A Sensitivity Study of the Sub-Volume and Resolution on the Prediction of Petrophysical Properties

Imperial Users onl

Impact of Completion on Wellbore Skin Effect

Imperial Users onl

Optimization of received power and SNR for an indoor attocells network in visible light communication

White LEDs Visible Light Communication (VLC) is applied in communication and illumination simultaneously. It provides unrestrained frequency spectrum and a large bandwidth that produces a higher transmission rate and speed in short-range communication. Also, VLC was considered as a promising alternative technology to the radio frequency in the next generation of communication systems. In this paper, the optical attocells configuration and LEDs distribution are proposed for optimizing the received power and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) in the Line of Sight (LOS) propagation link. Besides that, the trade-off between minimum SNR and received power are investigated. The simulation results showed that the proposed model can save 6.25% of the total transmitted power, and the optical received power versus semi-angle and field of view have with about increased 16.5% and 27.54% respectively. Moreover, the SNR also has 7.4% improvement. Hence, the proposed configuration model has improved the performance of VLC systems and has widen the window for future improvement

Evaluation of WGS-subtyping methods for epidemiological surveillance of foodborne salmonellosis

Background: Salmonellosis is one of the most common foodborne diseases worldwide. Although human infection by non-typhoidal Salmonella (NTS) enterica subspecies enterica is associated primarily with a self-limiting diarrhoeal illness, invasive bacterial infections (such as septicaemia, bacteraemia and meningitis) were also reported. Human outbreaks of NTS were reported in several countries all over the world including developing as well as high-income countries. Conventional laboratory methods such as pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) do not display adequate discrimination and have their limitations in epidemiological surveillance. It is therefore very crucial to use accurate, reliable and highly discriminative subtyping methods for epidemiological characterisation and outbreak investigation. Methods: Here, we used different whole genome sequence (WGS)-based subtyping methods for retrospective investigation of two different outbreaks of Salmonella Typhimurium and Salmonella Dublin that occurred in 2013 in UK and Ireland respectively. Results: Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based cluster analysis of Salmonella Typhimurium genomes revealed well supported clades, that were concordant with epidemiologically defined outbreak and confirmed the source of outbreak is due to consumption of contaminated mayonnaise. SNP-analyses of Salmonella Dublin genomes confirmed the outbreak however the source of infection could not be determined. The core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) was discriminatory and separated the outbreak strains of Salmonella Dublin from the non-outbreak strains that were concordant with the epidemiological data however cgMLST could neither discriminate between the outbreak and non-outbreak strains of Salmonella Typhimurium nor confirm that contaminated mayonnaise is the source of infection, On the other hand, other WGS-based subtyping methods including multilocus sequence typing (MLST), ribosomal MLST (rMLST), whole genome MLST (wgMLST), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs), prophage sequence profiling, antibiotic resistance profile and plasmid typing methods were less discriminatory and could not confirm the source of the outbreak. Conclusions: Foodborne salmonellosis is an important concern for public health therefore, it is crucial to use accurate, reliable and highly discriminative subtyping methods for epidemiological surveillance and outbreak investigation. In this study, we showed that SNP-based analyses do not only have the ability to confirm the occurrence of the outbreak but also to provide definitive evidence of the source of the outbreak in real-time