Experimental Study of Pathogenic Microorganisms Inactivated by Venturi-Type Hydrodynamic Cavitation with Different Throat Lengths

Based on self-developed Venturi-type hydrodynamic cavitation device with different throat length-radius ratios L/R in Hydraulics Laboratory at Zhejiang University of Technology in China, 4 throat length-radius ratios L/R=10, 30, 60 and 100, and 4 raw water percentages V0/V=25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% were considered, Escherichia coli and total colony count were selected for indicator bacteria, effects of throat length-radius ratio, throat velocity, cavitation time, raw water percentage and cavitation number on inactivating pathogenic microorganism in raw water by hydrodynamic cavitation were experimentally studied. The results showed cavitation damage of cells of pathogenic microorganisms occurred by microjets and shock waves due to cavitation bubble collapse. The lower the flow cavitation number, the higher the killing rate of E. coli and total colony count. When flow velocity was lower or raw water percentage was higher, killing rate gradually increased with increase in throat length-radius ratio; when flow velocity was higher or raw water percentage was lower, killing rate was almost independent of throat length-radius ratio. Inactivated effect of pathogenic microorganisms can be further enhanced by increasing throat velocity or prolonging cavitation time. Hydrodynamic cavitation is a novel disinfection technique for drinking water without disinfection byproducts (DBPs) and no need to add disinfectant

Ride comfort analysis of a nonlinear vehicle excited by the consecutive speed-control humps

The consecutive speed-control humps (SCHs) possess the function of controlling speed forcibly, but cause violent vibration of a vehicle inevitably. This paper tries to further explore the inherent link among parameters of the SCHs, velocity and vehicle vibration. A 4-DOF nonlinear half-vehicle model with nonlinear springs and nonlinear dampers is established. The consecutive SCHs-speed coupling excitation function is presented by combination of trapezoidal and sine wave of constant amplitude and variable frequency. The nonlinear dynamics of half-vehicle model is investigated by numerical simulation. It reveals that various forms of vibrations, such as periodic, quasi-periodic and chaotic vibrations, could appear in the system with the change of the velocity. Further it is found that quasi-periodic motions will affect vehicle ride comfort most and can be avoided by changing parameters of the consecutive SCHs. Results are conductive to deep understanding of nonlinear vibration in vehicle and rational design of the consecutive SCHs

光学および磁気特性を有するパイ共役系高分子の設計、合成および特性

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201

The PEG-PCL-PEG Hydrogel as an Implanted Ophthalmic Delivery System after Glaucoma Filtration Surgery; a Pilot Study

Currently, filtration surgery has been considered as the most effective therapy for glaucoma; however, the scar formation in the surgical area may often lead to failure to the procedure. An implanted drug delivery system may provide localized and sustained release of a drug over an extended period. Poly (ethylene glycol)-poly (ε-caprolactone)-poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG-PCL-PEG, PECE) hydrogel has been successfully synthesized and determined as thermosensitive and biocompatible. In order to overcome the limitations of common local ophthalmic medications, we investigated the function of a self-assembled PECE hydrogel as an intracameral injection-implanted drug carrier to inhibit the formation of postoperative scarring. Following intraoperative administration bevacizumab-loaded hydrogel intracameral was injected into rabbit eyes; the status of the bleb and filtration fistula formed following the filtering surgery were also examined through pathologic evaluation. Due to the sustained release of bevacizumab from the hydrogel, neovascularization and scar formation were inhibited; moreover, there were no corneal abnormalities and other ocular tissue damage found in the rabbits. This suggests that the PECE hydrogel may be considered as the novel biomaterial with potential as a sustained release system in glaucoma filtering surgery. Further studies require in shedding the light on the subject

COLO: A Contrastive Learning based Re-ranking Framework for One-Stage Summarization

Traditional training paradigms for extractive and abstractive summarization systems always only use token-level or sentence-level training objectives. However, the output summary is always evaluated from summary-level which leads to the inconsistency in training and evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning based re-ranking framework for one-stage summarization called COLO. By modeling a contrastive objective, we show that the summarization model is able to directly generate summaries according to the summary-level score without additional modules and parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that COLO boosts the extractive and abstractive results of one-stage systems on CNN/DailyMail benchmark to 44.58 and 46.33 ROUGE-1 score while preserving the parameter efficiency and inference efficiency. Compared with state-of-the-art multi-stage systems, we save more than 100 GPU training hours and obtaining 3~8 speed-up ratio during inference while maintaining comparable results.Comment: Accepted by COLING 202

Uncertain times and the insider perspective

This paper examines insiders' informational privilege by studying the nexus between aggregated self-reported insider trades and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU). We demonstrate that firm insiders act in response to the first signs of uncertainty as it appears in the media, and high-ranked managers, such as CEOs and CFOs, react more promptly than other insiders. Our findings further support the idea that insiders' indirect informational advantages allow them to interpret the significance of public information for cash flows more accurately in their own companies. Our study is the first to examine insiders' behavior using pure public information; it is also the first to exclude the influence of private information completely. We also consider various measures of EPU, including global and categorical indices representing economic, political uncertainty, while taking the financial crisis period into account

SUMA: A Partial Materialization-Based Scalable Query Answering in OWL 2 DL

AbstractOntology-mediated querying (OMQ) provides a paradigm for query answering according to which users not only query records at the database but also query implicit information inferred from ontology. A key challenge in OMQ is that the implicit information may be infinite, which cannot be stored at the database and queried by off -the -shelf query engine. The commonly adopted technique to deal with infinite entailments is query rewriting, which, however, comes at the cost of query rewriting at runtime. In this work, the partial materialization method is proposed to ensure that the extension is always finite. The partial materialization technology does not rewrite query but instead computes partial consequences entailed by ontology before the online query. Besides, a query analysis algorithm is designed to ensure the completeness of querying rooted and Boolean conjunctive queries over partial materialization. We also soundly and incompletely expand our method to support highly expressive ontology language, OWL 2 DL. Finally, we further optimize the materialization efficiency by role rewriting algorithm and implement our approach as a prototype system SUMA by integrating off-the-shelf efficient SPARQL query engine. The experiments show that SUMA is complete on each test ontology and each test query, which is the same as Pellet and outperforms PAGOdA. Besides, SUMA is highly scalable on large datasets