Late Diagnosis of 5-α-Reductase Type 2 Deficiency in an Adolescent Girl with Primary Amenorrhoea : Case report

Deficiency of the 5-α-reductase enzyme has been found to affect male sexual development. We report an 18-year-old patient who was referred to an endocrinology clinic in Jizan, Saudi Arabia, in April 2014 with primary amenorrhoea, virilisation and a lack of secondary sex characteristics. As female external genitalia were present at birth, she had been raised as a female. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed no uterine or ovarian tissue in the pelvis and the presence of a scrotal sac. She was diagnosed with 5-α-reductase type 2 deficiency, a 46,XY disorder of sexual development. Typically, affected males have pseudovaginal perineoscrotal hypospadias and ambiguous genitalia at birth. Individuals who have been raised as female manifest characteristics of virilisation at puberty, including deepening of the vocal tone, phallus enlargement, scrotal hyperpigmentation and increased muscle mass

Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule, but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an influence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints defining the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often conflicting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions

Actes du deuxième colloque africain sur la recherche en informatique = Proceedings of the second African Conference on research in computer science

Nous nous intéressons dans cet article au problème de la vérification des bases de connaissances imprécises et/ou incertaines. Le cadre choisi est le raisonnement approximatif basé sur la théorie des possibilités et celle des sous-ensembles flous. Dans ce cadre, nous définissons un ensemble de propriétés que doivent vérifier les bases de connaissances cohérentes. Nous tirons également parti des travaux menés dans le cadre de la résolution des équations des relations floues et mettons au point un schéma abductif flou, pour vérifier la non violation par la base de connaissances des contraintes d'integrité définies par l'expert, lors de l'élaboration de cette base. (Résumé d'auteur

Experimental study of a closed loop flat plate pulsating heat pipe under a varying gravity force

This paper reports on an experimental study of a closed loop Flat Plate Pulsating Heat Pipe (FPPHP) tested on ground and on board of an aircraft during the 60th ESA parabolic flight campaign, during which hyper- and microgravity conditions were reproduced. The tested FPPHP consists in two brazed copper plates, at which location a continuous rectangular channel (1.6 x 1.7 mm²) with 12 bends in the evaporator is machined. The channel is filled with FC-72 as working fluid with a volumetric filling ratio of 50%. Tests have been conducted with the FPPHP positioned both horizontally and vertically (bottom-heated). The FPPHP presents an innovative design, involving the milling of grooves between the channels. Experimental results on the ground show that the thermal device can transfer more than 180 W in both inclinations, and that the horizontal operation is characterized by repeated stop-and-start phases and lower thermal performance. The FPPHP can operate under microgravity conditions and with a transient gravity force, with global thermal resistance reaching 50% and 25% of a void only-conduction plate, in horizontal and vertical orientation respectively. The temperature homogeneity remains within 10K in the evaporator section and 3K in the condenser section with thermal power transfer up to 180 W. Minimum thermal resistance of 0.12 KW-1 was recorded, with its value rising as heating grew more powerful. A parabolic flight test demonstrated that the FPPHP in vertical inclination is rapidly influenced by variation of gravity field, even if, due to the novel geometry, it continues to operate under microgravity. In horizontal inclination, on the other hand, there was no observable parameter change during gravity field variations

Crystallisation of undercooled aqueous solutions: Experimental study of free dendritic growth in cylindrical geometry

This paper reports a study of crystallisation kinetics in small volumes of undercooled water-MPG (monopropylene glycol) mixture. The experimental cell is a vertical cylinder (height 5 mm, diameter 2r(c) = 7.5 mm); its bottom section is closed by a Plexiglas disc that transmits light from the lower part of the cylinder to a high-speed digital camera. Photographic recordings allow the determination of the crystal growth rate. When the antifreeze mass fraction is below 25 wt%,, crystallisation is clearly divided into two stages: the growth of dendritic crystals in the undercooled solution followed by the passage of the interdendritic solidification front. Dendrite growth induces a sudden temperature increase in the mixture, while the passage of the interdendritic solidification front determines the time at which sensible heat effects again predominate. The results show that the dendrite growth rate is an increasing function of the degree of undercooling and a decreasing function of the antifreeze mass fraction. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Thermographic Investigation on Fluid Oscillations and Transverse Interactions in a Fully Metallic Flat-Plate Pulsating Heat Pipe

The present investigation deals with the quantification of fluid oscillation frequencies in a metallic pulsating heat pipe tested at varying heat loads and orientations. The aim is to design a robust technique for the study of the inner fluid dynamics without adopting typical experimental solutions, such as direct fluid visualizations through transparent inserts. The studied device is made of copper, and it is partially filled with a water-ethanol mixture (20 wt.% of ethanol). Heat fluxes locally exchanged between the working fluid and the device walls are first assessed through the inverse heat conduction problem resolution approach by processing outer wall temperature distributions acquired by thermography. The estimated local heat transfer quantities are therefore processed to quantify the fluid oscillatory behavior in every device branch during the intermittent flow and full activation regimes, thus providing a deeper insight into the heat transfer modes. After dealing with a further validation of the inverse approach in terms of oscillation frequency restoration capability, the wall-to-fluid heat fluxes referred to each channel are processed by means of the wavelet method. Scalograms and power spectra of the considered signals are presented for a time-based analysis of the working fluid oscillations, as well as for the identification of dominant oscillation frequencies. Fluid motion is then quantified in terms of the continuity of fluid oscillations and activity of channels by applying a scalogram denoising technique named K-means clustering method. Moreover, a statistical reduction of the channel-wise dominant oscillation frequencies is performed to provide useful references for the interpretation of the overall oscillatory behavior. The link between oscillations and transverse interactions is finally investigated. The vertical bottom-heated mode exhibits stronger fluid oscillations with respect to the horizontal mode, with fluid oscillation frequencies ranging from 0.78 up to 1 Hz. Nonetheless, the fluid motion is more stable in terms of oscillation frequency between channels when the device operates in the horizontal orientation probably due to negligible buoyancy effects. Moreover, thermal interactions between adjacent channels are found to be stronger when the oscillatory behavior presents similar features from channel to channel in horizontal orientation. The proposed method for fluid oscillation analyses in fully metallic flat-plate pulsating heat pipes can be effectively adopted to other flat-plate layouts without any need for transparent windows, thus reducing the overall complexity of experimental set-ups and providing, at the same time, a good insight into the inner fluid dynamics