Unburned carbon measurement in fly ash using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy with short nanosecond pulse width laser

The unburned carbon in fly ash is one of the important factors for the boiler combustion condition. Controlling the unburned carbon in fly ash is beneficial for fly ash recycle and to improve the combustion efficiency of the coal. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technology has been applied to measure the fly ash contents due to its merits of non-contact, fast response, high sensitivity, and real-time measurement. In this study, experimental measurements have been adopted for fly ash flows with the surrounding gases of N₂ and CO₂, while the CO₂ concentration varified to evaluate the CO₂ effect on the unburned carbon signal from fly ash powder. Two kinds of pulse width lasers, 6?ns and 1?ns, were separately adopted to compare the influence of laser pulse width. Results showed that compared with that using 6?ns pulse width laser, plasma temperature was lower and had less dependence on delay time when using 1?ns pulse width laser, and spectra had more stable background. By using 1?ns pulse width laser, the emission signal from surrounding CO₂ also decreased because of the less surrounding gas breakdown. The solid powder breakdown signals also became more stable when using 1?ns pulse width laser. It is demonstrated that 1?ns pulse width laser has the merits for fly ash flow measurement using LIBS.     

Continuous measurements of bronchial exposure induced by radon decay products during inhalation

The deposition of radon decay products is not equal in each of the respiratory regions and as the presence of radon has been linked with an increase in lung cancer risk, it is important to calculate the deposition of radon decay products in each of the respiratory regions. Recently, many studies on the deposition of radon in respiratory regions have been simulated using wire screens. The systems and equipment used in those studies are not suitable for field measurements as their dimensions are relatively massive, nor can they measure continuously. We developed a continuous bronchial dosimeter (CBD) which is suitable for field measurements. It was designed with specifications that allow it to be remain compact. The CBD simulates the deposition of radon decay products in the different respiratory regions by the use of a combination of wire screens. Deposition in the simulated regions of the lung can be continuously estimated in various environments. The ratio of activities deposited in a simulated nasal cavity (N) and tracheobronchial (TB) regions was calculated from the results of simultaneous measurements using CBD-R (reference), CBD-N (nasal), and CBD-TB (tracheobronchial) measurement units. After aerosols were injected into the radon chamber, the ratio of N and TB depositions decreased. This results indicate that the CBD gave a good response to changes in the environment. It was found that the ratio of N and TB deposition also varied with time in each actual environment.     

Thermodynamic properties of aluminum, magnesium, and calcium in molten silicon

The thermodynamic properties of aluminum, magnesium, and calcium in molten silicon were investigated using a chemical equilibration technique at 1723 to 1848 K, 1698 to 1798 K, and 1723 to 1823 K, respectively. The activity coefficient of aluminum in molten silicon was determined by equilibrating molten silicon-aluminum alloys with solid Al₂O₃ and Al₆Si₂O₁₃, that of magnesium was determined by equilibrating molten silicon-magnesium alloys and MgO-SiO₂-Al₂O₃ melts doubly saturated with MgSiO₃ and SiO₂, and that of calcium was determined by equilibrating molten silicon-calcium alloys with SiO₂-saturated CaO-SiO₂ melts. The activity coefficients at infinite dilution relative to the pure liquid state were determined as follows:

Electrochemically-switchable emission and absorption by using luminescent Lanthanide(III) complex and electrochromic molecule toward novel display device with dual emissive and reflective mode

Electroswitching of emission and coloration was achieved by a combination of a luminescent Eu(III) complex and an electrochromic molecule of diheptyl viologen (HV²⁺), indicating that the complex-molecule combination could be used as a display material with dual emissive and reflective modes. The coloration of the material was associated with the electrochromism of HV²⁺. Emission control was found to be possible due to the electrochromism of HV²⁺ via intermolecular energy transfer from the excited state of the Eu(III) ion to the reduced state of HV⁺. By using this mechanism, dual emissive and reflective representation of numerical characters were demonstrated.     

Multi-channel higher-order local autocorrelation for object detection on satellite images

ABSTRACT

An automatic object-detection method is necessary to facilitate the efficient analysis of satellite images consisting of multispectral images. Considering that the relationship between spectrums is important for discriminating objects in multispectral images. This paper proposes a feature extraction method that can capture both spatial and spectral relationships of the multispectral images. Moreover, image preprocessing and dimensionality reduction procedures are introduced for stable feature extraction. In this study, we conducted experiments for detecting two types of objects by using Landsat 8 images. The proposed method improved the detection performance relative to other image features.     

Activity of Chromium Oxide in CaO‐SiO2 based Slags at 1873 K

Thermodynamic properties of chromium oxides in molten slags are very important for optimization of stainless steel refining processes as well as reduction processes of chromium ores. The solubility of chromite into molten slags has been found to vary drastically with oxygen partial pressure and slag composition in the former studies by the authors. In the present study, activity data and redox equilibria of chromium oxides measured under moderately reducing conditions, P_O2= 6.95×10^?11 atm, at 1873 K are summarized. For the CaO‐SiO₂‐CrO_x system, the activity coefficient of chromium oxide increased with increasing basicity and the optimized slag composition for stainless steel refining is assessed as that saturated with CaCr₂O₄ and Cr₂O₃ using the phase relations determined. On the other hand, the presence of MgO and Al₂O₃ brings about different behaviour of chromium oxide activity and redox equilibria and the 44 mass per cent CaO ‐ 39 mass per cent SiO₂ ‐11 mass per cent Al₂O₃ ‐ 6 mass per cent MgO slag is recommended to reduce the chromium oxidation loss in the practical stainless steel refining process at 1873 K.     

Handwritten digit recognition: benchmarking of state-of-the-art techniques

This paper presents the results of handwritten digit recognition on well-known image databases using state-of-the-art feature extraction and classification techniques. The tested databases are CENPARMI, CEDAR, and MNIST. On the test data set of each database, 80 recognition accuracies are given by combining eight classifiers with ten feature vectors. The features include chaincode feature, gradient feature, profile structure feature, and peripheral direction contributivity. The gradient feature is extracted from either binary image or gray-scale image. The classifiers include the k-nearest neighbor classifier, three neural classifiers, a learning vector quantization classifier, a discriminative learning quadratic discriminant function (DLQDF) classifier, and two support vector classifiers (SVCs). All the classifiers and feature vectors give high recognition accuracies. Relatively, the chaincode feature and the gradient feature show advantage over other features, and the profile structure feature shows efficiency as a complementary feature. The SVC with RBF kernel (SVC-rbf) gives the highest accuracy in most cases but is extremely expensive in storage and computation. Among the non-SV classifiers, the polynomial classifier and DLQDF give the highest accuracies. The results of non-SV classifiers are competitive to the best ones previously reported on the same databases.     

Handwritten digit recognition: investigation of normalization and feature extraction techniques

The performance evaluation of various techniques is important to select the correct options in developing character recognition systems. In our previous works, we have proposed aspect ratio adaptive normalization (ARAN) and have evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art feature extraction and classification techniques. For this time, we will propose some improved normalization functions and direction feature extraction strategies and will compare their performance with existing techniques. We compare ten normalization functions (seven based on dimensions and three based on moments) and eight feature vectors on three distinct data sources. The normalization functions and feature vectors are combined to produce eighty classification accuracies to each dataset. The comparison of normalization functions shows that moment-based functions outperform the dimension-based ones and the aspect ratio mapping is influential. The comparison of feature vectors shows that the improved feature extraction strategies outperform their baseline counterparts. The gradient feature from gray-scale image mostly yields the best performance and the improved NCFE (normalization-cooperated feature extraction) features also perform well. The combined effects of normalization, feature extraction, and classification have yielded very high accuracies on well-known datasets.     

Plasma Sphingosine-1-Phosphate Levels Are Associated with Progression of Estrogen Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer

Although numerous experiments revealed an essential role of a lipid mediator, sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), in breast cancer (BC) progression, the clinical significance of S1P remains unclear due to the difficulty of measuring lipids in patients. The aim of this study was to determine the plasma concentration of S1P in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive BC patients, as well as to investigate its clinical significance. We further explored the possibility of a treatment strategy targeting S1P in ER-positive BC patients by examining the effect of FTY720, a functional antagonist of S1P receptors, on hormone therapy-resistant cells. Plasma S1P levels were significantly higher in patients negative for progesterone receptor (PgR) expression than in those positive for expression (p = 0.003). Plasma S1P levels were also significantly higher in patients with larger tumor size (p = 0.012), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.014), and advanced cancer stage (p = 0.003), suggesting that higher levels of plasma S1P are associated with cancer progression. FTY720 suppressed the viability of not only wildtype MCF-7 cells, but also hormone therapy-resistant MCF-7 cells. Targeting S1P signaling in ER-positive BC appears to be a possible new treatment strategy, even for hormone therapy-resistant patients.