ULTRA‐FINE TRACKING CONTROL ON PIEZOELECTRIC ACTUATED MOTION STAGE USING PIEZOELECTRIC HYSTERETIC MODEL

The tracking control accuracy of the piezoelectric actuator (PEA) is limited due to its inherent hysteresis nonlinearity. A new piezoelectric‐actuator model is synthesized based on two first‐order transfer systems in parallel with two tuned parameters determined from one experiment. Two open‐loop tracking controllers are implemented with the proposed model to compensate the hysteresis of linear positioning. Numerical simulations and experimental tests on the tracking of sinusoidal and triangular waveforms with signal frequencies ranging from 1Hz to 30 Hz are revisited and compared with the conventional Bouc‐Wen and Duhem models. Experimental results reveal that the RMS tracking error can be reduced to less than 2% of the maximum traveling distance without any feedback sensor. When a piezoelectric actuated on a two Degree‐Of‐Freedom (DOF) monolithic motion stage was employed, the RMS tracking error was 50 nm within the measured sensor accuracy.     

Procedural Synthesis using Vortex Particle Method for Fluid Simulation

We propose a fast and effective technique to improve sub‐grid visual details of the grid based fluid simulation. Our method procedurally synthesizes the flow fields coming from the incompressible Navier‐Stokes solver and the vorticity fields generated by vortex particle method for sub‐grid turbulence. We are able to efficiently animate smoke which is highly turbulent and swirling with small scale details. Since this technique does not solve the linear system in high‐resolution grids, it can perform fluid simulation more rapidly. We can easily estimate the influence of turbulent and swirling effect to the fluid flow.     

New Beta-lactamases in Candidate Phyla Radiation: Owning Pleiotropic Enzymes Is a Smart Paradigm for Microorganisms with a Reduced Genome

The increased exploitation of microbial sequencing methods has shed light on the high diversity of new microorganisms named Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR). CPR are mainly detected via 16S rRNA/metabarcoding analyses or metagenomics and are found to be abundant in all environments and present in different human microbiomes. These microbes, characterized by their symbiotic/epiparasitic lifestyle with bacteria, are directly exposed to competition with other microorganisms sharing the same ecological niche. Recently, a rich repertoire of enzymes with antibiotic resistance activity has been found in CPR genomes by using an in silico adapted screening strategy. This reservoir has shown a high prevalence of putative beta-lactamase-encoding genes. We expressed and purified five putative beta-lactamase sequences having the essential domains and functional motifs from class A and class B beta-lactamase. Their enzymatic activities were tested against various beta-lactam substrates using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and showed some beta-lactamase activity even in the presence of a beta-lactamase inhibitor. In addition, ribonuclease activity was demonstrated against RNA that was not inhibited by sulbactam and EDTA. None of these proteins could degrade single- and double-stranded-DNA. This study is the first to express and test putative CPR beta-lactamase protein sequences in vitro. Our findings highlight that the reduced genomes of CPR members harbor sequences encoding for beta-lactamases known to be multifunction hydrolase enzymes.