Performance Evaluation of the Three Dimensional Woven Copper Matrix as Heat Exchanger

The three dimensional copper woven matrix is used as a heat exchanger device. The structure of copper mesh is made up of the fill, cross plane and warp yarn. Various geometrical configurations of the mesh are obtained by removing the alternate yarns and by varying the diameter ratio. These variations change the porosity, specific surface area and the metal fraction of the woven mesh. A mathematical model to quantify these changes is suggested. Seven woven mesh having different geometrical configurations, are manufactured. The effect of these geometrical variations on thermal properties is studied. An open circuit is built to determine the friction factor and number of transfer units of the specimen. Air is passed through the woven mesh. The mesh is heated and the pressure drop across the mesh is noted. The functional form of the friction factor and the number of transfer units is developed. It is observed that an increase in ply ratio increases the thermal performance and the friction factor. It is observed that the removal of cross plane yarn decreases the friction factor by 25%, but the number of transfer units also decreases by 30%. The increase in diameter ratio leads to the enhanced heat transfer characteristics and a decrease in pressure drop. The mesh system is compared with existing fin technology and it was found that the mesh system is efficient at low pumping power

On the maintenance of the mean monsoon trough over north India

The different terms in the equation for the balance of standing eddy kinetic energy are estimated in the region of the monsoon trough over north India. The main contribution to the maintenance of the trough against frictional dissipation is from the work done by the horizontal pressure forces. The contribution by the mean and transient advection terms is of a smaller order of magnitude. There is loss of standing eddy kinetic energy by the rising of cold air and sinking of warm air in the x-p plane in the lower troposphere. The circulation is forced by the flux of potentia1 energy from outside, mainly from the bottom and southern boundaries

Harmonic analysis of summer mean wind at 200 mbar level during contrasting monsoon years over India

Summer (June-August) mean zonal and meridional wind components at 200 mbar level are subjected to harmonic analysis for the years 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1979. It is found that the small scale disturbances are intense during normal monsoon years. The westerlies in the belt 10°S to 30°S are stronger during drought years. During normal monsoon years (1970, 1971) the northward transport of westerly momentum by wave number 1 at 19.6°N is large as compared to drought years (1972, 1979). The transport of westerly momentum by standing eddies is northward for all the years between 5°S and 28.7°N but large during the normal monsoon years

THE IMPACT OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGY ON NURSES CARING BEHAVIOR DURING BLOOD PRESSURE MONITORING FOR ADULT PATIENTS AT GENERAL HOSPITALS, KUWAIT.

Introduction: The nursing profession has advanced immensely from the onset. Remarkable changes in medical technology facilitated patients’ survival and treatments which were unimaginable during the period of Florence Nightingale. Although, technology empowered the nurses to provide quality care to patients, some of these technologies can break the bond of therapeutic nurse - patient relationship and make it mechanical, instead. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate nurses caring behavior during blood pressure monitoring with manual and electronic devices. Objective: Compare the nurses caring behavior while monitoring blood pressure by electronic and manual devices. Methods: a descriptive comparative design was used in this study. The staff nurses (N=325) were selected randomly based on certain criteria from the medical wards of five governmental hospitals. Observations were done during blood pressure monitoring with manual and electronic devices using nursing caring behavior assessment tool. Result: Paired t-test was used to examine the differences in nurses caring behavior. There were significant differences in the mean scores between the manual BP monitoring and the electronic in terms of nursing caring behavior, t(324) = -8.66, P\u3e 0.001. Conclusion: Nurses were able to give more humanistic caring behavior when they monitored blood pressure manually than when blood pressure was monitored electronically. Recommendations: Workshop sessions can be conducted for staff nurses to emphasize the importance of providing a humanistic approach while providing care for the patients when using the technology

Gender and impact of climate change adaptation on soybean farmers' revenue in rural Togo, west Africa

Open Access JournalThis study assesses the impact of climate change (CC) adaptation on farm-level revenue among 500 soybean farmers randomly selected in three districts in Togo using endogenous switching regression method. The survey results indicate that only 40.37% of the women have adapted to CC against 59.62% of the men. Moreover, being member of farmer-based organization (FBO), access to credit and extension services, agricultural training of women are the main factors that increase the likelihood of adaptation. The gender-differentiated impact shows that women would earn more than men from adaptation, while losing compared to men if they do not take any adaptation actions. The loss from non-adapting to CC will increase by 0.268% of the soybean revenue. However, the heterogeneity effects suggest further assessment on the adopted technology in soybean farming in the study areas. Adaptation policy that seeks to ensure food security and enhance farmers’ welfare in subsistence agriculture should consider the gender dimension, while reviewing the financial policy in terms of affordability, access of extension services and supporting FBO will increase technologies adoption and farming revenue

Associated factors for maternal-foetal complications in pregnant women with sickle cell disease at the departmental University Hospital of Borgou and Alibori (Benin)

Background: Sickle cell disease is one of the most common genetic disorders in the world, with a high prevalence in Africa. It is a pathology that threatens the maternal-fetal prognosis in case of pregnancy. The objective of this study was to describe the maternal-foetal complications and to identify the factors associated with maternal-foetal complications in sickle cell pregnant women (SP).Methods: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study with retrospective data collection over a period of 4 years (01 January 2015 to 31 August 2019). The study population was All SP who had given birth in the maternity ward of the UH of Borgou/Alibori.Results: We recorded 130 SP out of 10087 admissions, either a frequency of 1.3%. There were 119/130 exploitable files. Maternal complications during pregnancy were: vaso-occlusive crises 79%; severe anaemia 27.7%; hyponatremia 10.1%; vasculo-renal syndromes 18.4%; infections 74.8%. The foetal complications during pregnancy were: Preterm births 38.6%, in utero deaths 17.6%, low birth weight 54.7%. Early neonatal mortality was 8.4% (8/95). There was a 4.2% (5/119) of maternal deaths. Low educational level of the SP, SS genotype, insufficient antenatal follow-up and antenatal follow-up outside the specialized center for the care of sickle cell pregnant women (SCCSP) were the factors associated with maternal-foetal complications in the SP.Conclusions: The association of pregnancy and sickle cell disease is frequent in West Africa, particularly in Benin, and is characterised by numerous maternal-foetal complications that are associated with certain factors

Cloning and heterologous expression of bovine pyroglutamyl peptidase type-1 in Escherichia coli : purification , biochemical and kinetic characterisation

We describe the cloning, expression and purification of the bovine XM866409 form of pyroglutamyl-aminopeptidase I. The amino acid sequence, deduced from the nucleotide sequence, revealed that it consists of 209 amino acid residues and showed to have 98% homology with the human AJ278828 form of the enzyme. Three amino acid residues at positions 81, 205 and 208 were found to vary among the two sequences. The bovine enzyme was expressed in XL10-gold Esherichia coli cells. Immobilizied Ni-ion affinity chromatography was used to purify the expressed protein resulting in a yield of 3.3mg of PAP1 per litre culture. The purified enzyme had a specific activity of 1700 units/ml. SDS-PAGE produced a single band for bovine PAP1 with a molecular weight of ~23-24 kDa which is in good agreement with previously reported data on PAP1. Kinetic constants Km and Kcat were 59μΜ and 3.5s-1, respectively. It possessed an optimum pH between 9-9.5, a temperature of 37°C and showed an absolute requirement for a thiol-reducing agent (10mM DTT). EDTA didn’t prove to have an effect on enzyme activity. Competitive inhibition was seen with pyroglutamyl peptides pGlu-His-Pro-NH2 (TRH; Ki= 44.1 uM), pGlu-Ala- OH (Ki=141 uM) and pGlu-Val-OH (Ki=652.17)

Prediction of Protein Modification Sites of Pyrrolidone Carboxylic Acid Using mRMR Feature Selection and Analysis

Pyrrolidone carboxylic acid (PCA) is formed during a common post-translational modification (PTM) of extracellular and multi-pass membrane proteins. In this study, we developed a new predictor to predict the modification sites of PCA based on maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) and incremental feature selection (IFS). We incorporated 727 features that belonged to 7 kinds of protein properties to predict the modification sites, including sequence conservation, residual disorder, amino acid factor, secondary structure and solvent accessibility, gain/loss of amino acid during evolution, propensity of amino acid to be conserved at protein-protein interface and protein surface, and deviation of side chain carbon atom number. Among these 727 features, 244 features were selected by mRMR and IFS as the optimized features for the prediction, with which the prediction model achieved a maximum of MCC of 0.7812. Feature analysis showed that all feature types contributed to the modification process. Further site-specific feature analysis showed that the features derived from PCA's surrounding sites contributed more to the determination of PCA sites than other sites. The detailed feature analysis in this paper might provide important clues for understanding the mechanism of the PCA formation and guide relevant experimental validations