Field Evaluation for Air-source Transcritical CO2 Heat Pump Water Heater with Optimal Pressure Control

Air-source transcritical CO2 heat pump water heater (ATHW) can supply hot water from 60 ? to 90 ? at high efficiency with environment-friendly refrigerant CO2 for commercial, residential and industrial applications. Several optimal discharge pressure correlations for transcritical CO2 heat pump have been proposed in the past few years, most of which are related to the ambient temperature, the evaporation temperature and the gas cooler outlet temperature. In an earlier study, the authors’ research group had presented a study on the dependency of the optimal discharge pressure on the ambient temperature and the hot water outlet temperature. In this study, a revised model for optimal discharge pressure is developed based on experimental results. In order to validate the optimal discharge pressure model developed, field tests are conducted to evaluate the performance of an air-source transcritical CO2 heat pump water heater in practical application. The system is comprised of a semi-hermetic reciprocating compressor, a counter-flow tube-in-tube gas cooler, a counter-flow internal heat exchanger, a fin-and-tube evaporator, and an electronic expansion valve (EEV) driven by electrically operated step motor. A Siemens SIMATIC S7-200 Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) was used to regulate the compressor discharge pressure by adjusting the EEV opening and the water flow rate by changing the frequency of the variable speed water pump. Field tests were conducted under three different operating scenarios: the nominal test condition, high water supply temperature condition and low ambient air temperature condition. The results show that the coefficient of performance (COP) can achieve 3.76 in the nominal test condition with 15? water inlet temperature and 80? hot water supply temperature. Even when the hot water temperature is higher than 90?, the COP remains at 3.21 with 20? dry-bulb temperature and 15? wet-bulb temperature. Under low ambient air temperature condition, the COP was 2.19 with the hot-water supply temperature of 60?. Comparison between the field test results and the model predictions show that the maximum relative error of discharge pressure control was 5.6% in the low temperature condition, while the maximum relative error of system COP was only 4.7%. With the reasonable agreement observed between the field test results and the model prediction. It is reasonable and effective to model the optimal discharge pressure as the function of the ambient temperature and the water outlet temperature

Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein by a Label-Free Biosensor Based on Optical Fiber Cylindrical Micro-Resonator

The current global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to be a severe threat to human health. Rapid, low-cost, and accurate antigen detection methods are very important for disease diagnosis. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) nucleocapsid protein (N-Protein) is often used as the diagnostic and screening for coronavirus detection. To this end, we propose and experimentally validate a highly sensitive whispering gallery mode (WGM) optical cylindrical micro-resonator (CMR) for bio immunoassay detection. To study the biokinetic process of immunoassay, the surface of the WGM micro-resonator is functionalized with N-Protein monoclonal antibody (N-Protein-m Ab), which led to the specific detection of N-Proteins. The spectral characteristics of the WGM resonance dip were investigated, and it is found that the transmission spectrum of WGM shows a monotonically increasing red-shift as a function of recording time. The WGM red-shift is due to the antibody-antigen reaction and can be used for the analysis of the immunoassay process. The wavelength shift is shown to be proportional to the concentration of N-Protein, which ranges between 0.1 and 100 μg /mL. Finally, different types of samples (concentration of 10 μg /mL of N-Protein) were prepared and tested to simulate the specificity of the sensor in the practical application environment. This method has the merits of a rapid assay, lower expense, easy preparation, and miniaturization, which makes the sensor have the potential for broad applications in the field of biochemistry and biomedical detection

BertNet: Harvesting Knowledge Graphs with Arbitrary Relations from Pretrained Language Models

It is crucial to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations to support knowledge discovery and broad applications. Previous KG construction methods, based on either crowdsourcing or text mining, are often limited to a small predefined set of relations due to manual cost or restrictions in text corpus. Recent research proposed to use pretrained language models (LMs) as implicit knowledge bases that accept knowledge queries with prompts. Yet, the implicit knowledge lacks many desirable properties of a full-scale symbolic KG, such as easy access, navigation, editing, and quality assurance. In this paper, we propose a new approach of harvesting massive KGs of arbitrary relations from pretrained LMs. With minimal input of a relation definition (a prompt and a few shot of example entity pairs), the approach efficiently searches in the vast entity pair space to extract diverse accurate knowledge of the desired relation. We develop an effective search-and-rescore mechanism for improved efficiency and accuracy. We deploy the approach to harvest KGs of over 400 new relations from different LMs. Extensive human and automatic evaluations show our approach manages to extract diverse accurate knowledge, including tuples of complex relations (e.g., "A is capable of but not good at B"). The resulting KGs as a symbolic interpretation of the source LMs also reveal new insights into the LMs' knowledge capacities.Comment: ACL 2023 (Findings); Code available at https://github.com/tanyuqian/knowledge-harvest-from-lm

Surface ligand controls silver ion release of nanosilver and its antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli

Understanding the mechanism of nanosilver-dependent antibacterial activity against microorganisms helps optimize the design and usage of the related nanomaterials. In this study, we prepared four kinds of 10 nm-sized silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with dictated surface chemistry by capping different ligands, including citrate, mercaptopropionic acid, mercaptohexanoic acid, and mercaptopropionic sulfonic acid. Their surface-dependent chemistry and antibacterial activities were investigated. Owing to the weak bond to surface Ag, short carbon chain, and low silver ion attraction, citrate-coated AgNPs caused the highest silver ion release and the strongest antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli, when compared to the other tested AgNPs. The study on the underlying antibacterial mechanisms indicated that cellular membrane uptake of Ag, NAD+/NADH ratio increase, and intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation were significantly induced in both AgNP and silver ion exposure groups. The released silver ions from AgNPs inside cells through a Trojan-horse-type mechanism were suggested to interact with respiratory chain proteins on the membrane, interrupt intracellular O2 reduction, and induce ROS production. The further oxidative damages of lipid peroxidation and membrane breakdown caused the lethal effect on E. coli. Altogether, this study demonstrated that AgNPs exerted antibacterial activity through the release of silver ions and the subsequent induction of intracellular ROS generation by interacting with the cell membrane. The findings are helpful in guiding the controllable synthesis through the regulation of surface coating for medical care purpose

Effects of tourmaline on growth of three kinds of microorganisms

Tourmaline is a kind of widespread minerals and has been used in many fields of society. Owing to the special electric properties, tourmaline can destroy the hydrogen bond between water molecules. The growth of microorganism may be affected with addition of tourmaline; therefore the effects of tourmaline on three different kinds of microorganisms were studied using microcalorimetric method. The kinetic parameters of growth process were obtained through the thermogenic curves. The results show that high concentration tourmaline inhibited the growth of prokaryotic cells (the growth rate constant of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus decreased 68.77 and 35.25% at tourmaline concentration of 160 g/L), while promoted eukaryotic cell (the growth rate constant of Candida albicans increased 40.73% at tourmaline concentration of 160 g/L). However, the low concentration tourmaline had complex effects on growth of the studied microorganisms.Key words: Microcalorimetric, water cluster, growth rate, inhibitory ratio