Biohydrogen Production from Organic Waste – A Review

Hydrogen fuel is a promising alternative to fossil fuels because of its energy content, clean nature, and fuel efficiency. However, it is not readily available. Most current producion processes are very energy intensive and emit carbon dioxide. Therefore, this article reviews technological options for hydrogen production that are eco-friendly and generate clean hydrogen fuel. Biological methods, such different fermentation processes and photolysis are discussed together with the required substrates and the process efficiency.     

Reconstruction of cellular biological structures from optical microscopy data

Developments in optical microscopy imaging have generated large high-resolution data sets that have spurred medical researchers to conduct investigations into mechanisms of disease, including cancer at cellular and subcellular levels. The work reported here demonstrates that a suitable methodology can be conceived that isolates modality-dependent effects from the larger segmentation task and that 3D reconstructions can be cognizant of shapes as evident in the available 2D planar images. In the current realization, a method based on active geodesic contours is first deployed to counter the ambiguity that exists in separating overlapping cells on the image plane. Later, another segmentation effort based on a variant of Voronoi tessellations improves the delineation of the cell boundaries using a Bayesian formulation. In the next stage, the cells are interpolated across the third dimension thereby mitigating the poor structural correlation that exists in that dimension. We deploy our methods on three separate data sets obtained from light, confocal, and phase-contrast microscopy and validate the results appropriately.     

Auto-Discovering Configurations for Service Management

Determining service configurations is essential for effective service management. In this paper we describe a model-driven approach for service configuration auto-discovery. We develop metrics for performance and scalability analysis of such auto-discovery mechanisms. Our approach addresses several problems in auto-discovery: specification of what services to discover, how to efficiently distribute service discovery, and how to match instances of services into related groups. We use object-oriented models for discovery specifications, a flexible bus-based architecture for distribution and communication, and a novel multi-phased, instance matching approach. We have applied our approach to typical e-commerce services, Enterprise Resource Planning applications, like SAP, and Microsoft Exchange services running on a mixture of Windows and Unix platforms. The main contribution of this work is the flexibility of our models, architecture and algorithms to address discovery of a multitude of services.     

New Algorithms for Resource Reclaiming from Precedence Constrained Tasks in Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

The scheduling of tasks in multiprocessor real-time systems has attracted many researchers in the recent past. Tasks in these systems have deadlines to be met, and most of the real-time scheduling algorithms use worst case computation times to schedule these tasks. Many resources will be left unused if the tasks are dispatched purely based on the schedule produced by these scheduling algorithms, since most of the tasks will take less time to execute than their respective worst case computation times. Resource reclaiming refers to the problem of reclaiming the resources left unused by a real-time task when it takes less time to execute than its worst case computation time. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to reclaim these resources from real-time tasks that are constrained by precedence relations and resource requirements, in shared memory multiprocessor systems. We introduce a notion called a restriction vector for each task which captures its resource and precedence constraints with other tasks. This will help not only in the efficient implementation of the algorithms, but also in obtaining an improvement in performance over the reclaiming algorithms proposed in earlier work [[2]]. We compare our resource reclaiming algorithms with the earlier algorithms and, by experimental studies, show that they reclaim more resources, thereby increasing the guarantee ratio (the ratio of the number of tasks guaranteed to meet their deadlines to the number of tasks that have arrived), which is the basic requirement of any resource reclaiming algorithm. From our simulation studies, we demonstrate that complex reclaiming algorithms with high reclaiming overheads do not lead to an improvement in the guarantee ratio.     

Harnessing power from sea water using nano material as photocatalyst and solar energy as light source: the role of hydrocarbon as dual agent

The splitting of water in the presence of ordinary and nano TiO₂ was carried out using hydrocarbon as a dual agent and solar energy as a light source for these experiments. The hydrogen gas evolved was tested and measured using downward displacement of water. The observed results show that more hydrogen was evolved when nano TiO₂ was used as catalyst due to the larger surface area of the nano material. The splitting of sea water yields more hydrogen compared with ordinary water due to the presence of electron donating sodium ions in water. The added hydrocarbon plays a dual role as electron donor and as a trapping agent, which enhances the production of hydrogen to a greater extent compared with the regular donors such as olefin. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Verification of the applicability of lattice model to concrete fracture by AE study

Notched three-point bend specimens (TPB) were tested under crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) control at a rate of 0.0004 mm/s and the entire fracture process was simulated using a regular triangular two-dimensional lattice network only over the expected fracture process zone width. The rest of the beam specimen was discretised by a coarse triangular finite element mesh. The discrete grain structure of the concrete was generated assuming the grains to be spherical. The load versus CMOD plots thus simulated agreed reasonably well with the experimental results. Moreover, acoustic emission (AE) hits were recorded during the test and compared with the number of fractured lattice elements. It was found that the cumulative AE hits correlated well with the cumulative fractured lattice elements at all load levels thus providing a useful means for predicting when the micro-cracks form during the fracturing process, both in the pre-peak and in the post-peak regimes.     

Sleep Disturbance and Metabolic Dysfunction: The Roles of Adipokines

Adipokines are a growing group of peptide or protein hormones that play important roles in whole body metabolism and metabolic diseases. Sleep is an integral component of energy metabolism, and sleep disturbance has been implicated in a wide range of metabolic disorders. Accumulating evidence suggests that adipokines may play a role in mediating the close association between sleep disorders and systemic metabolic derangements. In this review, we briefly summarize a group of selected adipokines and their identified function in metabolism. Moreover, we provide a balanced overview of these adipokines and their roles in sleep physiology and sleep disorders from recent human and animal studies. These studies collectively demonstrate that the functions of adipokine in sleep physiology and disorders could be largely twofold: (1) adipokines have multifaceted roles in sleep physiology and sleep disorders, and (2) sleep disturbance can in turn affect adipokine functions that likely contribute to systemic metabolic derangements.     

Preparation and characterization of novel polyurethanes containing 4,4′‐{oxy‐1,4‐diphenyl bis(nitromethylidine)}diphenol schiff base diol

Four novel segmented polyurethanes (PUs) based on4,4′‐{oxy‐1,4‐diphenyl bis(nitromethylidine)}diphenol (ODBNMD) diol with different diisocyanates such as 4,4′‐diphenylmethane diisocyanate, toluene 2,4‐diisocyanate, isophorone diisocyanate, and hexamethylene diisocyanate have been prepared by solution method. The structures of ODBNMD and PUs have been confirmed by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), nuclear magnetic resonance (¹H‐NMR and ¹³C‐NMR), UV‐visible, and fluorescence spectroscopies. The segmented PUs were further characterized by thermogravimetry (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and wide‐angle X‐ray diffraction. FTIR confirmed hydrogen bonding interactions, whereas TGA and DSC suggested that introduction of aromatic/phenyl ring in the main chain considerably increased the thermal stability. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 54:24–32, 2014. © 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Optical and structural properties of highly porous shell structured Fe doped TiO2 thin films

TiO2thin films with 0.2 wt%, 0.4 wt%, 0.6wt%, and 0.8 wt% Fe were prepared on glass and silicon substrates using sol–gel spin coating technique. The optical cut-off points are increasingly red-shifted and the absorption edge is shifted over the higher wavelength region with Fe content increasing. As Fe content increases, the optical band gap decreases from 3.03 to 2.48 eV whereas the tail width increases from 0.26 to 1.43 eV. The X-ray diffraction（XRD） patterns for doped films at 0.2 wt% and0.8 wt% Fe reveal no characteristic peaks, indicating that the film is amorphous whereas undoped TiO2exhibits（101） orientation with anatase phase. Thin films of higher Fe content exhibit a homogeneous, uniform, and nanostructured highly porous shell morphology.