Adherence of Acanthamoeba to human corneal epithelial cells recovered from normal non-lens wearers and asymptomatic contact lens wearers.

To increase our knowledge of factors leading to Acanthamoeba keratitis in contact lens wearers, we determined the ability of this organism to adhere to corneal epithelial cells (EC) recovered from non-lens wearers (NL) and from subjects using hydrogel contact lenses on a daily (DW) and extended wear (EW) schedule. ECs were incubated with trophozoites of Acanthamoeba and, after 3 h, the median per cent of cells exhibiting adherence was 24, 23 and 23 for NL, DW and EW groups respectively (P=0.552, Kruskal-Wallis Test). There were no differences between the groups for the number of adherent amoebae and a significant majority had only one adherent trophozoite per EC. No difference in adherence was seen with increasing exposure time. Factors other than amoebic adherence to superficial corneal EC are responsible for the increased incidence of Acanthamoeba keratitis in lens wearers.     

A novel fed-batch digestion system for biomethanation of plant biomasses

Plant biomasses, which in the absence of adequate pretreatment pose serious operational problems in biogas production using conventional domestic flow-through digesters, can be successfully digested in a novel fedbatch digestion system that produces a steady rate of biogas. Basically, the system is a batch digestion operated with a regular input of a calculated amount of feed based on first order decay kinetics in order to maintain a regular biogas production rate. For nearly three years the system was tested in a laboratory-scale fed-batch digester (10 l) using dried water hyacinth as feed providing the desired biogas production rate. A field-scale domestic digester of masonry construction with a working volume of 10 m3 was designed and tested for about 9 months by feeding a mixture of dried water hyacinth or banana stem along with sugarcane press mud, yielding an average biogas production of 90-100% of the expected rate calculated on the basis of the feed rate.     

Adaptively Grouped Multilevel Space-Time Trellis Codes

Grouped multilevel space-time trellis codes (GMLSTTCs) utilize multilevel coding (MLC), antenna grouping and space time trellis codes (STTCs) for simultaneously providing coding gain, diversity improvement and increased spectral efficiency. The performance of GMLSTTCs is limited due to predefining of the antenna groups. It has been shown that when perfect or partial channel state information is available at the transmitter, the performance and capacity of space-time coded system can be further improved. In this paper, we present a new code designed by combining MLC, STTCs, antenna grouping and channel state information at transmitter, henceforth referred to as adaptively grouped multilevel space time trellis codes (AGMLSTTCs). AGMLSTTCs use a single full-diversity STTC at initial some levels and multiple STTCs at some later levels. The single full diversity STTC at each initial level spans all transmit antennas and the STTC at each later level spans a group of transmit antennas. The channel state information at the transmitter is used to adaptively group the transmit antennas for the later levels. Instantaneous channel power gain is calculated between each transmit antenna and all the receive antennas. A subset of transmit antennas having maximum channel power gain is selected to form a group. The simulation results show that AGMLSTTCs enable to transmit more than one data symbol per time slot with improved error performance over GMLSTTCs with predefined transmit antenna grouping.     

Two-stage decision making policy for opportunistic spectrum access and validation on USRP testbed

“Recently, various paradigms, for instance, device-to-device communications, LTE-unlicensed and cognitive radio based on an opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) are being envisioned to improve the average spectrum utilization. In OSA, secondary (unlicensed) users (SUs) need decision making policies (DMPs) to identify and transmit over optimum frequency bands without any interference to the primary (licensed) users as well as minimize the number of collisions among SUs. In this paper, we have proposed a two-stage DMP consisting of Bayesian Multi-armed Bandit algorithm to accurately characterize the frequency band statistics independently at each SU and frequency band selection scheme for orthogonalization of SUs. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed DMP leads to 45% improvement in the average spectrum utilization compared to 36–39% in the existing DMPs. Furthermore, the number of collisions are 58.5% lower in the proposed DMP making SU terminals energy-efficient. The performance of the proposed DMP has been verified on the proposed USRP testbed in real radio environment and the experimental results closely match the simulated results .”     

Copper@ZIF-8 Core-Shell Nanowires for Reusable Antimicrobial Face Masks

SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses spread via aerosols generated by infected people. Face masks can limit transmission. However, widespread use of disposable masks consumes tremendous resources and generates waste. Here, a novel material for treating blown polypropylene filtration media used in medical-grade masks to impart antimicrobial activity is reported. To produce thin copper@ZIF-8 core-shell nanowires (Cu@ZIF-8 NWs), Cu NWs are stabilized using a pluronic F-127 block copolymer, followed by growth of ZIF-8 to obtain uniform core-shell structures. The Cu@ZIF-8 NWs are applied to filtration media by dip coating. Aerosol filtration efficiency decreases upon exposure to ethanol (solvent for dip-coating), but increases with addition of Cu@ZIF-8 NWs. Cu@ZIF-8 NWs shows enhanced antibacterial activity, compared to Cu NWs or ZIF-8 alone, against Streptococcus mutans and Escherichia coli. Antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 is assayed using virus-infected Vero E6 cells, demonstrating 55% inhibition of virus replication after 48 h by 1 µg of Cu@ZIF-8 NWs per well. Cu@ZIF-8 NWs’ cytotoxicity is tested against four cell lines, and their effect on inflammatory response in A549 cells is examined, demonstrating good biocompatibility. This low-cost, scalable synthesis and straightforward deposition of Cu@ZIF-8 NWs onto filter media has great potential to reduce disease transmission, resource consumption, and environmental impact of waste.     

A model of front-illuminated n+-p-p+high-efficiency silicon solar cell

A realistic model of a front-illuminated n⁺-p-p⁺ silicon solar cell is developed by solving the current continuity equations for minority carriers in the quasi-neutral regions in steady state, assuming the light in the cell is trapped as a result of multiple reflections at the front and the back of the cell. This model is used to study the effects of the front emitter thickness and doping level and the light trapping on the J-V characteristic and thereby on the open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current density, curve factor, and the efficiency of the cell. A textured cell with an emitter thickness in the range of 0.3-1.0 μm with its doping ≈5×10¹⁸ cm^-3 and the recombination velocities of minority carriers as large as 200 cm/s at the n⁺ front surface and 10 cm/s at the back of the p base can exhibit an efficiency in excess of 26% (under AM 1.5 sunlight of 100 mW/cm² intensity) at 25°C if the light reflection losses at the front surface can be made small     

Stochastic model of k-parallel service channels

With the enhanced rate of inflow of units, especially in randomly distributed batch sizes, service through parallel channels appears to be the optimal course for relieving congestion and reducing the waiting time of customers. Keeping this fact in view, this paper involves k-parallel service channels which operate together for dealing with the situation of bulk arrivals. The time-dependent and steady state behaviour of the queueing system is dealt with at length. Laplace transforms of the probability generating functions for queue length distributions are obtained and the steady state results are derived therefrom. Finally, some particular cases which can be derived from the main theorem are also discussed.     

Progress on large area n‐type silicon solar cells with front laser doping and a rear emitter

We report on the progress of imec's n‐type passivated emitter, rear totally diffused rear junction silicon solar cells. Selective laser doping has been introduced in the flow, allowing the implementation of a shallow diffused front surface field and a reduction of the recombination current in the contact area. Simplifications have been implemented towards a more industrial annealing sequence, by replacing expensive forming gas annealing steps with a belt furnace annealing. By applying these improvements, together with an advanced texturing process and emitter passivation by atomic layer deposition of Al₂O₃, 22.5% efficient cells (three busbars) have been realized on commercial 156 · 156 mm² Czochralski‐Si. This result has been independently confirmed by ISE CalLab. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Channel capacity with suboptimal adaptation technique over generalized-K fading using marginal moment generating function

In this paper we have computed the channel capacity for suboptimal adaptation technique over the generalized-K fading environment. The analytical expression for channel capacity in case of the truncated channel inversion with fixed rate (C_TCIFR) has been exploited in terms of marginal moment generating function (MMGF) and its performance is evaluated over the generalized-K faded environment. The MMGF based approach for the computation of channel capacity has been validated with the reported literature for channel capacity in case of the channel inversion with fixed rate using the suboptimal adaptive technique.