Contribution à l’étude de la salinisation de la nappe côtière de sahel El Haouzia région d’El Jadida au Maroc

La nappe côtière du Sahel d’El Haouzia circulent soit dans les calcaires fissurés du Cénomanien (partie amont), soit dans les formations détritiques du Plioquaternaire (partie avale). Ce sont des formations perméables favorisant le transit des eaux d’infiltration à forte charge saline, vers la nappe d’eau souterraine, circulant généralement à de faibles de la surface. La conductivité électrique moyenne des eaux souterraines étudiées montre des variations importantes, de 1,7 mS/cm (zone interne) à 7 mS/cm. En effet, elle accuse des valeurs de plus en plus importantes en direction de la mer, avec un gradient d’augmentation important dans les premiers kilomètres du rivage. La minéralisation totale est déterminée principalement par les ions chlorures et sodium qui montrent une corrélation positive avec la conductivité électrique. La combinaison des outils, géologiques, hydrogéologiques, piézométriques et hydrochimiques a montré que les fortes salinités des eaux souterraines sont liées au phénomène d’intrusion marine (dans les premiers kilomètres de la côte), à celui du lessivage de la roche réservoir et de l’infiltration des eaux de retour. Ces méthodes d’étude ont montré une meilleure adaptation avec notre système aquifère côtier.Mots-clés : Nappe côtière, salinité, intrusion marine, hydrochimie, Sahel ElHaouzia, Maroc

Cystatin C, a marker for successful aging and glomerular filtration rate, is not influenced by inflammation

Abstract Background. The plasma level of cystatin C is a better marker than plasma creatinine for successful aging. It has been assumed that the advantage of cystatin C is not only due to it being a better marker for glomerular filtration rate (GFR) than creatinine, but also because an inflammatory state of a patient induces a raised cystatin C level. However, the observations of an association between cystatin C level and inflammation stem from large cohort studies. The present work concerns the cystatin C levels and degree of inflammation in longitudinal studies of individual subjects without inflammation, who undergo elective surgery. Methods. Cystatin C, creatinine, and the inflammatory markers CRP, serum amyloid A (SAA), haptoglobin and orosomucoid were measured in plasma samples from 35 patients the day before elective surgery and subsequently during seven consecutive days. Results. Twenty patients had CRP-levels below 1 mg/L before surgery and low levels of the additional inflammatory markers. Surgery caused marked inflammation with high peak values of CRP and SAA on the second day after the operation. The cystatin C level did not change significantly during the observation period and did not correlate significantly with the level of any of the four inflammatory markers. The creatinine level was significantly reduced on the first postoperative day but reached the preoperative level towards the end of the observation period. Conclusion. The inflammatory status of a patient does not influence the role of cystatin C as a marker of successful aging, nor of GFR

A survey on direct solvers for Galerkin methods

In this paper we describe the history, performance, and design concepts of direct solvers for algebraic systems resulting from Galerkin discretizations of partial differential equations. Popular direct solver implementations of Gaussian elimination (also known as LU factorization) are introduced and briefly analyzed. We discuss three of the most relevant aspects influencing the performance of direct solvers on this kind of algebraic systems. First, the ordering of the degrees of freedom of the algebraic system has a significant impact on the solver performance, solution speed and memory requirements. The impact of unknowns ordering for elimination is exemplified and alternative ordering algorithms are described and compared. Second, the effect of round-off error on the simulation results is discussed. We detail this effect for uniform grids where the impact of round-off error on the solution is controlled by the condition number of the matrix in terms of the element size, but is independent of the polynomial order of approximation. Additionally, we discuss the link between unknown ordering and round-off error. Third, we describe the impact of the connectivity pattern (graph) of the basis functions on the performance of direct solvers. Variations in the connectivity structure of the resulting discrete system have severe impact on performance of the solver. That is, the resources needed to factorize the system strongly depend on its connectivity graph. Less connected graphs are cheaper to solve, that is, C0 finite element discretizations are cheaper to solve with direct solvers than Cp−1 discretizations