A Multi-Expert System for chlorine electrolyzer monitoring

The Chlor-Alkali production is one of the largest industrial scale electro-synthesis in the world. Plants with more than 1000 individual reactors are common, where chlorine and hydrogen are only separated by 0.2 mm thin membranes. Wrong operating conditions can cause explosions and highly toxic gas releases, but also irreversible damages of very expensive cell components with dramatic maintenance costs and production loss. In this paper, a Multi-Expert System based on first-order logic rules and Decision Forests is proposed to detect any abnormal operating conditions of membrane cell electrolyzers and to advice the operator accordingly. Robustness to missing data – which represents an important issue in industrial applications in general – is achieved by means of a Dynamic Selection strategy. Experiments performed with real-world electrolyzer data indicate that the proposed system can significantly detect the different operating modes, even in the presence of high levels of missing data – or “wrong” data, as a consequence of maloperation –, which is essential for precise fault detection and advice generation.     

Chemical composition and nutritional value of raw and fried allis shad (Alosa alosa)

The main objective of this study was to compare the proximate chemical composition and fatty acid profile of migrating allis shad (MS) and resident allis shad (RS) and to evaluate the nutritional value of fried migrating allis shad. No significant differences in the proximate chemical composition between males and females of each stock were obtained. However, MS fish had a significantly higher fat content than RS fish. The monounsaturated fatty acids group was the dominant in MS fish and oleic acid presented the highest percentage. Docosahexaenoic acid followed by eicosapentaenoic acid were the main PUFA in fish from both stocks. However, RS fish had higher total ω6 than MS fish due to its higher percentage of linoleic acid and arachidonic acid. Frying resulted in a significant reduction in water content and affected significantly the proximate chemical composition and the fatty acid profile, particularly the palmitic, oleic and linoleic acid.     

Two experimental methods to determining stress–strain behavior of work-hardened surface layers of metallic components

Two experimental methods to characterize the mechanical behavior of work-hardened surface layers of metallic materials, induced by mechanical surface treatments, are described and discussed. The study was conducted using two steels with different mechanical properties, subjected to a similar shot-peening treatment. To characterize the elastic–plastic behavior of the surface layers affected by shot-peening, the X-ray diffraction assisted four-point bending method (XRDABM) and the normalized hardness variation method (NHVM) were applied. The results were compared and discussed taking into account the advantages and disadvantages of both methods. Similar yield strength values of the treated surfaces were found by both proposed methods. Taking into account their measuring characteristics, these can be considered complementary methods.     

Refined Mindlin-Reissner theory of forced vibrations of shear deformable plates

Two theories of shear deformable plate vibrations that account for the influence of the transverse normal stress component are derived. The first is a slightly modified Mindlin theory, including a shear correction factor, while in the second the use of the shear correction factor is replaced by stress components that exactly satisfy elasticity motion equations and plate face boundary conditions. A comparison with the exact 3D solution for a sinusoidally loaded rectangular plate and infinite strip is made. It is found that the refined theories significantly increase the accuracy of results compared to the original Mindlin theory.     

Overexpression of TcNTPDase-1 Gene Increases Infectivity in Mice Infected with Trypanosoma cruzi

Ecto-nucleoside triphosphate diphosphohydrolases (NTPDases) are enzymes located on the surface of the T. cruzi plasma membrane, which hydrolyze a wide range of tri-/-diphosphate nucleosides. In this work, we used previously developed genetically modified strains of Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi), hemi-knockout (KO +/−) and overexpressing (OE) the TcNTPDase-1 gene to evaluate the parasite infectivity profile in a mouse model of acute infection (n = 6 mice per group). Our results showed significantly higher parasitemia and mortality, and lower weight in animals infected with parasites OE TcNTPDase-1, as compared to the infection with the wild type (WT) parasites. On the other hand, animals infected with (KO +/−) parasites showed no mortality during the 30-day trial and mouse weight was more similar to the non-infected (NI) animals. In addition, they had low parasitemia (45.7 times lower) when compared with parasites overexpressing TcNTPDase-1 from the hemi-knockout (OE KO +/−) group. The hearts of animals infected with the OE KO +/− and OE parasites showed significantly larger regions of cardiac inflammation than those infected with the WT parasites (p < 0.001). Only animals infected with KO +/− did not show individual electrocardiographic changes during the period of experimentation. Together, our results expand the knowledge on the role of NTPDases in T. cruzi infectivity, reenforcing the potential of this enzyme as a chemotherapy target to treat Chagas disease (CD).     

Effect of RF magnetron sputtering parameters on the optimization of the discharge capacity of ternary lithium oxide thin films

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - The increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries has stimulated the investigation of new compounds in order to reduce the costs and the...     

Generative face alignment through 2.5D active appearance models

This work addresses the matching of a 3D deformable face model to 2D images through a 2.5D Active Appearance Models (AAM). We propose a 2.5D AAM that combines a 3D metric Point Distribution Model (PDM) and a 2D appearance model whose control points are defined by a full perspective projection of the PDM. The advantage is that, assuming a calibrated camera, 3D metric shapes can be retrieved from single view images. Two model fitting algorithms and their computational efficient approximations are proposed: the Simultaneous Forwards Additive (SFA) and the Normalization Forwards Additive (NFA), both based on the Lucas–Kanade framework. The SFA algorithm searches for shape and appearance parameters simultaneously whereas the NFA projects out the appearance from the error image and searches only for the shape parameters. SFA is therefore more accurate. Robust solutions for the SFA and NFA are also proposed in order to take into account the self-occlusion or partial occlusion of the face. Several performance evaluations for the SFA, NFA and theirs efficient approximations were performed. The experiments include evaluating the frequency of converge, the fitting performance in unseen data and the tracking performance in the FGNET Talking Face sequence. All results show that the 2.5D AAM can outperform both the 2D + 3D combined models and the 2D standard methods. The robust extensions to occlusion were tested on a synthetic sequence showing that the model can deal efficiently with large head rotation.     

Component-Based Applications: A Dynamic Reconfiguration Approach with Fault Tolerance Support

This paper presents a mechanism for dynamic reconfiguration of component-based applications and its fault tolerance strategy. The mechanism, named generic connector, allows composing a component-based application as a set of services with no previous knowledge about the specific components that will provide some services. The components will be selected at runtime. The objective of this work is to offer a mechanism that tries to satisfy every invocation under its responsibility and makes failures as transparent as possible. It is an important tool to compose applications through the reuse of existing components because it frees the programmer from the task of searching components in order to use them and, also, from solving some types of failures.