Properties of modified polyacrylonitrile membranes prepared by copolymerization with hydrophilic monomers for water–ethanol mixture separation

A new kind of terpolymer membrane was employed to separate a permselective water–alcohol mixture. This membrane was prepared via the copolymerization of acrylonitrile, sodium salt styrene sulfonic acid (SStSA), and hydroxyethyl methacrylate in dimethylsulfoxide with azobisisobutyronitrile as an initiator. The reaction mechanism, resultant structure, and polymer composition were confirmed by IR and elemental analysis. The effects of the feed composition on the polymer composition, mechanical properties, thermal properties, and degree of swelling were investigated. It was found that water permeated through the membrane preferentially in a water/alcohol system. The flux increased with the increase of SStSA, but the separation factor decreased drastically with higher SStSA. For a 50 wt % water–ethanol mixture, a flux of 0.65 kg/m² h and a separation factor of 212 were obtained at 30°C when the membrane containing the highest SStSA content was used. The capacities of the metal ions absorbed by the membranes were investigated in the study. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 90: 244–250, 2003     

Annular ring slot antenna design with reconfigurable polarization

A microstrip‐fed conventional annular ring slot (ARS) antenna with linear polarization (LP) is initially studied. To generate two orthogonal degenerate modes for circular polarization (CP) radiations, two identical meandering perturbation slots (MPS) are symmetrically loaded into the ARS. By further incorporating a PIN diode switch across each MPS, the proposed antenna can switch between left‐hand CP (LHCP), right‐hand CP (RHCP), and LP. All three polarizations have shown good impedance bandwidth and broad CP bandwidth that can satisfy the wireless local area network (WLAN) 2.4‐GHz operating band (2400–2480 MHz). Furthermore, desirable gains of 1.8–2.0 dBi and 2.40–2.84 dBic are also exhibited at LP and LHCP/RHCP, respectively. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 26:110–120, 2016.     

A sensor-based feet motion recognition of graphical user interface controls

Motion sensing has now become one of the crucial parts of modern life. The tech products for entertainment create huge competition in the modern market, with the front runners such as game and handset manufacturers. Users can use their own bodies to control the systems without Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) and Graph User Interfaces (GUIs). With many benefits, the technologies of NUI is getting more and more important, which also are usually accompanied by the sensor developments. Hence, system designers uses the sensors on the embedded platforms used to develop the system devices for different body movement control interfaces, such as using the gravitational sensor to control the systems or using touchscreen detection. However most of the body movement is restricted to the hand portion for the system platform, making it not as dynamic as the traditional monitor consoles. Thus, this restriction decreases the multitude and availability of controlling modes in system devices. In this study, a sensor-based gait recognition was proposed, in order to provide a novel natural user interface for control systems except the operating modes of gesture.     

PREACO: A fast ant colony optimization for codebook generation

This paper presents an effective and efficient method for speeding up ant colony optimization (ACO) in solving the codebook generation problem. The proposed method is inspired by the fact that many computations during the convergence process of ant-based algorithms are essentially redundant and thus can be eliminated to boost their convergence speed, especially for large and complex problems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we compare it with several state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the computation time of ACO-based algorithms evaluated in this paper while at the same time providing results that match or outperform those ACO by itself can provide.     

3D strain mapping in rocks using digital volumetric speckle photography technique

Speckle photography technique is a versatile displacement/deformation mapping technique that can be applied to almost any material. It has its genesis in the laser speckle interferometry technique whereby the natural speckles created by illuminating an optically rough surface using a coherent laser beam are used as displacement gauging elements. It evolves into the white light speckle photography technique whereby a random pattern of any type is used as a displacement measurement transducer. With the advent of digital cameras and ubiquitous usage of computers, the digital version of the technique is developed. Up to now, the technique is essentially limited to 2D applications. Recently, we extended the technique into the 3D domain by using the volumetric imaging capabilities of CT or MRI. In this paper, we apply this technique to measuring the internal deformation of rocks. It so happens that certain rocks have natural density variation at various places such that when imaged by CT these impurities can be treated as 3D speckles. The elements of volumetric speckle photography technique are as follows. A reference volumetric image of the rock is recorded by a micro-CT scan and stored as a reference. Under load, the deformed CT image of the rock is also recorded. Both volume images are divided into subsets of certain voxel arrays. Each corresponding pair of the subsets is “compared” via a two-step 3D Fourier transform analysis. The result is a 3D map of displacement vectors representing the collective displacement experienced by all the speckles within the subset of voxels. The strain distribution of the entire rock specimen can then be calculated using appropriate displacement strain relations. The application of this technique to strain mapping of red sandstone and argillite rocks is presented.     

Non-Contact Physiological Measurement System for Wearing Masks During the Epidemic

Physiological signals indicate a person’s physical and mental state at any given time. Accordingly, many studies extract physiological signals from the human body with non-contact methods, and most of them require facial feature points. However, under COVID-19, wearing a mask has become a must in many places, so how non-contact physiological information measurements can still be performed correctly even when a mask covers the facial information has become a focus of research. In this study, RGB and thermal infrared cameras were used to execute non-contact physiological information measurement systems for heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and forehead temperature for people wearing masks due to the pandemic. Using the green (G) minus red (R) signal in the RGB image, the region of interest (ROI) is established in the forehead and nose bridge regions. The photoplethysmography (PPG) waveforms of the two regions are obtained after the acquired PPG signal is subjected to the optical flow method, baseline drift calibration, normalization, and bandpass filtering. The relevant parameters in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for the regression model can correctly predict the heartbeat and blood pressure. In addition, the temperature change in the ROI of the mask after thermal image processing and filtering can be used to correctly determine the number of breaths. Meanwhile, the thermal image can be used to read the temperature average of the ROI of the forehead, and the forehead temperature can be obtained smoothly. The experimental results show that the above-mentioned physiological signals of a subject can be obtained in 6-s images with the error for both heart rate and blood pressure within 2%~3% and the error of forehead temperature within ±0.5°C.     

CHL1 encodes a component of the low-affinity nitrate uptake system in Arabidopsis and shows cell type-specific expression in roots

The Arabidopsis CHL1 (AtNRT1) gene confers sensitivity to the herbicide chlorate and encodes a nitrate-regulated nitrate transporter. However, how CHL1 participates in nitrate uptake in plants is not yet clear. In this study, we examined the in vivo function of CHL1 with in vivo uptake measurements and in situ hybridization experiments. Under most conditions tested, the amount of nitrate uptake by a chl1 deletion mutant was found to be significantly less than that of the wild type. This uptake deficiency was reversed when a CHL1 cDNA clone driven by the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter was expressed in transgenic chl1 plants. Furthermore, tissue-specific expression patterns showed that near the root tip, CHL1 mRNA is found primarily in the epidermis, but further from the root tip, the mRNA is found in the cortex or endodermis. These results are consistent with the involvement of CHL1 in nitrate uptake at different stages of root cell development. A functional analysis in Xenopus oocytes indicated that CHL1 is a low-affinity nitrate transporter with a K(m) value of approximately 8.5 mM for nitrate. This finding is consistent with the chlorate resistance phenotype of chl1 mutants. However, these results do not fit the current model of a single, constitutive component for the low-affinity uptake system. To reconcile this discrepancy and the complex uptake behavior observed, we propose a "two-gene" model for the low-affinity nitrate uptake system of Arabidopsis.     

High quality surface remeshing with equilateral triangle grid

This study proposes a robust and efficient 3D surface remeshing algorithm for mesh quality optimization. Instead of the global mesh relaxation method proposed in the previous study conducted on remeshing, this study proposes an equilateral triangle grid-resampling scheme for achieving mesh optimization more efficiently. In order to improve the feasibility of resampling by directly using an equilateral triangle grid, the surface structure of the original model is correctly extracted by an automatic surface segmentation technique before the resampling step is executed. Results of this study show that the proposed remeshing algorithm can automatically and substantially improve the quality of triangulation, as well as automatically preserve shape features under an acceptable level of measurement error in the shape approximation, which is suitable for a mesh with a specific topology.     

A memetic algorithm for minimizing total weighted tardiness on parallel batch machines with incompatible job families and dynamic job arrival

This paper addresses a scheduling problem motivated by scheduling of diffusion operations in the wafer fabrication facility. In the target problem, jobs arrive at the batch machines at different time instants, and only jobs belonging to the same family can be processed together. Parallel batch machine scheduling typically consists of three types of decisions—batch forming, machine assignment, and batch sequencing. We propose a memetic algorithm with a new genome encoding scheme to search for the optimal or near-optimal batch formation and batch sequence simultaneously. Machine assignment is resolved in the proposed decoding scheme. Crossover and mutation operators suitable for the proposed encoding scheme are also devised. Through the experiment with 4860 problem instances of various characteristics including the number of machines, the number of jobs, and so on, the proposed algorithm demonstrates its advantages over a recently proposed benchmark algorithm in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency.