Seismic hazard reassessment of an existing NPP in Slovenia

A seismic hazard reassessment of the site of an existing nuclear power plant in Slovenia was performed. For probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, the extended basic approach laid out by Cornell in 1968 was applied (Cornell, 1968). The study was based on existing data only. To overcome the lack of data and to handle uncertainties in the data, a multiple model approach was applied. Tectonic interpretations, seismic source determinations and estimates of the uncertainty were made by three independent groups of earth-scientists. The delineation of seismic sources and the estimation of their parameters were defined by the distribution of earthquakes, by fault rupture sizes, and by fault slip rates. The Gutenberg–Richter doubly truncated exponential recurrence relationship was used for magnitude distribution. Lower-bound magnitude was set at 5.0 for all seismic sources. Maximum observed earthquakes and assumed fault rupture sizes were used as the main criteria for the estimation of upper-bound magnitudes of area and fault sources respectively. The activity rates were either based on the catalogue or estimated from the assessed average fault slip rates. Subjective weights were assigned to model alternatives and to source parameter alternatives. The results of the study are presented as seismic hazard curves and spectra.     

Labeling of Symbolic Prosody Breaks for the Slovenian Language

This paper presents the data-driven prediction of word level prosody breaks modelling for the Slovenian language. Automatic learning techniques depend on the construction of a large corpus labeled appropriately. This labeling can be done either automatically, or by hand. While automatic labeling can be less accurate than hand labeling, the latter is very time consuming and, in some cases, inconsistent. Therefore, a new interactive tool for word level prosody labeling (major/minor breaks) is presented together with a new semi-automatic approach for determining prosody breaks. This interactive tool combines the advantages of hand labeling and automatic labeling by achieving a high consistency in labeling and reducing the time needed for hand labeling. The labeled Slovenian corpus has been used to train our phrase break prediction module, implementing a neural network (NN) structure. Experiments for the data-driven prediction of major = minor and major/minor phrase breaks were performed. The prediction accuracy achieved marks state-of-the-art word level prosody breaks prediction for the Slovenian language and is comparable to the prediction accuracy of other approaches in which more complex NN structures (Müller et al., 2000) or other prediction methods (Black and Tailor, 1997) were applied, and a much larger corpus was used for training. The overall prediction accuracy achieved is 94% for major = minor breaks and over 98/92% for major/minor phrase breaks, respectively.     

Uranium oxides formed in air and water in the temperature range 200–375°C

The oxidation of uranium in oxygen, air, and water vapor has been studied in the range 200 to 375°C. Uranium dioxide is the only product found at the uranium-oxide interface and no epitaxy has been observed. With increasing thickness of film, oxygen-rich oxides are formed, the composition of the spalled layers being temperature-dependent. The oxide of composition U₃O₈ was observed only in the spalled layers at temperatures above 275°C.     

Annotated news corpora and a lexicon for sentiment analysis in Slovene

In this study, we introduce Slovene web-crawled news corpora with sentiment annotation on three levels of granularity: sentence, paragraph and document levels. We describe the methodology and tools that were required for their construction. The corpora contain more than 250,000 documents with political, business, economic and financial content from five Slovene media resources on the web. More than 10,000 of them were manually annotated as negative, neutral or positive. All corpora are publicly available under a Creative Commons copyright license. We used the annotated documents to construct a Slovene sentiment lexicon, which is the first of its kind for Slovene, and to assess the sentiment classification approaches used. The constructed corpora were also utilised to monitor within-the-document sentiment dynamics, its changes over time and relations with news topics. We show that sentiment is, on average, more explicit at the beginning of documents, and it loses sharpness towards the end of documents.     

Deep node ranking for neuro-symbolic structural node embedding and classification

Network node embedding is an active research subfield of complex network analysis. This paper contributes a novel approach to learning network node embeddings and direct node classification using a node ranking scheme, coupled with an autoencoder-based neural network architecture. The main advantages of the proposed Deep Node Ranking (DNR) algorithm are competitive or better classification performance, significantly higher learning speed and lower space requirements when compared to state-of-the-art approaches on 15 real-life structural node classification benchmarks. It also enables exploration of the relationship between symbolic and the derived sub-symbolic node representations, offering insights into the learned node space structure. To avoid the space complexity bottleneck in a direct node classification setting, DNR, if needed, computes stationary distributions of personalized random walks from given nodes in mini-batches, scaling seamlessly to larger networks. The scaling laws associated with DNR were also investigated by considering 1,488 synthetic Erd?s-Rényi networks, demonstrating its scalability to tens of millions of links.     

Effect of structural and acidity/basicity changes of CuO–CeO2 catalysts on their activity for water–gas shift reaction

The objective of this work was to investigate the influence of CuO loading and catalyst pretreatment procedure to derive an optimal CuO–CeO₂ catalyst for the water–gas shift reaction (WGS), and to study in detail structure– and surface acidity–activity relationships. Catalyst samples prepared by coprecipitation and a 10, 15 and 20 mol% CuO content were examined by XRD, BET and TPR/TPD analyses and subjected to pulse WGS activity tests in the temperature range of 180–400 °C. Strong structure–activity dependence in the WGS reaction was observed for all catalyst samples. It was established that increasing CuO content has a positive effect on H₂ production during the WGS reaction, due to favored CeO₂ reduction. Increasing calcination temperature on the other hand reduces the BET surface area, induced by CuO sintering and agglomeration of CeO₂ particles, resulting in a negative effect on H₂ production. Distinctive WGS activity dependence on surface acidity was observed and investigated.     

Experimental evidence for the interaction of C-60 fullerene with lipid vesicle membranes

There are some molecular dynamic simulations but a paucity of experimental evidence of the effects of C-60 fullerene on lipid bilayers. The aim of this study is to assess the potential for disruption of the lipid bilayer by C-60 suspended in water. We selected a C-60 suspension that has previously been shown to provoke cell membrane destabilisation in vivo. Electromobility measurements show significant negative surface charge on the C-60 nanoparticles suspended in a glucose solution and a zeta potential of ?26 mV. The prevalent C-60 clusters have hydrodynamic radii of approximately 2 nm. Phase contrast microscopy and computer aided image analysis results show that C-60 causes shape transformations and rupture of unilamellar phospholipid vesicles, indicative of changes in their average mean curvature. Small-angle X-ray scattering reveals that C-60 provokes disruptions of external membranes of multilamellar vesicles only after freeze and thaw cycles. Here, the liposomes undergo breakage and annealing steps which increase the probability for fullerenes to insert into the MLVs. Our experimental findings confirm the potential of C-60 to reconstruct lipids in biological membranes. This research enhances our understanding of the impact of engineered nanoparticles on cell membranes.     

Mechanical,thermal, and burning properties of viscose fabric composites: Influence of epoxy resin modification

The influence of epoxy resin modification by 3‐aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) on various properties of warp knitted viscose fabric is reported in this study. Dynamic mechanical, impact resistance, flexural, thermal properties, and burning behavior of the epoxy/viscose fabric composites are studied with respect to varying content of silane coupling agent. The results obtained for APTES‐modified epoxy resin based composites reinforced with unmodified viscose fabric composites are compared to unmodified epoxy resin based composites reinforced with APTES‐modified viscose fabric. The dynamic mechanical behavior of the APTES‐modified resin based composites indicates improved interfacial adhesion. The composites prepared from modified epoxy resin exhibited a twofold increase in impact resistance. The improved adhesion between the fiber and modified resin was also visible from the scanning electron microscope analysis of the impact fracture surface. There was less influence of resin modification on the flexural properties of the composites. The 5% APTES modification induced early degradation of composites compared to all other composites. The burning rate of all the composites under study is rated to be satisfactory for use in automotive interior applications. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2018 , 135, 46673.