FIRST RESULTS OF SPACE CHARGE SIMULATIONS FOR THE NOVEL MULTI-TURN INJECTION

Recently, a novelmulti-turn injection technique was proposed. It is based on beam merging via resonance crossing. The various beamlets are successively injected and merged back by crossing a stable resonance generated by non-linear magnetic fields. Space charge is usually a crucial effect at injection in a circular machine and it could have an adverse impact on the phase space topology required for merging the various beamlets. Numerical simulations were performed to assess the stability of the merging process as a function of injected beam charge. The results are presented and discussed in this paper

Changes in the starch-protein interface depending on common wheat grain hardness revealed using atomic force microscopy

The Atomic Force Microscope tip was used to progressively abrade the surface of non-cutted starch granules embedded in the endosperm protein matrix in grain sections from wheat near-isogenic lines differing in the puroindoline b gene and thus hardness. In the hard near-isogenic wheat lines, starch granules exhibited two distinct profiles corresponding either to abrasion in the surrounding protein layer or the starch granule. An additional profile, only identified in soft lines, revealed a marked stop in the abrasion at the protein-starch transition similar to a lipid interface playing a lubricant role. It was related to the presence of both wild-type puroindolines, already suggested to act at the starch-protein interface through their association with polar lipids.This study revealed, for the first time, in situ differences in the nano-mechanical properties at the starch-protein interface in the endosperm of wheat grains depending on the puroindoline allelic status

Micromechanisms of fracture propagation in glassy polymers

While most glassy polymers are nominally brittle at macroscopic scales, they are known to exhibit plastic deformation in indentation, scratching, and microcutting when the loaded region is sufficiently small. The same applies to the micrometer size process zone at the tip of a propagating crack. While the presence and approximate size of this microscale plastic zone is well described by the Dugdale model, the prediction of the toughness of these materials is not possible without accounting for the details of the local large strain field and the work hardening behaviour of these polymers, which can be inferred from their response to compressive tests. Strain localization mechanisms such as crazing or shear banding should also be taken into account to properly model toughness. Finally, viscoplastic creep plays a major role in determining the dependence of the toughness on crack propagation velocity, as well as the important difference between the initiation and propagation toughness, which is responsible for the occurrence of a characteristic stick-slip propagation under some loading conditions. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

A framework for estimating society’s economic welfare following the introduction of an animal disease: the case of Johne’s disease

Animal diseases are global issues affecting the productivity and financial profitability of affected farms. Johne’s disease is distributed on farms worldwide and is an endemic contagious bacterial infection in ruminants caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis. In cattle, the clinical disease manifests itself as chronic enteritis resulting in reduced production, weight loss, and eventually death. Johne’s disease is prevalent in the UK, including Scotland. Direct costs and losses associated with Johne’s disease have been estimated in previous research, confirming an important economic impact of the disease in UK herds. Despite this, the distributional impact of Johne’s disease among milk consumers and producers in Scotland has not been estimated. In this paper, we evaluate the change in society’s economic welfare, namely to dairy producers (i.e. infected and uninfected herds) and milk consumers in Scotland induced by the introduction of Johne’s disease in the national Scottish dairy herd. At the national-level, we conclude that the economic burden falls mainly on producers of infected herds and, to a lesser extent, milk consumers, while producers of uninfected herds benefit from the presence of Johne’s. An infected producer’s loss per cow is approximately two times larger in magnitude than that of an uninfected producer’s gain. Such economic welfare estimates are an important comparison of the relative costs of national herd prevalence and the wider economic welfare implications for both producers and consumers. This is particularly important from a policy, public good, cost sharing, and human health perspective. The economic welfare framework presented in this paper can be applied to other diseases to examine the relative burden of society’s economic welfare of alternative livestock disease scenarios. In addition, the sensitivity analysis evaluates uncertainty in economic welfare given limited data and uncertainty in the national herd prevalence, and other input parameters, associated with Johne’s disease in Scotland. Therefore, until the prevalence of Johne’s is better understood, the full economic cost to Scottish dairy herds remains uncertain but in the meantime the sensitivity analysis evaluates the robustness of economic welfare to such uncertainties