The BbRib gene participates in the infection process of Beauveria bassiana (B. bassiana). It also helps pathogenic fungi to escape and defeat the insect host immune defense system by regulating the innate immune response. However, model insects are rarely used to study the mechanism of fungal ribosomal toxin protein. In this study, BbRib protein was produced by prokaryotic expression and injected into silkworm (Bombyx mori) larvae. The physiological and biochemical indexes of silkworm were monitored, and the pathological effects of BbRib protein on immune tissues of silkworm were examined by Hematoxylin and Eosin (HE) staining. BbRib protein can significantly affect the growth and development of the silkworm, causing poisoning, destroying the midgut and fat body and producing physiological changes. The ROS stress response in the adipose tissue and cells of the silkworm was activated to induce apoptosis. These results indicated that the BbRib gene not only participates in the infection... [more]

One of the many barriers to decarbonization and decentralization of the energy sector in developing countries is the economic uncertainty. As such, this study scrutinizes economics of three grid-independent hybrid renewable-based systems proposed to co-generate electricity and heat for a small-scale load. Accordingly, the under-study systems are simulated and optimized with the aid of HOMER Pro software. Here, a 20-year average value of discount and inflation rates is deemed a benchmark case. The techno-economic-environmental and reliability results suggest a standalone solar/wind/electrolyzer/hydrogen-based fuel cell integrated with a hydrogen-based boiler system is the best alternative. Moreover, to ascertain the impact of economic uncertainty on optimal unit sizing of the nominated model, the fluctuations of the nominal discount rate and inflation, respectively, constitute within the range of 15−20% and 10−26%. The findings of economic uncertainty analysis imply that total net prese... [more]

The atmospheric corrosion of weathering steels varies as a function of geographic zone, season, and other environmental variables related to that region which the experiments have been done. Meanwhile, rusting is a continuous process, and it is the main corrosion product of atmospheric corrosion. The current study investigates the effects of rust on weathering steel in the localized region of Digha, a sea resort of West Bengal, India. The investigations have been performed by purposely accelerating the rusting of weathering steel in a laboratory within one week in order to simulate approximately 18 months of actual rusting that can be achieved at field exposure. Anodic polarization of weathering steel comparable to potentiostatic passivation is obtained by shorting weathering steel with nobler metals, such as copper or graphite. The effect of rust formation on corrosion resistance after being immersed in 0.01 M KCl solutions for polished and unpolished samples has been investigated usi... [more]

The paper is an extensive monographic review of the literature, and also uses the results of the authors’ own experimental research illustrating the noticed developmental tendencies of the filling material based on gutta-percha. The whole body of literature proves the correctness of the research thesis that this material is the best currently that can be used in endodontics. Caries is one of the most common global infectious diseases. Since the dawn of humankind, the consequence of the disease has been the loss of dentition over time through dental extractions. Both tooth caries and tooth loss cause numerous complications and systemic diseases, which have a serious impact on insurance systems and on the well-being, quality, and length of human life. Endodontic treatment, which has been developing since 1836, is an alternative to tooth extraction. Based on an extensive literature review, the methodology of qualifying patients for endodontic treatment was analyzed. The importance of sele... [more]

Data-driven model with predictive ability are important to be used in medical and healthcare. However, the most challenging task in predictive modeling is to construct a prediction model, which can be addressed using machine learning (ML) methods. The methods are used to learn and trained the model using a gene expression dataset without being programmed explicitly. Due to the vast amount of gene expression data, this task becomes complex and time consuming. This paper provides a recent review on recent progress in ML and deep learning (DL) for cancer classification, which has received increasing attention in bioinformatics and computational biology. The development of cancer classification methods based on ML and DL is mostly focused on this review. Although many methods have been applied to the cancer classification problem, recent progress shows that most of the successful techniques are those based on supervised and DL methods. In addition, the sources of the healthcare dataset are... [more]

Based on DPF filtration and regeneration bench, the solid particle emission and high-temperature filtration characteristics of different carbon black particle loadings and particle deposition distributions are studied. The aerosol generator (PAlAS RGB 1000) is used to introduce carbon black particles into the inlet of a DPF, and the NanoMet3 particle meter is used to measure the solid particle concentration at the inlet and outlet of a DPF to obtain the filtration characteristics. Previous studies found that without inlet carbon black particles, there was an obvious solid particle emission peak at the outlet of the deposited DPF during the heating, and the concentration increased by 1−2 orders of magnitude. In this paper, the high-temperature filtration characteristics under steady-state temperature conditions are studied. It is found that a DPF can reduce the range of inlet fluctuating particles, and with the increase of temperature, the proportion of large solid particles in the outl... [more]

In 2005, a 60 kt/a alkylation (ALK) unit began to resume production in the Second Oil Refinery Plant of Beijing Yanshan Petrochemical Company. There have been many leak cases from pipeline welds, valve body, flange, etc. After a half-year period of operation, production process is stable. However, the operation of the hydrofluoric (HF) acid ALK unit has been suffered from corrosion problems. There are no clear answers and references to the following problems. What types of corrosion are currently in the main equipment for HF acid ALK unit? What does cause equipment corrosion? What are the main influencing factors for corrosion? What measures can be taken to reduce the corrosion of HF acid? In this paper, considering the acid-related conditions of the ALK unit, the damage mechanism and damage rate analysis were carried out to calculate the safety risk of the static equipment of the ALK unit. Based on the damage mechanism and failure history, the material suitability of the ALK unit was... [more]

With the widespread use of substations around the world, oil jet fire accidents from transformer oil-filled equipment in substations caused by faults have occurred from time to time. In this paper, a series of transformer oil jet fire experiments are carried out by changing the external heat source (30 cm and 40 cm) and the inner diameter of the container (5 cm, 8 cm and 10 cm) to study the axial centerline temperature distribution of the transformer oil jet fire plume of the transformer oil-filled equipment in the substation. The experiment uses K-type thermocouple, electronic balance and CCD to measure and assess the temperature distribution of the axial centerline of the fire plume of the transformer oil jet. The result demonstrates that the axial centerline temperature of the fire plume increases with the external heat release rate and the inner diameter of the container. In addition, a novel axial temperature distribution prediction model of the transformer oil jet fire plume is e... [more]

Currently, some coffee production centers still perform classification manually, which requires a very long time, a lot of labor, and expensive operational costs. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to design and test the performance of a coffee bean classifier that can accelerate the process of classifying beans. The classifier used consisted of three main parts, namely the frame, the driving force, and sieves. The research parameters included classifier work capacity, power, specific energy, classification distribution and effectiveness, and efficiency. The results showed that the best operating conditions of the coffee bean classifier was a rotational speed of 91.07 rpm and a 16° sieve angle with a classifier working capacity of 38.27 kg/h: the distribution of the seeds retained in the first sieve was 56.77%, the second sieve was 28.12%, and the third sieve was 15.11%. The efficiency of using a classifier was found at a rotating speed of 91.07 rpm and a sieve angle of 16°. T... [more]

The insecticidal ingredient in a biogas solution being fully utilized by cation exchange resin to produce slow-release insecticide is of great social value. In this work, the feasibility of ammonia nitrogen in a biogas slurry loaded on resin as a slow-release insecticide was evaluated by studying the effect of adsorption and the slow release of ammonia nitrogen by resin. The effects of the ammonia nitrogen concentration, resin dosage, adsorption time and pH value on the ammonia nitrogen adsorption by the resin were studied. The results showed that the ion exchange resin had a good adsorption effect on the ammonia nitrogen. With the increase of the resin dosage, time and ammonia nitrogen concentration, the adsorption capacity increased at first and then stabilized. The ammonia nitrogen adsorption capacity reached its maximum value (1.13 mg) when the pH value was 7. The adsorption process can be fitted well by the Langmuir isothermal adsorption equation and quasi-second-order kinetic mod... [more]

The global population is moving away from fossil fuel technologies due to their many disadvantages, such as air pollution, greenhouse gases emission, global warming, acid rain, health problems, and high costs. These disadvantages make fossil fuels unsustainable. As a result, renewable energy is becoming more attractive due to its steadily decreasing costs. Harnessing renewable energy promises to meet the present energy demands of the African continent. The enormous renewable energy potential available across the African continent remains largely untapped, especially for wind energy. However, marginal and fair wind speeds and power densities characterize African wind energy resulting in low and unsustainable power in many areas. This research develops a techno-economic model for wind energy cost analysis for a novel, Ferris wheel-based wind turbine. The model is used to techno-economically analyze the siting of wind turbine sites in low wind speed areas on the African continent. The win... [more]

The major challenges for the commercialization of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are durability and cost. Prognostics and health management technology enable appropriate decisions and maintenance measures by estimating the current state of health and predicting the degradation trend, which can help extend the life and reduce the maintenance costs of PEMFCs. This paper proposes an online model-based prognostics method to estimate the degradation trend and the remaining useful life of PEMFCs. A non-linear empirical degradation model is proposed based on an aging test, then three degradation state variables, including degradation degree, degradation speed and degradation acceleration, can be estimated online by the particle filter algorithm to predict the degradation trend and remaining useful life. Moreover, a new health indicator is proposed to replace the actual variable loading conditions with the simulated constant loading conditions. Test results using actual aging dat... [more]

Various types of chemical and physical protocols are used, thermal treatment in particular, to increase the quality of bulk food products (for example, dates or some sort of nuts) and extend shelf life, and combinations of methods are frequently used to achieve the best results. However, the use of these processing methods is not always the best option to preserve the initial taste and appearance of food products. For instance, a product may lose its initial natural appearance and acquire different flavors due to chemical transformations that occur at certain temperatures or when the products are treated with chemicals. Non-thermal treatment methods are called “cold” pasteurization. This is a set of advanced techniques that are based on physical and chemical effects that do not result in the structural food-product transformations caused by heating. We have developed and tested a new technique for efficient food-product processing and cold pasteurization in an ultrasonic field under pr... [more]

The research herein explored the possible mechanism of toxicity of the antibiotic sulfadiazine (SD) and the related antibiotic resistance gene transformation in lettuce by systematically investigating its growth responses, ultrastructural changes, and antibiotic resistance gene transformation via solution culture experiments. The results showed that SD mainly accumulated in the roots of lettuce at concentrations ranging from 6.48 to 120.87 μg/kg, which were significantly higher than those in leaves (3.90 to 16.74 μg/kg). Lower concentrations of SD (0.5 and 2.0 mg/L) in the culture nutrient solution exerted little effect on lettuce growth, while at SD concentrations higher than 10 mg/L, the growth of lettuce was significantly inhibited, manifesting as shorter root length and lower dry matter yield of whole lettuce plants. Compared with that for the control group, the absolute abundance of bacteria in the root endophyte, rhizosphere, and phyllosphere communities under different concentra... [more]

The study aimed to verify whether the addition of selected herbs and spices will affect the content of polyphenols in biscuits and their antioxidant capacity, as well as what impact it will have on their sensory properties and attractiveness to consumers. Ground cloves, cinnamon, mint, and grape flour were added to the biscuits in concentrations of 1.0, 3.0, 5.0, and 10.0%. The total content of polyphenols in spices and biscuit samples was determined using the Folin−Ciocalteau solution and, subsequently, the antioxidant capacity was measured by FRAP (ferric ion reducing antioxidant power) and DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl inhibition). Polyphenols were transferred through spices and herbs into the biscuits in all samples and thus their antioxidant capacity was increased. The antioxidant capacity of the control sample measured by the DPPH method was 15.41%, and by the FRAP method 1.02 μmol Trolox/g. There was an increase in antioxidant capacity in all samples with the addition of s... [more]

Chemical Product Engineering (CPE) is marked by numerous challenges, such as the complexity of the properties−structure−ingredients−process relationship of the different products and the necessity to discover and develop constantly and quickly new molecules and materials with tailor-made properties. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods have gained increasing attention due to their performance in tackling particularly complex problems in various areas, such as computer vision and natural language processing. As such, they present a specific interest in addressing the complex challenges of CPE. This article provides an updated review of the state of the art regarding the implementation of ML techniques in different types of CPE problems with a particular focus on four specific domains, namely the design and discovery of new molecules and materials, the modeling of processes, the prediction of chemical reactions/retrosynthesis and the support for... [more]

This comparative study inspects the MHD three-dimensional revolving flow and temperature transmission of a radiative stretching surface. The flow of nanofluid is modeled using the Tiwari and Das model. Water is the base fluid, and the nanoparticles are composed of two different types of nanoparticle, i.e., gold and silver (Au and Ag). The non-radiative heat flow notion is examined in a temperature field that results in a nonlinear energy equation. Conformist transformations are used to generate a self-similar arrangement of the leading differential system. The resulting system has an intriguing temperature ratio constraint, which shows whether the flow has a little or significant temperature differential. By using a powerful mathematical technique, numerical results are obtained. The solutions are influenced by both stretching and rotation. The difference in velocity constituents with the elements’ volume fraction is non-monotonic. Results for the rotating nanofluid flow and heat trans... [more]

Recently proposed recommendation systems based on embedding vector technology allow us to utilize a wide range of information such as user side and item side information to predict user preferences. Since there is a lack of ability to use the sequential information of user history, most recommendation system algorithms fail to predict the user’s preferences more accurately. Therefore, in this study, we developed a novel recommendation system that takes advantage of sequence and heterogeneous information in the candidate-generation process. The principle underlying the proposed recommendation model is that the new sequence based embedding layer in the model catches the sequence pattern of user history. The proposed deep-learning model may improve the prediction accuracy using user data, item data, and sequential information of the user’s profile. Experiments were conducted on datasets of the Korean e-learning platform, and the empirical results confirmed the capability of the proposed a... [more]

Wind power generation is a widely used power generation technology. Among these, the wind turbine blade is an important part of a wind turbine. If the wind turbine blade is damaged, it will cause serious consequences. The traditional methods of defect detection for wind turbine blades are mainly manual detection and acoustic nondestructive detection, which are unsafe and time-consuming, and have low accuracy. In order to detect the defects on wind turbine blades more safely, conveniently, and accurately, this paper studied a defect detection method for wind turbine blades based on digital image processing. Because the log-Gabor filter used needed to extract features through multiple filter templates, the number of output images was large. Firstly, this paper used the Lévy flight strategy to improve the PSO algorithm to create the LPSO algorithm. The improved LPSO algorithm could successfully solve the PSO algorithm’s problem of falling into the local optimal solution. Then, the LPSO al... [more]

Hybrids and composite materials offer a synergic combination of polymer and inorganic features [...]

Medicinal plants possess a surplus of novel and biologically active secondary metabolites that are responsible for counteracting diseases. Traditionally, Gomphandra tetrandra (Wall.) Sleumer is used to treat mental disorders. The present research was designed to explore phytochemicals from the ethanol leaf extract of Gomphandra tetrandra (Wall.) Sleumer to identify the potential pharmacophore(s) in the treatment of neurological disorders. The chemical compounds of the experimental plant were identified through GC-MS analysis. In-vitro antioxidant activity was assessed using different methods. Furthermore, in-vivo neurological activity was assessed in Swiss-albino mice. Computer-aided analysis was appraised to determine the best-fit phytoconstituent of a total of fifteen identified compounds in the experimental plant extract against beta-amyloid precursor protein. The experimental extract revealed fifteen compounds in GC-MS analysis and the highest content was 9, 12, 15-octadecatrienoic... [more]

Today, real-time fault detection and predictive maintenance based on sensor data are actively introduced in various areas such as manufacturing, aircraft, and power system monitoring. Many faults in motors or rotating machinery like industrial robots, aircraft engines, and wind turbines can be diagnosed by analyzing signal data such as vibration and noise. In this study, to detect failures based on vibration data, preprocessing was performed using signal processing techniques such as the Hamming window and the cepstrum transform. After that, 10 statistical condition indicators were extracted to train the machine learning models. Specifically, two types of Mahalanobis distance (MD)-based one-class classification methods, the MD classifier and the Mahalanobis−Taguchi system, were evaluated in detecting the faults of rotating machinery. Their performance for fault detection on rotating machinery was evaluated with different imbalanced ratios of data by comparing with binary classification... [more]

With the recent push towards high injection rate blast furnace operation for economic and environmental reasons, it has become desirable in North America to better understand the impacts of alternate injected gas fuels in comparison to the well-documented limitations of natural gas. The quenching effects of gas injection on the furnace present a functional limit on the maximum stable injection rate which can be utilized. With this in mind, researchers at Purdue University Northwest’s Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation utilized previously developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of the blast furnace to explore the impacts of replacing natural gas with syngas in a blast furnace with a single auxiliary fuel supply. Simulations predicted that the syngas injection can indeed reduce coke consumption in the blast furnace at similar injection rates to natural gas while maintaining stable raceway flame and reducing gas temperatures. The coke rates predicted by... [more]

Currently, people worldwide, in the period from September to April, observe with their own eyes and feel the pollution of the air, called smog, in their own breath. The biggest cause of smog and the source of air pollution is burning rubbish in stoves. Other causes include exhaust fumes from large factories, burning coal in furnaces, and car exhaust fumes. Smog is an unnatural phenomenon, directly related to human activity. The weather is becoming worse. On no-wind, foggy days, the smog phenomenon is the most troublesome for city dwellers. Smog persists in European countries from November to April, during the heating season. The harmful effect of smog affects almost the entire human body. Every year, air pollution causes the death of approximately 26,000−48,000 people. At the same time, poor air quality reduces life expectancy by up to a year. The purpose of this article is to present buildings and finishing elements that can help in the fight against air pollution.

A novel delay-dependent stability criterion for Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems with multiplicative noise is addressed in this paper subject to passivity performance. The general case of interval time-varying delay is considered for the practical control issue. For the criterion, an integral Lyapunov-Krasovskii function is proposed to derive some sufficient relaxed conditions and to avoid the derivative of the membership function. Moreover, a free-matrix inequality is adopted to deal with the delay terms such that the available derivative of time-varying delay is bigger than one. In order to employ a convex optimization algorithm to find the control gain, a projection lemma is applied to acquire the Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) form of the sufficient conditions. With the obtained gains, a fuzzy controller is designed by the concept of Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) such that the delayed T-S fuzzy systems with multiplicative noise are asymptotically stable and passive in th... [more]