The effects of friction reducing polymers on the operation of journal bearings

As rotating machines become larger, an increasing number of plain journal bearings operate in the turbulent regime. The addition of small amounts of high molecular weight polymers to the lubricant offers an attractive method of counteracting the increased power loss. This effect has previously been investigated for turbulent flow in pipes. Experiments are described on the operation of a four-inch diameter bearing lubricated with a very dilute, aqueous solution of poly(ethylene oxide).It is shown that the film extent in large clearance bearings is very dependent on the operating parameters, A numerical analysis based on the Reynolds equation indicates that a minimum dissipation principle can be used to explain the delay in the formation of a full width film. The transition to turbulence occurred at a Reynolds number of 2000. There was little evidence of Taylor vortices. The bearing friction was significantly affected by the angular momentum of the leakage flow. Very low concentrations of polymer were found to be effective in reducing the friction. Typically, 0.005% by weight causing a reduction of k5% at a Reynolds number of 3500, The bearing was also significantly stabilised against whirling, although the pressure distribution was unchanged. The polymer became ineffective after approximately twenty passes through the bearing. The degradation caused by shearing will probably be the factor limiting commercial exploitation of friction reduction in turbulent bearings

Social inclusion: Context, theory and practice

This paper reviews the literature on social inclusion in Australia and provides an overview of the current situation regarding university/community engagement. Social inclusion is a contested term in both academic and policy literature entailing a range of interpretations. The paper will argue that there is a spectrum of ideological positions underlying theory, policy and practice. The broad theoretical construct put forward regards social inclusion in relation to areas (who is to be included?) and degrees (ideologies) of inclusion. Possible areas of inclusion are socio‐economic status, culture (including indigenous cultures), linguistic group, religion, geography (rural and remote/isolated), gender, sexual orientation, age (including youth and old age), physical and mental health/ability, and status with regard to unemployment, homelessness and incarceration. Degree of inclusion comprises a nested threefold schema incorporating a spectrum of ideologies involving—from narrowest to most encompassing—the neoliberal focus on access and economic factors, the social justice focus on community participation and the human potential focus on personal and collective empowerment stemming from positive psychology and critical/transformative pedagogies. Contemporary Australian social inclusion policy is related to UK policy. While policy rhetoric indicates a broad interpretation of social inclusion, concerns are raised that a dominant Economicist agenda favours corporate and national economic interests over social and psychological ones. Questions are also raised about the privileging of some areas of inclusion over others and the possibility that reductive interpretations of social inclusion are forms of cultural assimilation. Social inclusion in practice is addressed both in relation to degrees of inclusion and through case studies. The paper provides an overview of examples of social inclusion interventions, including a review of two initiatives of RMIT University and Victoria University focussing on industry/community partnerships. The paper concludes with some challenges and issues for further research on social inclusion including a proposed in-depth survey and consideration of literature on integrative phenomena such as ecological sustainability, and contextualisation of social inclusion within broader movements of global socio‐cultural change

An overview of early investigational drugs for the treatment of human papilloma virus infection and associated dysplasia

Introduction: High-risk HPV (HR-HPV) related invasive cervical cancer (ICC) causes >270,000 deaths per annum world-wide with over 85% of these occurring in low-resource countries. Ablative and excisional treatment modalities are restricted for use with high-grade pre-cancerous cervical disease with HPV infection and low-grade dysplasia mostly managed by a watch-and-wait policy.Areas Covered: Various pharmacological approaches have been investigated as non-destructive alternatives for the treatment of HR-HPV infection and associated dysplasia. These are discussed dealing with efficacy, ease-of-use (physician or self-applied), systemic or locally applied, side-effects, cost and risks. The main focus is the perceived impact on current clinical practice of a self-applied, effective and safe pharmacological anti-HPV treatment.Expert opinion: Current prophylactic HPV vaccines are expensive, HPV type restricted and have little effect in already infected women. Therapeutic vaccines are under development but are also HPV type-restricted. At present, the developed nations use national cytology screening and surgical procedures to treat only women identified with HPV-related high-grade dysplastic disease. However, since HPV testing is rapidly replacing cytology as the test-of-choice, a suitable topically-applied and low-cost antiviral treatment could be an ideal solution for treatment of HPV infection per se with test-of-cure carried out by repeat HPV testing. Cytology would only then be necessary for women who remained HPV positive. Although of significant benefit in the developed countries, combining such a treatment with self-sampled HPV testing could revolutionise the management of this disease in the developing world which lack both the infrastructure and resources to establish national cytology screening programs

Measured Sensitivity of the First Mark II Phased Array Feed on an ASKAP Antenna

This paper presents the measured sensitivity of CSIRO's first Mk. II phased array feed (PAF) on an ASKAP antenna. The Mk. II achieves a minimum system-temperature-over-efficiency $T_\mathrm{sys}/\eta$ of 78 K at 1.23 GHz and is 95 K or better from 835 MHz to 1.8 GHz. This PAF was designed for the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope to demonstrate fast astronomical surveys with a wide field of view for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Electromagnetics in Advanced applications (ICEAA), 2015 International Conference o

The West Falmouth oil spill : persistence of the pollution eight months after the accident

A spill of 650,000-700,000 liters of #2 fuel oil has contaminated the coastal areas of Buzzards Bay, Mass. The present report summarizes the results of our continuing chemical and biological study which were available at the end of May 1970, more than eight months after the accident. The effects of environmental exposure on the composition of the oil are discussed; many analytical parameters are sufficiently stable to permit continued correlation of the oil remaining in sediments and organisms with the fuel oil involved in the spill. Oil from the spill is still present in the sediments, inshore and offshore and in the shellfish. A further spread of the pollution to more distant offshore regions has occurred during midwinter; as a result, the pollution now covers a much larger area than immediately after the accident. The first stages of biological (presumably bacterial) degradation of the oil are now evident especially in the least polluted regions; however, it has depleted predominantely the straight and branched chain alkanes. The more toxic aromatic hydrocarbons are resistant; as a result, the toxicity of the oil has not been diminished. Where oil can be detected in the sediments there has been a kill of animals; in the most polluted areas the kill has been almost total. Shellfish that survived the accident have taken up the fuel oil. The 1970 crop of shellfish is as heavily polluted as was last year’s crop. Oysters transplanted to unpolluted water for as long as 6 months retained the oil without change in composition or concentration.Submitted to the Office of Naval Research under Contract ONR N00014-66-C0241; NR 083-0043 and partially supported by the Federal Water Quality Act Grant 18050-EBN3 and with the National Science Foundation Grant GA-1625

Heterogeneous processes: Laboratory, field, and modeling studies

The efficiencies of chemical families such as ClO(x) and NO(x) for altering the total abundance and distribution of stratospheric ozone are controlled by a partitioning between reactive (active) and nonreactive (reservoir) compounds within each family. Gas phase thermodynamics, photochemistry, and kinetics would dictate, for example, that only about 1 percent of the chlorine resident in the lower stratosphere would be in the form of active Cl or ClO, the remainder existing in the reservoir compounds HCl and ClONO2. The consistency of this picture was recently challenged by the recognition that important chemical transformations take place on polar regions: the Airborne Antarctic Ozone Experiment (AAOE) and the Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASA). Following the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, Solomon et al. suggested that the heterogeneous chemical reaction: ClONO2(g)+HCl(s) yields Cl2(g)+HNO3(s) could play a key role in converting chlorine from inactive forms into a species (Cl2) that would rapidly dissociate in sunlight to liberate atomic chlorine and initiate ozone depletion. The symbols (s) and (g) denote solid phase, or adsorbed onto a solid surface, and gas phase, respectively, and represent the approach by which such a reaction is modeled rather than the microscopic details of the reaction. The reaction was expected to be most important at altitudes where PSC's were most prevalent (10 to 25 km), thereby extending the altitude range over which chlorine compounds can efficiently destroy ozone from the 35 to 45 km region (where concentrations of active chlorine are usually highest) to lower altitudes where the ozone concentration is at its peak. This chapter will briefly review the current state of knowledge of heterogeneous processes in the stratosphere, emphasizing those results obtained since the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) conference. Sections are included on laboratory investigations of heterogeneous reactions, the characteristics and climatology of PSC's, stratospheric sulfate aerosols, and evidence of heterogeneous chemical processing

A Single-Arm, Proof-Of-Concept Trial of Lopimune (Lopinavir/Ritonavir) as a Treatment for HPV-Related Pre-Invasive Cervical Disease

BACKGROUND: Cervical cancer is the most common female malignancy in the developing nations and the third most common cancer in women globally. An effective, inexpensive and self-applied topical treatment would be an ideal solution for treatment of screen-detected, pre-invasive cervical disease in low resource settings. METHODS: Between 01/03/2013 and 01/08/2013, women attending Kenyatta National Hospital's Family Planning and Gynaecology Outpatients clinics were tested for HIV, HPV (Cervista®) and liquid based cervical cytology (LBC -ThinPrep®). HIV negative women diagnosed as high-risk HPV positive with high grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL) were examined by colposcopy and given a 2 week course of 1 capsule of Lopimune (CIPLA) twice daily, to be self-applied as a vaginal pessary. Colposcopy, HPV testing and LBC were repeated at 4 and 12 weeks post-start of treatment with a final punch biopsy at 3 months for histology. Primary outcome measures were acceptability of treatment with efficacy as a secondary consideration. RESULTS: A total of 23 women with HSIL were treated with Lopimune during which time no adverse reactions were reported. A maximum concentration of 10 ng/ml of lopinavir was detected in patient plasma 1 week after starting treatment. HPV was no longer detected in 12/23 (52.2%, 95%CI: 30.6-73.2%). Post-treatment cytology at 12 weeks on women with HSIL, showed 14/22 (63.6%, 95%CI: 40.6-82.8%) had no dysplasia and 4/22 (18.2%, 95%CI: 9.9-65.1%) were now low grade demonstrating a combined positive response in 81.8% of women of which 77.8% was confirmed by histology. These data are supported by colposcopic images, which show regression of cervical lesions. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate the potential of Lopimune as a self-applied therapy for HPV infection and related cervical lesions. Since there were no serious adverse events or detectable post-treatment morbidity, this study indicates that further trials are clearly justified to define optimal regimes and the overall benefit of this therapy. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN Registry 48776874

Automated Analysis of Risk Factors for Postictal Generalized EEG Suppression

Rationale: Currently, there is some ambiguity over the role of postictal generalized electro-encephalographic suppression (PGES) as a biomarker in sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Visual analysis of PGES, known to be subjective, may account for this. In this study, we set out to perform an analysis of PGES presence and duration using a validated signal processing tool, specifically to examine the association between PGES and seizure features previously reported to be associated with visually analyzed PGES. Methods: This is a prospective, multicenter epilepsy monitoring study of autonomic and breathing biomarkers of SUDEP in adult patients with intractable epilepsy. We studied videoelectroencephalogram (vEEG) recordings of generalized convulsive seizures (GCS) in a cohort of patients in whom respiratory and vEEG recording were carried out during the evaluation in the epilepsy monitoring unit. A validated automated EEG suppression detection tool was used to determine presence and duration of PGES. Results: We studied 148 GCS in 87 patients. PGES occurred in 106/148 (71.6%) seizures in 70/87 (80.5%) of patients. PGES mean duration was 38.7 ± 23.7 (37; 1–169) seconds. Presence of tonic phase during GCS, including decerebration, decortication and hemi-decerebration, were 8.29 (CI 2.6–26.39, p = 0.0003), 7.17 (CI 1.29–39.76, p = 0.02), and 4.77 (CI 1.25–18.20, p = 0.02) times more likely to have PGES, respectively. In addition, presence of decerebration (p = 0.004) and decortication (p = 0.02), older age (p = 0.009), and hypoxemia duration (p = 0.03) were associated with longer PGES durations. Conclusions: In this study, we confirmed observations made with visual analysis, that presence of tonic phase during GCS, longer hypoxemia, and older age are reliably associated with PGES. We found that of the different types of tonic phase posturing, decerebration has the strongest association with PGES, followed by decortication, followed by hemi-decerebration. This suggests that these factors are likely indicative of seizure severity and may or may not be associated with SUDEP. An automated signal processing tool enables objective metrics, and may resolve apparent ambiguities in the role of PGES in SUDEP and seizure severity studies