Mapping past,current and future energy research trend in Pakistan: a scientometric assessment

This work describes the contribution of researchers in the field of the energy from Pakistan in the period 1990–2016. A scientometric approach was applied to analyze the scientific publications in the field using the Scopus Elsevier database. Different aspects of the publications were analyzed, such as publication type, major research areas, journals, citations, authorship pattern, affiliations as well as the keyword occurrence frequency. The present research trends are analyzed and future research directions are outlined. The impact factor, h-index and number of citations were used to investigate the strength of active institutes, authors, and journals in the field of the energy in Pakistan. From 1990 to 2016, 991 articles have been published by 2139 authors from 213 research institutes. The total number of citations and impact factor are 10,287 and 2301 respectively, corresponding to 10 citations per paper and an impact factor of 2.32 per publication. The research articles originate primarily from COMSATS, NUST, PIEAS, and PINSTECH. Pakistan has published 60% of publication with the collaboration of the foreign institutes, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. The core research activities in the field are mainly focused on resource assessment, energy policy, energy efficiency, feasibility study, energy economics, and performance assessment. The most productive journal, author, institution, are renewable & sustainable energy review, Shahbaz M., and COMSATS, respectively.     

光触发增强葡萄糖氧化酶催化活性的等离子体囊泡用于程序化光热-饥饿疗法

在肿瘤的饥饿治疗及协同治疗中,基于葡萄糖氧化酶(GOx)的纳米诊疗剂展现出具大的应用前景.自组装等离子体金囊泡(GV),由于具有独特的光学性能、巨大空腔和强局域表面等离子体共振等特性,可作为协同治疗的多功能纳米载体.本文中,我们开发了一种装载GOx的GV(GV-GOx)用于光触发释放GOx,同时增强GOx的催化活性,从而实现程序化光热-饥饿治疗.在近红外激光照射下,由于GV具有等离子体耦合效应, GV-GOx可以产生很强的局部高热,引起封装的GOx释放,同时高热可提高GOx催化活性,从而增强肿瘤的饥饿效应.此外,高光热效应可促进细胞对GV-GOx的摄取,并可通过活体光声/光热双模态成像对协同治疗进行有效监测.令人印象深刻的是,协同光热/饥饿疗法能完全消融4T1荷瘤小鼠的肿瘤,抗肿瘤效果明显优于单一疗法,且没有明显的系统毒性.本工作展示了一种光触发的纳米平台,可用于癌症协同治疗.     

Comparative Assessment of Ambient Air Quality of Major Cities of Pakistan

The deterioration of ambient air quality is one of the emerging environmental problems in developing countries of South Asia. Unplanned urbanization, population growth, degradation of vegetation cover and industrial and vehicular emissions, particularly in urban areas, have resulted in substantial rise in the level of air pollutants and emission sources. This study focused on monitoring of different cities as per traffic volume and flow. Air quality monitoring was conducted on hourly basis to determine the major parameters; i.e. PM₁₀, NO_x, SO₂, CO by using fixed station for 8 h from 1:30 pm to 9:30 pm. All the measuring values were then compared with the National Environment Quality Standards (NEQS) and Air Quality Index (AQI). Results revealed that the concentration of PM₁₀ at the selected areas of these cities ranged from 156 to 390 μg/m³, CO ranged from 1.18 to 6.01 mg/m³, and NO_x ranged from 32.65 to 129.47 μg/m³. It was evident that all these concentration had been higher than the permissible limits of NEQS, whereas only SO₂ was found within the permissible limits (15.60–110.52 μg/m³⁾. Air Quality Index (AQI) of all the designated points of cities was also assessed, and most of the vehicular and commercial areas had shown unhealthy and severe conditions ranging from 191 to 320, respectively.

     

Suitability of VVC and HEVC for Video Telehealth Systems

Video compression in medical video streaming is one of the key technologies associated with mobile healthcare. Seamless delivery of medical video streams over a resource constrained network emphasizes the need of a video codec that requires minimum bitrates and maintains high perceptual quality. This paper presents a comparative study between High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and its potential successor Versatile Video Coding (VVC) in the context of healthcare. A large-scale subjective experiment comprising of twenty-four non-expert participants is presented for eight different test conditions in Full High Definition (FHD) videos. The presented analysis highlights the impact of compression artefacts on the perceptual quality of HEVC and VVC processed videos. Our results and findings show that VVC clearly outperforms HEVC in terms of achieving higher compression, while maintaining high quality in FHD videos. VVC requires upto 40% less bitrate for encoding an FHD video at excellent perceptual quality. We have provided rate-quality curves for both encoders and a degree of overlap across both codecs in terms of perceptual quality. Overall, there is a 71% degree of overlap in terms of quality between VVC and HEVC compressed videos for eight different test conditions.     

Design of a Compact Monopole Antenna for UWB Applications

In this paper, a low cost, highly efficient and low profile monopole antenna for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications is presented. A new inverted triangular-shape structure possessing meander lines is designed to achieve a wideband response and high efficiency. To design the proposed structure, three steps are utilized to achieve an UWB response. The bandwidth of the proposed antenna is improved with changing meander lines parameters, miniaturization of the ground width and optimization of the feeding line. The measured and simulated frequency band ranges from 3.2 to 12 GHz, while the radiation patterns are measured at 4, 5.3, 6 and 8 GHz frequency bands. The overall volume of the proposed antenna is 26 × 25 × 1.6 mm3 ; whereas the FR4 material is used as a substrate with a relative permittivity and loss tangent of 4.3 and 0.025, correspondingly. The peak gain of 4 dB is achieved with a radiation efficiency of 80 to 98% for the entire wideband. Design modelling of proposed antenna is performed in ANSYS HFSS 13 software. A decent consistency between the simulated and measured results is accomplished which shows that the proposed antenna is a potential candidate for the UWB applications.     

Theoretical Investigations of Magnetic Properties and Mechanical Stability of Quaternary Heusler Compounds FeYCrZ (Z = Al,Ga, Ge,and Si): a Spin Gapless Semiconductor

Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism - In this work, full potential linearized augmented plane wave (FP-LAPW) method is used to determine the electronic, magnetic, and mechanical...     

Simulation of liquid micro-jet in free expanding high-speed co-flowing gas streams

We present the development of an experimentally validated computational fluid dynamics model for liquid micro jets. Such jets are produced by focusing hydrodynamic momentum from a co-flowing sheath of gas on a liquid stream in a nozzle. The numerical model based on laminar two-phase, Newtonian, compressible Navier–Stokes equations is solved with finite volume method, where the phase interface is treated by the volume of fluid approach. A mixture model of the two-phase system is solved in axisymmetry using?~?300,000 finite volumes, while ensuring mesh independence with the finite volumes of the size 0.25 µm in the vicinity of the jet and drops. The numerical model is evaluated by comparing jet diameters and jet lengths obtained experimentally and from scaling analysis. They are not affected by the strong temperature and viscosity changes in the focusing gas while expanding at nozzle outlet. A range of gas and liquid-operating parameters is investigated numerically to understand their influence on the jet performance. The study is performed for gas and liquid Reynolds numbers in the range 17–1222 and 110–215, and Weber numbers in the range 3–320, respectively. A reasonably good agreement between experimental and scaling results is found for the range of operating parameters never tackled before. This study provides a basis for further computational designs as well as adjustments of the operating conditions for specific liquids and gases.     

3D Printed Enzyme-Functionalized Scaffold Facilitates Diabetic Bone Regeneration

Patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) suffer from a high risk of fractures and poor bone healing ability. Surprisingly, no effective therapy is available to treat diabetic bone defect in clinic. Here, a 3D printed enzyme-functionalized scaffold with multiple bioactivities including osteogenesis, angiogenesis, and anti-inflammation in diabetic conditions is proposed. The as-prepared multifunctional scaffold is constituted with alginate, glucose oxidase (GOx), and catalase-assisted biomineralized calcium phosphate nanosheets (CaP@CAT NSs). The GOx inside scaffolds can alleviate the hyperglycemia environment by catalyzing glucose and oxygen into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂). Both the generated H₂O₂ as well as the overproduced H₂O₂ in DM can be scavenged by CaP@CAT NSs, while the initiated hypoxic microenvironment stimulates neovascularization. Moreover, the incorporation of CaP@CAT NSs not only enhance the mechanical property of the scaffolds, but also facilitate bone regeneration by the degraded Ca²⁺ and PO₄³⁻ ions. The remarkable in vitro and in vivo outcomes demonstrate that enzymes functionalized scaffolds can be an effective strategy for enhancing bone tissue regeneration in diabetic conditions, underpinning the potential of multifunctional scaffolds for diabetic bone regeneration.     

BDN-GWMNN: Internet of Things (IoT) Enabled Secure Smart City Applications

Nowadays, next-generation networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and 6G are played a vital role in providing an intelligent environment. The development of technologies helps to create smart city applications like the healthcare system, smart industry, and smart water plan, etc. Any user accesses the developed applications; at the time, security, privacy, and confidentiality arechallenging to manage. So, this paper introduces the blockchain-defined networks with a grey wolf optimized modular neural network approach for managing the smart environment security. During this process, construction, translation, and application layers are created, in which user authenticated based blocks are designed to handle the security and privacy property. Then the optimized neural network is applied to maintain the latency and computational resource utilization in IoT enabled smart applications. Then the efficiency of the system is evaluated using simulation results, in which system ensures low latency, high security (99.12%) compared to the multi-layer perceptron, and deep learning networks.