CHARACTERISTICS AND KINETICS OF BIOMASS PYLOLYSIS IN A MICRO FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR

A Micro Fluidized Bed Reactor (MFBR) was developed to enable on-line pulse feeding and isothermal differential reaction of particle reactant. Application of the MFBR to biomass pyrolysis demonstrated that the resulting globe kinetics parameters were 11.77 kJ/mol and 1.45 s-1 on the gas release characteristics, respectively

Human Circulating MicroRNA-1 and MicroRNA-126 as Potential Novel Indicators for Acute Myocardial Infarction

Circulating miRNAs have been shown as promising biomarkers for various pathologic conditions. The aim of this study was to clarify that circulating miR-1 and miR-126 in human plasma might be useful as biomarkers in acute myocardial infarction (AMI). In our study, after pre-test, two candidate miRNAs were detected by using real-time RT-PCR. Cardiac troponin I (cTnI) concentrations were measured by ELISA assay in plasma from patients with AMI (n=17) and healthy subjects (n=25), simultaneously. Increased miR-1 and decreased miR-126 in plasma from patients with AMI after the onset of symptoms compared with healthy subjects were found. A remarkable finding in this study is that miR-1, miR-126 and cTnI expression levels exhibited the same trend. Our results suggest that the plasma concentrations of miR-1 and miR-126 may be useful indicators for AMI

O2ATH: An OpenMP Offloading Toolkit for the Sunway Heterogeneous Manycore Platform

The next generation Sunway supercomputer employs the SW26010pro processor, which features a specialized on-chip heterogeneous architecture. Applications with significant hotspots can benefit from the great computation capacity improvement of Sunway many-core architectures by carefully making intensive manual many-core parallelization efforts. However, some legacy projects with large codebases, such as CESM, ROMS and WRF, contain numerous lines of code and do not have significant hotspots. The cost of manually porting such applications to the Sunway architecture is almost unaffordable. To overcome such a challenge, we have developed a toolkit named O2ATH. O2ATH forwards GNU OpenMP runtime library calls to Sunway's Athread library, which greatly simplifies the parallelization work on the Sunway architecture.O2ATH enables users to write both MPE and CPE code in a single file, and parallelization can be achieved by utilizing OpenMP directives and attributes. In practice, O2ATH has helped us to port two large projects, CESM and ROMS, to the CPEs of the next generation Sunway supercomputers via the OpenMP offload method. In the experiments, kernel speedups range from 3 to 15 times, resulting in 3 to 6 times whole application speedups.Furthermore, O2ATH requires significantly fewer code modifications compared to manually crafting CPE functions.This indicates that O2ATH can greatly enhance development efficiency when porting or optimizing large software projects on Sunway supercomputers.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables

Improvement of leaching efficiency of cathode material of spent LiNixCoyMnzO2LiNi_xCo_yMn_zO_2 lithium-ion battery by the in-situ thermal reduction

Green cars and electronic products consume lots of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), and massive spent LIBs are yielded due to performance degradation. This paper provides an economical and environmentally friendly approach to recover valuable metals from cathode materials of the spent LIBs. It combines the in-situ thermal reduction (self-reduction by polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and residual electrolyte in cathode material) and sulfuric acid leaching. Elements of high valent are reduced by the binder (PVDF) and the residual electrolyte on the surface of $NCM(LiNi_xCo_yMn_{1-x-y}O_2)$ material at high temperatures. Moreover, the changes in substance type, element valency, and contents of cathode materials reduced with various terminal temperatures and retention time are analyzed by Xray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Results show that the optimal terminal temperature for in-situ thermal reduction is 600 °C, and the optimum retention time is 120 min. Under the best in-situ thermal reduction conditions, the results from XRD confirm that part of $Ni^{2+}$ is converted to simple substance $Ni$, $Co^{3+}$ is reduced to $Co$, and $Mn^{4+}$ is reduced to $Mn^{2+}$ and elemental $Mn$, which are confirmed by XRD. Analyzed results by XPS indicate that the content of $Ni^{2+}$ decreases to 67.05%, and $Co^{3+}$ is completely reduced to $Co$. $Mn^{4+}$ is reduced to 91.41% of $Mn^{2+}$ and 8.59% of simple substance $Mn$. In-situ thermal reduction benefits the leaching processes of cathode materials. The leaching efficiencies of $Ni$, $Co$, and $Mn$ increase from 53.39%, 51.95%, and 0.71% to 99.04%, 96.98%, and 97.52%, respectively

Kinetics and Mechanism of Solid Reactions in a Micro Fluidized Bed Reactor

A novel gas solid Micro Fluidized Bed Reaction Analyzer (MFBRA) was developed to deduce reaction rates and kinetic parameters through measuring time-dependent composition changes of evolved gases from the reactions. Application of the MFBRA to the decomposition of CaCO(3) powder resulted in an apparent activation energy of 142.73 kJ/mol and a pre-exponential factor of 399,777 s(-1). This apparent activation energy was much lower than the thermogravimetry-measured value of 184.31 kJ/mol, demonstrating a quicker reaction in the MFBRA. This was further verified by CuO reduction in CO, as accelerated by the fast diffusion and high heating rate in the MFBRA. Measurement of pyrolysis of coal and biomass in MFBRA found that the reaction process was completed in about 10 s, a time much shorter than the literature-reported values in larger fluidized bed reactors. By monitoring the release of gas species from reactions at different temperatures, the MFBRA also allowed deeper insight into the mechanism of pyrolysis reactions. (C) 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 56: 2905-2912, 201

Facile and Reliable in Situ Polymerization of Poly(Ethyl Cyanoacrylate)-Based Polymer Electrolytes toward Flexible Lithium Batteries

Polycyanoacrylate is a very promising matrix for polymer electrolyte, which possesses advantages of strong binding and high electrochemical stability owing to the functional nitrile groups. Herein, a facile and reliable in situ polymerization strategy of poly­(ethyl cyanoacrylate) (PECA) based gel polymer electrolytes (GPE) via a high efficient anionic polymerization was introduced consisting of PECA and 4 M LiClO₄ in carbonate solvents. The in situ polymerized PECA gel polymer electrolyte achieved an excellent ionic conductivity (2.7 × 10^–3 S cm^–1) at room temperature, and exhibited a considerable electrochemical stability window up to 4.8 V vs Li/Li⁺. The LiFePO₄/PECA-GPE/Li and LiNi_1.5Mn_0.5O₄/PECA-GPE/Li batteries using this in-situ-polymerized GPE delivered stable charge/discharge profiles, considerable rate capability, and excellent cycling performance. These results demonstrated this reliable in situ polymerization process is a very promising strategy to prepare high performance polymer electrolytes for flexible thin-film batteries, micropower lithium batteries, and deformable lithium batteries for special purpose

Circulating miR-30a, miR-195 and let-7b Associated with Acute Myocardial Infarction

<div><h3>Background</h3><p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play key roles in diverse biological and pathological processes, including the regulation of proliferation, apoptosis, angiogenesis and cellular differentiation. Recently, circulating miRNAs have been reported as potential biomarkers for various pathologic conditions. This study investigated miR-30a, miR-195 and let-7b as potential of biomarker for acute myocardial infarction (AMI).</p> <h3>Methods and Results</h3><p>Plasma samples from 18 patients with AMI and 30 healthy adults were collected. Total RNA was extracted from plasma with TRIzol LS Reagent. MiRNA levels and plasma cardiac troponin I (cTnI) concentrations were measured by quantitative real-time PCR and ELISA assay, respectively. <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0050926#s3">Results</a> showed that circulating miR-30a in AMI patients was highly expressed at 4 h, 8 h and 12 h after onset of AMI, and miR-195 was highly expressed at 8 h and 12 h. However, let-7b was lower in AMI patients than in controls throughout the whole time points. Interestingly, in these patients, circulating miR-30a, miR-195 and let-7b all reached their expression peak at 8 h. By the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses, these plasma miRNAs were of significant diagnostic value for AMI. The combined ROC analysis revealed the an AUC value of 0.93 with 94% sensitivity and 90% specificity at 8 h after onset, and an AUC value of 0.92 with 90% sensitivity and 90% specificity at 12 h after onset, in discriminating the AMI patients from healthy controls.</p> <h3>Conclusions</h3><p>Our results imply that the plasma concentration of miR-30a, miR-195 and let-7b can be potential indicators for AMI.</p> </div