The Performance of an Air-Cooled Diesel Engine with a Variable Cross-Section Dual-Channel Swirl Chamber

In order to improve the performance of a mini-type air-cooled diesel engine in terms of the overall efficiency and engine emissions, a swirl chamber of a variable cross-section dual-channel model was developed. This study proposed nine turbulent swirl chambers with a variable cross-section for a dual-channel combustion solution, which applied a dual-channel cross-section to the insert between the original swirl chamber and the main chamber. Model-based design, simulation and experiments were applied as a feasible approach to address this issue to find out the influence of the dual-channel inclination angle and divergence angle on the swirl rate in the swirl chamber, the power and the emissions performance, including the fuel efficiency. By comparing the tests, the performance of the diesel engine with a variable cross-section dual-channel swirl chamber was superior to the original one with a single channel in terms of the swirl rate, fuel consumption rate and emissions

Towards Incentive Mechanism For Taxi Services Allocation With Privacy Guarantee

With the development of online taxi-hailing systems (DiDi, Uber Lyft, etc.), how to effectively allocate taxis has attracted great attention in the recent past. Meanwhile, with the rapid increase of taxi-related crimes, the privacy of passengers\u27 sensitive information such as location remains a critical concern. In this paper, we present a novel incentive-based scheme, which provides the differential privacy guarantee for passengers\u27 locations in taxi-hailing systems. To be specific, to allocate limited taxis to passengers, we first present the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based online auction mechanism for determining the winning passengers. Then, to match the taxis and winning passengers as well as to protect the location privacy of passengers, we present the new allocating rule based on the exponential differential privacy-based mechanism. Further, we prove that the proposed incentive-based scheme satisfies both economic properties and 2-ϵ differential privacy guarantee. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme. The experimental data confirms that our proposed scheme not only achieves better performance than the two baseline schemes with respect to social welfare and satisfaction ratio, but also is capable of protecting the location privacy of passengers with low privacy disclosure

Metabolomics Analysis Reveals the Effects of Compound Fuzhuan Brick Tea (CFBT) on Regulating Dyslipidemia and Metabolic Disorders in Mice Induced by High-Fat Diet

Background: It is well known that obesity induced by high-fat diet (HFD) poses a serious threat to people’s health. Fuzhuan brick tea, one of the most popular beverages, is reported to possess a significant effect on regulating lipid metabolism, attributed to its many bioactive ingredients. However, the efficacy and mechanism of compound Fuzhuan brick tea (CFBT) made from Fuzhuan brick tea and other six Chinese herbal medicines are still not well defined. Methods: Sixty mice were divided into six groups: normal control group (CK), high-fat model group (NK), positive control group with anti-hyperlipidemic drug (YK), CFBT at low-(FL), medium-(FM) and high-(FH) dosage. Intervening for 30 days, conventional indexes analysis combined with metabolomics were performed to evaluate the changes in biochemical indexes and liver metabolic profiles in mice submitted to HFD. Results: CFBT treatment was able to ameliorate obesity, serum biochemical parameters, antioxidant activity and hepatic steatosis. In addition, significant alterations in the liver tissue metabolic profiles were observed, with most of these associated with inflammation, glucose and lipid metabolism. Conclusions: This study provides evidence that consumption of CFBT is capable of preventing dyslipidemia, reducing weight gain, restoring liver injury, as well as improving metabolic disorders