Novel methods to characterize ink - Coating interactions, coating structure and surface energy

The main focus of this thesis is to analyze capillary adsorption of heterogeneous porous paper coatings. The approach is to develop a novel Gibbs energy model, analyze the structure and surface energy parameters of pilot coated paper and board samples, and compare results to ink tack kinetics. Recent studies have modeled and verified that when inertial force and kinetic energy are included, a smaller diameter capillary starts to fill faster. In addition, other retarding forces, such as local transient sticking of the ink vehicle at surface asperities or chemical inhomogeneities, capillary surface topography and connections between capillaries or physical inhomogeneities in coating, affect the total rate of imbibition. While these resistant factors are very important none of them changes the fact that the basic force driving spontaneous imbibition is the total liquid sorption energy in all various capillaries. This thesis suggests that the change in Gibbs free energy of a liquid associated with its imbibition into capillaries of coating can be used to describe such driving energy. It first derives an expression for this quantity then shows how specific Gibbs energy correlates with the time to reach maximum ink tack, tmax for carbonate-kaolin and latex based coatings. The application of the Gibbs energy model shows that for a relatively constant liquid-solid-vapor interface a larger capillary pore surface area strongly increases the rate of ink setting, as measured by the reduced tmax. In contrast, there is no correlation between ink tack development and pigment surface area or peak pore size of the coating which are currently in use. This new model analyzing Gibbs energy has advantages of combining porous structure variables (volume and diameter, Σ(Vi/Di)) and surface energy parameters (γcosθ) at the interface which often vary concurrently when coating components change, and being independent of many details of time-dependent variables. Surface topography affects liquid-solid-vapor/air interfaces. The second part of the thesis describes simultaneous characterization of surface topographies, using Near-field scanning optical microscopy. Finally, the thesis relates light scattering and absorption to the influence of fine kaolin and carbonates on coating structure and water soluble chemical such as fluorescence whitening agent distribution and efficiency in paper coating

BEIKE NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Prompt-Based Paragraph Classification for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection

PCL detection task is aimed at identifying and categorizing language that is patronizing or condescending towards vulnerable communities in the general media.Compared to other NLP tasks of paragraph classification, the negative language presented in the PCL detection task is usually more implicit and subtle to be recognized, making the performance of common text-classification approaches disappointed. Targeting the PCL detection problem in SemEval-2022 Task 4, in this paper, we give an introduction to our team's solution, which exploits the power of prompt-based learning on paragraph classification. We reformulate the task as an appropriate cloze prompt and use pre-trained Masked Language Models to fill the cloze slot. For the two subtasks, binary classification and multi-label classification, DeBERTa model is adopted and fine-tuned to predict masked label words of task-specific prompts. On the evaluation dataset, for binary classification, our approach achieves an F1-score of 0.6406; for multi-label classification, our approach achieves an macro-F1-score of 0.4689 and ranks first in the leaderboard

Prognostic factors of the short-term outcomes of patients with hepatitis B virus-associated acute-on-chronic liver failure

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the impact of the baseline status of patients with hepatitis B virus-associated acute-on-chronic liver failure on short-term outcomes. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted that included a total of 138 patients with hepatitis B virus-associated acute-on-chronic liver failure admitted to the Department of Infectious Diseases, Taihe Hospital, Hubei University of Medicine, from November 2013 to October 2016. The patients were divided into a poor prognosis group (74 patients) and a good prognosis group (64 patients) based on the disease outcome. General information, clinical indicators and prognostic scores of the patients’ baseline status were analyzed, and a prediction model was established accordingly. RESULTS: Elder age, treatment with artificial liver support systems and the frequency of such treatments, high levels of white blood cells, neutrophils, neutrophil count/lymphocyte count ratio, alanine aminotransferase, gamma-glutamyl transferase, total bilirubin, urea, and prognostic scores as well as low levels of albumin and sodium were all significantly associated with the short-term outcomes of hepatitis B virus-associated acute-on-chronic liver failure. The predictive model showed that logit (p) = 3.068 + 1.003 × neutrophil count/lymphocyte count ratio - 0.892 × gamma-glutamyl transferase - 1.138 × albumin - 1.364 × sodium + 1.651 × artificial liver support therapy. CONCLUSION: The neutrophil count/lymphocyte count ratio and serum levels of gamma-glutamyl transferase, albumin and sodium were independent risk factors predicting short-term outcomes of hepatitis B virus-associated acute-on-chronic liver failure, and the administration of multiple treatments with artificial liver support therapy during the early stage is conducive to improved short-term outcomes

Disability transitions and health expectancies among elderly people aged 65 years and over in China: A nationwide longitudinal study

Disability has become a critical issue among elderly populations, yet limited large-scale research related to this issue has been conducted in China, an aging society. This study explored sex and urban-rural differences in disability transitions and life expectancies among older adults in China. Data were collected from the Chinese Longitudinal Health Longevity Survey (CLHLS), which enrolled people aged 65 and older and was conducted in randomly selected counties and cities across 22 provinces in China. Disability was diagnosed based on basic activities of daily living (BADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). Several individual characteristics were assessed, including sociodemographic factors (age, sex and region, etc.) and health behaviors (currently smoking, currently drinking, etc.). Multistate models were applied to analyze the transition rates among 4 states: no disability, mild disability, severe disability and death. The transition rates from disabled states to the no-disability state were found to decrease markedly with age. The rates of recovery from mild disability in rural areas were higher than those in urban areas. Rural elderly individuals lived shorter lives than their urban counterparts, but they tended to live with better functional status, spending a larger fraction of their remaining life with less severe disability. Based on these findings, devoting more attention and resources to rural areas may help less severely disabled people recuperate and prevent severe disability. The study provides insights into health plan strategies to help guide the allocation of limited resources

Investigation on the propagation characteristics of pressure wave during managed pressure drilling

The small difference between formation pressure and fracture pressure in offshore oil and gas reservoirs poses a huge challenge to drilling. Managed pressure drilling (MPD) technology, as a drilling technique that can accurately control bottomhole pressure, is an effective technique to solve this challenge. In MPD technology, the pressure wave propagation behavior and mechanism in the wellbore induced by wellhead backpressure are crucial for parameter design and efficient application. In this paper, pressure wave propagation characteristics and mechanism in gas-liquid flow were investigated with a new proposed pressure wave velocity model that considers inter-phase mass transfer effect. This new model and its solution algorithm were verified with experimental data in literature. The influence of gas invasion stage, drilling fluid type, drilling fluid density and backpressure on pressure wave propagation characteristics were investigated. Results show that the time for pressure wave induced by wellhead backpressure in the wellbore cannot be ignored in the design of the backpressure value during MPD. This propagation time increases with occurrence of gas invasion. Moreover, the propagation time in water-based drilling fluid is longer than that in oil-based drilling fluid, which is because the interphase mass transfer between invaded gas and oil-based drilling fluid. The influence mechanism of high drilling fluid density and wellhead backpressure on pressure wave propagation characteristics is due to the suppression of gas invasion process. These findings could be used as guides in parameters design and optimization in MPD

Scalable synthesis of robust and stretchable composite wound dressings by dispersing silver nanowires in continuous bacterial cellulose

"Available online 31 July 2020"While silver nanoparticles are widely used to endow materials with antibacterial activity, silver nanowires (AgNWs) have not attracted much attention. Herein, the composites of bacterial cellulose (BC) and AgNWs were prepared through a novel step-by-step in situ biosynthesis which retains the three-dimensional network of BC. The results of water vapor permeability, water uptake rate, and water retention rate showed that the BC/AgNW wound dressings could absorb wound skin exudates and maintain moisture environments. Furthermore, the BC/AgNW dressings were robust and stretchable. More importantly, the BC/AgNW dressings exhibited sustained release of Ag+. The results from animal tests indicated that the BC/AgNW dressing with 38.4 wt% AgNWs exhibited higher expression levels of cytokeratin-10 and integrin-β4, greater proliferation of keratinocytes and formation of epithelial tissues and greatly improved skin regeneration over the bare BC. We propose that the integrated nanofibrous structure and the excellent and sustained antibacterial activity of AgNWs are responsible for the excellent in vivo wound healing ability and biocompatibility. These results suggest that the BC/AgNW composites have promising application as wound dressings.Y. Wan, S. Yang, and J. Wang contributed equally to this work, which was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 31870963, 51973058) and the Provincial Key Research and Development Program of Jiangxi (No. 20192ACB80008).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Altered Brain Function in Treatment-Resistant and Non-treatment-resistant Depression Patients: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

ObjectiveIn this study, we used amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo) to observe differences in local brain functional activity and its characteristics in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and non-treatment-resistant depression (nTRD), and to explore the correlation between areas of abnormal brain functional activity and clinical symptoms.MethodThirty-seven patients with TRD, 36 patients with nTRD, and 35 healthy controls (HCs) were included in resting-state fMRI scans. ALFF and ReHo were used for image analysis and further correlation between abnormal brain regions and clinical symptoms were analyzed.ResultsANOVA revealed that the significantly different brain regions of ALFF and ReHo among the three groups were mainly concentrated in the frontal and temporal lobes. Compared with the nTRD group, the TRD group had decreased ALFF in the left/right inferior frontal triangular gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, left cuneus and bilateral posterior lobes of the cerebellum, and increased ALFF in the left middle frontal gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus, and the TRD group had decreased ReHo in the left/right inferior frontal triangular gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, and increased ReHo in the right superior frontal gyrus. Compared with the HC group, the TRD group had decreased ALFF/ReHo in both the right inferior frontal triangular gyrus and the left middle temporal gyrus. Pearson correlation analysis showed that both ALFF and ReHo values in these abnormal brain regions were positively correlated with HAMD-17 scores (P < 0.05).ConclusionAlthough the clinical symptoms were similar in the TRD and nTRD groups, abnormal neurological functional activity were present in some of the same brain regions. Compared with the nTRD group, ALFF and ReHo showed a wider range of brain area alterations and more complex neuropathological mechanisms in the TRD group, especially in the inferior frontal triangular gyrus of the frontal lobe and the middle temporal gyrus of the temporal lobe