Experimental and kinetic study on ignition delay times of methane/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen mixtures by shock tube

This study aims (1) to analyze the performances among regencies/ cities in Jambi Province, and (2) to categorize the regencies/ cities in Jambi Province based on economic, human resources, and infrastructure development performances. Datas used in this study are secondary data of 2009-2012 from Statistics Indonesia, consists of eight component indicators to assess the performance of economic development, the five component indicators to assess the performance of the components of human resources development, and eight component indicators to assess the performance of infrastructure development. The analytical method used to achieve the objectives of the first research purposes is principal component analysis (PCA) which followed by factor analysis and to achieve the third purpose is cluster analysis. The results showed that (1) Jambi City is ranked first in the overall development performance, followed by of Tanjab Barat and Batang Hari Regencies, (2) four clusters of regencies/ cities in Jambi Province are formed based on the performance of development, namely: cluster I (Kerinci, Merangin, and Tebo Regencies) have lower performance of regional development, cluster II (Tanjab Timur Regency) has average to high performance of regional development, cluster III (Sarolangun, Batang Hari, Muaro Jambi, Tanjab Barat, Bungo Regencies, and Sungai Penuh City) have average performance of regional development, and cluster IV (Jambi City) has high performance of regional development

An ultrasonic transducer transient compensator design based on a simplified Variable Structure Control algorithm

A non-linear control method, known as Variable Structure Control (VSC), is employed to reduce the duration of ultrasonic (US) transducer transients. A physically realizable system using a simplified form of the VSC algorithm is proposed for standard piezoelectric transducers and simulated. Results indicate a VSC-controlled transmitter reduces the transient duration to less than a carrier wave cycle. Applications include high capacity ultrasound communication and localization systems

Construction of Simplified Microbial Consortia to Degrade Recalcitrant Materials Based on Enrichment and Dilution-to-Extinction Cultures

International audienceAbstract The capacity of microbes degrading recalcitrant materials has been extensively explored from environmental remediation to industrial applications. Although significant achievements were obtained with single strains, focus is now going toward the use of microbial consortia because of advantages in terms of functional stability and efficiency. While consortia assembly attempts were made from several known single strains, another approach consists in obtaining consortia from complex environmental microbial communities in search for novel microbial species, genes and functions. However, assembling efficient microbial consortia from complex environmental communities is far from trivial due to large diversity and biotic interactions at play. Here we propose a strategy containing enrichment and dilution-to-extinction cultures to construct simplified microbial consortia (SMC) for keratinous waste management, from complex environmental communities. Gradual dilutions were performed from a keratinolytic microbial consortium, and dilution 10 −9 was selected to construct a SMC library. Further compositional analysis and keratinolytic activity assays demonstrated that microbial consortia were successfully simplified, without impacting their biodegradation capabilities. These SMC possess promising potential for efficient keratinous valorization. More importantly, this reasoning and methodology could be transferred to other topics involving screening for simplified communities for biodegradation, thus considerably broadening its application scope. Importance Microbial consortia have got more and more attention and extensive applications due to their potential advantages. However, a high diversity of microbes is likely to hide uncontrollable risks in practice specific to novel strains and complicated interaction networks. Exploring a convenient and efficient way to construct simplified microbial consortia is able to broaden the applied scope of microbes. This study presents the approach based on enrichment and dilution-to-extinction cultures, which gain abundance microbial consortia including some without losing efficiency from the enriched functional microbial community. The microbial interactions at the strain level were evaluated by using compositional identification and correlation analysis, which contribute to revealing the roles of microbes in the degradation process of recalcitrant materials. Our findings provide a systematic scheme to achieve optimizing microbial consortia for biodegradation from an environmental sample, could be readily applied to a range of recalcitrant materials management from environmental remediation to industrial applications

Artificial selection of stable rhizosphere microbiota leads to heritable plant phenotype changes

International audienceResearch on artificial selection of microbial community has become popular due to perspectives in improving plant and animal health 1-4 . However, reported results still lack consistency 5-8 . We hypothesized that artificial selection may provide desired outcomes provided that microbial community structure has stabilized along the selection process. In a ten-generation artificial selection experiment involving 1,800 plants, we selected rhizosphere microbiota of Brachypodium distachyon that were associated with high or low levels of leaf greenness, a proxy for plant health 9 . Monitoring of the rhizosphere microbiota dynamics showed strong oscillations in community structure during an initial transitory phase of five generations, with no heritability in the selected property. In the last five generations, the structure of microbial communities displayed signs of stabilization, concomitantly to the appearance of heritability in leaf greenness. Selection pressure, initially ineffective, became successful in changing the greenness index in the intended direction, especially toward high greenness values. We showed a remarkable congruence between plant traits and selected microbial community structures, highlighting two phylogenetically distinct microbial sub-communities correlating with leaf greenness, whose abundance was significantly steered by directional artificial selection. Understanding microbial community structure stabilization can thus help improve the reliability of artificial microbiota selection

The L2 norm of the deviation between the measured and computed transient displacement field in a test weld

The transient displacement field caused by an arc weld was measured experimentally with an Aramis stereo-camera. The transient displacement field was also predicted using a computational weld mechanics program called VrWeld for ten different sets of model parameters. The objective was to identify the effect of model parameters on the deviation between experimental data and the data computed by computational weld mechanics. For each set of model parameters, the L2 normof the difference between the experimental and computed displacement fields was computed for each of the 800 time steps. The structure being welded was a 50 × 600 × 10 mm stringer fillet welded to a 300 × 600 × 10 mm low alloy steel plate. The displacement field was measured on the 'back' surface of the plate. A robot made the metal-inert-gas weld. The parameters varied in the ten models included welding current, width of the power density d