Purulent pericarditis and pericardiac tamponade in a pregnant hemodialysis patient: A case report

Bacterial pericarditis is rare in chronic hemodialysis and has poor prognosis. In this case, we report a pregnant hemodialysis patient who developed purulent bacterial pericarditis and pericardiac tamponade in the 28th week of her pregnancy, and who had delivered a healthy living baby.     

Jacobi polynomials approximation to the one-speed neutron transport equation

Jacobi polynomials, the largest family of classical orthogonal polynomial sequence, are used to obtain eigenspectrum of one-speed neutron transport equation for strongly anisotropic scattering. Previously detailed Ultraspherical or Gegenbauer polynomials approximation including spherical harmonics, Chebyshev polynomials approximation of first and second kinds is a special case of Jacobi polynomials approximation in which the two variables of the Jacobi polynomials are equal. Eigenspectrum calculations using the so-called Jacobi polynomials approximation have demonstrated that plane symmetrical systems prefer Ultraspherical polynomials approximation since their well-known peculiarity or symmetry property meets the requirement of symmetry in angular flux with respect to spatial coordinates for every order of approximation. In the more general case when two variables of Jacobi polynomial are unequal, symmetry in eigenvalues disappear in the low-order approximations. However, it has been shown that symmetrical eigenvalue pairs are reached asymptotically as the order of approximation is increased for unequal variables too. Jacobi polynomials approximation is further applied to homogeneous slab criticality problem with strongly anisotropic scattering and reflected boundaries. Additionally, very useful analytical recursive relations for the calculation of various types of integrals involving Jacobi polynomials are derived which are needed in the eigenspectrum and criticality calculations.     

Biological treatment and nanofiltration of denim textile wastewater for reuse

This study aims at coupling of activated sludge treatment with nanofiltration to improve denim textile wastewater quality to reuse criteria. In the activated sludge reactor, the COD removal efficiency was quite high as it was 91+/-2% and 84+/-4% on the basis of total and soluble feed COD, respectively. The color removal efficiency was 75+/-10%, and around 50-70% of removed color was adsorbed on biomass or precipitated within the reactor. The high conductivity of the wastewater, as high as 8 mS/cm, did not adversely affect system performance. Although biological treatment is quite efficient, the wastewater does not meet the reuse criteria. Hence, further treatment to improve treated water quality was investigated using nanofiltration. Dead-end microfiltration (MF) with 5 microm pore size was applied to remove coarse particles before nanofiltration. The color rejection of nanofiltration was almost complete and permeate color was always lower than 10 Pt-Co. Similarly, quite high rejections were observed for COD (80-100%). Permeate conductivity was between 1.98 and 2.67 mS/cm (65% conductivity rejection). Wastewater fluxes were between 31 and 37 L/m2/h at 5.07 bars corresponding to around 45% flux declines compared to clean water fluxes. In conclusion, for denim textile wastewaters nanofiltration after biological treatment can be applied to meet reuse criteria.     

A new approach on the strengthening of primary school buildings in Turkey: An application of external shear wall

Considerable life and property losses have occurred because of the devastation due to the earthquakes happened in Turkey during the last 10 years. Especially, the damages that occurred on the public buildings were more serious and irrevocable when compared with the damages that took place on private buildings. In Turkey, primary school buildings constitute a large portion of the public buildings. Unfortunately, these buildings faced with heavy damages during the last earthquakes. The strengthening of existing primary school buildings in accordance with new contract specifications, thereby reducing losses of life and property to a minimum in case of an earthquake, has become one of the important issues on the agenda of the Turkish government. However, the strengthening of the primary school buildings by using the available methods is so difficult, because the strengthening works take a long time, the user of these buildings are obliged to evacuate the buildings and also there occurs extra costs caused by the additional repairs and renovations within the buildings when these methods are used. In this study, a new strengthening type of reinforced concrete buildings namely “external reinforced concrete shear wall” application method is discussed. For this purpose, three typical projects, which have been built commonly, are mentioned. The structural deficiencies observed in these buildings are given. In the experimental stage of this study, an experimental programme is formed in order to evaluate the performance of the external shear wall application. In the experimental schedule, four reinforced concrete test specimens are produced by using the design and detailing data of the considered school buildings. According to these tests, the strengthening and system improvement performed through adding external reinforced concrete shear wall to the reinforced concrete buildings will add improved behaviour, strength and rigidity to the system with its low cost besides the ease of construction and application. Since these buildings are detached and located in a multi-purpose garden, constructed as typical projects and have special architectural layout, developing this method for the existing primary school buildings will be able to be implemented in most of the primary school buildings without any problems.     

Rheological behavior of styrene‐maleic anhydride/polyol blends obtained through reactive processing

The condensation reaction of styrene‐maleic anhydride copolymer (SMAH) with polytetramethylene ether glycol (PTMEG) in the presence or absence of a hydrated zinc acetate catalyst was studied in a batch mixer. As a control, pure SMAH and an SMAH/catalyst blend were also subjected to the same processing conditions. The reaction characteristics of the blends were investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermal and rheological analysis. FTIR analysis of the SMAH/PTMEG blend indicated ester formation. The addition of zinc acetate and/or PTMEG to SMAH decreased the glass transition temperature of pure SMAH. Oscillatory shear properties of storage modulus, G′, loss modulus, G″, and complex viscosity, η*, were measured. The SMAH/PTMEG/zinc acetate blend had higher G′, G″, and η* than the blend without the zinc acetate catalyst. The parameters of the relaxation spectra were calculated by using the experimental oscillatory data and the generalized Maxwell model. Zero shear viscosity and the mean relaxation time increased with addition of zinc acetate and/or PTMEG to SMAH as a result of chain extension/branching reactions. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 85: 2615–2623, 2002     

Harnessing the Power of GPUs to Speed Up Feature Selection for Outlier Detection

Acquiring a set of features that emphasize the differences between normal data points and outliers can drastically facilitate the task of identifying outliers. In our work, we present a novel non-parametric evaluation criterion for filter-based feature selection which has an eye towards the final goal of outlier detection. The proposed method seeks the subset of features that represent the inherent characteristics of the normal dataset while forcing outliers to stand out, making them more easily distinguished by outlier detection algorithms. Experimental results on real datasets show the advantage of our feature selection algorithm compared with popular and state-of-the-art methods. We also show that the proposed algorithm is able to overcome the small sample space problem and perform well on highly imbalanced datasets. Furthermore, due to the highly parallelizable nature of the feature selection, we implement the algorithm on a graphics processing unit （GPU） to gain significant speedup over the serial version. The benefits of the GPU implementation are two-fold, as its performance scales very well in terms of the number of features, as well as the number of data points.     

Reactive processing and properties of styrene–maleic anhydride and poly(tetramethylene ether glycol)

The anhydride/hydroxyl‐functionalized blends of styrene–maleic anhydride (SMAH) with poly(tetramethylene ether glycol) (PTMEG) in the presence or absence of a hydrated zinc acetate catalyst were produced in a batch mixer and in a corotating twin‐screw extruder. In batch mixing, torque values increased with time as a result of chain‐extension/branching reactions. The reaction products were studied by thermal, mechanical, morphological, and spectroscopic characterization techniques. The glass transition temperature of SMAH was lowered by the addition of PTMEG into the system. Major morphological changes were observed at the initial stages of extrusion. The changes in the screw speed influenced the mechanical properties and morphology of the blends. SMAH/PTMEG blends were brittle due to the glassy nature of SMAH. FTIR analysis of the SMAH/PTMEG system showed carboxylic acid and ester formation in the extrusion experiments. Mechanical property data and FTIR spectra indicated that at 150 rpm chain‐extension/branching reactions were maximized due to ester formation. However, at 220 rpm, a lower extent of ester formation was observed due to the lower residence time in the extruder. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 83: 2148–2156, 2002     

Improving privacy in health care with an ontology-based provenance management system

Provenanc refers to the origin of information. Therefore, provenance is the metadata that record the history of data. As provenance is the derivation history of an object starting from its original source, the provenance information is used to analyse processes that are performed on an object and to track by whom these processes are performed. Thus, provenance shows the trustworthiness and quality of data. In a provenance management system in order to verify the trustworthy of provenance information, security needs must be also fulfilled. In this work, an ontology-based privacy-aware provenance management model is proposed. The proposed model is based on the Open Provenance Model, which is a common model for provenance. The proposed model aims to detect privacy violations, to reduce privacy risks by using permissions and prohibitions, and also to query the provenance data. The proposed model is implemented with Semantic Web technologies and demonstrated for the health care domain in order to preserve patients' privacy. Also, an infectious disease ontology and a vaccination ontology are integrated to the system in order to track the patients' vaccination history, to improve the quality of medical processes, the reliability of medical data, and the decision making in the health care domain.     

Effect of volume fraction and particle size on wall slip in flow of polymeric suspensions

For especially highly concentrated suspensions, slip at the wall is the controlling phenomenon of their rheological behavior. Upon correction for slip at the wall, concentrated suspensions were observed to have non‐Newtonian behavior. In this study, to determine the true rheological behavior of model concentrated suspensions, “multiple gap separation method” was applied using a parallel‐disk rheometer. The model suspensions studied were polymethyl methacrylate particles having average particle sizes, in the range of 37–231 μm, in hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene. The effects of particle size and solid particle volume fraction on the wall slip and the true viscosity of model concentrated suspensions were investigated. It is observed that, as the volume fraction of particles increased, the wall slip velocity and the viscosity corrected for slip effects also increased. In addition, for model suspensions in which the solid volume fraction was ≥81% of the maximum packing fraction, non‐Newtonian behavior was observed upon wall slip correction. On the other hand, as the particle size increased, the wall slip velocity was observed to increase and the true viscosity was observed to decrease. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 98: 439–448, 2005     

Removal of bacteria by clinoptilolite rich mineral and its surfactant modified forms

Batch experiments were carried out to understand the potential values of clinoptilolite rich mineral and its surfactant modified forms in the removal of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Zeta potential and Fourier Transform IR analysis were performed to explain the possible interactions between the bacteria and the zeolite samples. The results revealed that hydrogen bonding was significant mechanism in the removal of bacteria with clinoptilolite rich mineral and anionic surfactant modified clinoptilolite rich mineral whereas both attractive electrostatic forces and hydrogen bonding were dominant mechanism in the removal of bacteria with cationic surfactant modified clinoptilolite rich mineral. Cationic and anionic surfactant modified clinoptilolite rich mineral are promising materials in removal of bacteria studies.