed loss function when noise injection is used.     

Integration of ECT measurements with hydrodynamic modelling of conventional gas-solid bubbling bed

The electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) provides fast images of the cross-sectional concentration distribution of solid-gas flow in a confined volume. This information can be integrated with numerical simulation to estimate some of the most important hydrodynamic quantities in solid-gas flow, such as the particles velocity, interstitial gas velocity and particle-particle contact forces.In this study, using the two-fluid approach, momentum and energy balance equations, along with the appropriate boundary conditions, have been solved by integrating the numerical procedure with the experimental data of the fluidised bed pressure drop and pixel distribution of particle concentration available from the ECT measurements. Preliminary results of time-dependent hydrodynamic features of the bed are presented. These results were analysed and assessed using the available experimental literature data on conventional bubbling fluidised bed. In general, it is demonstrated that the integration of ECT measurements with numerical modelling offers a unique and promising technique for comprehensive non-intrusive information on gas-solid flow systems.     

Adsorption of Methyl Chloride on Molecular Sieves,Silica Gels,and Activated Carbon

Adsorption of methyl chloride (CH₃Cl or MeCl) on five different types of adsorbents was investigated experimentally at increasing pressures and room temperature. Prior to adsorption, all adsorbents were analyzed to assess their physical and chemical characteristics. The experimental data was then used to determine the adsorption isotherms, heats of adsorption, adsorption rates, and their respective theoretical models. The MeCl adsorption capacity was found to reasonably correlate with the adsorbent's surface area. The MeCl adsorption isotherm and adsorption rates were fitted for the first time to a Freundlich isotherm model and pseudo first-/second-order kinetic models, respectively. The range of heat of adsorption indicated a physisorption type of bonding; hence, the investigated adsorbents can potentially be regenerated for cyclic adsorption.     

Intelligent Model for Constructed Facilities Surface Assessment

Computerized intelligent systems can simulate human expertise as well as analyze and process vast amounts of data instantaneously. This paper presents a hybrid intelligent computerized model for constructed facilities surface quality assessment. The model uses computers to analyze digital images of the areas to be assessed to identify and measure defects. Moreover, neural networks are used to train the system to automate the process and replicate the experts' knowledge in identifying the defects. Most techniques, currently used in construction quality assessment, rely mostly on subjective criteria. The model applies digital image processing and neural network techniques for constructed facilities surface quality assessment to make the process objective, quantitative, consistent, and reliable. Highway steel bridge coating assessment was used to exemplify the generic model.