Histological technique to detect the physiological age of the malaria vector mosquito Anopheles pharoensis (Diptera: Culicidae)

The risk of malaria recurrence increases due to the main vector, Anopheles pharoensis. The physiological age of the mosquito population is needed to expect malaria vector dynamics. The number of completed gonotrophic cycles is of great importance in determining the physiological age of females. A technique has been described that focuses on the number of dilatations remaining in the ovarioles after each oviposition to determine how many blood meals have been taken. At each gonotrophic cycle, the chances of infection of the vectors are repeated. The histological changes that occur immediately in the ovarioles and ovulation itself were studied. Under the influence of the contractions of the ovarian muscles, the eggs begin to move over the distal end of the ovariole into the inner oviduct. The terminal pedicle is markedly dilated near the diameter of the eggs. After the expulsion of the mature eggs, ovariole dilations were found at the point of their development in the terminal pedicle due to the accumulation of nurse cell remnants and follicular epithelium. The results were used to develop epidemiological localization and to evaluate the effectiveness of antimalaria interventions. The ovarian inspection often provides a technique to distinguish nulliparous from parous female anophelines. In addition, this study can provide basic entomological knowledge on the physiological age of mosquitoes by considering the histological changes in the ovaries, which allow the evaluation of vector management strategies in the field.     

Stability preservation analysis in direct discretization of fractional order transfer functions

In this paper, a class of the direct methods for discretization of fractional order transfer functions is studied in the sense of stability preservation. The stability boundary curve is exactly determined for these discretization methods. Having this boundary helps us to recognize whether the original system and its discretized model are the same in the sense of stability. Finally, some illustrative examples are presented to evaluate achievements of the paper.     

Effect of exhaust gas recirculation on diesel engine nitrogen oxide reduction operating with jojoba methyl ester

Jojoba methyl ester (JME) has been used as a renewable fuel in numerous studies evaluating its potential use in diesel engines. These studies showed that this fuel is good gas oil substitute but an increase in the nitrogenous oxides emissions was observed at all operating conditions. The aim of this study mainly was to quantify the efficiency of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) when using JME fuel in a fully instrumented, two-cylinder, naturally aspirated, four-stroke direct injection diesel engine. The tests were carried out in three sections. Firstly, the measured performance and exhaust emissions of the diesel engine operating with diesel fuel and JME at various speeds under full load are determined and compared. Secondly, tests were performed at constant speed with two loads to investigate the EGR effect on engine performance and exhaust emissions including nitrogenous oxides (NO_x), carbon monoxide (CO), unburned hydrocarbons (HC) and exhaust gas temperatures. Thirdly, the effect of cooled EGR with high ratio at full load on engine performance and emissions was examined. The results showed that EGR is an effective technique for reducing NO_x emissions with JME fuel especially in light-duty diesel engines. With the application of the EGR method, the CO and HC concentration in the engine-out emissions increased. For all operating conditions, a better trade-off between HC, CO and NO_x emissions can be attained within a limited EGR rate of 5–15% with very little economy penalty.     

A new compaction strategy for enhancing the utilization of reconfigurable chips

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are designed to implement any logic circuit with the ability to host several independent tasks simultaneously. They inherit reconfigurability from their programmable architecture. However, designs are usually dynamic and the arrival times of tasks may be unknown in advance. Accordingly, FPGA should have the ability to: (1) place incoming tasks at run time, and (2) compact the chip whenever needed. Compaction is a proposed solution to alleviate external fragmentations. It tries to move running tasks closer to each others to free a sufficient area for hosting more tasks. Unfortunately, traditional compaction techniques suffer from internal and external fragmentations. This paper introduces a novel puzzle-based compaction (PBC) technique. PBC is a shape-aware technique that is the first to take the task shape into consideration. Hence, it succeeds not only to eliminate the internal fragmentations but also to minimize the external fragmentations. Moreover, the paper develops a novel formula, which is the first not to estimate, but to exactly calculate the amount of external fragmentations generated by hosting a set of tasks inside the reconfigurable chip. Experimental results have shown that PBC outperforms recent compaction techniques in which the chip utilization has reached 87 %.     

Dynamic modeling of gas phase propylene homopolymerization in fluidized bed reactors

A new model with comprehensive kinetics for propylene homopolymerization in fluidized bed reactors was developed to investigate the effect of mixing, operating conditions, kinetic and hydrodynamic parameters on the reactor performance as well as polymer properties. Presence of the particles in the bubbles and the excess gas in the emulsion phase was considered to improve the two-phase model, thus, considering the polymerization reaction to take place in both the bubble and emulsion phases. It was shown that in the practical range of superficial gas velocity and catalyst feed rate, the ratio of produced polymer in the bubble phase to the total production rate is roughly between 10% and 13%, which is a substantial amount and cannot be ignored. Simulation studies were carried out to compare the results of the improved two-phase, conventional well-mixed and constant bubble size models. The improved two-phase and well mixed models predicted a narrower and safer window at the same running conditions compared with the constant bubble size model. The improved two-phase model showed close dynamic behavior to the conventional models at the beginning of polymerization, but starts to diverge with the evolution of time.     

The dual-edge alignment technique with improved spur reduction effects in ring oscillators

In this paper, the technique of dual-edge phase-alignment and its effects on ring oscillators are presented. This technique provides resetting of the built-up jitter at both rising and falling edges of a clean aligning signal named as the reference. Using signals and systems theory, the effect of the technique on the spurs due to the aligning reference signal is completely analyzed. We show that adding properly the dual-edge aligning feature to phase-aligned ring oscillators cause the spurs in the neighborhood of the carrier to disappear. First, the validity of the results obtained from the derived analytical equations is verified through simulations using MATLAB. Then a complete circuit considering realistic models for its components is simulated in TSMC RF CMOS 0.18um process using ADS for further validation.     

Trellis precoding for MIMO broadcast signaling

Channel Inversion, and its Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) variation, are low complexity methods for Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) in Multiple Input Multiple Output Broadcast Channel (MIMO-BC). As the channel matrix deviates from orthogonal, these methods result in a waste of transmit power. This paper proposes a trellis precoding method (across time and space) to improve the power efficiency. Adopting a 4-state trellis shaping method from [1], the complexity of the proposed method, which is entirely at the transmitter side, is equivalent to the search in a trellis with 4N states where N is the number of transmit antennas. Numerical results are presented showing that the achievable gains, which depend on the channel realization, can be significantly higher than the traditional shaping gain which is limited to 1.53dB.     

MATRIX AND CEMENT EFFECTS ON RESIDUAL OIL SATURATION IN SANDSTONE FORMATIONS: A NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Residual oil in sandstone is affected by mineral composition, clay matrix and cementing material. Matrix minerals affect the affinity of a fluid to spread on a rock surface significantly and in turn controls the fluid distribution within the pore spaces. At the interface between the rock surface and the contacting fluid, electrical charges are in the origin of the extent of phase wetness. Available framework grains, a dominant component of rock matrix, affect porosity and, hence, amounts of rock preferential wetness. Cement, clay matrix and quartz overgrowth, which make up for the rest of the grain population in a rock, influence wetness and, therefore, amounts of residual oil. In this paper, spectro-electromicroscopy (SEM) point-count technique in conjunction with neural network analysis were used to determine the effect of certains rock parameters on the amounts of residual oil following waterflooding operations. Using artifcial neural network, the intent was then to predict the extent of residual oil in sandstone rocks given limited information about rock matrix, cementing material and primary porosity.