Patterns of Total Gaseous Mercury Variation Prior to and After Brownfield Remediation in Syracuse, NY

Although mercury toxicity has been recognized for centuries, the atmospheric cycle of this element is still not fully understood. In order to obtain a better perspective of the dynamics of atmospheric mercury in urban areas, total gaseous mercury (TGM) was measured at a brownfield site at the Center of Excellence (CoE) in Syracuse NY from 2011 to 2016. The brownfield was removed on May 2015, and a parking lot was installed. For this study, I had a series of objectives including: (1) to understand vertical and temporal variations in TGM concentration; (2) investigate the influence of meteorological factors on TGM concentrations and variations; (3) evaluate the effect of brownfield removal and site restoration on TGM concentrations and variations; (4) compare TGM variation at this site with other monitoring sites in New York State to confirm hypothesis made in this study. Continuous TGM measurements were made at two different heights (1.8 m and 42.7 m) at the COE. To interpret TGM variations, meteorological data collected by SUNY-ESF were also used in this analysis. In addition, mercury flux measurements from the land surface was conducted at this site on June 2015. Prior to brownfield remediation, the overall average TGM concentrations were 1.6±0.58 ng/m3 and 1.4±0.40 ng/m3 at ground and upper level, respectively. TGM tended to have higher concentrations during night and in the morning, and was positively correlated with air temperature, solar radiation, but negatively correlated with wind speed. After brownfield remediation, TGM concentrations immediately decreased by 32% and 22% at the ground and upper level, respectively and likely to have higher concentrations during nighttime and lower concentrations in the daylight. Relations of TGM concentrations with temperature, solar radiation and wind speed were completely eliminated after brownfield remediation. These results suggest that TGM concentrations at this site were strongly controlled by local mercury evasion prior to brownfield removal, with evasion rate increasing due to higher air temperature and stronger solar radiation. TGM derived from mercury evasion from the site were diluted by horizontal mixing from winds and vertical mixing associated with movement of the PBL

State Estimation for Electrolytic Capacitor with Parameter Fitting

Metro supply system composed of PWM rectifier, i.e. supply system with bi-directional power flow, contributes much to improve supply quality. However, the electrolytic capacitors, working as DC-side supporting capacitor, are relatively weakest in the whole system, so that state estimation for electrolytic capacitor should be taken into consideration. In view of the difficulty in application of conventional capacitor estimation approach with voltage and current ripples into PWM rectifier, this paper proposes a novel approach, which first searches into capacitor’s aging mechanism, presents approximate relation between capacitance and equivalent serial resistance of electrolytic capacitor through mathematical fitting, and then derives the discrete iterative equations of  capacitance and equivalent serial resistance from the analytical model of PWM rectifier. Finally, capacitor state estimation is combined with Miner criterion, which implies digital accumulated damage principle. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i8.3049

Optimal bike allocations in a competitive bike sharing market

This paper studies the bike allocation problem in a competitive bike sharing market. To overcome computational challenges, a continuum approximation (CA) approach is applied, where the allocation points and user demand are assumed to be continuously distributed in a two-dimensional region. Companies offering bike sharing service bear both allocation cost and bike depreciation cost while earning revenue from fare collection. The user's selection of bike service is affected by both walking distance and preference towards bike quality. The elasticity of the demand is considered in relation to the density of allocation points in the market. A leader-follower Stackelberg competition model is developed to derive the optimal allocation strategy for market leader. Two sets of numerical studies - one hypothetical case and one from a real case - are conducted to specify the impact of the parameters on model performance and illustrate how the proposed model can be applied to support the decision making.<br/

Systematic studies on the kinetic process of 20(S)-protopanaxadiol in rats and dogs: absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion

Background and ObjectiveGinseng has been regarded as a precious medicinal herb with miraculous effects in Eastern culture. The primary chemical constituents of ginseng are saponins, and the physiological activities of ginsenosides determine their edible and medicinal value. The aim of this study is to comprehensively and systematically investigate the kinetic processes of 20(S)—protopanaxadiol (PPD) in rats and dogs, in order to promote the rational combination of ginseng as a drug and dietary ingredient.MethodsPPD was administered, and drug concentration in different biological samples were detected by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) and radioactive tracer methods. Pharmacokinetic parameters such as absorption, bioavailability, tissue distribution, plasma protein binding rate, excretion rate, and cumulative excretion were calculated, along with inference of major metabolites.ResultsThis study systematically investigated the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion (ADME) of PPD in rats and dogs for the first time. The bioavailabilities of PPD were relatively low, with oral absorption nearly complete, and the majority underwent first-pass metabolism. PPD had a high plasma protein binding rate and was relatively evenly distributed in the body. Following oral administration, PPD underwent extensive metabolism, potentially involving one structural transformation and three hydroxylation reactions. The metabolites were primarily excreted through feces and urine, indicating the presence of enterohepatic circulation. The pharmacokinetic processes of PPD following intravenous administration aligned well with a three-compartment model. In contrast, after gastric administration, it fitted better with a two-compartment model, conforming to linear pharmacokinetics and proportional elimination. There were evident interspecies differences between rats and dogs regarding PPD, but individual variations of this drug were minimal within the same species.ConclusionThis study systematically studied the kinetic process of PPD in rats and also investigated the kinetic characteristics of PPD in dogs for the first time. These findings lay the foundation for further research on the dietary nutrition and pharmacological effects of PPD

VILAS: Exploring the Effects of Vision and Language Context in Automatic Speech Recognition

Enhancing automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance by leveraging additional multimodal information has shown promising results in previous studies. However, most of these works have primarily focused on utilizing visual cues derived from human lip motions. In fact, context-dependent visual and linguistic cues can also benefit in many scenarios. In this paper, we first propose ViLaS (Vision and Language into Automatic Speech Recognition), a novel multimodal ASR model based on the continuous integrate-and-fire (CIF) mechanism, which can integrate visual and textual context simultaneously or separately, to facilitate speech recognition. Next, we introduce an effective training strategy that improves performance in modal-incomplete test scenarios. Then, to explore the effects of integrating vision and language, we create VSDial, a multimodal ASR dataset with multimodal context cues in both Chinese and English versions. Finally, empirical results are reported on the public Flickr8K and self-constructed VSDial datasets. We explore various cross-modal fusion schemes, analyze fine-grained crossmodal alignment on VSDial, and provide insights into the effects of integrating multimodal information on speech recognition.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 202

Death of a parent during childhood and blood pressure in youth: a population-based cohort study of Swedish men

publishedVersio

Mechanically robust, flame-retardant poly(lactic acid) biocomposites via combining cellulose nanofibers and ammonium polyphosphate

Expanding the application range of flame-retardant polymer biocomposites remains a huge challenge for a sustainable society. Despite largely enhanced flame retardancy, until now the resultant poly(lactic acid) (PLA) composites still suffer reduced tensile strength and impact toughness due to improper material design strategies. We, herein, demonstrate the design of a green flame retardant additive (ammonium polyphosphate (APP)@cellulose nanofiber (CNF)) via using the cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) as the green multifunctional additives hybridized with ammonium polyphosphate (APP). The results show that PLA composite with 5 wt % loading of APP@CNF can pass the UL-94 V-0 rating, besides a high limited oxygen index of 27.5%, indicative of a significantly enhanced flame retardancy. Moreover, the 5 wt % of APP@CNF enables the impact strength (σi) of the PVA matrix to significantly improve from 7.63 to 11.8 kJ/m2 (increase by 54%), in addition to a high tensile strength of 50.3 MPa for the resultant flame-retardant PLA composite. The enhanced flame retardancy and mechanical strength performances are attributed to the improved dispersion of APP@CNF and its smaller phase size within the PLA matrix along with their synergistic effect between APP and CNF. This work opens up a facile innovative methodology for the design of high-performance ecofriendly flame retardants and their advanced polymeric composites

Simulation study of BESIII with stitched CMOS pixel detector using ACTS

Reconstruction of tracks of charged particles with high precision is very crucial for HEP experiments to achieve their physics goals. As the tracking detector of BESIII experiment, the BESIII drift chamber has suffered from aging effects resulting in degraded tracking performance after operation for about 15 years. To preserve and enhance the tracking performance of BESIII, one of the proposals is to add one layer of thin CMOS pixel sensor in cylindrical shape based on the state-of-the-art stitching technology, between the beam pipe and the drift chamber. The improvement of tracking performance of BESIII with such an additional pixel detector compared to that with only the existing drift chamber is studied using the modern common tracking software ACTS, which provides a set of detector-agnostic and highly performant tracking algorithms that have demonstrated promising performance for a few high energy physics and nuclear physics experiments