A Modular Single-phase Multistring Multilevel Inverter Topology for Distributed Energy Resources

AbstractThis Paper presents simulation analysis of single phase multilevel inverter for distributed energy resources(DER) system are small power generation tools, in order to reduce conversion losses, complexity of the circuit and to improve the size and cost of the system. The system involves a high step up converter is used to set up the voltage coming from the various DER's such as Fuel cell module and Photovoltaic module, this high voltage acts as input to the inverter. This system requires less number of switches as compare to conventional cascade H-bridge (CCHB) inverter. There are some advantages of this multilevel inverter such as improved output waveform, and lower Electromagnetic interference, lower switching power loss and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD)

Numerical Simulation of Incompressible Turbulent Flow using Linear Eddy Viscosity-based Turbulence Models

The present study focuses on the recent development of an implicit pressure-based finite volume algorithm for numerical solution of Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) in an inertial frame of reference for the prediction of unsteady incompressible flow problems. The algorithm uses boundary-conforming, multiblock structured grid with moving boundaries, collocated variable arrangement with momentum equations resolved along cartesian directions, second-order accurate spatial and temporal discretisation schemes for the convective fluxes and a pressure-velocity solution strategy. Effect of turbulence was simulated using appropriate linear eddy viscosity-based turbulence models. The capabilities and limitations of the cost-effective unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) approach has been demonstrated for few application problems of engineering interest.Defence Science Journal, 2010, 60(6), pp.614-627, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.60.60

Magnetism in Dense Quark Matter

We review the mechanisms via which an external magnetic field can affect the ground state of cold and dense quark matter. In the absence of a magnetic field, at asymptotically high densities, cold quark matter is in the Color-Flavor-Locked (CFL) phase of color superconductivity characterized by three scales: the superconducting gap, the gluon Meissner mass, and the baryonic chemical potential. When an applied magnetic field becomes comparable with each of these scales, new phases and/or condensates may emerge. They include the magnetic CFL (MCFL) phase that becomes relevant for fields of the order of the gap scale; the paramagnetic CFL, important when the field is of the order of the Meissner mass, and a spin-one condensate associated to the magnetic moment of the Cooper pairs, significant at fields of the order of the chemical potential. We discuss the equation of state (EoS) of MCFL matter for a large range of field values and consider possible applications of the magnetic effects on dense quark matter to the astrophysics of compact stars.Comment: To appear in Lect. Notes Phys. "Strongly interacting matter in magnetic fields" (Springer), edited by D. Kharzeev, K. Landsteiner, A. Schmitt, H.-U. Ye

GRB 010222: A burst within a starburst

We present millimeter- and submillimeter-wavelength observations and near-infrared K-band imaging toward the bright gamma-ray burst GRB 010222. Over seven different epochs, a constant source was detected with an average flux density of 3.74 ± 0.53 mJy at 350 GHz and 1.05 ± 0.22 mJy at 250 GHz, giving a spectral index α = 3.78 ± 0.25 (where F ∝ vα). We rule out the possibility that this emission originated from the burst or its afterglow, and we conclude that it is due to a dusty, high-redshift starburst galaxy (SMM J14522 + 4301). We argue that the host galaxy of GRB 010222 is the most plausible counterpart of SMM J14522+4301, based in part on the centimeter detection of the host at the expected level. The optical/near-IR properties of the host galaxy of GRB 010222 suggest that it is a blue sub-L* galaxy, similar to other GRB host galaxies. This contrasts with the enormous far-infrared luminosity of this galaxy based on our submillimeter detection (LBol ≈ 4 × 10 12 L⊙). We suggest that this GRB host galaxy has a very high star formation rate, SFR ≈ 600 M⊙ yr -1, most of which is unseen at optical wavelengths

Cianoacrilato na colagem de Bráquetes ortodônticos em resina acrílica: há maior adesão?

Pacientes em tratamento ortodôntico apresentam restaurações provisórias com frequência. No entanto, poucos estudos avaliam a influência dos adesivos na resistência ao cisalhamento dos bráquetes nessas superfícies. A resina acrílica é comumente indicada para colagem de bráquetes, porém o uso do cianoacrilato como adesivo ortodôntico é uma opção analisada. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi avaliar o desempenho do cianoacrilato associado aos materiais comumente utilizados para a fixação de bráquetes metálicos em restaurações provisórias de resina acrílica. Quarenta amostras em resina acrílica foram preparadas e as superfícies homogeinizadas com lixas de carboneto de silício (320 e 600). Em seguida, as amostras foram divididas aleatoriamente em quatro grupos (n=10) com base no tratamento de superfície e agente de união: G1 - bráquetes colados com resina acrílica; G2 - bráquetes colados com resina acrílica e aplicação de cianoacrilato; G3 - bráquetes colados com Transbond(tm) XT; G4 - bráquetes colados com Transbond(tm) XT e aplicação de cianoacrilato. Foram utilizados bráquetes ortodônticos de aço inoxidável, prescrição Roth, Kirium (3M/Abzil) para incisivos centrais superiores direitos, slot 022. Após colagem, as amostras foram submetidas ao teste de cisalhamento a uma velocidade de 0,5mm/min em uma máquina de ensaios universal (EMIC DL-1000). Os dados foram coletados e submetidos à análise estatística pelo teste ANOVA com nível de significância de 5%. A associação de resina acrílica ao cianoacrilato (G2) resultou na maior resistência ao cisalhamento (13,76 MPa), mas não significativa em comparação aos valores obtidos para a resina acrílica (G1= 7,76 MPa). O mesmo pôde ser observado para a associação Transbond(tm) XT e cianoacrilato (G4= 4,03 MPa) em relação a utilização da Transbond(tm) XT de forma isolada (G3= 3,87 MPa) e resina acrílica. O tratamento de superfície tem efeito significativo na resistência da união dos bráquetes colados aos materiais provisórios. A associação de cianoacrilato ao monômero de metilmetacrilato apresentou maior resistência ao cisalhamento, sendo mais indicada clinicamente

Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990-2015: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Background: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2015 provides an up-to-date synthesis of the evidence for risk factor exposure and the attributable burden of disease. By providing national and subnational assessments spanning the past 25 years, this study can inform debates on the importance of addressing risks in context. Methods: We used the comparative risk assessment framework developed for previous iterations of the Global Burden of Disease Study to estimate attributable deaths, disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), and trends in exposure by age group, sex, year, and geography for 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks from 1990 to 2015. This study included 388 risk-outcome pairs that met World Cancer Research Fund-defined criteria for convincing or probable evidence. We extracted relative risk and exposure estimates from randomised controlled trials, cohorts, pooled cohorts, household surveys, census data, satellite data, and other sources. We used statistical models to pool data, adjust for bias, and incorporate covariates. We developed a metric that allows comparisons of exposure across risk factors—the summary exposure value. Using the counterfactual scenario of theoretical minimum risk level, we estimated the portion of deaths and DALYs that could be attributed to a given risk. We decomposed trends in attributable burden into contributions from population growth, population age structure, risk exposure, and risk-deleted cause-specific DALY rates. We characterised risk exposure in relation to a Socio-demographic Index (SDI). Findings: Between 1990 and 2015, global exposure to unsafe sanitation, household air pollution, childhood underweight, childhood stunting, and smoking each decreased by more than 25%. Global exposure for several occupational risks, high body-mass index (BMI), and drug use increased by more than 25% over the same period. All risks jointly evaluated in 2015 accounted for 57·8% (95% CI 56·6–58·8) of global deaths and 41·2% (39·8–42·8) of DALYs. In 2015, the ten largest contributors to global DALYs among Level 3 risks were high systolic blood pressure (211·8 million [192·7 million to 231·1 million] global DALYs), smoking (148·6 million [134·2 million to 163·1 million]), high fasting plasma glucose (143·1 million [125·1 million to 163·5 million]), high BMI (120·1 million [83·8 million to 158·4 million]), childhood undernutrition (113·3 million [103·9 million to 123·4 million]), ambient particulate matter (103·1 million [90·8 million to 115·1 million]), high total cholesterol (88·7 million [74·6 million to 105·7 million]), household air pollution (85·6 million [66·7 million to 106·1 million]), alcohol use (85·0 million [77·2 million to 93·0 million]), and diets high in sodium (83·0 million [49·3 million to 127·5 million]). From 1990 to 2015, attributable DALYs declined for micronutrient deficiencies, childhood undernutrition, unsafe sanitation and water, and household air pollution; reductions in risk-deleted DALY rates rather than reductions in exposure drove these declines. Rising exposure contributed to notable increases in attributable DALYs from high BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, occupational carcinogens, and drug use. Environmental risks and childhood undernutrition declined steadily with SDI; low physical activity, high BMI, and high fasting plasma glucose increased with SDI. In 119 countries, metabolic risks, such as high BMI and fasting plasma glucose, contributed the most attributable DALYs in 2015. Regionally, smoking still ranked among the leading five risk factors for attributable DALYs in 109 countries; childhood underweight and unsafe sex remained primary drivers of early death and disability in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Interpretation: Declines in some key environmental risks have contributed to declines in critical infectious diseases. Some risks appear to be invariant to SDI. Increasing risks, including high BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, drug use, and some occupational exposures, contribute to rising burden from some conditions, but also provide opportunities for intervention. Some highly preventable risks, such as smoking, remain major causes of attributable DALYs, even as exposure is declining. Public policy makers need to pay attention to the risks that are increasingly major contributors to global burden. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Global, regional, and national life expectancy, all-cause mortality, and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes of death, 1980�2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Background Improving survival and extending the longevity of life for all populations requires timely, robust evidence on local mortality levels and trends. The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Study (GBD 2015) provides a comprehensive assessment of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. These results informed an in-depth investigation of observed and expected mortality patterns based on sociodemographic measures. Methods We estimated all-cause mortality by age, sex, geography, and year using an improved analytical approach originally developed for GBD 2013 and GBD 2010. Improvements included refinements to the estimation of child and adult mortality and corresponding uncertainty, parameter selection for under-5 mortality synthesis by spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression, and sibling history data processing. We also expanded the database of vital registration, survey, and census data to 14�294 geography�year datapoints. For GBD 2015, eight causes, including Ebola virus disease, were added to the previous GBD cause list for mortality. We used six modelling approaches to assess cause-specific mortality, with the Cause of Death Ensemble Model (CODEm) generating estimates for most causes. We used a series of novel analyses to systematically quantify the drivers of trends in mortality across geographies. First, we assessed observed and expected levels and trends of cause-specific mortality as they relate to the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary indicator derived from measures of income per capita, educational attainment, and fertility. Second, we examined factors affecting total mortality patterns through a series of counterfactual scenarios, testing the magnitude by which population growth, population age structures, and epidemiological changes contributed to shifts in mortality. Finally, we attributed changes in life expectancy to changes in cause of death. We documented each step of the GBD 2015 estimation processes, as well as data sources, in accordance with Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER). Findings Globally, life expectancy from birth increased from 61·7 years (95 uncertainty interval 61·4�61·9) in 1980 to 71·8 years (71·5�72·2) in 2015. Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa had very large gains in life expectancy from 2005 to 2015, rebounding from an era of exceedingly high loss of life due to HIV/AIDS. At the same time, many geographies saw life expectancy stagnate or decline, particularly for men and in countries with rising mortality from war or interpersonal violence. From 2005 to 2015, male life expectancy in Syria dropped by 11·3 years (3·7�17·4), to 62·6 years (56·5�70·2). Total deaths increased by 4·1 (2·6�5·6) from 2005 to 2015, rising to 55·8 million (54·9 million to 56·6 million) in 2015, but age-standardised death rates fell by 17·0 (15·8�18·1) during this time, underscoring changes in population growth and shifts in global age structures. The result was similar for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with total deaths from these causes increasing by 14·1 (12·6�16·0) to 39·8 million (39·2 million to 40·5 million) in 2015, whereas age-standardised rates decreased by 13·1 (11·9�14·3). Globally, this mortality pattern emerged for several NCDs, including several types of cancer, ischaemic heart disease, cirrhosis, and Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. By contrast, both total deaths and age-standardised death rates due to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional conditions significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, gains largely attributable to decreases in mortality rates due to HIV/AIDS (42·1, 39·1�44·6), malaria (43·1, 34·7�51·8), neonatal preterm birth complications (29·8, 24·8�34·9), and maternal disorders (29·1, 19·3�37·1). Progress was slower for several causes, such as lower respiratory infections and nutritional deficiencies, whereas deaths increased for others, including dengue and drug use disorders. Age-standardised death rates due to injuries significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, yet interpersonal violence and war claimed increasingly more lives in some regions, particularly in the Middle East. In 2015, rotaviral enteritis (rotavirus) was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to diarrhoea (146�000 deaths, 118�000�183�000) and pneumococcal pneumonia was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to lower respiratory infections (393�000 deaths, 228�000�532�000), although pathogen-specific mortality varied by region. Globally, the effects of population growth, ageing, and changes in age-standardised death rates substantially differed by cause. Our analyses on the expected associations between cause-specific mortality and SDI show the regular shifts in cause of death composition and population age structure with rising SDI. Country patterns of premature mortality (measured as years of life lost YLLs) and how they differ from the level expected on the basis of SDI alone revealed distinct but highly heterogeneous patterns by region and country or territory. Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, and diabetes were among the leading causes of YLLs in most regions, but in many cases, intraregional results sharply diverged for ratios of observed and expected YLLs based on SDI. Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases caused the most YLLs throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with observed YLLs far exceeding expected YLLs for countries in which malaria or HIV/AIDS remained the leading causes of early death. Interpretation At the global scale, age-specific mortality has steadily improved over the past 35 years; this pattern of general progress continued in the past decade. Progress has been faster in most countries than expected on the basis of development measured by the SDI. Against this background of progress, some countries have seen falls in life expectancy, and age-standardised death rates for some causes are increasing. Despite progress in reducing age-standardised death rates, population growth and ageing mean that the number of deaths from most non-communicable causes are increasing in most countries, putting increased demands on health systems. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY licens

Open data from the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO

The global network of gravitational-wave observatories now includes five detectors, namely LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO 600. These detectors collected data during their third observing run, O3, composed of three phases: O3a starting in 2019 April and lasting six months, O3b starting in 2019 November and lasting five months, and O3GK starting in 2020 April and lasting two weeks. In this paper we describe these data and various other science products that can be freely accessed through the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center at https://gwosc.org. The main data set, consisting of the gravitational-wave strain time series that contains the astrophysical signals, is released together with supporting data useful for their analysis and documentation, tutorials, as well as analysis software packages