A new converter topology for high-speed high-starting-torque three-phase switched reluctance motor drive system

Switched reluctance motor (SRM) has become a competitive selection for many applications of electric machine drive systems recently due to its relative simple construction and its robustness. The advantages of those motors are high reliability, easy maintenance and good performance. The absence of permanent magnets and windings in rotor gives possibility to achieve very high speeds (over 10000 rpm) and turned SRM into perfect solution for operation in hard conditions like presence of vibrations or impacts. Such simple mechanical structure greatly reduces its price. Due to these features, SRM drives are used more and more into aerospace, automotive and home applications. The major drawbacks of the SRM are the complicated algorithm to control it due to the high degree of nonlinearity, also the SRM has always to be electronically commutated and the need of a shaft position sensor to detect the shaft position, the other limitations are strong torque ripple and acoustic noise effects.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Accurate Diagnosis of COVID-19 Patients Using Chest X-Ray Image Databases from Italy, Canada, and the USA

Introduction: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), famously known as COVID-19, has quickly become a global pandemic. Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging has proven reliable, fast, and cost-effective for identifying COVID-19 infections, which proceeds to display atypical unilateral patchy infiltration in the lungs like typical pneumonia. We employed the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) ResNet-34 to detect and classify CXR images from patients with COVID-19 and Viral Pneumonia and Normal Controls. Methods: We created a single database containing 781 source CXR images from four different international sub-databases: the Società Italiana di Radiologia Medica e Interventistica (SIRM), the GitHub Database, the Radiology Society of North America (RSNA), and the Kaggle Chest X-ray Database for COVID-19 (n = 240), Viral Pneumonia (n = 274), and Normal Controls (n = 267). Images were resized, normalized, without any augmentation, and arranged in m batches of 16 images before supervised training, testing, and cross-validation of the DCNN classifier. Results: The ResNet-34 had a diagnostic accuracy as of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves of the true-positive rate versus the false-positive rate with the area under the curve (AUC) of 1.00, 0.99, and 0.99, for COVID-19 and Viral Pneumonia patient and Normal control CXR images; respectively. This accuracy implied identical high sensitivity and specificity values of 100, 99, and 99% for the three groups, respectively. ResNet-34 achieved a success rate of 100%, 99.6%, and 98.9% for classifying CXR images of the three groups, with an overall accuracy of 99.5% for the testing subset for diagnosis/prognosis. Conclusions: Based on this high classification precision, we believe the output activation map of the final layer of the ResNet-34 is a powerful tool for the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 infection from CXR images

Pulsatile Chronotherapeutic Drug Delivery for Controlling Early Morning Surge in Blood Pressure; Effect of Coating on Eplerenone In-vitro, In- vivo Release and Urinary Na/K Ratio

The objective of the present study was to develop time delayed chronotherapeutic formulation of Eplerenone (Ep) to provide rapid drug release after a pre-determined lag time for the treatment of early morning hypertension. Cyclodextrin complexation was used to prepare fast release Ep core tablets. The developed core tablets were then coated with different rate-controlling polymers using compression coating technique. The developed tablets were evaluated for hardness, friability, drug content and swelling index. The in-vitro drug release was carried out to study the effect of different coating materials on drug release and lag time. Tablets selected for stability study were those showing lag time of 5-7 hours followed by complete drug release; F2, F3, F7, F8, and F12. The in-vivo study was carried out on tablets with the highest t90 as compared to commercial tablets after being administered to healthy human volunteers where plasma Ep and urinary Na/K ratio were determined. Results suggested that this approach was able to provide delayed release Ep formulations that will be useful for patients with morning surge in blood pressure

Binding Free Energy (BFE) Calculations and Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) Analysis of Schistosoma mansoni Histone Deacetylase 8 (smHDAC8) Inhibitors

Histone-modifying proteins have been identified as promising targets to treat several diseases including cancer and parasitic ailments. In silico methods have been incorporated within a variety of drug discovery programs to facilitate the identification and development of novel lead compounds. In this study, we explore the binding modes of a series of benzhydroxamates derivatives developed as histone deacetylase inhibitors of Schistosoma mansoni histone deacetylase (smHDAC) using molecular docking and binding free energy (BFE) calculations. The developed docking protocol was able to correctly reproduce the experimentally established binding modes of resolved smHDAC8-inhibitor complexes. However, as has been reported in former studies, the obtained docking scores weakly correlate with the experimentally determined activity of the studied inhibitors. Thus, the obtained docking poses were refined and rescored using the Amber software. From the computed protein-inhibitor BFE, different quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models could be developed and validated using several cross-validation techniques. Some of the generated QSAR models with good correlation could explain up to ~73% variance in activity within the studied training set molecules. The best performing models were subsequently tested on an external test set of newly designed and synthesized analogs. In vitro testing showed a good correlation between the predicted and experimentally observed IC50 values. Thus, the generated models can be considered as interesting tools for the identification of novel smHDAC8 inhibitors

Prevalence of Multidrug-resistant Enterotoxigenic Staphylococcus aureus in Pagrus and Saurus Fish Intended for Human Consumption

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is considered the most important cause of food borne intoxication, which occurs due to ingesting of food contaminated with enterotoxin of S. aureus. In this study, S. aureus from saurus, and pagrus fish species were isolated, then identified by morphological and biochemical examination. S. aureus coagulase, and D-Nase +ve were detected in 16 from 25 (64%), and 17 from 25(68%) of the examined samples of saurus, and pagrus, respectively. Total S. aureus counts were 5.14±0.06 in saurus, and 5.02±0.03 log 10 cfu/g in pagrus fish, respectively. Detection and typing of enterotoxin by Reverse Passive Latex Agglutination technique "RPLA" revealed the detection of staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) SEA, SEC, and SED at 18%, 6%, 0% in saurus and 5%, 0%, and 11%, at pagrus, respectively. S. aureus was tested for antimicrobial susceptibility. The recovered S. aureus coagulase, and D-Nase +ve in the current study showed resistance to kanamycin, clindamycin, nalidixic acid, and sulphamethoxazole at 100%, 87.9%, 84.8%, and 81.8%, respectively. The isolates showed sensitivity to amikacin, imipenem, meropenem, oxacillin at 90.9%, 87.9%, 84.8%, and 81.8% respectively. It could be concluded that multidrug resistant enterotoxigenic strains of S. aureus could be isolated from saurus and pagrus spp. Therefore, it is highly recommended to adopt strict hygienic measures and efficient cooking during before consumption of such fish species

Hygienic Status of the Carcass Surfaces of Cattle, Buffalo, Sheep, and Camel Carcasses and their Contact Surfaces

A main task for the food safety and animal hygiene sectors is to ensure safety and adoption of strict hygienic measures during the entire chain of the meat industry. To fulfill this task, continuous monitoring of the hygienic status of meat of different animal species and their contact surfaces is mandatory. In this study, the hygiene indicators including total bacterial counts (TBC), most probable number (MPN) of coliforms, total Staphylococcus aureus (TSC), and total mold and yeast counts (TMYC) of the surfaces of cattle, buffaloes, camel, and sheep retailed in Sharkia governorate Egypt were tested. Besides, such parameters were also investigated for the carcass contact surfaces including, the batcher hands, knives, cutting boards, and walls of the butcher shops. The obtained results indicated microbial contamination of the meat of different animals and their contact surfaces at variable rates. In general, cattle carcasses followed by that of the buffaloes had the highest microbial contamination. While, walls and cutting boards showed the highest microbial contamination among the examined contact surfaces. In conclusion, adoption of strict hygienic measure during handling of the animal carcasses, sterilization of the carcass's contact surfaces is highly suggested to produce meat of high keeping quality