High-efficiency Silicon Solar Cells: A Review

Over the past few decades, crystalline silicon solar cells have been extensively studied due to their high efficiency, high reliability, and low cost. In addition, these types of cells lead the industry and account for more than half of the market. For the foreseeable future, Si will still be a critical material for photovoltaic devices in the solar cell industry. In this paper, we discuss key issues, cell concepts, and the status of recent high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells.     

Visualizing for the Non‐Visual: Enabling the Visually Impaired to Use Visualization

The majority of visualizations on the web are still stored as raster images, making them inaccessible to visually impaired users. We propose a deep‐neural‐network‐based approach that automatically recognizes key elements in a visualization, including a visualization type, graphical elements, labels, legends, and most importantly, the original data conveyed in the visualization. We leverage such extracted information to provide visually impaired people with the reading of the extracted information. Based on interviews with visually impaired users, we built a Google Chrome extension designed to work with screen reader software to automatically decode charts on a webpage using our pipeline. We compared the performance of the back‐end algorithm with existing methods and evaluated the utility using qualitative feedback from visually impaired users.     

Combination of vegetable soup and glucan demonstrates synergistic effects on macrophage-mediated immune responses

Vegetable soup (VS), a plant-based functional food, has been used as a traditional folk medicine and is attracting attention for its ability to enhance the immune response. β-Glucan, a well-established and effective immunomodulator, has synergistic effects when used in combination with some bioactive compounds. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the synergistic immunomodulatory effects of the combination of VS and β-glucan on macrophage-mediated immune responses. β-Glucan was demonstrated to synergistically enhance the VS-stimulated immune response, including the production of interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-α, and nitric oxide, mainly through the mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway in macrophages. In addition, this combination has the potential for further development in functional foods with immune-enhancing activity.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10068-021-00888-x.     

Frequency Insertion Strategy for Channel Assignment Problem

This paper presents a new heuristic method for quickly finding a good feasible solution to the channel assignment problem (CAP). Like many other greedy-type heuristics for CAP, the proposed method also assigns a frequency to a call, one at a time. Hence, the method requires computational time that increases only linear to the number of calls. However, what distinguishes the method from others is that it starts with a narrow enough frequency band so as to provoke violations of constraints that we need to comply with in order to avoid radio interference. Each violation is then resolved by inserting frequencies at the most appropriate positions so that the band of frequencies expands minimally. An extensive computational experiment using a set of randomly generated problems as well as the Philadelphia benchmark instances shows that the proposed method perform statistically better than existing methods of its kind and even yields optimum solutions to most of Philadelphia benchmark instances among which two cases are reported for the first time ever, in this paper. Won-Young Shin was born in Busan, Korea in 1978. He received B.S. in industrial engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in 2001 and M.S in operation research and applied statistics from POSTECH in 2003. Since 2003 he has been a researcher of Agency for Defense Development (ADD) in Korea. He is interested in optimization of communication system and applied statistics. Soo Y. Chang is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He teaches linear programming, discrete optimization, network flows and operations research courses. His research interests include mathematical programming and scheduling. He has published in several journals including Discrete Applied Mathematics, Computers and Mathematics with Application, IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, and so on. He is a member of Korean IIE, and ORMSS. Jaewook Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics with honors from Seoul National University, and the Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in applied mathematics in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). His research interests include nonlinear systems, neural networks, nonlinear optimization, and their applications to data mining and financial engineering. Chi-Hyuck Jun was born in Seoul, Korea in 1954. He received B.S. in mineral and petroleum engineering from Seoul National University in 1977, M.S. in industrial engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1979 and Ph.D. in operations research from University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Since 1987 he has been with the department of industrial engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and he is now a professor and the department head. He is interested in performance analysis of communication and production systems. He has published in several journals including IIE Transactions, IEEE Transactions, Queueing Systems and Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. He is a member of IEEE, INFORMS and ASQ.     

基于交会图和多元统计法的神经网络技术在火山岩识别中的应用

针对火山岩储层的特殊性(复杂性、离散性和随机性),应用BP神经网络技术对火山岩测井解释中岩性识别问题进行了研究。该方法的技术关键是样本集和初始权重的建立,以及模型的优选。本文提出了一种基于交会图和多元统计法的学习样本生成方法,即根据取心岩样的地球化学和岩石学研究,用交会图技术建立样本集,采用聚类分析和距离判别法确定初始权重。将研究方法应用在松辽盆地杏山地区火山岩岩性识别问题中,取得了很好的效果,岩性解释符合率高于90%。文中通过四种岩性识别处理模式的对比研究,表明赋权重处理模式为最优处理模型。在神经网络模型预测过程中,需充分利用已有的地质经验和测井曲线信息建立典型可靠的样本文件,同时考虑神经网络方法中各种因素的影响,优选模型和计算参数才能使预测结果符合实际情况。     

地层测试的压力"下滑恢复"响应分析

在油气井的试油测试资料中，压力恢复曲线有时会出现下滑现象，常被认为是施工失误所致。本文以实际资料为例，分析了“下滑恢复”的压力响应特征和影响因素，认为只在低渗透地层有可能产生“下滑恢复”现象，并提出了避免“下滑恢复”的施工建议。     

聚丙烯装置聚合区设备布置及管廊的配管设计

结合工程特点及工艺流程,阐述了300 kt/a聚丙烯装置的布置原则,管道、管架设计要点和方法,以及需要注意的问题。     

石化企业线性规划模型的自动生成

根据石化企业生产过程的实际情况，考虑原料供应量、装置加工能力、物料平衡和价格等情况．建芷反映企业生产情况的线性规划数学模型。分别阐述了模型的决策变量、目标函数和约束方程的自动生成的方法，并给出了模型文件的存储结构。