A branching streamer propagation argon plasma plume

Cold atmospheric-pressure plasma plumes have obtained great interests for their attractive features and application potentials. In this paper, a pulsed argon plasma plume was generated in the open air. Characteristic propagation of the argon plasma plume was carried out through high-speed imaging by an ICCD camera. An interesting propagation process was observed for the plasma plume, during which the plasma first propagated in a single streamer channel, and then with side branching as the applied voltage increased. The side branches are generated surrounding the main plasma channel but not split from the anode tip. This branching streamer propagation behavior was much different from the bulletlike development of typical plasma jets or streamers in point-wire or point-plane gaps

Steady state analytical solutions for pumping in a fully bounded rectangular aquifer

Using the Schwartz-Christoffel conformal mapping method together with the complex variable techniques, we derive steady state analytical solutions for pumping in a rectangular aquifer with four different combinations of impermeable and constant-head boundaries. These four scenarios include: (1) one constant-head boundary and three impermeable boundaries, (2) two pairs of orthogonal impermeable and constant-head boundaries, (3) three constant-head boundaries and one impermeable boundary, and (4) four constant-head boundaries. For these scenarios, the impermeable and constant-head boundaries can be combined after applying the mapping functions, and hence only three image wells exist in the transformed plane, despite an infinite number of image wells in the real plane. The closed-form solutions reflect the advantage of the conformal mapping method, though the method is applicable for the aspect ratio of the rectangle between 1/10.9 and 10.9/1 due to the limitation in the numerical computation of the conformal transformation from a half plane onto an elongated region (i.e., so-called “crowding” phenomenon). By contrast, for an additional scenario with two parallel constant-head boundaries and two parallel impermeable boundaries, an infinite series of image wells is necessary to express the solution, since it is impossible to combine these two kinds of boundaries through the conformal transformation. The usefulness of the results derived is demonstrated by an application to pumping in a finite coastal aquifer

Analytical solutions of seawater intrusion in sloping confined and unconfined coastal aquifers

Sloping coastal aquifers in reality are ubiquitous and well documented. Steady state sharp-interface analytical solutions for describing seawater intrusion in sloping confined and unconfined coastal aquifers are developed based on the Dupuit-Forchheimer approximation. Specifically, analytical solutions based on the constant-flux inland boundary condition are derived by solving the discharge equation for the interface zone with the continuity conditions of the head and flux applied at the interface between the freshwater zone and the interface zone. Analytical solutions for the constant-head inland boundary are then obtained by developing the relationship between the inland freshwater flux and hydraulic head and combining this relationship with the solutions of the constant-flux inland boundary. It is found that for the constant-flux inland boundary, the shape of the saltwater interface is independent of the geometry of the bottom confining layer for both aquifer types, despite that the geometry of the bottom confining layer determines the location of the interface tip. This is attributed to that the hydraulic head at the interface is identical to that of the coastal boundary, so the shape of the bed below the interface is irrelevant to the interface position. Moreover, developed analytical solutions with an empirical factor on the density factor are in good agreement with the results of variable-density flow numerical modeling. Analytical solutions developed in this study provide a powerful tool for assessment of seawater intrusion in sloping coastal aquifers as well as in coastal aquifers with a known freshwater flux but an arbitrary geometry of the bottom confining layer

Sublethal and Killing Effects of Atmospheric-Pressure, Nonthermal Plasma on Eukaryotic Microalgae in Aqueous Media

In-depth studies on the interaction of nonthermal plasmas with microorganisms usually focus on bacteria; only little attention has been given to their effects on more complex eukaryotic cells. We report here nonthermal plasma\u27s effects on cell motility, viability staining, and morphology of eukaryotic microalgae, with three marine dinoflagellates and a marine diatom as major targets. The effects on motility and viability staining depended on the time of exposure to plasma and the species of microalgae. We observed a strong pH decrease in aqueous samples (marine and freshwater algal cultures, their culture media, and deionized water) after exposure to plasma, and hypothesized this decreased pH as the principal mechanism by which plasma exerts its deleterious effects on cells in aqueous media. The hypothesis was supported by results of experiments in which decreasing the pH of algal samples (effected by addition of acid) caused the same morphological damage (as determined with scanning-electron microscopy) as did exposure to plasma

Global-Local Stepwise Generative Network for Ultra High-Resolution Image Restoration

While the research on image background restoration from regular size of degraded images has achieved remarkable progress, restoring ultra high-resolution (e.g., 4K) images remains an extremely challenging task due to the explosion of computational complexity and memory usage, as well as the deficiency of annotated data. In this paper we present a novel model for ultra high-resolution image restoration, referred to as the Global-Local Stepwise Generative Network (GLSGN), which employs a stepwise restoring strategy involving four restoring pathways: three local pathways and one global pathway. The local pathways focus on conducting image restoration in a fine-grained manner over local but high-resolution image patches, while the global pathway performs image restoration coarsely on the scale-down but intact image to provide cues for the local pathways in a global view including semantics and noise patterns. To smooth the mutual collaboration between these four pathways, our GLSGN is designed to ensure the inter-pathway consistency in four aspects in terms of low-level content, perceptual attention, restoring intensity and high-level semantics, respectively. As another major contribution of this work, we also introduce the first ultra high-resolution dataset to date for both reflection removal and rain streak removal, comprising 4,670 real-world and synthetic images. Extensive experiments across three typical tasks for image background restoration, including image reflection removal, image rain streak removal and image dehazing, show that our GLSGN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: submmitted to Transactions on Image Processin

Femtosecond Photon-Mediated Plasma Enhances Photosynthesis of Plasmonic Nanostructures and Their SERS Applications

Laser ablation in liquid has proven to be a universal and green method to synthesize nanocrystals and fabricate functional nanostructures. This study demonstrates the superiority of femtosecond laser-mediated plasma in enhancing photoredox of metal cations for controllable fabrication of plasmonic nanostructures in liquid. Through employing upstream high energetic plasma during laser-induced microexplosions, single/three-electron photoreduction of metallic cations can readily occur without chemical reductants or capping agents. Experimental evidences demonstrate that this process exhibits higher photon utilization efficiency in yield of colloidal metal nanoparticles than direct irradiation of metallic precursors. Photogenerated hydrated electrons derived from strong ionization of silicon and water are responsible for this enhanced consequences. Furthermore, these metallic nanoparticles are accessible to self-assemble into nanoplates for silver and nanospheres for gold, favored by surface-tension gradients between laser irradiated and unirradiated regions. These metallic nanostructures exhibit excellent surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy performance in trace detection of Rhodamine 6G (R6G), 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA), and mercapto-5-nitrobenzimidazole molecules with high sensitivity (down to 10–12 mol L–1, 30 × 10–15 m for R6G), good reproducibility (relative standard deviation \u3c 7%), and good dual-analyte detection ability with mixture ratios of R6G to 4-MBA ranging from 20 to 0.025. The conceptual importance of this plasma-enhanced-photochemical process may provide exciting opportunities in photochemical reactions, plasmofluidics, and material synthesis. Includes Supplementary Material